Hoo boy, this sounds straight out of Kooksville. If anyone can suggest a mechanism for this sort of "large energy transfer", I would be most interested to read about it.
Gravitational, due to close pass-by. (It doesn't have to be all that close with bodies as large as Mars and Earth.) Anyway, it was a model, with a naturalistic approach, attempting to explain events described in historical records from many cultures around the earth.