But the author of this post is not anonymous. His name is disclosed here, and he’s an actual (gasp) asteroid researcher with (gasp) published, peer-reviewed results relating to asteroid dynamics and impact. He’s also written for the four largest astronomy magazines in the world, and was on staff at the second-largest. As a reviewer, as it happens.

And the 100 free copies of the book thing is silly. Post a preprint on the arXiv astrophysics server. Or send BCS a PDF. This doesn’t cost any money. I seriously doubt the book will do any better than the press release, but if you are so confident, start treating your colleagues, and ones who actually work in the field you are writing about, respectfully. Subject your work to review.

Also Douglas, the book includes the impact velocity which was 15 km/s for the best match orbit and goes down to 12 km/s for some alternatives. It is definitely neither stony nor iron (what Aten is?) indeed the impact dynamics suggest a density below 1000 kg/m3. The impact effect will be over estimated by Marcus, Melosh, and Collins because of the Alpine terrain. The way it reaches the south east Mediterranean is the back plume which is deflected by the low pressure region behind the object, an effect well documented during the Shoemaker/Levy 9 impact. Please also note the warning in the book that our analysis is rather crude and first order and ignores lift effects, therefore our estimate of the plume re-entry point may be out.

However I am not going to go through every point raised on every website. Alan and I have spent three years on the write up alone preparing the presentation of our arguments as we wish people to read them, and no-one on any website has yet come up with anything we have not considered and already carefully answered in the book. This is not an attempt to sell the book, which is simply an extended paper and about as gripping as the San Paulo telephone directory translated into Japanese, but if you want to publically slag it off as delusional pseudo-science please do us the courtesy of finding out what we are actually saying first. To date (and I know it is early days) I know of nobody who has actually read the book making this sort of criticism.

A final point on free copies; we have sent around 100 copies to journals and researchers in the field, (and in a strange reversal of the current argument several expressed surprise saying they had expected to buy it). I am sorry if you did not end up on that list, but I hope you can see the problem of sending copies to every anonymous web blogger. We have made every effort (including the use of self publishing) to keep the price low, and if even that is not good enough then get it from the library for free.

The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth, that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit.

The bit about the Aten asteroids being resonant is just wrong. Many are resonant, some more strongly than others; but Aten asteroids are defined as those with a semi-major axis of less than one astronomical unit…. That’s all - you don’t need the asteroid to be in a resonant orbit to be an Aten.

I believe you misread that sentence. I think the actual meaning was
“The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit. An Aten is a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth.” The fact that the description was offset by commas indicates it was a modifying dependent clause interrupting the main clause. The resonant description was an additional bit of information besides the description as an Aten.

Not that it makes anything else you said incorrect.

Textual folks: Thanks for weighing in on the subject of copying very old Sumerian texts. I defer to your expertise and grant that the possibility of copying is greater than I originally credited. I still have a little problem using a copy (of a copy of a copy?) of an observation to compute an orbit with a MOID smaller than Earth’s diameter. I’ve got some familiarity with textual criticism of the bible, and the kinds of transmission errors seen there, if committed in the Sumerian copy, would preclude the determination of an orbit so precisely as to characterize it as an Earth-impactor, or as an Aten-family asteroid, to say nothing of both. I guess what I’m saying is that solving the copying problem seems to me to strike another blow against the book’s hypothesis - we have one textual witness that preserves unknown transmission errors, from which the authors claim they have computed a particular kind of orbit, while modern astronomers find this same task daunting on a routine basis even when the data are generated to much higher precision and don’t contain errors….