Scientific Reports will retract a controversial paper claiming to present evidence an ancient city in the Middle East was destroyed by an exploding celestial body – an event the authors suggested could have inspired the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The decision comes two years after Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature title, published an editor’s note informing readers the journal was looking into concerns about the data and conclusions in the work.
The pending retraction was the subject of an April 10 blog post by one of the paper’s authors, George Howard, who called the journal’s decision to remove the article “a profoundly disappointing and frankly disgusting turn of events.”
Criticism of the article, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” began soon after its publication in September 2021. Between critiques, questions, and the authors’ responses, the article has garnered 187 comments on PubPeer, outpacing the 19 scholarly citations recorded in Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The authors have corrected the article twice. In a February 2022 correction, they acknowledged “inappropriate” manipulation of several dozen figures, which sleuth Elisabeth Bik had flagged on PubPeer, and published the original images. A May 2023 correction updated a figure sourced from physicist Mark Boslough, who said the authors had mislabeled and misinterpreted it.
Boslough coauthored a Matters Arising commentary, published April 22, describing “errors” in the work that “have led to assertions of evidence that do not appear to be supported by the data, and to conclusions that are not factually supported.”
Six of the paper’s authors wrote a response, which the journal did not publish but Howard included in his blog post. “We agree with the points raised” in the Matters Arising commentary, they wrote, “with the clarification that none of their comments are relevant to the conclusion” of the original article.
The authors’ response reiterated the “high-temperature melted pottery and melted surficial sediment” they had reported at the site. An earlier Matters Arising, published in March 2022, questioned whether those findings could be the result of ancient smelting technologies rather than a fireball from space. “The observations and data presented here do not meet the well-established criteria for documenting evidence of an extraterrestrial event,” the critics concluded.
“Obviously, I and the other coauthors strongly disagree with the retraction,” Allen West, the corresponding author of the paper, told us. “A small but vocal group of scientists has actively sought to stifle discussion on the Tall el-Hammam airburst. Such actions undermine the principles of scientific inquiry.”
West said the authors would republish the original article with new data. “The critics thought that they could suppress this discussion, but they failed,” he said. “We are simply going around them so that the debate about these extremely dangerous airbursts can continue.”
Boslough has been in contact with Rafal Marszalek, chief editor of Scientific Reports, about the paper since soon after its publication. Boslough called the journal’s system of handling concerns “opaque,” with all decisions “made behind closed doors.”
In a statement to us, Marszalek called the questions about the paper “a complex case for which differing concerns emerged over many months, with the final concerns raised undermining the conclusions of the paper and necessitating retraction.”
“Throughout the process, in line with COPE guidelines, our focus was solely on responsibly assessing the validity of the conclusions of the paper, and never on the ideological positions of any of the parties involved,” Marszalek said in the statement. “We would like to thank all those that contributed their time and expertise throughout the process.”
“I think the pattern of problems revealed on PubPeer were overwhelming,” Boslough said, starting with the image manipulation Bik observed. “Their evidence simply didn’t support their conclusions, and they withheld most of the data that they claimed provided the basis for many of their graphs, maps, and age interpretations.”
Boslough anticipates the retraction will lead to more scrutiny of the group’s other, also controversial, work, such as a 2007 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claiming to present evidence of an extraterrestrial impact about 13,000 years ago they say led to the extinction of wooly mammoths and the Clovis culture in North America.
The other papers “have similar problems with lack of transparency, missing or nonexistent evidence, and basic misunderstandings of the physics associated with impacts and airbursts,” Boslough said.
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