Scott Wolter Investigates Long-Debunked "Wall" for Evidence of a Lost Civilization

4/9/2013

We’re getting our first hints at what season two of America Unearthed plans to cover, and it doesn’t look promising. According to an article published in the Rockwall, Texas Herald-Banner, the H2 pseudo-documentary series is currently filming in Rockwall, a town twenty-five miles from Dallas and the site of an infamous geological formation that has been mistaken for a prehistoric rock wall for centuries.

I first wrote about the Rockwall rock wall in May 2012, when I reviewed claims for it made by former neo-Nazi and convicted child predator Frank Joseph of Ancient American magazine in the same anthology of that magazine’s work which printed Scott Wolter’s Bat Creek Stone claim, as well as Wolter’s first attempt at “proving” the Newport Tower was a Cistercian-Templar Venus-tracking, goddess-worshiping heretical church. (Those are all Wolter’s adjectives, not mine.) Needless to say, the rock wall hasn’t changed since last year. Honestly, I can’t believe anyone is trying to revive this faded “mystery.” In fact, in checking my reference books, I can’t even find recent mystery-mongering efforts to revive this wall’s spurious claims. (It does appear in a 2005 encyclopedia of the unexplained I found on Google, though not without caveats.) It has been so thoroughly debunked that last year I assumed it was sufficient to simply cite the geology as proof of reality. Ha! How naïve of me.

In 1854, the town of Rockwall took its name from what local residents, who had been living there since 1851, believed to be a prehistoric stone wall which surrounded the town. While digging wells, they found large sections of rock that seemed to resemble manmade constructions. Several layers of buried rock were piled one atop the other, broken and cracked so that each layer resembled carefully stacked, irregular bricks, something like dry stone walls writ large. Many believed that this ancient construction was built by an unknown prehistoric people, possibly the same lost white race that supposedly built the Native American mounds.

However, in 1874, geologist Richard Burleson examined the rocks and concluded they were a natural formation. In 1901, geologist Robert T. Hull was even more specific, identifying the wall as clastic sand dykes. In 1909, the definitive study of the site was published in Science. Geologist Sidney Paige surveyed the alleged wall and determined that it was made of sand dykes that intruded in Cretaceous rock, but moreover the “wall” was not a wall but rather a series of disconnected intrusions, with few if any connected sections. More recent geological work has confirmed the same results over and over again down to the present.

Frank Joseph, in discussing the wall, cited only the most superficial examinations (those conducted by W. L. Stephenson in 1927 and Robert T. Hill in 1975) alongside Martin Kelsey and Harold Denton’s 1980s visit to the site. He seems to have deliberately left out the 1909 study from Science, which involved significant fieldwork and was the reason that later geologists did not need to study the site as extensively; they were merely confirming earlier, well-done work.

However, in 1925, a freelance tomb raider (“amateur archaeologist”) named Count Byron de Prorok, preparing to go off in search of King Solomon’s mines, swept into town and declared the wall the remains of a lost civilization. He specifically felt that the wall belonged to a North African culture, probably the Carthaginians (an offshoot of the Phoenicians). Later speculators claimed the walls resembled “pre-Inca” constructions of Peru. Not ready to let good publicity go to waste, Rockwall turned the wall into a tourist attraction and, for a time, even charged admission to see the wonder of the “lost race” during the Texas centennial celebrations.

The town’s real estate developers wanted to capitalize on the fame of the walls, so they hired geologists from the local universities to prove that the walls were the remains of a fortress of the pre-Flood Biblical giants, all the better to sell land to Christian extremists. The geologists told the real estate people that the wall was natural. Not satisfied, they asked the Institute for Creation Research to come prove the wall belonged to the giants of Genesis 6:4. Young earth creationist John Morris came out to survey the site, and even the creationist agreed that the wall was completely natural, though of course he felt it was deposited recently, according to Flood geology.

When even creationists gave up on the wall, it faded into obscurity except among New Age extremists. In 1999, architect John Lindsey told a New Age group that the wall was the remains of a 30,000-year-old civilization, and in 2001 New Age believers began to assert that a “channeled” being from another plane named Lady Kadjina had explained that the wall belonged to Atlantis. Such claims were confined to New Age spirituality until Frank Joseph tried to revive the wall’s archaeological significance in the pages of Ancient American. Frank Joseph wrote that he could not imagine any Native Americans capable of building rock walls; he proposed that the Romans built it in the first century CE.

Scott Wolter, following in de Prorock’s and Joseph’s footsteps, is spending this entire week in Rockwall with producer Maria Awes to attempt to “prove” whether the wall is an ancient construction. We have seen that geologists have understood the “wall” for more than a century, but Awes told the local newspaper that the wall is a “lesser-known” mystery that was never “quite explained”—except, you know, by 140 years of geological investigation. The newspaper fibs along with Awes by ratifying the view that the wall’s origins have “never been determined,” a clearly false statement that ignores work done from 1909 on.

Awes’s subsequent statement to the Herald-Banner is interesting for other reasons:

“We always wish we could have an open set, but unfortunately because of the nature of the material and our show that just isn’t something we can do,” Awes said. “But we know that this is an exciting thing for the town, so if anybody sees the crew or our host around town, we want them to feel free to come up and talk to us. We won’t be able to reveal any details to anyone, but we love to hear people’s stories and get their feedback. The show will most definitely be worth the wait. I think at the end of the episode, people will finally have the answers they’re looking for.”

I’ll let you chew on that for a bit. I wonder what the “nature of the material” is? Judging by past episodes, the secrecy is necessary to help fabricate evidence, do repeated retakes of “spontaneous” discussions, and avoid scrutiny or observation from those with mainstream perspectives. More likely, she meant that they needed open space and quiet to film quickly and cheaply without interruption.

Update, 2:07 PM: A thought that came to me after posting this: If they just started their "testing" of the rock wall on April 7, how did Maria Awes known before any filming began what Wolter's conclusion about it is going to be to know this will be one of their best-ever investigations? It sounds like they knew what they wanted to find before they even started looking for it. Obviously, pre-production involves planning out what the show will do, but this hints that the plans involve determining a conclusion before doing a sham investigation for the camera.

Update, 8:57 PM: Apparently Rockwall is planning to vote on whether to spend $5 million to turn to the rock wall into a park. Also, a Dallas radio host discussed the rock wall last month and claimed that it was evidence of a lost white race of mound builders who ruled ancient America before the Native Americans invaded. Sigh. This racist old claptrap never dies. It was false when eighteenth century anti-Native racists invented the claim, and it's still false today.

29 Comments

Gunn

4/9/2013 04:35:50 am

The Ulen Sword (MN), too, was thoroughly de-bunked for years, but the locals wanted to keep the "Viking" relic for all to see. I was surprised to see it show up on America Unearthed, getting freshly de-bunked again.

I mentioned to someone in an earlier blog that I had looked into the Ulen Sword myself a few years ago, and it was easy to discover the truth...which is why it should not have been considered along with the Runestone Museum's collection of iron combat relics appearing to be from a much earlier time.

I guess this approach can be considered as an insult to our intelligence, since we live in the google-age. For example, by digging just a tad, one can find that a famous/infamous runestone (its name purposely avoided) was authenticated by a well-respected geologist many, many years before Scott Wolter re-authenticated it.

Just an example.

Joe

4/9/2013 06:28:54 am

New Age believers began to assert that a “channeled” being from another plane named Lady Kadjina had explained that the wall belonged to Atlantis.
__________________

Sounds pretty solid. Have they stopped the presses so this can be included in all the history books?

Jason, I have no idea how you manage this stuff day after day. There truly is nothing out there too loony for somebody to believe it!

CFC

4/9/2013 12:51:53 pm

I think it will be interesting to see if this kind of media coverage becomes one of Maria Awes' latest techniques in the communities they visit. OHHHH.....let's create some hype and come to your town and solve a mystery! Just more deception.

The Other J.

4/9/2013 08:29:15 am

There's a strange impoverishment of imagination going on when someone like Frank Joseph or Scott Wolter can't imagine Native Americans building anything in North America, or Jim Marrs not understanding how human technology could advance by human means; yet they're able to do intellectual half-gainers to connect what they think they see with ancient Europeans, secret societies and aliens. That's really odd.

I wonder if the way to make this kind of programming less palatable would be to ruthlessly mock it, rather than confront it head-on. I don't mean just snarkily making fun of it; the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe already does that, and it's not that funny.

I mean something more like a Monty Python/Daily Show approach whose presentation is its own target, while using satire and sarcasm to dismantle that target from within its own arguments. That could be useful.

Christopher Randolph

4/10/2013 04:37:59 am

That approach might work with some people on the fence.

I've certainly put in to much time in email and on the net battling 9/11 Truthers, and one approach they hate is to start from their own assumption that it was an American conspiracy. If we start asking questions about how any reasonably intelligent person might go about designing a 'false flag' attack on the US, this clearly wasn't the way to do it. It turns humorous at times.

I like to ponder why if we're making up hijackers out of whole cloth to attack Iraq and Afghanistan that we wouldn't bother making even one of them... from Iraq or Afghanistan. I like to ask if WTC 7 were the actual target why we wouldn't pretend a plane hit WTC 7 at all. I like to ask why we would space the three buildings falling so far apart - and so long after the first plane hit - that we could wait for the world's media to get the cameras rolling along and take plenty of footage for the genius conspiracy detectives to dissect later.

As anything other than an al Qaeda attack this is farce.

4/10/2013 06:16:19 am

Hi Christopher. I come in peace, Bro'.

Probably because I grew up in the "assassination era," I tend to think 9/11 was allowed to happen, but not directly caused by our government. I take the same view after laboriously going over the Kennedy assassination material...that a US President was allowed to get whacked by the MOB. Can one cross the MOB? Never.

In my mind, the worst shame is that cover-ups ensued in both cases. In Criminal Justice, cover-ups are often looked at as being worse than the crimes themselves--such as how conspiracy to commit murder is a worse offense than "just" plain murder.

The past American record shows how the CIA at one time considered ploys for going to war, such as the idea of downing a plane-load of passengers, etc. Soldiers were used as guinea pigs for medical experimentation right up to the time I served.

I watched a program a few months ago about soldiers in the '60's being given LSD. They couldn't keep formation, and they weren't taking soldiering seriously at all, laughing inappropriately at once-rigid authority.

The question is: what are governments capable of?

With third-generation Bonesman George Bush serving the role of a classic Wolf in Sheep's clothing, America actually got involved in tyranny--by dictionary definition. There is no other way to describe government sanctioned torture.

It drives some people crazy to learn that there are other people who believe the real purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to keep a tyrannical government from going too far. Can it happen? Could people be "disappeared" in future America like in South America not long ago?

Best Geogio smile, with expressive enthusiam: "Of course it is possible!"

4/10/2013 07:03:49 am

No doubt the CIA (and in fact the other agencies whose budgets, manpower and missions are rather more to the cloak and dagger point these days than the CIA's has been in decades - the NSC, US Army Intelligence or what have you) pull all manner of dirty tricks, true. It's a cue to me often to ignore arguments that something was done recently "by the CIA" when in fact the CIA today mainly does things like monitor the popular press and prepare very mundane daily briefing reports which could also be done by a person with a shortwave radio.

Here's the thing: the intelligence scams we eventually learn about make sense. For example if the point were to, a priori, provide an excuse for attacking Iraq, and 9/11 were made up out of whole cloth, wouldn't ONE invented hijacker have an Iraq connection? ONE? As it stands this is like framing the pitcher for a crime by planting evidence on the centerfielder.

Where do people get the idea Kennedy did something to upset "the mob"? Although there's no smoking gun proof, Kennedy is reported by mainstream historians to have likely "won" Illinois in 1960 (and therefore the presidency) via a corrupt election returns system tied to organized crime. Kennedy's family in fact made their money initially *as* organized crime. Havana was a haven for organized crime until Castro kicked out the previous dictator:

http://www.history.com/videos/godfathers-of-havana-cuba-castro--organized-crime#godfathers-of-havana-cuba-castro--organized-crime

If anyone would be a target of "the mob" it'd be Castro... who was also a target of Kennedy's. Kennedy taking out Castro would have made the mafia very happy. He tried.

Do you seriously not believe that the US has done anything in the past several decades that might upset Islamic Middle Eastern radicals? It's amazing how the in the conspiracy literature that no one from Cuba to Afghanistan ever has any legit reason whatever to be upset with US foreign policy. How intellectually stunted are we as a society to produce that worldview?

Over and over again I find myself stating on the internet the simple fact that Lee Harvey Oswald had already taken a failed shot at killing a John Bircher retired Brigadier General before shooting JFK. Why must people so firmly believe that this guy (LHO) could not conceivably be fond of the Cuban revolution?

4/10/2013 08:08:22 am

To be fair to Gunn here, if you're going with the 'let it happen' hypothesis, then you wouldn't necessarily expect to have an Iraqi on the plane; if the CIA or anyone else installed an Iraqi hijacker as a prerequisite for invasion, then you're getting into 'made it happen' territory. So no Iraqi needed.

And the mob did have a problem with Kennedy -- Bobby. That's not necessarily connected to JFK's assassination nor RFK's hit, but it couldn't have helped RFK's chances.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist (if people couldn't tell from my comments), but I've studied them before when I was in grad school, and some of the more realistic ones are -- to my mind -- more disturbing than the far-fetched out-of-human-hands ones. I was particularly interested in the management of the media cycle in the build-up to the Iraq war.

Remember the "dodgy dossier" that Colin Powell presented to the UN? It was shown to be a plagiarized master's thesis, written in California 11 years prior, by a British news team (Channel 4 News). That dossier was one of the major pillars in Powell's presentation to the UN, and he is on record regretting that he didn't have time to verify it himself; it was presented to him by Dick Cheney's staff, and he was told they verified it. Powell's presentation was on Feb. 6, 2003.

When the story broke in Britain, it was still the middle of the night in the U.S., and made the front pages of the British, Australian, Indian, Russian, Argentinian, and other national presses. It was also an AP feed story on the Washington Post and NY Times web pages.

By 9 a.m. or so the following morning (Feb. 7, 2003), Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge had held a press conference where he announced the U.S. was going to orange (high) alert, which is the first time the country went on high alert since the 9/11 attacks. In the press conference, he said the CIA had "credible evidence" of an impending attack, most likely in Pennsylvania, and they're targeting schools, churches, and shopping malls. (In other words, your children, your faith, and your way of life.)

By 11 a.m., all news of the dossier was blown off the U.S. news web pages, as all attention was focused on this impending attack. A review of LexisNexis shows that the only national paper that brought up the dossier was the Milwaukee State Journal, and only once. The story was dropped and didn't appear again until the next presidential election cycle, when it was old, old news.

The thing is, about a month after Ridge moved the country to orange alert, it was quietly reduced to yellow (Feb. 27) and nothing else was said. Until some later follow-up reporting showed the "credible intelligence" used to justify the threat was itself faked -- just like Powell's evidence in the dossier. No one seemed to be able to get to the bottom of how the CIA had passed on faked credible evidence, as the story was stonewalled and then dropped. By the time the faked evidence story came out, the non-event itself was too old to really be news.

Again, only one U.S. paper ran a story about the dossier in their print edition when it happened; the orange alert effectively washed the dossier off the U.S. news cycle, which distracted the U.S. media long enough to keep attention away from the dossier story that brought the case for war under question. I don't know if that was a conspiracy or not, but looking at the results, it was certainly masterful media management.

4/10/2013 08:24:24 am

"Remember the "dodgy dossier" that Colin Powell presented to the UN? It was shown to be a plagiarized master's thesis, written in California 11 years prior, by a British news team (Channel 4 News)."

I wasn't clear -- Channel 4 News discovered the dossier was a plagiarized thesis, they didn't plagiarize the thesis. That's obvious, but my language wasn't clear. It's not easy writing long comments in these tiny boxes; really should keep a text editor open.

4/10/2013 10:06:33 am

Other J. -

"Allowed to happen" to what end? To attack Iraq? Makes no sense there, Iraq wasn't involved. What's the motivation here? To attack Afghanistan? We didn't need any provocation to do so previously. We'd been fanning the flames there since the late '70s. Certainly the people you're naming do big business with the Gulf oil states and would not want public outcry against them by "allowing" 19 citizens of those states to murder Americans by the thousand.

No one wants the simple truth that al Qaeda outsmarted the US with a few boxcutters and that all of Pentagon 'readiness' and 'defense' spending is at the end of the day a useless fig leaf. Is it so mindblowing that brown people can have even a temporary victory only when "allowed" to by shady omniscient Washington overlords, secretly pulling the strings and playing multi-dimensional chess? Apparently so.

No doubt Powell et al. are liars and so forth. But the fact remains that external actors caused 9/11 and the US federal government response, however manipulative, was a reaction to that and not the result of a plan which included allowing 9/11 happening. That the situation was taken advantage of has nothing to do with the people in charge being caught with their pants down.

Incidentally I have yet to see people with two different versions of 9/11 conspiracy - completely irreconcilable versions mind you - argue with each other when someone who thinks al Qaeda did it is around.

For me the damage here is that if people don't accept the reality of 'blowback' and continue to think that the US can perpetually do whatever it wants in the world consequence-free (unless someone in charge in DC is playing games and "lets" them attack) then we as a society have learned zero.

4/10/2013 10:12:36 am

I'll append that the idea that RFK must have been shot by shadowy forces in part negates the Occam's razor notion that Palestinians are less than thrilled with US foreign policy on behalf of Israel.

Note a linking theme to the JFK, RFK and 9/11 conspiracies - they all make a whole lot more sense if the believer can't conceive of how or why US foreign policy makes anyone upset!

4/10/2013 12:07:55 pm

This is the truth. I just spent a half-hour explaining things in detail and everything disappeared. This has never happened to me here on this blog before. I'm not touching this subject any more. Creepy.

4/10/2013 12:10:13 pm

I mean to say, disappeared from the comments box before I could post it, not afterwards. Wow, what a jolt!

4/10/2013 12:27:04 pm

Christopher -- I'm not taking any side of the conspiracy here. I'd like to see better evidence of any such conspiracy before I'd make a judgment. (I used to teach a comp course about conspiracy theories where my students tore these arguments up.)

All I'm doing here is explaining why Gunn's 'let it happen' theory doesn't have to have anything to do with any Iraqis on the plane. You're attacking the wrong theory by claiming no Iraqi on the plane proves that the administration was not involved; that's the 'made it happen' theory. Again: I'm not saying any theory is true, I'm just explaining their interpretation of it.

The origins of the LIHOP theory (as far as I know) probably begin with the national security memo "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the U.S." The LIHOP side argues that there were elements in the Bush administration (neocons) that wanted any excuse to foment a war in the Middle East, and they didn't care where the reason came from. So when the administration learned that an attack was impending, they sat back and waited for it. Then they responded by linking it to whatever they could. Whoever was on the plane is incidental. Step one was to mobilize troops in the Middle East, so let the attack happen unabated; step two was to cook up reasons to invade Iraq.

I'm also of the opinion that Al Qaeda was involved, and have never seen a good reason for why special forces were ordered to stand down when they had Al Qaeda and supposedly Bin Laden trapped in the caves at Tora Bora. That still eats at the British special forces.

And I also have no illusions about the legitimate gripes the various nations in the Middle East might have with the U.S. Here's a comparative timeline I whipped up for my students some time back, because they had no idea about the history of Western involvement in the Middle East: http://tinyurl.com/mideast-timeline

I'm actually surprised we haven't seen more from Iran over the years -- Mossadeq, the Shah and all that. But I suppose most of their retaliation came in the 1970's when the Ayatollah returned.

4/10/2013 06:44:16 pm

Other J. -

I don't think I'm being clear. "Letting it happen" as some accuse the US of having done with Pearl Harbor makes internal sense if one is planning to attack the people who are doing the act. Letting the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor as a pretext for declaring war on Japan at least makes internal sense regardless of what one thinks of the hypothesis. Letting Australia bomb Pearl Harbor is not a good plan for encouraging people to back war on Japan.

"Letting" 19 people from Gulf oil states (ones not only on friendly terms with the US - specifically in fact with the Bush family - but also ones on bad terms with Iraq) attack as a pretext for retaliating against Iraq is daft. Why not simply "let" Iraq itself do something?

The US already had sanctions on Iraq, already had no fly zones over Iraq and was already charging Iraq with carrying out a WMD program. There was an overabundance of opportunity to provoke, plant or manufacture an Iraqi move as a pretext (in fact Washington did so around 1990, displaying falsified photos of Iraqis massing on the Saudi border).

The calculation appears to be that Washington (or the Bush Administration specifically) thought they'd get more public support by appearing not to be able to stop an attack than by stopping it. That'd be a massive gamble alone. Further calculations would have to include no one noticing that Iraq and al Qaeda were in fact foils, or that the hijackers were from the "Coalition of the Willing" from the last Iraq war.

Public sentiment could easily have blown up in the administration's face, and people could well have been suspect of further involving the US in the region. Letting Saudis attack the US as a means of pumping up support for (in essence) backing the Saudi regime's regional goals doesn't make sense.

All of this is predicated upon a complete fantasy world in which the US has to "let" an attack such as this happen because otherwise we have technology and related systems that work so well that no one could penetrate our shell otherwise.

I'd also have to ask why 4 planes would have to be allowed to be hijacked. One wouldn't be enough? One plane hitting the Pentagon or the WTC wouldn't have been sufficient to stir war fever? Are people more likely to support leadership and a military which stops 3 out of 4 planes or 0 out of 4?

4/11/2013 10:48:03 am

Christopher, I don't think either of us is being clear here.

I understand your position, and I personally have no argument with it. From the LIHOP perspective, though, it's not necessary to have Iraqis on any plane because the point was to get troops into the region, not necessarily Iraq. Iraq was incidental, and they'd manufacture a reason for that invasion after they had the troops regionally placed. (Some of the neocon documents talk about bringing democracy to the entirety of the Middle East, so the theory wasn't necessarily focused on specific countries).

There are other problems with having Iraqis on the plane: First it would have seemed "off" to any reporters or governmental or UN reviews, because Hussein's government had a well-documented antagonistic relationship with Al Qaeda. (And we did still try to get UN support to invade.) So why would Hussein work with Bin Laden in an attack that would so clearly bring down the wrath of the Bush administration? That would be so convenient as to seem fishy, and would have suggested more of a conspiracy. A different link would have to be established.

That link was Al Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist who had set up camps in Iran and Iraq and had worked with Al Qaeda in the past -- but not with Hussein. The government didn't do itself any favors here by trying to link Al Zarqawi to Hussein's regime, but that's the best link they could come up with. Before he was taking heads, Al Zarqawi was operating a camp in Kirma, Northern Iraq, where they were manufacturing ricin. The problem is the base was located well within the U.S.-monitored No Fly Zone, and it wasn't raided and dismantled until two weeks after the Iraqi invasion. In a Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Chuck Hagel grilled Colin Powell about how a known terrorist was making ricin within the U.S.-controlled No Fly Zone, and why they waited for two weeks after the invasion to raid the camp. Powell refused to answer in an open hearing. (The transcript for this hearing was up on the U.S. Printing Office website for a while, but disappeared after NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reported on it. The report appeared again a few years later. I don't know if it's still available.)

The assumption (which LIHOP adherents follow) is that by allowing Al Zarqawi to operate they could use him as the Al Qaeda link to Iraq, and that's exactly what happened. Through Al Zarqawi they were able to establish a more plausible link than Saddam Hussein working with a known enemy in a one-off attack that would guarantee a devastating invasion of his country. The first option -- Iraqis on the plane -- wouldn't pass the smell test. They just needed the military staging, which any attack would do -- Saudis, Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians, it doesn't matter, especially since the underlying principle was to spread democracy across the region. Once the military forces were in place in the region, they could use Al Zarqawi to help make their case (which they did). Eventually, though, the link between Iraq and Al Zarqawi fell apart, even though the administration kept repeating it (and Cheney still uses it to this day).

Personally, I think Al Qaeda got one over on the Bush Administration, and they scrambled after the fact to make the threat look bigger than it actually was (Iraq) and then reached for justifications wherever they thought one might be built up (Al Zarqawi). I don't think we know nearly enough about the region, it's tribal affiliations and political problems to really understand who has legitimate or manufactured gripes against whom in the region, and where the U.S. figured into those complaints. Former CIA Robert Baer is actually a really good source for getting your head around how complex the Middle East can be; he has as good a grasp on its different factions, ethnic groups, tribal affiliations, and shifting political sands as anyone. (The film Syriana was a fictionalized version of his memoir.)

4/11/2013 12:15:55 pm

Thanks, The Other J., for offering many points of clarification. I'll try a shorter version of what I tried the other day. First, though, let me say I'm surprised you didn't bring up the Israeli student spy issue, inasmuch as the news surrounding them disappeared from the media scene rather quickly and suspiciously, too.

I'm not overtly blaming Israel for not warning America; indeed, elements within the Israeli government almost certainly did warn us...along with many other countries. It's just that we now know that some of the spies were tracking some of the hijackers. That's problematic, because it is publicly obvious that others were aware of what was about to happen...besides our own NSA, who I guess weren't able to share information properly enough to avoid the outrage.

4/11/2013 12:25:43 pm

Going "back" to war with Iraq was a Bush thing. Personal, and it worked. The atmosphere of 9/11 made it conveniently possible.

War is always the objective, which is why Kennedy was allowed to get whacked, too. The huge green money machine must roll on....

Soldiers are the most obvious victims, but we are all victims.

Welcome back to the '60's, Gunn.

4/12/2013 03:40:11 am

Other J. -

I should maybe add that I lived & worked in the Middle East and was in fact living in the Gulf when 9/11 happened. Part of the problem I have with the Truthers is that they tend to have zero experience in the region.

I understand that you don't buy this stuff. At the same time I think you give the people who do a little too much credit for having a viewpoint with internal logic.

IMO it very much matters if the people on the planes are from countries the US allies itself with as it plans to go to war against Iraq.

People forget that the Iraq war never ended in the '90s, that thousands of sorties (actual targeted attacks and not just fly-overs) were flown against Iraq through the decade prior to 9/11, that we had the embargo and so forth. American forces already dominated the region. The estimate is that during the Clinton presidency a strike hit Iraq once every four days. It simply stopped being a news story, but we never stopped the war on Iraq. One could pull any number of Gulf of Tonkin-style stunts if one wanted a pretext for sending ground troops into Arab Iraq (we likely already had a small number in Iraqi Kurdistan), any one of which would make direct linear sense as opposed to the Rube Goldberg 9/11 gambit.

Obviously the US in general and the neo-cons in particular don't have and never had any interest in "spreading democracy" in the region, a bad joke. From the emirs of the Gulf to the strongmen in North Africa, our allies in the region are/were there to suppress democracy.

We'll note that in the '90s the US bombed Sudan and more recently we attacked and helped overthrow the government of Libya, all without claiming that either country launched terror attacks on American soil. Think of the other countries in recent decades we've sent troops into or launched airstrikes upon also with no such claims - Grenada, Somalia, Serbia, Sudan, Libya, Panama... it's not as if the US needs a plane to hit the Pentagon for people to back these things. One of the myths the Truthers believe is that Americans need a revenge motive to back a war.

Saddam Hussein was our ally in the region (prior to the Kuwait invasion) precisely because he was a relative secularist who repressed the sort of movements that spawned al Qaeda. I'd have to restate that it makes no sense whatever to "allow" al Qaeda to attack as a pretext for attacking Iraq. Next we'll be planting evidence on the Red Sox to attack the Yankees.

The notion that American and/or Israeli intelligence knew exactly what was coming and allowed it to happen further rests on fantasies that these are omniscient entities who can never be fooled. There's a world of difference between knowing that bin Laden wanted to attack the US (I should think the embassy bombings would make that clear to a four year old) and knowing specific airplanes on a specific day were the plan.

Jonathan

4/9/2013 10:25:05 am

Gunn,
Are the "iron combat relics" from the Rune Stone Museum available for viewing online somewhere?

Thank you,
Jonathan

4/10/2013 05:24:19 am

Jonathan, here is a 2012 photo of the iron objects I found online by googling. I checked the museum site and they don't even have a photo of the weapons. I didn't realize before your question that a wooden handle is still attached to one.

http://travellingstrongs.blogspot.com/2012/08/runestone-museum-kensington-runestone.html

Here's my own website, where a more frontal photo was taken of the iron objects in a previous display:

www.hallmarkemporium.com/discoveries

Carbon dating can be tricky with wood, though, because trees can grow to be quite old, and the heartwood can date differently from, say, smaller branch wood. I know Europe has an extensive "wood history" collection of growth rings which can sometimes be useful for making comparisons back in time. But the handle could be from a much later period than the ax itself...even so, the results would still be interesting.

4/10/2013 09:47:06 am

Thank you, Gunn. I know much more about swords than I do axes, but the two on the right in the first photo are not Medieval. They look like 19th century pieces meant to resemble Renaissance halberds.I think the museum should contact Craig Johnson of the Oakeshott Institute (the sword expert who debunked the Ulen Sword for Wolter) for his opinion. Some things can be evaluated by sight alone, no carbon testing needed. I think some of the items in that display case could easily be identified by an expert in the field of Medieval arms and armor.

RLewis

4/9/2013 02:28:06 pm

Hmmm. A site with multiple, well-documented scientific studies performed over several decades confirming its natural origins, and apparently many miles from any navigable waterways; and with a long history of native American habitation, and absolutely no freaking wild-ass way there is any reasonable connection to pre-Columbian Europeans..
well then, I can't see how they possibly will be able to stretch this out over an entire episode.
Unless they make stuff up, of course.

Sticker

4/10/2013 04:31:29 am

The Other J. - That would be awesome! Comedy is sometimes the best way to get across some pretty meaty criticisms in a way that people can really relate to. I do find it odd that there hasn't even been a decent parody of "Ancient Aliens" yet --- and this certainly can't be for lack of unique characters and lampoonable material.

Titus pillo

4/13/2013 04:01:00 am

Jason

We talked about auburn a few weeks ago. My dad gre up on barber street across from the prison. Typical Italian immigrants were his parents. I grew up in Rochester but we would visit his folks graves twice a year at that massive cemetery across fron auburn high school. I drive thru the town now and then since we have friends who own a cottage on sa lake just east of mighty owasco...ha ha

I came across a great quote by Goethe about the truth needs to be repeated again and again....I'm sure unknown of it.

I used to live in Dallas but never heard of this rock wall.

Cheer

Will Ritson

5/4/2013 06:52:56 pm

If AU is a "pseudo-documentary series," does that make this a pseudo-intellectual blog?

Judging by many of the comments, one would think so.

Graham Wellington link

12/10/2013 02:59:28 am

It's ashame that you will not give any credibility to research that doesn't fit your paradigm. The fact is, regardless of who does the research whether they have an official 'title' that you approve of, YOU weren't there when the megaliths/pyramids/rock walls etc etc were built. None of us were. So you don't really know, do you? Didn't think so. You infact do exactly what everone theorizes you do (no pun intended) : You simply go to school, get good grades, believe EVERYTHING your taught, and considering you look like George Costanza with a facelift you've realized that you can't get a girl (unless you're gay) so you decide to focus your bitterness of the academically and socially successful ..on picking apart their work...infact you've made a life of doing that. I live right next to America's Stonehenge, you've said the stones were 'tiny' ? hahahaaa Are you kidding me? Yeah some are small, but others weigh TONS. Funny how you left that part out of your interview, as you claim Scot Wolter does. I think you are more like Scot Wolter than you may realize, however I bet he's gotten far more women than you have. : )

Barbara A. Addington

7/19/2015 06:58:53 am

WOW.....Your comments sound like a bunch of left wing idiots! Do you have the experience to decide that the work of a man, so exceedingly beyond your credits of accomplishments? I think not.

John Carr

4/6/2017 08:36:39 pm

Four Years Later...
Behind the Rockwall County Historical Society lies stones from the wall taken from the Stodghill Farm. Go there. Look at them carefully. There is a gray mortar on the outside. It is in 1/4" layers. Scratch marks from the trowel that laid the mortar can still be seen.

See for yourself.