Newsweek has a fascinating piece about the people who believe that there is a lost Viking or Spanish ship in the deserts of California, somewhere between Coachella and Baja. It’s a modern myth, one born of some tall tales spun in the 1800s and especially after the 1930s, but it is a story that continues to fascinate believers, often treasure hunters, down the present. The most popular version of the story, from 1939, is a secondhand account of a man who claimed to see a stereotyped Viking vessel in the desert, complete with round shields attached to the sides, just like in the picture books. The present Newsweek article takes the form of a profile of the adventures of former mattress salesman John Grasson, a man born in 1957 and currently living on disability, who is both a treasure hunter and a believer in the UFO crash at Roswell. Newsweek describes his quest for the lost ship, which he thinks was actually a Spanish vessel that sailed up the Colorado River, thinking California to be an island, in quite stark terms familiar to any of us who recall the anger and grievance almost all believers in fringe history share: He is also driven by a slight sense of grievance, a conviction that academics are errant in their near-unanimous assertion that there is no desert ship. He knows they look down on him, but he also thinks he knows more than they do. “All archeologists are wreck hunters,” he told me. “[Their] science basically started with a treasure hunter looking for gold.” This a reference to Heinrich Schliemann, who founded modern archeology with his search for the city of Troy in southern Turkey. Grasson isn’t denigrating professional archeology; only reminding its more pedigreed practitioners that their profession rewards a well-developed imagination—something it shares with astrophysics and pure mathematics but few other disciplines. Grasson knows so much, in fact, that after fifteen years of seeking the ship, he has yet to find a single trace of it. Nevertheless, he has a fantasy that one day he will find proof of the ship, take it to a major university, and force them to plaster it with his name so he can lord it over all of them. You might think of him as a kook and a crank, but I’m sure you’ve already guessed where this is going. Cable television has beaten a path to his door, and TV fame is much more fun and lucrative than mattress sales. According to Newsweek, despite his proven track record of failure, he has appeared on Myth Hunters on the American Heroes Channel and will appear on an upcoming series called American Legends for the Travel Channel and an unnamed upcoming pilot for a new a series on the unexplained for the History Channel. There is almost literally nothing too stupid or too lacking in evidence for cable TV to throw money at. According to Newsweek, both the Travel Channel and the History Channel sent teams with ground-penetrating radar to try to find the ship. Of course they found nothing. Grasson, when confronted with skeptical views, could only offer as a rejoinder that skeptics cannot prove a negative, so the ship might exist until its non-existence has been demonstrated conclusively. If that were the standard of proof, then we would be overrun with unicorns and Atlanteans. Newsweek’s Alexander Nazaryan compared Grasson to a religious believer and suggested that his faith in a goofball legend helps to alleviate the workaday miseries of his painful, impecunious life: In other words, Grasson has plenty in common with the WWCs—i.e., members of the white working class—who handed the presidency to Donald Trump: he’s a middle-aged, white-as-the-driven-snow guy from the Midwest who served in the armed forces but can’t even get decent medical care. Yet never once did I hear him air any grievances. He had given himself to a greater faith and, like all devoted believers who do so, he could not be bothered by the petty inconveniences of everyday life. I’ll just stop to note that Nazaryan specifically identified Grasson’s distrust of academic elites as a grievance, though presumably he is here claiming that Grasson wasn’t blaming his problems on Mexicans or Muslims because he was too busy fantasizing about buried treasure and how he will use it to stick it to the intellectual elites. Nazaryan seems blind to where Grasson has displaced his sense of grievance, even as he himself reported it with the word grievance!
According to a guidebook produced by the U.S. government before World War II, the legend of the desert boat was inspired by a real abandoned vessel, built in 1862 for a Colorado river mining company and abandoned in the desert when the cost of transporting it to the Colorado River was too great. Not coincidentally, sightings of the “Spanish” or “Viking” ship began shortly after, in the 1870s. Nazaryan, while knowing that this is the origin of the story, nevertheless prefers the myth. He claims that some fake stories are “evil” and should be exposed, but “others must be allowed to live, because without such nourishing nuggets of wonder, life can shrivel up into an endless series of tasks, captured and measured, posted on social media, forgotten.” Nazaryan, like Grasson and so many others, confuses fantasy with fun, and fabrication with improvement. He thinks fake legends are somehow the only thing reenchanting the world, adding magic into the drudgery of life. This is the bad argument of a person unwilling to do the work of finding the actual fun and interesting parts of life. Science is full of what Darwin once termed “endless forms most wonderful,” and we don’t need fake stories to find fun. Wonder is all around us, but one must be willing to look for it. A retreat into fantasy is the province of the lazy and the small and the dull. Grasson has one amazing line in his interview with Nazaryan that about sums up the entire philosophy of fringe historians everywhere: “The beauty with legend,” he says, “is that you’re never wrong.”
28 Comments
Only Me
2/4/2017 10:12:12 am
"If you gotta guy who spends 10, 15 years looking at one particular story,” Grasson said one day over breakfast, “and you got an academic who spent maybe a summer or two—you gotta realize who really knows more.”
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Time Machine
2/4/2017 09:27:43 pm
There you are again Only Me
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Time Machine
2/4/2017 09:29:50 pm
Jesus Christ does exist and is something tangible and real
Americanegro
2/5/2017 06:39:00 am
Mister Sweet gives me his nectar.
Only Me
2/5/2017 10:16:27 am
"Attacking beliefs and people that you disagree with"
Shane Sullivan
2/4/2017 11:36:21 am
"Science is full of what Darwin once termed “endless forms most wonderful,” and we don’t need fake stories to find fun. Wonder is all around us, but one must be willing to look for it. A retreat into fantasy is the province of the lazy and the small and the dull."
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V
2/4/2017 04:52:48 pm
As a writer of fiction, I hope so, too, Shane. Fantasy has its place, and I don't think it belongs solely to "the lazy and the small and the dull." I think judging it to be so is the province of the elitist, and certainly is a...hm...decidedly BIASED, even bigoted viewpoint, shall we say?
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Mark L
2/4/2017 07:39:01 pm
You know that's not what he was on about. Do you literally believe the fantasy stories you read and write are true?
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At Risk
2/4/2017 01:04:11 pm
As a controversial "fringe" person who doesn't even consider himself fringe, I would like to stick up for fantasy and the creative mind. Not all fantasy is, or turns out to be, purely fiction, and there's a big difference between skepticism and disparagement, too.
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Tom
2/4/2017 01:32:27 pm
Sorry is this a spoof?
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Weatherwax
2/4/2017 02:47:13 pm
I'm sorry, but you are a prime example of the problem of not mistaking fantasy for reality. How many hours have you devoted to trying to convince the professional academics that your imaginary codes are proof that the Norse were deep into North America long before the current history says? How many times have you been unable to accept being told by said academics that your "proof" is not what you think it is?
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A Bufddhist
2/4/2017 03:25:23 pm
Since At Risk has in the past spoken highly of ley lines in connection with his search for Norse exploration, I would not be surprised if he used dowsing rods or similar alternative methods.
mwduchek
2/4/2017 03:41:41 pm
I didn't want to come right out and say that.
Weatherwax
2/4/2017 03:42:41 pm
mwduchek is me, I just mis typed.
Thank you for the comments of further interest. Tom, this is no joke...but I'll admit that it sounds so far-fetched that it must be placed in the category of fiction, or fantasy. This is my fantastic problem. My very real find is so fantastic-sounding that it's difficult to get people to take me seriously.
Weatherwax
2/4/2017 05:11:50 pm
The idea doesn't make anyone angry, just frustrated at your constant interruptions of every thread to insist that your fantasy Norse code is in fact a real code.
At Risk
2/5/2017 11:49:58 am
You may have noticed that my "intrusion" is very much on topic this time around. We're heavy into fantasy and intrepretations of perceived fantasy.
Weatherwax
2/5/2017 03:14:22 pm
You picture is not large enough to identify the equipment.
Americanegro
2/7/2017 09:54:51 am
Your "decoding" boils down to "there are three holes, it looks like two together and one apart; because I would like to see two pairs of two it is obviously a code."
Titus pullo
2/4/2017 03:43:44 pm
Im so sick of folks with theories of european exploration or what not in the americas before columbus. Wheres the gd proof? Other than some norse in Newfoundland there is zero hard evidence. Where are the structures? Bodies? Garbage? Or like bigfoot our myserious notse or templars or iris monks hid their travels and took all their garbage out with them. Where are the tons of detritus from the minoans mining copper on isle royale? This ship story dounds like a clive cussler book i read 25 uears ago! Enough. Please just stop!
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V
2/4/2017 04:37:59 pm
Hey! At least Clive Cussler accepts and even points out that finding out these things wouldn't affect modern life pretty much AT ALL. Unlike Gunn up there, who seems to think that finding out Vikings came to the US and buried a rock would make the Swedes and the Norse our new masters, because apparently he's not even remotely familiar with the principals surrounding abandonment of property and the fact that the Colonies were sold wholesale to the Brits, etc.
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At Risk
2/4/2017 05:03:33 pm
V, you seem to be dealing more in fantasy than me! Looking for new masters? Wow, don't you know by now that I already have one Master only? I'm also not concerned with any effect this kind of finding would have on modern life. I'm interested in history, period. Truthful, accurate history is my goal, and it's very apparent to me that this will continue to be a difficult goal to attain while people are wearing self-blinders.
El Cid
2/4/2017 07:07:08 pm
I am willing to tell about the giant ancient Assyrian airliner I think I saw off of a hiking trail in exchange for huge amounts of money and several TV series.
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Americanegro
2/4/2017 07:10:33 pm
"It generally costs several hundred dollars, but I got a fairly new one on Ebay for about $350."
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Tom
2/5/2017 02:58:11 am
Hello At Risk, I think you may have made at least one your points.
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At Risk
2/5/2017 12:03:55 pm
Thank you, Tom, for the sincere comments. I think if you took the time to read the article I suggested, above, and ask for the PDF, you would see that I have been talking about factual evidence. Some of this is in the eye of the beholder, some isn't. But, anyone who bothers to follow the trail of photos and commentary I have already supplied will likely come up with a much clearer idea of what I'm positing.
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Brian
2/5/2017 12:38:55 pm
Ah, the rewards of obstinate ignorance.
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Bob Jase
2/6/2017 01:37:44 pm
Myth Hunters already did a really decent episode on this.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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