It’s reassuring, downright heartwarming, in fact, to discover that Michael Fairchild isn’t the only crazy person suggesting that the big tsunami was caused by something other than an earthquake. He must have got that stuff from someplace else, right? He’s a Hendrixologist — what does he know about geological phenomena?

It doesn’t take long to ferret out his cohorts in craziness. The sanely titled EcologyNews.com is mild enough in reporting that the would-be earthquake took place a mere 2.5 miles deep, but frets that “the exact depth of the ocean at the event site has been left out of every news report”.

A website with a trickier name, SurfingTheApocalypse.net, advises that “evidence for Sumatra 9.0 quake leans toward meteorite”. It seems to get this conclusion from a website with a name that ought to be reassuring, WhatDoesItMean.com.

This site has an analysis dated December 28, 2004, fast work by Sorcha Faal: “It is being reported that the depth was 10 kilometres. More importantly perhaps are the growing signs surrounding this event that rather than being caused by internal earth dynamics, as is being widely reported, it was instead caused by an extraterrestrial event, a meteorite strike into the ocean having come from the Southern Hemispheric skies.”

Faal notes that Australian researcher Professor Ted Bryant had predicted a meteor-driven disaster in his book “Tsunami — The Underrated Hazard”, based on a 1491 meteorite strike that lifted 130-metre waves.

Then it’s over to Australian Spaceguard Survey researcher Michael Paine, who says an asteroid smacking into the ocean would cause a gigantic explosion as the water vaporises and is viloently displaced — a 100-metre-wide asteroid would create a two-kilometre-wide “crater”. “The centre of the ‘crater’ oscillates up and down several times and a series of waves radiate out.”

Then Faal cites “a number of world reports relating to fireballs, mysterious lights in the sky around the world and exploding meteorites turning ‘night into day’ in both Indonesia and China” just before the 2004 catastrophe.

Reason shows up late in a May 2005 article on the website of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, though author Robert Sheaffer refrains from laughing out loud.

“Humans are pattern-seekers,” he writes, “and to many it seems impossible that an event so awesome and destructive could occur without at least some violation of the natural order, no matter how small.”

He notes that a British tsunami survivor told a newspaper that she’d been to see a palmist in Sri Lanka on the eve of the tsunami and he told her, “Stay out of the sea, big wave coming.” And that famed Thai fortune teller Pinyo Pongcharoen, president of the International Astrology Association, had blamed it all on the “bad luck” dogging Thaksin Shinawatra, then Thailand’s prime minister.

As reported at the time in my newspaper, The Nation, Thaksin’s evil astrological influences triggered the disaster that swallowed nearly a quarter of a million people.

Sheaffer then mentions that business about animals getting the hell out of the way before any human figured out that trouble was on its way, but harrumphs that animals don’t usually hang around the beach anyway. (He hasn’t seen the beach dogs of Thailand.)

More worrying, though, was an “investigative report” in the Egyptian weekly Al-Usbu suggesting that the earthquake and tsunami were a consequence of secret nuclear testing by the US, Israel and India aimed at finding a way of “liquidating humanity”. “Although the nuclear explosions were carried out in desert lands, tens of thousands of kilometres away from populated areas, they had a direct effect on these areas” by destabilising the tectonic plates.
Then there’s the Saudi professor who attributed the tragedy to divine retribution for homosexuality and fornication, and an Egyptian researcher saying NASA had discovered that “infinite” short-wave radiation was emanating from the Ka’ba in Mecca. The radiation extended “well past Mars, apparently extending to ‘the celestial Ka’ba’, effectively connecting heaven and earth”.

Other Dorseyland tsunami posts:
* On the first anniversary
* On the second anniversary
* It was that big
* Making nonsense of it