M.J. Rose

DEJA NEWS – Vintage News

The following item appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on

February 16, 1947 (and was repeated by Ivan T. Sanderson in the

January 1970 issue of his magazine, Pursuit):

When the first atomic bomb exploded in New Mexico, the desert

sand turned to fused green glass. This fact, according to the

magazine Free World, has given certain archaeologists a turn.

They have been digging in the ancient Euphrates Valley and have

uncovered a layer of agrarian culture 8,000 years old, and a layer

of herdsman culture much older, and a still older caveman culture.

Recently, they reached another layer of fused green glass.

It is well known that atomic detonations on or above a sandy desert will melt the silicon in the sand and turn the surface of the Earth into a sheet of glass. But if sheets of ancient desert glass can be found in various parts of the world, does it mean that atomic wars were fought in the ancient past or, at the very least, that atomic testing occurred in the dim ages of history?

This is a startling theory, but one that is not lacking in evidence, as such ancient sheets of desert glass are a geological fact. Lightning strikes can sometimes fuse sand, meteorologists contend, but this is always in a distinctive root-like pattern. These strange geological oddities are called fulgurites and manifest as branched tubular forms rather than as flat sheets of fused sand. Therefore, lightning is largely ruled out as the cause of such finds by geologists, who prefer to hold onto the theory of a meteor or comet strike as the cause. The problem with this theory is that there is usually no crater associated with these anomalous sheets of glass.

Brad Steiger and Ron Calais report in their book, Mysteries of Time and Space, that Albion W. Hart, one of the first engineers to graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was assigned an engineering project in the interior of Africa. While he and his men were travelling to an almost inaccessible region, they first had to cross a great expanse of desert.

“At the time he was puzzled and quite unable to explain a large expanse of greenish glass which covered the sands as far as he could see,” writes Margarethe Casson in an article on Hart’s life in the magazine Rocks and Minerals (no. 396, 1972). She then goes on to mention: “Later on, during his life he passed by the White Sands area after the first atomic explosion there, and he recognized the same type of silica fusion which he had seen fifty years earlier in the African desert.”