In a profoundly disappointing and frankly disgusting turn of events, Nature Scientific Reports has made the decision today to retract one of the most important and widely-read scientific papers of all time.
Years of relentless harrassment of the Editor In Chief of Nature Scientific Reports has finally seen him cave. Rather than simply blocking email addresses to prevent the daily influx of emails from serial complainers, as would be the more appropriate action, Rafal Marszalek has chosen to retract the article on the basis of the latest batch of complaints.
Worse still, the very reasonable and measured response to those complaints by Phil Silvia and coauthors will not be published alongside the “Matters Arising” complaints that led to the paper’s ultimate demise.
Not only did they cave to the trolling of the CRG’s most persistent and unreasonable critics, they refuse to give us a fair hearing by publishing our response!
That’s why you can read all of it at the bottom of this post.
The splitting of hairs in the Matters Arising are irrelevant to the physical evidence recovered from the Terminal Destruction Matrix (TDM) at Tall el-Hammam, including abundant trinitite and other melt products, that can only have been formed during a touchdown airburst event over the site at the time of its destruction.
Their claims are solely focused on the perceived misunderstandings about Tunguska by the authors, and have nothing whatsoever to do with the airburst proxies reported in the manuscript.
Nobody was there to witness Tunguska, and published estimates of its size and effects are highly variable. The serial complainers refuse to acknowledge other work that might disagree with their claims about Tunguska as valid, and instead impose their narrow, reductionist claims as absolute truth. Even if their claims regarding the authors’ “misunderstandings” regarding Tunguska were true, Bunch et al. repeatedly claim in the manuscript that the claimed airburst that destroyed Tall el-Hammam was larger in scale and effect than Tunguska, as Silvia et al. demonstrate in their response.
As any reasonable person can see, Silvia et al. addressed the irrelevant complaints of the serial pests remarkably well… Perhaps too well for the pre-determined outcome the editors had in mind.
Publishing Silvia et al.’s response alongside the retraction notice would show that they had no reasonable grounds for retraction, other than that Rafal Marszalek wants to be free of the incessant mewling of the serial pests that harrass him daily.
His desire to be free of the mewling of serial pests is the same dynamic that led Petaev to join as a coauthor of Holliday et al. 2023’s “comprehensive refutation” of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis; he was essentially held at gunpoint by these people and told to partially walk back the very reasonable claims he had made in the original 2013 publication of what has now been confirmed as the Global Platinum Anomaly at the YD Boundary.
No doubt these mewling cretins are popping champagne tonight, but their corruption of the scientific process will ultimately be their downfall.
I am ramping up my efforts to spread awareness of the scientific fraud perpetrated by Sun et al. (2020) against the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis in the journal Science Advances, which as of the time of writing has not been retracted, and is not even under investigation by the editors.
The court of public opinion is much more powerful than a shadowy hatchetman spamming a corrupt editor’s inbox, and with enough exposure, I am confident we can retract that fraudulent article as well.
Boslough & Bruno’s “Matters Arising”
BosloughBruno_MattersArising
Silvia et al.’s Response
24-12-16-Silvia-Reply-to-BosloughGuest edited by Marc D. Young