Hi, Pete. Good to meet ya, and thank you. That's correct, but I prefer to use my handle on the boards.

Quickly, I can't address every question, but yes, we did consult NASA and other professional journals.

There is evidence, and I stated some of that in previous letters.

The distance question is good. Space bodies have magnetic polarity, so it's like taking two magnets and pointing their north poles at each other. The closer they get, the more repulsion you see. Otherwise, if the opposite poles are pointed at each other, they draw one another in.

But suppose that there is also electrical polarity. Opposite poles can cause lightning, with the electricity going from positive of one body to the negative of the other. If the electric universe theory is proven, not only will it make Jim McCanney happy, but we could see electrical sprites coming from the sun and going towards this thing as it approaches.

How close? I am no scientist, and I prefer to write about humanity rather than this, but from what I gathered in working on the book, it depends on the power contained in both bodies.

On the disk, have you ever seen a weight plate underneath the body of a van? Or those plates that they put on the road to allow drivers to drive over construction areas? Those are flat, and they are no more than 1 inch thick. Yet, to lift one takes a crane or a tractor, because they are very dense. And looking through one edge-to-edge is impossible. That's why I used the pea-soup fog analogy.

Ah, this one is better suited to me. The Sumerians lived about 6000 years ago, which did include one flyby.

I am not a scientist, so I don't have the calculations. We have some in the book, but I did not make them.

About the hoping that these things don't happen, I don't think that's a negative self-assessment at all. I don't believe that anyone in their right mind would want these things to happen. Many of us see them as inevitable. I choose to see them as likely, that the future is not written in stone. However, as a former Girl Scout, I also like to be prepared.

According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian creation story, the planet that Earth used to be was located in what is now the asteroid belt. Another planet crashed into it, splitting it into one small whole and millions of tiny parts (small and tiny relative to the planet that supposedly crashed into it). The tiny parts became the asteroid belt, but the small whole was knocked inward towards the sun. The impact rearranged the water that covered the planet into seas. According to the Sumerians, the planet that crashed into it was captured by the sun and trapped in a long elliptical orbit. I don't have a copy of this book, but have read bits of it here and there on the web, in English, of course.

The sun going crazy. Hmmm... We just entered solar cycle 24. Solar cycle 23 was pretty crazy, in itself. It had a double-maximum, and we had to invent a new solar-flare class to measure the whopper flares it sent out. Lots of CME, too. All of my friends and I expressed gratitude whenever one of the giant CME's pointed away from Earth. Yet, NASA has predicted #24, that peaks in less than 5 years now, to be 1.5 X the strength of #23, which was much stronger than many of the cycles before.

Thanks again, Pete. I'm sorry to have had to remove most of your letter. I didn't want to top-post.

Cheers,
Princess