Randall Carlson
| Randall Carlson |
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Randall Carlson is an American independent researcher, sacred geometer, and master builder based in Atlanta, Georgia, known for his decades of field research in geology, catastrophism, and the history of science, and for hosting the Kosmographia podcast. He is one of the most prominent public advocates of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, arguing that a comet or asteroid swarm impact approximately 12,800 years ago triggered the Younger Dryas cold period, caused catastrophic flooding that reshaped the North American landscape, and destroyed a pre-Ice Age civilization — a conclusion he reached through more than forty years of field research and review of over 10,000 scientific papers.
Biography
Background and professional work
Carlson trained as a master builder, working in traditional construction and developing expertise in sacred geometry as applied through history to significant architecture. Beginning in 1995 he ran hands-on geometry and nature-science classes for homeschooled students in the Atlanta area, tutoring over 120 young people and integrating building-site mathematics with field geology. He has also operated the Wheelhouse Craft Pub and Kitchen in Atlanta. His independent research podcast, Kosmographia, has produced multi-hour lecture series on subjects including Atlantis, ancient astronomy, and catastrophic geology; his nine-episode series on Atlantis alone ran to approximately twelve to fourteen hours of content.
Research
Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
Carlson's engagement with catastrophism began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he identified what he called the "energy paradox" in glaciological literature — the observation, noted at scientific conferences in 1973 and 1975, that the measured rate of retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet was far too rapid to be explained by gradual solar warming alone, and that the ice sheet's growth and dispersal centers remained enigmatic. He concluded that the energy required to terminate the last Ice Age in concentrated pulses — rather than the smooth curve predicted by Milankovitch cycles — demanded an extraterrestrial cause, either a cometary impact or an anomalous solar event.
He was "very gratified" when in 2007 a team of researchers — who subsequently organized as the Comet Research Group — published a paper proposing a cometary impact at the onset of the Younger Dryas approximately 12,850–12,900 years ago. The proxies Carlson cites as evidence include iridium and platinum-group metal spikes in the Greenland ice cores, nanodiamond concentrations, impact glass (trinitite-like material), magnetic microspheres, and the black mat layer that marks the disappearance of both the Clovis culture and Pleistocene megafauna at a single stratigraphic horizon. Carlson argues that the impact was not a single object but a series of approximately ten impacts concentrated at the Younger Dryas onset, likely delivered by Earth's passage through a dense node of the Taurid meteor stream — a debris field associated with comet Encke — which he links to the 1908 Tunguska event as a smaller-scale modern analogue.
The Younger Dryas interval itself lasted approximately 1,300 years — from about 12,850 to 11,600 years ago — and its sudden end coincided with a catastrophic rise in sea level (meltwater pulse 1B) that Carlson connects to the chronology of Plato's description of Atlantis via the Egyptian priests' record preserved in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias.
Channeled Scablands and the Missoula Floods
Carlson has conducted extensive field research in the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington, documenting evidence for the Missoula Floods — catastrophic meltwater discharges that he argues were far larger and faster than mainstream geology has acknowledged. He calculates that Moses Coulee — an 800–1,000-foot-deep canyon cut up to two miles wide — was carved within approximately a week, based on estimated peak discharges of 300–400 million cubic feet per second: ten to twenty times the combined flow of every river on Earth. Along the Columbia River he finds gigantic gravel bars, misplaced boulders, and recessional cataracts that, he argues, can only have formed under conditions of rapid, catastrophic flooding — a position vindicated in miniature when Canyon Lake Gorge, Texas, reproduced similar canyon forms in two days during a 2002 flood. By 2017 Carlson had traversed the Channeled Scablands and surrounding glaciated terrain over 60,000 miles since 1970 — including Camas Prairie, the Quincy Basin, and multiple drumlin fields — and had accumulated over 10,000 field photographs of flood-modified landforms, constituting what he describes as an irreducible visual archive of catastrophic glacial processes that no single academic geologist has equaled in depth of field coverage.
Sacred geometry and the lost civilization
Major megalithic sites — including the Great Pyramid of Giza, Stonehenge, and Angkor Wat — encode astronomical and geometrical knowledge that implies a sophisticated source civilization predating the historical record. He demonstrates that the Great Pyramid's proportions encode the squaring of the circle: the ratio of its height to its square base, when the pyramid is scaled up by a factor of 43,200, yields the equatorial circumference of the Earth with high precision — a number he identifies as recurring across Vedic, Biblical, Mayan, and Sumerian traditions. He links this numerical encoding to what he identifies as a lost pre-Younger Dryas civilization that transmitted its cosmological knowledge through myth, number, and significant architecture to post-catastrophe cultures — the "fingerprints of the gods" argument developed in parallel with Graham Hancock.
Cycles of catastrophe
Drawing on the neo-catastrophist work of British astronomers Victor Clube and William Napier, Cosmic impacts are not random but periodic: the Earth crosses the Taurid meteor stream twice yearly, and the density of that stream varies across centuries, creating "impact epochs" of elevated risk. The theory traces to Fred Whipple — one of the founders of modern cometary science — who proposed that large comets entering the inner solar system progressively disintegrate into debris streams, of which the Taurid is one, creating elevated impact risk at predictable orbital junctures: "William Napier addresses this in an interesting article, that possibly around 13,000 years ago, Earth may have encountered some of the debris from a disintegrating comet, which ultimately goes back to Fred Whipple, who was one of the godfathers of cometary science." He has tracked near-miss asteroid events from 1988 onward — headline after headline of objects passing within the Moon's orbit — to argue that modern civilization has been "rather lucky" and that a Tunguska-scale or larger impact is not a science-fiction scenario but a statistical certainty over geologically short timescales.
Public activities
Collaboration with Graham Hancock
Carlson first met Joe Rogan in 2009 at a comedy club in Atlanta, where a single conversation sparked Rogan's long-running interest in catastrophism and led to Carlson's first appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience. Carlson and Graham Hancock have appeared together on multiple Joe Rogan Experience episodes, and Hancock has credited their collaboration — Carlson providing the physical-catastrophe evidence, Hancock the civilizational-amnesia argument — with substantially advancing both bodies of work to a mass audience. The 2007 paper that launched the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis also directly inspired Hancock to return to the catastrophist framework he had proposed in Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), having previously followed the pole shift model of Charles Hapgood.
Lunar anomalies
In a 2025 American Alchemy episode, Carlson addressed a cluster of physical anomalies about the Moon that he regards as difficult to explain through natural processes. He noted that the Moon's mass is sufficient that under standard physics it should have deformed into a perfect sphere — the minimum-energy state — yet it has two distinct moments of inertia, meaning it is locked in a one-to-one spin-orbit coupling with Earth's gravity field in a way that implies an interior mass distribution inconsistent with the natural rounding process: "the laws of physics as we know it don't seem to be applying here." He stated that he is "willing to consider that the moon has been geo engineered" by an advanced civilization, while declining to commit to any single model for how this would have been accomplished.
Additional anomalies Carlson cites include Apollo seismometer data showing the Moon rings for three or more hours after impact — far longer than the Earth — suggesting unusual internal structure; the presence of high-refractory metals including titanium and chromium on the surface; and hundreds of documented lunar transient phenomena involving outgassing of carbon dioxide and water vapor that remain unexplained. He also noted the proportional coincidence by which the Sun is 400 times the Moon's diameter and 400 times farther away — producing near-perfect solar eclipses — as among "a whole array of weird coincidences about this reality that we inhabit" when examining the solar system's structure.
These anomalies connect to the Atlantis research, explored in the spirit of what is called "outrageous hypotheses" — following geomorphologist William Morris Davis's 1920s paper The Value of Outrageous Hypotheses — that ancient civilizations with technologies lost in the Younger Dryas catastrophe may have had access to extraterrestrial or advanced propulsion knowledge, and that the apparent evidence of major subsidence along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge supports the broad outlines of Plato's description of Atlantis disappearing beneath the Atlantic.