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310 (Mercury). Prior to 1994 the possibility that seven comets would "attack" our celestial region all at once was so remote that the text seemed more a fantasy than a reality witnessed by Mesopotamian astronomers. But when, in July 1994, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke up into twenty-one pieces that impacted Jupiter in quick succession—in full view of observers from Earth—the Mesopotamian texts assume an impressive reality. Had a comet broken up into seven pieces and caused havoc- in our celestial vicinity, impacting Earth and breaking its rotation? Or, as Alfred Jeremias (The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient Near East), reproducing what he called "an important astral-mythological text," treated it as possibly an unusual alignment of seven planets that, with the resulting immense gravitational pull, affected the Sun and Moon from the perspective of Earth—making the Sun and Moon appear to stand still because in reality it was the Earth whose rotation was temporarily halted. Whatever the explanation, there is corroboration for the occurrence itself from the other side of the world. In both Mesoamerica and South America, "legends"—collective memories—have persisted of a long night of about twenty hours during which the Sun failed to rise. Our investigations (fully reported in The Lost Realms) concluded that this long night occurred in the Americas circa 1400 B.C.—the same time when me Sun did not set in Canaan for a similar period. Since one phenomenon is the opposite of the other, the same occurrence—whatever its cause—that made the Sun appear to stand still in Canaan, would have made the Sun fail to rise on the opposite side of the Earth, in the Americas. The Mesoamerican and South American recollections thus validate the tale of the Day the Earth Stood Still—not the movie script, but the olden biblical tale. And with that, we need neither science fiction nor fantasies to accept the tale of the greatest Theophany ever as the memorable fact that it has been. assume an DIVINE ENCOUNTERS