Happening Now in "Who Really Built That?" Templars at the Newport Tower, a Lost Ice Age Civilization at Giza, and Australian Aborigines at Göbekli Tepe

​Late last week novelist David S. Brody, who is a close colleague of former television personality Scott F. Wolter, posted on his blog what he called new information about the origins of the Old Stone Mill in Newport, Rhode Island, popularly known as the Newport Tower. Brody presented a quotation from Pocasset Wampanoag chief Daryl “Black Eagle” Jamieson, a younger man who has clearly been influenced by modern fringe history claims. Jamieson spoke with the Wolter/Brody wing of fringe history in 2015, and it is on his authority that Brody and Wolter claim that Native Americans have a centuries-old oral history of the medieval Earl Henry Sinclair of Orkney coming to America in the late 1300s. Specifically, here is what Black Eagle had to say in his own words:

​The Narragansett history is that the people that built this Tower are people that came here with red hair... They were red-haired people building here and they were allowed to build here—allowed... To me, the only person that could have came (sic) here and gotten away with that is somebody that was brought here by another native tribe... They would have had to have had some kind of alliance... The only ones that I know that had that alliance were Henry Sinclair when he came and met with the Micmacs. The Knights Templar. They were the only legitimate people that could have come here and built this with the permission of the natives.

​Wolter had made reference to this claim in 2015, but declined to identify the source pending the release of a future book or TV series. Brody, however, has given us more information than he intended to about the source of their elaborate conspiracy claims.
 
Note carefully that only the first two sentences are presented as history; the rest is Black Eagle’s own fringe history interpretation of it. I wouldn’t even trust that much as history going back to the Middle Ages due to the two centuries of local claims that the Newport Tower was built by Vikings, which is more than enough time for Native oral histories to absorb and adapt the local (white) legend, just as animals like the mammoth and dinosaurs entered into other oral histories after they became part of pop culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and just as more than one Native American has added ancient astronauts to traditional stories after being exposed to Chariots of the Gods or Ancient Aliens. So far as I know, there is no record of Native American claims of red-headed tower builders prior to the past couple of decades, but it is nearly identical to Roger Williams’s (misleading) claims in the colonial era that the Native people of Narragansett were born with white skin and red hair. Indeed, it seems closer to truth to say that Black Eagle was referring to this history rather than an ancient tribal secret in relating claims about redheads in the Newport area.
 
For his part, yesterday, Wolter, a licensed geologist, alleged in comments on his blog that the Giza pyramids and the Great Sphinx are more than 10,000 years old. “The geological evidence presented by Dr. Robert Schoch has definitively proven the great Pyramids, and the Sphinx in Giza, are older than 10,000 years,” he wrote. Wolter’s rendition of the West-Schoch-Bauval-Hancock hypothesis is more extreme that those authors’ works support, and without evidence to back up his expansion of the Sphinx weathering claim to the pyramids, but this is only to be expected. What is stranger still is that this wasn’t the weirdest idea about 10,000-year-old monuments on offer this month.
 
The reliably bonkers English edition of the Epoch Times, a New York-based newspaper operated by Falun Gong practitioners to serve the anti-communist Chinese diaspora community, reported that Australian Aborigines built Göbekli Tepe, the 12,000-year-old temple complex in Turkey. According to the newspaper, our old friend Bruce Fenton, the Australian fringe writer once hired by the Science Channel to find giants and the coauthor of Ancient Aliens in Australia, alleges in New Dawn magazine that an Australian Aboriginal symbol appears on one of the stone pillars at the Turkish site.
 
The argument is essentially “looks like, therefore is,” and it remains as convincing as any other application of that faulty logic.
 
Specifically, Fenton compares simple geometric figures and declares them to be the same. Specifically, he posits that any circle divided in half with an additional shape placed between the two halves must have a common origin. He also suggests that oval-shaped stones carved with geometric figures in both locations must consequently have a common origin. The Göbekli Tepe symbol is 12,000 years old, while the Australian Aboriginal symbol’s origins are uncertain; the images in question used for the comparison date only to around 1900, though the symbol presumably predates its first recording.
 
Fenton ties his fantasized Aboriginal origins for geometric shapes to Graham Hancock’s hypothesis that Göbekli Tepe is an outpost of pre-Ice Age Atlantean culture, as filtered through the embarrassingly awful academic journal article from earlier this year that attempted to read the ancient pillars in light of Hancock’s and Andrew Collins’s work, claiming them to be a record of a comet impact during the Younger Dryas period.
 
“The purpose of the complex was to reverse the flooding underway during the Younger Dryas, by placating the Rainbow Serpent (they assumed this water deity was responsible),” Fenton told the Epoch Times by email.
 
For those of you interested in the finer details of the various symbols involved and why Fenton is wrong to compare them superficially—and Epoch Times is still more wrong to deceptively present photographs to make them look still more similar—Jens Notroff has a thorough discussion on the Göbekli Tepe Research Staff’s blog.