Within two weeks of the 26 December earthquake and tsunamis that killed nearly 150,000 people across South and Southeast Asia, speculation about a human or extraterrestrial cause was spreading through internet forums and casual conversation.
The most widely circulated theory held that the US or Indian military had tested electromagnetic "eco-weapons" capable of triggering earthquakes remotely. A related claim argued that governments had received advance warning but withheld it from coastal populations, pointing to the US Navy base on the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia, which escaped unscathed. Further out, some online writers contended that alien entities deliberately triggered the Sumatra quake to correct an instability in Earth's rotation.
Scientists dismissed the claims outright. Dr. Bart Bautisda of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said the energy required to generate tsunamis of that scale was far beyond any artificial source, and that seismologists can reliably tell natural earthquakes apart from man-made explosions.
Conspiracy theories have followed other large traumatic events, from Pearl Harbor to the September 11 attacks. In Hong Kong, one bar patron noted the quake fell on the same calendar date as the 2003 Bam earthquake in Iran, which killed 30,000, calling the timing suspicious and predicting more damaging revelations ahead.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in January 2005, in its own words.