Yes, I’m way behind on my email.
The staff report pooh-poohed the relationship between venus flytraps and space aliens. I’m not going to argue that because it would be dumb. However there is a connection, however tenuous, between the plants and meteors.
Venus flytraps appear in bogs throughout the Carolinas. Many of these bogs are called “Carolina Bays.” Nobody is really sure where the bays came from but there are a couple of popular theories: they are the remains of clearings created by native Americans for farming, or they are relics of an ancient meteor storm caused by a comet or asteroid breakup.
The primary evidence in favor of the latter theory is that the bays are all oblong depressions whose long axes are oriented in the same direction, just as you would expect following impacts from a meteor stream.
My source for this story was an ecologist at the college where I used to teach physics and astronomy in South Carolina. I’ve seen a few of the bays, and they do have the appearance of a filled in crater, but of course all that really means is that they are round. As far as I know, no one has ever found meteor debris in any of them.