30-10 Groundwater Surveys to Cosmic Catastrophes: Addressing Questionable Geology with New Mexico Links

Session: Geological and Geochemical Investigations of Critical Minerals in New Mexico and Beyond, and Technological Advances in Extraction of Critical Minerals

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In 1997 Allen Whitt published “Groundwater Survey of the Tijeras Basin Area”. He found enough water to supply 225,000 people for 100 years. The 2002 Campbell Ranch Master Plan cited Whitt for “a large and relatively untapped supply of ground water.”

Whitt returned to New Mexico in 2005, using the name Allen West, seeking evidence at Blackwater Draw that a comet impact wiped out the Clovis people and North American megafauna.  His resulting book “Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes” was released in 2006 by a Santa Fe-founded new-age publisher.

Later that year, biblical archaeologists from an unaccredited institution (now located in an Albuquerque strip mall) found vitreous debris at a site in Jordan they associated with the biblical city of Sodom that had also been an artillery emplacement with a minefield in the 20^th century. They called it “trinitite”, the glass formed by the 1945 Trinity test near Socorro. They recruited West to lead the writing of their 2021 paper, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea”.

None of these publications contain data essential to verify their claims. Whitt’s groundwater survey includes graphs of processed data (resistivity versus depth) but no raw data (voltages or electrode distances) or methodology. His book contains graphs (abundances versus depth) but without tables of associated data or methods. The Sodom paper included photographs that had been digitally manipulated, but original unprocessed data and images were not provided.

There are other reasons for concern and skepticism. Another groundwater survey that Whitt conducted a year after his Tijeras Basin report was determined to be fraudulent by one of his clients based on findings of the California State Board of Registration for Geologists and Geophysicists. Unsupported graphs from his 2006 new age book have propagated into the peer reviewed literature in support of the discredited Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH) but requests for raw data and materials continue to be ignored or denied. The 2021 Sodom paper was retracted in 2025 because the authors did not provide evidence that supported their conclusions. Two YDIH papers were retracted in 2026.

This presentation surveys these dubious scientific claims involving New Mexico, and what professional Earth scientists can do to address them.

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