Florida Mystery Waves Blamed On Meteorite Impact

[Original headline:Meteor, not storm, blamed for big waves]

"I'd be willing to bet that if you had the weather maps of the Atlantic Ocean on those days, you'd find no wave-generating storm off Africa," wrote Gene Floersch of Melbourne Beach. He was referring to a suggested cause of the mysterious huge waves we've been writing about.

They suddenly invaded the beach north of Fort Lauderdale on a clear, sunny, wind-free day in early March 1962 and frightened onlookers. One, Mary Swanson, now an Indialantic resident, said she'd moved to Arizona soon after the event and never knew what caused it.

She hoped our readers could tell her. We've been reporting their responses, which mostly blame the waves on far-off storms, as distant as Africa.

Gene contrasted the nature of the waves described by Mary to the storm-generated ocean swells that "every good surfer knows" - like the ones he surfed that year in Daytona Beach ("no mystery waves there," he said).

"Any storm powerful enough to send waves clear across the Atlantic would have affected the whole Florida coastline . . . and would also have first devastated the Bahama Islands," Gene said.

However, he added, "there was a more recent incident of 'mystery waves' that did hit Daytona Beach on an evening when the sea was flat, swamping beach-parked cars and scaring a lot of tourists at the boardwalk. Officials claimed these waves were generated by a 'sand slide' out on the continental shelf, but there was no geological activity registered by seismic sensors along the east coast.

"Some weeks later a local news channel ran a report about the operators of a shrimp boat off the coast witnessing a huge splash in the distance and then almost being swamped by massive swells.

"I believe the waves in both cases were caused by meteor impacts at sea. I also believe that safety officials play down these incidents, feeding the public any excuse but the truth.

"Why? Because we have no defense or warning systems to deal with meteor impacts. Our government justifies spending billions of tax dollars on missile defense systems, and yet a missile attack is less of a threat than the debris flying around in local space. The reality is that even if an imminent impact were predicted, there is nothing we could do about it."

• Story originally published in •
Florida Today | By Milt Salamon - September 5 2000