Published June 2025 in Airbursts and Cratering Impacts by a 25-author team including Kennett, West, Moore, and LeCompte: the depression holds glass-filled shocked quartz, meltglass requiring temperatures above 2,000 degrees Celsius, Fe and Si spherules concentrated at the center, and magnetic anomalies resembling known impact sites. Radiocarbon and argon dating cluster at 12,835 to 12,735 cal BP. Hydrocode modeling supports a touch-down airburst, a Tunguska-scale object detonating low enough to scar the ground without a classic crater. Industrial, volcanic, and fluvial origins were tested and argued against.
The folk frame: since 2007 the impact hypothesis's fatal gap was no crater, and critics like Holliday made it the centerpiece of the rebuttal. A touch-down airburst answers it by design, explosions like Tunguska 1908 leave glass and shock but no bowl. Perkins is the first physical scar offered. Sweatman's verdict captures the mood: clearly it's not a crater, but that's fine, the hypothesis never needed one.
The claim: Perkins is a single pellet hole from a shotgun blast, one fragment of a disintegrating comet that peppered four continents, with the Carolina Bays, thousands of elliptical depressions along the Atlantic coast, long promoted as the rest of the pattern. The bays' impact origin is broadly rejected by mainstream geology; the pattern-reading persists anyway.
Is this the crater the impact hypothesis needed for eighteen years, or the hypothesis finding what it went looking for?