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Some of Firestone and West’s co-authors distanced themselves from the effort, but other scientists took their place. In 2016, West and several colleagues formed Comet Research Group Inc., which, according to its website, “cooperates and provides funding to select impactful research scientists around the world.” The organization is a division of Rising Light Group, an Arizona-based nonprofit that “promotes public awareness and tolerance in a variety of fields, including religion, philosophy, and science.” To skeptics of the impact hypothesis, this affiliation was another sign that something was wrong. But West, who is listed as director of the Rising Light Group, dismisses any suggestion that religion or mysticism has seeped into scientific research into the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. “We have scientists in our group of all kinds of religious persuasions and, as far as I know, none of their beliefs have appeared in our articles,” he says. “To me, any scientist who judges a scientist’s beliefs outside of that article is not good science.”
Along with a growing group of collaborators, the Comet Research Group produced new research, presenting evidence such as shock-synthesized hexoganal nanodiamonds from Santa Rosa Island, California; siliceous slag-like objects from Melrose, PA, Blackville, SC, and Abu Hureyra, Syria, as well as corundum, mullite, sessile, and lechatelierite; elevated levels of chromium, iridium, copper, nickel and ruthenium in the sediments of Lake Medvedeskoye, western Russia; planar deformation, orthoclase and monazite features in the Andes of northwestern Venezuela; and suggestive patterns in the chronosequences of eubacteria and paleosols in the Monte Viso basin of the Cotcian Alps. What Topping and Firestone first discovered at a single archaeological site in Michigan had expanded to become, as one researcher put it, a “global cosmic catastrophe.”
These elements, minerals and geological forms are real. What many outside scientists continued to question were the hypothesis makers’ interpretations of what these things meant. For the non-scientist, this coming and going is impenetrable. “It’s very difficult for laypeople to evaluate whether something is true or not,” says Tiffany Morriseau, a social cognitive scientist at Paris Cité University. She was part of an interdisciplinary team of experts commissioned by the European Union in the wake of the pandemic to investigate the loss of trust in experts. The group thought that, in a complicated world, there is no choice but to trust the experts. After all, everyone is profane in some facets of their existence. The plumber must sometimes trust the veterinarian, who sometimes trusts the engineer.
Turning to experts is one way people employ what psychologists call “epistemic vigilance,” a kind of immune system for our individual conceptions of reality, allowing us to analyze truth and falsehood. But this defense can be confusing in cases of contested expertise, with rows of doctors lined up on either side, offering conflicting explanations. In such a situation, Morriseau says, a person might lean toward one understanding over another based on how closely it aligns with previously held political or cultural beliefs or affiliations. A compelling story could make all the difference.
In a recent article, two psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Spencer Mermelstein and Tamsin German have argued that pseudoscientific beliefs, Ranging from the relatively harmless (astrology, dowsing) to the deeply malignant (eugenics, Holocaust denial), they tend to find cultural success when they hit a sweet spot of strangeness: too extravagant, and the epistemological immune system will reject it; too banal and no one transmits it. What’s most likely to be established, Mermelstein says, is something that adds an intriguing twist to a person’s current sense of the world. The idea that a comet impact shaped many details of the modern world is not only surprising and interesting, he says; It also roughly conforms to most people’s prior understanding of the Earth’s geological past. And it is simpler and more satisfying than alternative explanations for the events of the Younger Dryas. “It’s like a great cause, a great result,” Mermelstein says. “We can move on, right?”