The Asteroid Behind the Bible's Most Famous Disaster

-Try QUO for free and get 20% off your first 6 months at https://www.quo.com/WHY. -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call (888) 949-9172 now. -Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at https://shopify.com/why. In 1650 BC, a city on the Dead Sea burned so completely that nothing grew there for six centuries. The destruction happened in a single morning, and the evidence left in the ground points to something falling from the sky. Three artifacts from three different countries describe the same event. A clay tablet from ancient Iraq. A bronze disk pulled from a German hillside. Melted pottery from the Jordan Valley. Scientists spent fifteen years excavating the site. What they pulled from the ground included glazed pottery, shocked quartz, diamond dust, and skeletons frozen mid-step. The same fingerprint shows up at confirmed impact sites worldwide. The story doesn't end in 1650 BC. The debris field responsible has a return date, and astronomers are watching the calendar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:37AJ Gentile?

  In December 2024, a telescope spotted a rock the size of a 20-story building heading our way. Its odds of hitting Earth were higher than any asteroid in 20 years. Then the math changed, and the threat passed. This time. We weren't the first to see a city killer coming. A tablet from a library in Iraq. A bronze disc buried on a German hillside. Melted pottery from the Dead Sea. Three different objects from three different countries describing the same event. Every ancient civilization on Earth has a story about that morning. It's the story of the end of the world. And today, we're going to read it off a piece of clay.

• 1:28AJ Gentile?

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• 2:12AJ Gentile?

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• 2:44AJ Gentile?

  Northern Iraq, 1842. The Bible called Nineveh the greatest city of the ancient world. Walls 100 feet tall, streets wide enough for three chariots side by side. Classical historians agreed it was real, but nobody can find it. Eventually, most scholars decided it never existed. Then a French consul started pulling giant winged bulls out of a mound in northern Mesopotamia. Paris went wild. The British Museum wanted a discovery of its own and Austin Henry Laird thought he knew where to find one. The race for the lost city was on.

• 3:23AJ Gentile?

  Laird followed the clues. Ancient texts put Nineveh directly across the river from what's now Mosul. One mound fit, a massive hill on the east bank of the Tigris. In 1849, Laird recruited a crew and dug and dug and dug. And then he hit stone.

• 3:42AJ Gentile?

  He expected a palace, but he broke into room after room full of clay tablets, stacked and shelved and cataloged the largest library of the ancient world. It belonged to King Ashurbanipal, who wanted every piece of knowledge on earth under one roof. He sent scribes across the empire to copy anything they could find. Medical texts, star charts, royal letters, 30,000 tablets, including the oldest version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. We still have these documents because of King Ashurbanipal.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Ah, King Ashton Bonaparte?

• 4:17AJ Gentile?

  Ashurbanipal.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Ash play from a pal?

• 4:20AJ Gentile?

  Ashurbanipal.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Ah, so Ashtray Bonaparte paved the way for AI companies to steal all our data. Ah, cool, cool, cool. Ah, I got it. Go ahead.

• 4:30AJ Gentile?

  Ashurbanapal bragged about it, in his own inscriptions, in his own voice. He claimed he read text written before the flood. Scholars filed that under "royal trash talk." Then, in 612 B.C., Nineveh's enemies burned the city to the ground. The fire should have destroyed everything, but it didn't. The clay tablets baked harder. The collapsed roof sealed the ruins. The library went underground for 2,500 years, preserved by the same disaster that was supposed to erase it. Laertians shipped the tablets to London. Then the hard part started. Cuneiform, the wedge-shaped writing of ancient Mesopotamia. That was a code nobody could fully read yet.

• 5:13AJ Gentile?

  One symbol could mean a single word, or a single sound, or a whole word, or a whole sentence. Scholars spent decades fighting over translations, publishing papers that flatly contradicted each other. And through all of it, one tablet sat in a drawer and waited. It was round, 5.5 inches across, small enough to hold in one hand. And round was strange, because cuneiform tablets are almost always rectangular. One side was blank, the other was divided into eight equal slices, like a pie. Each one packed with writing and little drawings: arrows, clusters of dots, a triangle, a spiral.

• 5:56AJ Gentile?

  The British Museum gave it a number: K8538. And a name: the Nineveh Planisphere. A planisphere is a flat map of the night sky. The scholars who named it took a guess, they had no idea how close they were. Because every expert who tried to read it got a different answer. One called it "an instrument for measuring stars." One spent 300 pages arguing it recorded a single night in 650 B.C. One called it "a message to the king about omens." They all agreed on exactly one thing: it was a text. They just argued about what it said. And the scribe who carved it into wet clay didn't understand it either.

• 6:37AJ Gentile?

  He copied it line for line from something 25 centuries older than he was: a text from before the flood. Exactly the kind of thing the king bragged he owned. The scribe was an expert on dead languages. By the time anyone could read this one... His language was dead too.

• 7:07AJ Gentile?

  A seriology is a closed world. It takes decades to learn. The writing, the dead languages, 3,000 years of Mesopotamian history. The people who translate these tablets train their whole lives to do it. Rocket scientists are supposed to stay in their lane. Alan Bond and Mark Hemcel were rocket scientists. Bond designed spacecraft engines. Hemcel taught astronautics. Neither one read cuneiform. For years, they were convinced that every translator for a century and a half had it backwards. The tablet wasn't a text at all. It was a map. The arrows and the clusters of dots were stars.

• 7:47AJ Gentile?

  Eight slices of sky in the exact positions of real constellations like Pisces and the Pleiades. Not a map of anywhere on Earth, a map of the night above it. So Bond and Hemcel fed the star positions into planetarium software, the kind that can run the sky backward to any date in history. So they told the software to find the night where those constellations lined up. It came back with an answer. 3123 B.C. That was 2,500 years earlier than anyone ever guessed. They assumed it was a mistake, so they ran it again. Check the constellations. Check the latitude. The answer kept coming back to the same. June 29th, 3123 B.C.

• 8:32AJ Gentile?

  Just before dawn, seen from southern Mesopotamia. Three of the eight slices showed ordinary sky. The other five showed what came next. Something crossed that sky, bright enough to cast shadows, fast enough that the scribe had to draw it in stages as it moved. The tablet described a white stone wall, a disk, coming out of the giant part of the sky we call Pisces, climbing to the northwest and crossing the horizon at an angle Bond and Hemcel could measure down to a fraction of a degree. Six degrees above the horizon. And that's where the math stops being abstract.

• 9:13AJ Gentile?

  An object that big, that low, moving that fast, doesn't stop at the horizon. It keeps going. They drew the line on a map. Northwest across Iraq, across Turkey, across the Balkans. 2,000 miles until the line ran straight into the side of a mountain. A valley in the Ashtay Alps, a place called Kofels. And for 100 years, Kofels was a problem nobody can solve. Until now.

• 9:53AJ Gentile?

  You want to know what's wild? The same institutions printing money and growing the debt to $39 trillion are also the ones telling you to keep your retirement in paper assets. Stocks, bonds, dollars. Assets that only hold value if you trust the system backing them. Meanwhile, the numbers are doing something different. Gold up around 35% this past year. Silver up over 125%. The stock market, which everyone's been celebrating, is up about 27%. It's not even a close comparison. And Bank of America is forecasting silver at $309 an ounce, with top banks projecting gold at $6,300. Now, I'm not guaranteeing those numbers.

• 10:38AJ Gentile?

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• 11:18AJ Gentile?

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• 11:48AJ Gentile?

  A piece of mountain the size of a small city, three-quarters of a cubic mile of rock, came off the ridge in an alpine valley in a single event and dropped the peak by 600 feet.

• 12:02AJ Gentile?

  The slide ran three miles wide and 1,600 feet thick. A rock like that doesn't just fall. Something has to move it. An earthquake didn't fit because no fault runs through the area. A normal landslide didn't fit either. It was too big, it was too fast, and it was too hot.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Nah, Janice.

• 12:21AJ Gentile?

  Who?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Ah, my first love. Janice, too big, too fast, too hot. Uh, why you gotta bring her up?

• 12:28AJ Gentile?

  I didn't. Because one detail made Kofels strange long before anyone said the word asteroid.

• 12:37AJ Gentile?

  The rock at the bottom of the slide was melted. Not weathered, not crushed, melted. Geologists call it frictionite, a glassy rock that forms when stone gets ground so fast that the friction turns it to liquid. Kofels has beds of the stuff several feet thick. And the quartz crystals down the slide carry shock fractures, microscopic damage that only forms under the kind of pressure you find at a nuclear test site or confirmed impact crater. The same fingerprint turns up at Chickshul, where the rock that killed the dinosaurs hit, and at Meteor Crater in Arizona.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Heat, friction, chicks, and lube. Uh, can we please stop talking about Janice?

• 13:21AJ Gentile?

  I would love nothing more. Here's what Bondin himself calculated it would take. An object a kilometer wide, two-thirds of a mile, hit the air at 20 kilometers a second, 45,000 miles an hour. At 6 degrees, which was the angle on the tablet, it came in so shallow it never cratered the ground. It skipped across the top of the atmosphere like a stone across a pond, crushing the air in front of it into a wall of plasma hotter than the surface of the sun. Anything alive under the track, every animal, every tree, everything from the Persian Gulf to the Alps, watched a second sunrise climb into the wrong part of the sky. And when it finally broke apart right over Kofels,

• 14:06AJ Gentile?

  it released more energy than every nuclear weapon on Earth going off at once.

• 14:13AJ Gentile?

  For comparison, in 1908, a rock about 160 feet across blew up over Siberia and flattened 800 square miles of forest. We call that tunguska. The Kofels object was 20 times wider. And energy scales with weight, not width. This thing carried thousands of tunguskas. The column of vaporized rock punched straight up out of the valley. Then the jet stream caught it, and one hour later, the cloud stretched from Ireland to Moscow.

• 14:53AJ Gentile?

  The cloud went up 40 miles. To picture that, a passenger jet flies at about 7 miles up. The space shuttle comes home through the atmosphere at around 40. The Kofels plume reached the same height, except it was made of vaporized rock and molten iron and air cooked into plasma. It climbed through the weather and into the edge of space. The largest hydrogen bomb ever built, the Soviet Tsar Bomba, sent its mushroom cloud to 40 miles, too. That's the scale we're talking about. But Kofels was a stack of Tsar Bombas going off on top of a mountain. The plume sheared sideways and rode the jet stream east.

• 15:37AJ Gentile?

  It spread as it went, a column turning into a mushroom, turning into a sheet of glowing debris the size of a comet. Inside it were pieces the blast didn't fully vaporize. Millimeter beads of molten iron and rock, frozen into glass as they shot upward. Scientists call them tectites and spherules. That's what an impact leaves behind, tiny drops of cooked planet scattered downwind. The plume came down eventually. The fallout reached across Europe and into the Near East, and it's still there. Archaeologists pull it out of the soil to this day. But here's the part that should keep you up at night. Kofels wasn't a freak accident. Astronomers know where the rock came from. They call it the Tord Stream, the wreckage of a giant comet.

• 16:22AJ Gentile?

  Comet that broke apart in the inner solar system sometime in the last 20,000 years. The biggest surviving chunk is a comet four kilometers across that still loops the sun every three years. Everything else, the dust and gravel and rocks and the occasional mountain, runs in a long tube of debris that crosses Earth's orbit twice a year, every year, for longer than our species has existed. Now, most of it is nothing. When the dust burns up over your house every Halloween, you call it the torrid meteor shower and make a wish.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  I made a wish once. I wished that every time someone tapped my bowl, they became uncomfortably damp forever.

• 17:04AJ Gentile?

  Did it work?

• 17:05Speaker 02

  You're dry, aren't you, human? Man, that John Cena is so full of [BLEEP].

• 17:10AJ Gentile?

  Now, every once in a while, a bigger piece gets through, and we have proof. In 1975, Earth crossed a dense part of the stream, and some of it hit the moon. The seismometers the Apollo astronauts left on the surface picked up the strikes, machines on the moon ringing as the swarm came through. The big pieces don't come every year. They come in clumps, thousands of years apart. The debris isn't spread out evenly. It orbits the sun seven times for every two trips Jupiter makes. And every so often Jupiter's gravity gives it a tug and herds the loose rock into dense knots. Picture a prospector swirling a pan until the gold collects in one spot.

• 17:52AJ Gentile?

  Earth doesn't cross those knots often, but when it does, cities burn. One of them sat on the shore of the Dead Sea, a city people told stories about for thousands of years, a city that, according to the Bible, God himself promised to destroy. And if you remember how the story ends, it doesn't end well.

• 18:19AJ Gentile?

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• 19:01AJ Gentile?

  They're always there, unlike some other entities who we investigate. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com/why. Go to Shopify.com/why. That's Shopify.com/why.

• 19:25AJ Gentile?

  For most of modern archaeology, Sodom was a bedtime story. The Bible said Sodom and its sister city Gomorrah burned from the sky in a single morning, in a rain of fire and sulfur that left the ground dead behind them. Ancient writers repeated the story. Medieval maps show the cities, but nobody ever found the ruins. And by the middle of the last century, archaeologists quit looking. Sodom got filed next to Atlantis, a moral lesson, not a real place. But Stephen Collins didn't buy it.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Bill Collins?

• 19:56AJ Gentile?

  Stephen.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  That would have been awesome. In the air tonight is actually a story about asteroids falling out of the sky. Epic!

• 20:04AJ Gentile?

  Collins ran the-

• 20:05Speaker 02

  The hair doesn't show, but the pain still grows. It's no stranger to you and me.

• 20:13AJ Gentile?

  Are you finished?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Do, do, do, do, do, do. Now I'm finished.

• 20:18AJ Gentile?

  Collins ran the archaeology program at a small evangelical university in New Mexico. The mainstream field didn't treat him as one of their own. Evangelical archaeologists dig to test the Bible, and that put him on the outside. But Collins was sure of two things: Sodom was real, and he knew where to look.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Ah, where do you look, Uranus?

• 20:39AJ Gentile?

  That's enough.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:41AJ Gentile?

  He spent 10 years on the geography before he even picked up a shovel. The Bible put Sodom on the plain north of the Dead Sea, not south, where everyone before him searched. One site sat exactly where the text pointed: A Bronze Age mound in Jordan called Tal El Hamam. And it was no village. In its day, this was the biggest city in the region, 10 times the size of Jerusalem and 5 times the size of Jericho. Its life ended all at once, in a single burned layer, around 1650 B.C. So in 2005, he started to dig.

• 21:19AJ Gentile?

  15 seasons, 5 feet of charcoal and ash. His team went in expecting a war. Armies burn cities. Earthquakes flatten them. Volcanoes bury them. Those were the way a Bronze Age city died. What they pulled out of the ground didn't match any of them. They pulled out pottery that melted instead of breaking, glazed on one side and untouched on the other, like somebody took a blowtorch to one side of a piece of clay. They found mud brick with the outer face turned into glass, while the inside was still clay, and grain cooked to black dust right where it sat. Glass forms at about 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. Lava out of a volcano tops out at around 2,200.

• 22:04AJ Gentile?

  Nothing on Earth's surface gets pottery that hot. Then, they found the people.

• 22:12AJ Gentile?

  Two skulls lying a hand's width apart. One with the eye socket crushed in. A skeleton in the throne room of the palace. Top half simply gone, and the bottom half burned down to the bone. Collins didn't trust it. He sent samples to lab after lab, and every lab sent back the same fingerprint. Shocked quartz, the same fractured crystals from Kofuls. Microscopic beads of molten iron and glass. Diamond dust, formed in the first instant of a shockwave. And a layer of iridium in the soil. The same metal that proves that the dinosaurs went extinct because of an impact. The numbers pointed to an airburst. An explosion in the air, instead of a crater in the ground.

• 22:56AJ Gentile?

  Something detonated about two and a half miles above the rooftops with a force of a thousand Hiroshimas. If you stood on the city wall that morning, the flash came first, brighter than the sun. The air itself arrived a few seconds later, moving faster than the speed of sound. The dirt holds one more clue. The destruction layer is packed with salt. 4% on average. In some samples, a quarter of the soil is salt. The team's best explanation is the blast went off close enough to the Dead Sea to vaporize part of it. And what rained down on the fields was the sea itself.

• 23:39AJ Gentile?

  One of the strangest details in the Bible story is Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt when she looked back. It's also the one detail that the soil proves. The salt poisoned everything. Nothing grew. Across a 15-mile circle, 120 towns and villages went dark, and they stayed dark for 600 years. His team expected graves. They found something like Pompeii. 17 centuries before Pompeii happened. They found people frozen mid-step with their mouths open, hands up, caught in the half-second before they died. And you can't help but wonder, in that moment, what did they say?

• 24:28AJ Gentile?

  Summer 1999, a forested hilltop in eastern Germany. Two men with a metal detector got a signal and started digging. What came out of the ground was a bronze plate about the size of a dinner plate, crusted green and heavy. Gold shapes were hammered into the face: a circle, a crescent, a tight cluster of seven dots. The men were looters. They had no idea what they had. They gouged it with the shovel, getting it out, chipped the gold, and sold the whole thing the next day for 31,000 marks. Then the disk disappeared. For three years, it moved through the black market, dealer to dealer, and the price climbed toward a million. There was just one problem for whoever held it.

• 25:10AJ Gentile?

  Under German law, the disk belonged to the state, which meant every sale was a crime, which meant it could never surface in the open. The hottest object in the German underground couldn't be sold in Germany. But the authorities knew it was out there, so in 2002, they set a trap. A tip put the disk in Switzerland, and a meeting was arranged in the bar of the Basel Hotel. The state archaeologists played the buyer. The dealers put 3,600 years of human history on a table next to the drinks, and he picked it up. He knew within seconds, this thing was real. He also refused to let go of it, and while he held on, undercover police moved in around the table.

• 25:55AJ Gentile?

  And that's how the oldest picture of the sky ever found ended up in a museum: a sting operation. Cleaned and restored, the disk shows a night sky in gold and dark bronze, a full sun or moon, a crescent, and a tight cluster of seven dots: the Pleiades. The same seven stars the scribe pressed into the clay at Nineveh. The gold came from Cornwall in England. The copper came from a single mine in the Austrian Alps, about 180 miles from Kofels. And along one edge runs a long curved golden arc. Most researchers read it as a boat carrying the sun across the night. Others read it as something else: a thing with a tail crossing the sky.

• 26:38AJ Gentile?

  The oldest map of the city on earth went into the ground within a few years of the morning that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah burned.

• 27:00AJ Gentile?

  Okay, what do we got? Everything I just told you, from the tablet to the disk, is a story as several research teams have published it. Bond and Hemcel's book on the planet Earth, Collins's 15 years at Tal El Hamam, a 2021 paper in a major journal arguing the city died in a blast from the sky. It's a hell of a story, but is it true? Well, start with the tablet. K8538 is real. It's in the British Museum right now. It's Assyrian, and it really is round when almost nothing else in that collection is. What's in question is the translation. The professional Assyriologists, the people who spent their lives on this, mostly don't buy Bond and Hemcel's reading.

• 27:43AJ Gentile?

  They see a ritual calendar about gods and constellations, not an eyewitness report. Bond and Hemcel read it the way engineers read data. Both readings fit the marks, but only one of them can be tested. Kohphos is more solid. The melted rock is real. A mountain came down in one night, and the stone at the bottom melted. What's not settled is when and why. The best dating we have puts the slide at around 7,500 B.C., more than 4,000 years before the tablet's mourning. And that's a serious problem for the impact theory. Plenty of geologists think a big enough landslide can make that rock melt all by itself. And some question the shocked quartz as well. Worst case for the theory, the date splits the story in two:

• 28:28AJ Gentile?

  A mountain that fell in 7,500 B.C. and a fireball over Mesopotamia in 3123 B.C. The tablet loses the mountain, but the sky keeps its track record. Tal El Hamam is the hot worst. That 2021 paper got the most attention and the most fire. Mark Boslow, a physicist at the University of New Mexico who models air bursts for living, pulled apart the paper's tunguska comparison and flagged excavation photos rotated to fit the blast story. The paper drew more than 180 challenges on a science watchdog site. In April 2025, the journal retracted it, and Boslow couldn't resist the Genesis joke on the way out.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Oh, did he say they were living in a land of confusion?

• 29:13AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 29:13Speaker 02

  It's a Phil Collins callback.

• 29:15AJ Gentile?

  I know what it is. The title of his takedown said the sodom claim should be taken with a pillar of salt. That didn't end the fight, though. It just moved it. One month later, the same team republished an expanded version somewhere else with new data and a computer model of the blast. The team said a small group of scientists tried to shut down the conversation and failed. The catch is that the journal they moved to was founded by people who backed these same airburst ideas. So depending on who you ask, that's either a brave team going around the gatekeepers or a closed-loop publishing itself. A retraction doesn't mean the city wasn't destroyed.

• 29:57AJ Gentile?

  It means the first claim about how it was destroyed didn't survive review. But here's the thing the critics can't wave away. Tal El Hamam isn't the only one. 12,800 years ago, long before writing, a village on the Euphrates called Abu Hurraea burned the same way. The same melt glass, the same diamond dust, the same iron beads. Temperatures past 3,600 degrees. Nobody retracted Abu Hurraea. The bigger idea belongs to a comet strike at the end of the last ice age is one of the nastiest feuds in modern science. But the paper stands. So even if Tal El Hamam falls apart tomorrow, the pattern doesn't fall with it. And then there's the disk.

• 30:42AJ Gentile?

  The honest answer is that nobody can read it. The comet reading is the minority of you. Most researchers see a boat carrying the sun. The copper coming from a mine near Kofels might be a memory of a trade route. And people still fight over how old the thing even is. One camp says it's Bronze Age. Another says it's 1,000 years younger. But the disk is real. What it remembers is up for grabs. So we don't get an answer. We just get an inventory. We know a scribe copied a tablet he couldn't read. And the library that held it burned. And the burning saved it. We know a mountain in Austria came down in one night and the rock at the bottom melted. We know a village on the Euphrates cooked to glass. We know a city on the Dead Sea.

• 31:27AJ Gentile?

  sea burned in a single warning and stayed empty for as long as 600 years. And we know that nearly every ancient culture on Earth tells a story about the day the sky caught fire. The Sumerians and the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Maya and the Hopi and the Aboriginal Australians. Maybe they're all the same story, or maybe none of them are.

• 31:52AJ Gentile?

  But here's the part that scares me. Mark Boslow, the man who helped take down the Sodom paper, led a new study on the Torrid Stream, the same stream from Kofels. His team's finding, the swarm makes its next close passes in 2032 and 2036. And if dangerous rocks are riding in it, most won't be visible until they're already past us. When he explains why he takes the swarm seriously, he points at the moon. Fireball spike and lunar impacts register right when the swarm theory says they should. His bottom line, we won't know until 2032 after it's too late, unless we do something about it.

• 32:34AJ Gentile?

  The man who debunked one part of the story is sounding the alarm on the other. And the last time the swarm came this close was June 1975. That pass set the moon ringing, that's true. Astronomers booked a dedicated hunt for the big objects during the swarm's 2019 pass, the best viewing window in decades. They never got to look. Protest shut down the mountain in Hawaii and the telescope sat dark through the entire window. They tried again in 2022 with two telescopes and came up empty, which is good news, sort of. The empty sky ruled out the giants, it couldn't rule out the small stuff. By the search team's own math, the swarm could still hold up to 1,000 rocks,

• 33:16AJ Gentile?

  the size of the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia. That was in 2013 and put 1,500 people in the hospital.

• 33:25AJ Gentile?

  They get two more chances to look before the swarm arrives. 2029 and a little bit sooner in 2026. Yes, this year in a few months. Which brings us back to where we started. In December 2024, a building-sized rock passed between the Earth and the satellites. We never saw it coming. We only saw it leaving. It came out of the daytime sky, passed us, and a telescope in Chile caught it two days later, already headed away. Its return date was December 2032. Different rock, different family, same year the swarm comes back.

• 34:09AJ Gentile?

  Now, for a while, the math said it might hit the Moon instead of us. And astronomers were honestly a little excited. A chance to watch it impact land somewhere else, on a surface where we can study it for centuries. Then, this past March, the Webb Telescope hunted the rock down one more time and called it. A clean miss, 15,000 miles. The math saved us this time. The people who watched the sky come apart 5,000 years ago didn't have this math. They didn't even have words for this. They had what they saw: a wet piece of clay and the hope that somebody, someday, would pick it up and understand. And right now, that's us. We're the ones holding the tablet.

• 34:50AJ Gentile?

  So, let's stop translating for a second and just listen to the thing. Not the theory, not the date, just what the object is telling us. It's telling us one thing as clear as the morning it was recorded: The sky is a dangerous place. You better do something about it. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My name is AJ. That's EchoFish.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  From now on, call me King Ashton Bonaparte.

• 35:26AJ Gentile?

  I will not. This has been the Y-Files. If you had fun or learned something, and I appreciate it, if you could like, subscribe, comment, share. Sorry for the homework, but that stuff really helps us out. Like most topics we cover on the channel, today's topic was recommended by you. So if there's a story you want to see or learn more about, go to theyfiles.com/tips, catch us on Discord, send an email, a chat during one of the videos, there's a lot of ways to get ahold of us, and we're always looking for good topics. Now, if you enjoy the stories I tell on the Y-Files, check out my other show on the channel, it's called The Basement. It's a conversation show where I chat with some interesting people who are behind these episodes. Some, you know, some you don't, but you're gonna like them all. They're all people that I find fascinating. Experts

• 36:08AJ Gentile?

  on topics like Knights Templar, moon landing hoax, quantum mechanics, JFK conspiracy, all kinds of wild stuff. And if there's someone you'd like to see on the show, let me know. I'm always looking for good guests. Remember, the Y-Files is also a podcast. You can take us on the road. I upload at least twice a week, episodes, campfire stories, interviews, and it's called the Y-Files Operation Podcast. It's available everywhere you get your podcasts. And if you are listening on an audio platform, please hit the thumbs up, or the follow, or the like, or whatever the button is. That really makes a big, big difference. Now, if you need more Y-Files in your life, check out our Discord. We've got over 100,000 members, so someone's there 24/7, causing trouble, having fun, but they're

• 36:52AJ Gentile?

  into the same weird stuff we are here. It's a great community, it's really supportive, it's a lot of fun, and it's free to join. Speaking of 24/7, check out our 24/7 stream of the Y-Files backstage. Over there, we run episodes back to back, some fun content in between. And to be honest, the live chat is more interesting than the videos. There's a great community over there. Special thanks to our patrons who made this channel possible. Every episode of the Y-Files is dedicated to my Patreon members. I couldn't do any of this without you. I wouldn't even be sitting here without your support. So, thank you. And if you'd like to support the channel, keep us going, but join this community, consider becoming a member on Patreon. It's only three bucks a month, you get access to perks like

• 37:33AJ Gentile?

  videos early with no commercials, exclusive merch, exclusive content, and two private live streams every week, all just for you. And the whole Y-Files team is on the stream. Me, Victoria, Mary Jane, Gino, hybrid.

• 37:49AJ Gentile?

  Whoever else has something to get in. All the mods that you see in the chat, they're usually up there. But you can turn on your camera, join us on stage, talk about anything you like, ask a question, tell a joke, just say hello. It's a way to get to know us as people and honestly, I think it's the best perk there is. Another great way to support the channel, grab something for the Wi-Fi store.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Grab a heck of a t-shirt, or what is it, Mr. Lookout, do you have your stick, your fist, or your fin, or your appendage, or your elbow, whatever it fits in there. I say try everything, try it all. Grab a hoodie, slap my face on it, or get one of these adorable, squeasy animal, look at these feathers, just want to squeeze them all, dang it, Lord. Ah, I didn't like the way it sounded. Can I do another take? I'll keep going, I got it, I got it. Grab a fish toy that's got a heck of a squeezing animal talking dog.

• 38:35AJ Gentile?

  But if you're gonna buy merch, make sure you become a member on YouTube. Hear me out, I know another membership. YouTube members get 10% off everything in the Wi-Fi store forever. It's only $3. So if you're gonna spend $40 on t-shirts, become a member, get the code, it pays for itself, and look, if they just cancel, that's fine. I don't think anything comes out of your bank account. Oh, probably on that. But, but the point is, the membership is there to save you money, not make you money. I prefer just to get the merch out there as cheap as possible. If you've been watching this channel for a while, you know that I hate creators who gouge, and I never have. So, it's a great way to support the team as well, because that membership revenue, I

• 39:20AJ Gentile?

  don't touch it. It goes to the amazing people that help me make this happen.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, keep that secret, uh, close to your scales, eh?

• 39:28AJ Gentile?

  Those are the plugs, and that's gonna do it. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  I played for Libya in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. Songs singing like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends. And it never ends, no it never ends.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  I fear the crackhead and got stuck inside mail's hole with them K-12 trucks. I'm being only too aware. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadows people there?

• 40:48Speaker 03

  The Razzwell Indians just fought the smiling man, I'm told. And his name was Cold. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ. When the whiff of love and me all through the night.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So the whiff of love and me all through the night.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  The mapman sightings and the solar storms still come. To a god that the secrets of the underground. Mysterious number stations, planets circle to Project Stargate. And what the dark watchers found.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  In a simulation, don't you worry though. The black nights had a light, it told me so. I can't believe, I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with DJ. And one more time, beat all through the night.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more time, beat all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights with DJ. And one more time, beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more time, beat all through the night.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  Girlie loves to dance. Girlie loves to dance on the dance floor. Because she is a camel, and camels love to dance. When the feeling is right on wasting time.

• 43:32Speaker 00

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• 44:00Speaker 04

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• 44:32Speaker 05

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