The Myth of a Lost Mound Builder Race

The first European explorers and settlers to set foot in North America during the 15th and 16th centuries found many large conical hills dotting the landscape of certain regions. During Hernando De Soto’s expedition across what is today the southeastern United States, he and his men passed by many of these and believed them to be nothing more than hills, but others he saw in the midst of populous native cities, with temples and the houses of chiefs built atop them, and he understood them to be manmade. By the time of French and English exploration and settlement, after De Soto’s expedition had decimated indigenous populations by introducing European disease, the cities too had disappeared, leaving only the earthen mounds, which looked to many an untrained eye like natural features of the landscape. Eventually, though, it became common knowledge that these were actually tumuli, or burial mounds, akin to the barrows of the Old World, and they were frequently destroyed by farmers seeking to level their fields, or by treasure-hunters who never found the riches they dreamed of within, just skeletons and artifacts that would only be of interest to antiquarians. Before the Revolutionary War, the consensus among the educated and scientifically-minded was that, of course, they had been built by the tribes of Native Americans who had first been encountered in the New World and who still remained there, in constant conflict with white settlers, but gradually, this belief came to be replaced by the idea that Native Americans, whom they considered “savages,” simply did not have the wherewithal to build such monuments. Rather, they must have been the work of a predecessor race, a superior breed of people more like Europeans and thus probably white, who had been wiped out by the native peoples they believed to be so barbarous. This myth of a lost race of mound-builders would breed countless theories of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact, as did the question of the origin of Native American peoples, and eventually, it would be enshrined in a uniquely American religion. It seems to have started with the vivid imagination of a Congregationalist preacher named Solomon Spalding, who encountered theories about the Old-World origins of a Mound Builder race in college at Dartmouth. After giving up preaching, he lived first in Western New York, before moving to Ohio, both regions with numerous ancient mounds, about which locals and visiting antiquarians told many stories and shared many theories. Eventually, Spalding shared his own, very publicly, telling many an acquaintance about a historical romance, or fiction, that he was writing, and sharing various drafts of it with whoever wanted to read it. The principal conceit of his story was that it was a translation of an ancient scroll found in a burial mound, which revealed the hidden history of the Mound Builder race. His manuscript would never be published, but, as some testimony reveals, it may have been taken from a printer’s office and copied by a young Baptist minister named Sidney Rigdon. After that, a young burial mound treasure-hunter in Western New York named Joseph Smith began claiming that an angel had revealed to him the location of a book of gold plates buried within a mound, which once translated by Smith, likewise told the story of the lost Mound Builder race. The fact that, later the same year that Smith published The Book of Mormon, Sidney Rigdon and several members of his congregation in Ohio would be converted to the new religion, and Rigdon would become Smith’s chief lieutenant, has led many to suspect that Rigdon planted the seeds of this new religion by secretly providing Solomon Spalding’s manuscript to Joseph Smith for use as a model. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, the entire basis of Mormonism, a religion claiming nearly 17 million converts today, remains that the ancient Mound Builders of America were actually a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel who found their way to the New World. According to the Book of Mormon, Native Americans too are descended from these Lost Tribes, but are derived from a separate tribe that engaged in idolatry and therefore were cursed with dark skin and descended into savagery, destroying the light-skinned Mound Builder tribe. This is the core of a quintessentially American myth, that the impressive ancient earthworks of our land were not constructed by the ancestors of the Native Americans we know, but rather that Native American peoples savagely wiped out this noble and white antecedent race. It is a myth that reveals the foundational racism that our country was built on, and that, despite having long been irrefutably debunked, survives today, in the dogma of the Latter-Day Saints, in the deceptive pseudohistorical work of several influential authors, and among the thickets of false claims blithely made online.

A depiction of Joseph Smith, who in his youth had been a treasure hunter, excavating a mound after he had founded a religion on the idea of a lost Mound Builder race.

The subject of this episode is one for which I have laid an extensive foundation. Many topics that have long been of interest to me, and that I have written about, in the podcast and in my historical fiction, are closely related to the myth of a lost Mound Building race in ancient America. Most recently, obviously, my series on giants ties directly into it, as 19th century claims of uncovering enormous skeletons in Native American burial mounds were encouraged by the idea that Native Americans could not have created such gigantic earthworks, and that instead they had been constructed by a mythical lost race in antiquity. In fact, as I mentioned briefly, Aaron Wright of Conneaut, Ohio, who is said to have claimed that he found a giant skull that fit over his head like a helmet, actually knew Solomon Spalding and gave testimony regarding the similarity of Spalding’s manuscript to Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon. The claims about giant remains in Conneaut mounds were certainly one among the many stories about Mound Builders that inspired Spalding, and probably, by extension, Mormonism. If you want to learn more about the relationship between Mound Builder legends and treasure-hunting and Mormonism, including a depiction of a likely scenario for how the Book of Mormon was composed and what influenced its composition, I wrote a historical novel all about it, which I researched and wrote over the course of a decade. Some of the subject matter relevant to both Mormonism and the Mound Builder myth I discussed at length last year in my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel, and I followed up that series with a survey of the many inscribed stone frauds that have been perpetrated to support the pre-Columbian transoceanic contact claims and, more specifically, the supposed Hebraic origins of Native Americans, a few of which I also dramatized in fiction. In fact, this story, of the quintessentially American myth of a lost Mound Builder race, even corresponds with the myth of an Aryan race, which I devoted most of an episode to discussing in my three-part series on Nazi Occultism years ago. In the late 18th century, an English linguist in British-controlled India named William Jones, remarking on the connections between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek and unable to conceive that something of value might have been contributed to mankind by a people of color, came to the baseless conclusion that an unknown white race had first brought this Proto-Indo-European language to India, and had since “degenerated” through racial admixture with the dark-skinned native peoples of India. This, of course, was the birth of a doctrine that would drive Nazi racial theories more than a hundred years later in Germany, and that survives today, sadly thriving in the dark dens and bastions of White Nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, neo-Confederates, the Christian Identity movement, and the Alt-Right. But long before it inspired these groups, it inspired the white inhabitants of a newly-independent United States of America to likewise imagine that there had once been a white predecessor race in their country as well, one quite superior to the Native Americans with whom they were locked in a perennial struggle for possession of these ancient lands.

Just as there were many theories about the racial heritage of Native American peoples, many and varied were the pet theories about the origins of the Mound Builder race that, by the mid-19th century, were believed by most Americans to have preceded them. Reflecting this connection to the myth of an Aryan race that was popularized by scholars in British India, some theories suggested the Mound Builders had been “Hindoos.” Of course, the term “Hindus” actually refers to a specific religious group, but these Mound Builder claims used it more generally to mean supposed ancient immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, likely meaning the mythical Aryan race posited at the time. It is ironic that these theorists refused to believe that the peoples they wrongly called “Indians” were responsible for the mounds, preferring instead to credit peoples more accurately called “Indians.” James McCulloh’s Researches on America, for example, suggested that the ancient Asian ancestors of Native Americans who crossed into the Americas via the land bridge at Beringia were more specifically from India, and that they had been trapped here by the sinking of Atlantis. Likewise, John Clifford’s “Indian Antiquities,” a series of letters published in Western Review, perceived similarities between the myths of Native Americans and the cultures of India, and though Judeo-Christian tradition had nothing to do with either, he believed the Bible provided insight into the construction of mounds in America, suggesting they had been further attempts to build to the sky after the fall of the Tower of Babel. Both men actually suggested that, though descended from “Hindoos,” it was indeed Native Americans who had built the mound—but not the native peoples of North America, whom they agreed were incapable of such feats. Rather, they argued it had been those indigenous to Mexico, the so-called Toltec peoples, who had been known to build impressive stone pyramids in Central America. This notion that the Toltec or Aztec Mesoamerican cultures actually originated as the Mound Builders before moving southward was quite popular, and it retained the critical element that the Native American tribes of the day were inferior, could not of built the mounds themselves, and likely drove the superior mound-building culture southward with their violent depredations.

Painting of Mound Builder Myth proponent Caleb Atwater.

The arguments of McCulloh and Clifford were further promoted in 1820 by Caleb Atwater, in his Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States. Close listeners to the preceding series on giants may recall the antiquarian Atwater had been excavating mounds in Conneaut, Ohio, and had declared that the skeletons there were very small, effectively refuting the claims that local man Aaron Wright had found giant skeletons in Conneaut’s tumuli. Atwater’s work borrowed heavily from John Clifford, and Clifford’s partner, French polymath Constantine Rafinesque, took umbrage, afterward engaging in a lifelong feud with Atwater, whose theory of Native American origins he vehemently opposed, so much so that, taking a cue from Joseph Smith, he would eventually resort to perpetrating a found manuscript hoax of his own to convince the world of his more traditional view of the Asiatic origins of Native Americans, a fraud I plan to discuss further in a patron exclusive episode. But attempting to disabuse the intellectual elite of their quickly multiplying historical fantasies was a losing battle. The Hindu/Toltec theory was only one among a plethora of popular notions about who the lost Mound Builders had been, and most of them were popularized by the work of one man, Josiah Priest, an undereducated leatherworker who started his writing career in 1825 publishing a work, The Wonders of Nature and Providence Displayed, that pieced together the work of other writers, including Ethan Smith, whose work View of the Hebrews had popularized the notion that Native Americans were actually Jews from the Lost Tribes of Israel. But in Priest’s later 1833 work, American Antiquities, and Discoveries in the West, he attempted to synthesize numerous competing theories about the origins of the Mound Builders. No longer were they merely lost Israelites, but also Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Norwegians, the Chinese and the Welsh. To give an example of his arguments, let’s look at the last group, the Welsh. Priest raises the Welsh myth of Prince Madoc, who was said to have sailed to America in the 12th century, and he shares certain claims about Native American tribes that some believed, without convincing evidence, could be of Welsh extraction. This legend had formerly been used by Queen Elizabeth to assert a claim over the new world, but the legend itself only appeared after Columbus’s voyage, in poetry, seemingly adapted from medieval tales such as the legendary voyage of the Celt, Brendan the Navigator. This is a good example of the unreliability of the claims of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact that were folded into the myth of a lost Mound Builder race, which Josiah Priest gathered and attempted to stitch together in his work, whose subtitle describes well the claims of this myth generally: “Being an Exhibition of the Evidence that an Ancient Population of Partially Civilized Nations, Differing Entirely from Those of the Present Indians, Peopled America Many Centuries before Its Discovery By Columbus, and Inquiries into Their Origin, with a Copious Description of Many of Their Stupendous Works Now in Ruins, with Conjectures Concerning What May Have Become of Them.” By this time, theories about Mound Builders had moved from a highly debated topic among an intellectual elite to a fashionable issue for discussion among less educated folk, who were Josiah Priest’s readership, and the notion of a lost Mound Builder race, whatever their origin, had proven entirely more popular.

That wasn’t always the case. In fact, prior to the Revolution, it was common for those who took an interest in mounds to logically assume they were the work of the only known residents of North America. In fact, as detailed in one of my principal sources, the exhaustively researched The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a “Lost White Race” by Jason Colavito, a founding father and one of probably the earliest scientific investigators of mounds, Thomas Jefferson, strongly believed that Native Americans had built these tumuli. He had good reason to believe it, since he had several times seen local Native Americans make pilgrimages to a mound on his property known as Indian Grave. Later in life, he made a study of the country’s tumuli, noting the difference between temple platform mounds that had been observed by the Spanish and burial mounds like the one on his property, and in order to answer questions of whether these were cemeteries used over generations or mass graves used in the aftermath of battle, he undertook a cautious and systematic excavation of Indian Grave. In doing so, as Colavito notes, he essentially invented the practices of modern archaeology, in stark contrast to the haphazard and destructive excavations of antiquaries of the day. Jefferson’s study, which presumed as an undisputable given that all such mounds were the work of “Aboriginal Indians,” would be spread far and wide, and in fact would end up reproduced in the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1797 to 1823. However, the encyclopedia placed Jefferson’s description in its section on barrows, tacitly comparing this practice with Old World funerary customs and thereby contributing to the growth of the myth that they had been constructed by some culture other than that of Native Americans.

Depiction of a cross-sectional mound excavation like that which Thomas Jefferson pioneered.

This implicit suggestion in the Encyclopedia Britannica was still something of an outlier view in the 1780s, but it came to be the view of Daniel Webster, of Webster’s Dictionary fame, who accepted Jefferson’s conclusions about Native Americans being responsible for smaller burial mounds but insisted that larger mounds and temple platforms must have been the work of Spaniards, a common enough claim at the time, or of ancient Celtic immigrants, given their similarity to European barrows. But such a view was certainly not commonly accepted yet and was even controversial. One who took exception to Webster’s claims was Brigadier General George Rogers Clark, a great American patriot called “Conqueror of the Old Northwest” for his role in winning the Northwest Territory from the British in the Revolutionary War. Clark had seen many a mound in that region and scoffed at the idea that De Soto’s expeditionary forces could possibly have constructed them during the few years of their inland exploration. Moreover, in contradiction to a central tenet of the Mound Builder Myth, that extant Native Americans had no knowledge of who had built the mounds, Clark informed Webster that, in his communications with leaders of the Kaskaskia and Cahokia tribes, they explicitly told him that the mounds had been built by their ancestors, in a time when they had been far more populous and gathered in “large towns,” specifically indicating that mounds were not only burial grounds and temple platforms, but also served as the location of the “palace” of a tribe’s leader, which supports our modern understanding of the uses of some mounds. Again, in 1803, the Reverend Dr. James Madison of the American Philosophical Society argued that the mounds were the work of Native Americans, but he was countered a couple years afterward by Unitarian minister and Harvard librarian Thaddeus Harris, who argued that Native Americans simply were not ingenious enough to accomplish such works, taking instead the view, which would become so popular, that they were the work of a Mexican native culture. So we see at the turn of the 19th century the myth in its infancy, still resisted by the rational and scientific-minded, but it was not long before it exploded, making this fiction into consensus reality. 

The growth of the myth was helped early on by the claim that another Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, took a view opposite that of Thomas Jefferson. According to Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, a French consul who claimed to have travelled in America with him, Ben Franklin scoffed at the notion of an Asiatic origin of Native Americans, preferring the notion that Inuit peoples had immigrated to the continent from Scandinavia and the tribes of the American South from Mexico. Writing in 1801, Crèvecoeur says Franklin likened burial mounds to European barrows and insisted, like others, that Native Americans had no knowledge of their construction, which of course was blatantly false, as Clark had already shown and as other evidence which I will later review further shows. Crèvecoeur writes that Franklin believed the Mound Builder “much further advanced in civilization than our Indians,” and looked forward to a time “[w]hen the population of the United States shall have spread over every part of that vast and beautiful region,” believing that “posterity, aided by new discoveries, may then perhaps form more satisfactory conjectures.” As Jason Colavito astutely discerns, this grasping after some grand lost history does indeed seem to represent a desire for the creation of a history for America that could rival the storied pasts of European nations, but more than that, these words about spreading across the continent reflect the growing desire for westward expansion, a tendency that would find its apotheosis, later that century, in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. In reality, Crèvecoeur had entirely fabricated the remarks of Benjamin Franklin, plagiarizing and adapting the words of others and placing them into the Founding Father’s mouth. Franklin actually believed the unsupportable argument that Spaniards had built the mounds of North America. We know this to be false, since the chronicles of Spanish explorers actually record their expeditions’ encounters with native cities and make specific mention of mounds.  Nevertheless, the remarks Crèvecoeur falsely attributed to Franklin would later be reprinted, devoid of context, in an encyclopedia and would be read and believed by many.

Portrait of Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, literary hoaxer and plagiarist.

While Franklin’s sentiments on this topic may have been falsified, other prominent politicians of the day evinced genuine belief in the Mound Builder myth. In 1811, DeWitt Clinton, Mayor of New York City, Lieutenant Governor of the state and soon-to-be presidential candidate, gave a speech to the New-York Historical Society in which he stated that the mounds were not temple platforms or burial places but military fortifications built by a lost race that had been destroyed in a race war by extant Native Americans, and he suggested that any native peoples who claimed they were the work of their ancestors were simply trying to take credit for feats their people did not actually accomplish. Years later, after acceding to the governorship, Clinton refined his claims to argue that this lost Mound Builder race was in fact the Scythians, which, as you may recall from my episode about the Tartaria delusion, was a vague racial designation applied to all peoples residing north of the Black Sea and east of Europe. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson devoted much of his State of the Union report to promoting the myth of a lost Mound Builder race, stating, “In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the west, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for the existing savage tribes.” And in 1837, future president William Henry Harrison addressed the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, stating that an ancient people, ancestors of the Aztecs of Mexico, had originated within the boundaries of the U.S. and built the “stupendous” earthen mounds here before fleeing “from the face of a tyrant, and the oppressions of unfeeling taskmasters,” suggesting the Mound Builders “had been made to yield to a more numerous…people…. Forced to fly before a new swarm from some northern or southern hive.” Jackson was a Democrat, and Harrison a Whig, but in this point there was broad bipartisan agreement. Indeed, both men had distinguished themselves in the American Indian Wars, which still raged and would continue to the end of the century. And here we approach the real heart of darkness within the Mound Builder myth: that it was a tool of propaganda used to justify their subjugation of Native American tribes.
In case you weren’t paying attention in your high school history class or your Survey of American history course in college, or in the likely event that your curriculum gave this aspect of American history short shrift, allow me to highlight it here. From the colonial period, through the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, The Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War, the United States was in a sporadic but near constant state of war with Native American tribes. These are typically better known by the names of individual conflicts with specific tribes or regions, such as the Cherokee-American Wars or Chickamauga Wars, the Northwest Indian War, Tecumseh’s War, in which William Henry Harrison was intimately involved, and the Creek and Seminole Wars, fought ruthlessly by General Andrew Jackson. Then, during his Presidency, with the passage of the Indian Removal Act, Jackson, with Congress’s approval, used the full power of the U.S. government to forcibly relocate Native American tribes to land promised them beyond the Mississippi, an unfathomably destructive displacement involving concentration camps and death marches and precipitating further conflicts, such as the Second Seminole War. Among the numerous tribes forced to take the “Trail of Tears,” the Choctaw, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, and the Seminole, historians estimate as many as 15,000 perished from diseases like cholera and dysentery. Those who survived would see their treaties broken once again as white settlers continued to press westward and settle the frontier lands that had been promised to them, triggering battles like Little Bighorn, and massacres like Wounded Knee. Surviving tribes would find themselves hemmed into reservations, and see their children taken and indoctrinated in draconic reeducation camps they called schools. The terrible irony is that Native American peoples had built impressive and populous cities and had established healthy trade relations across a vast and prosperous culture that was laid low by European disease and massacre, reducing their cities to abandoned mounds and their peoples to nomadic warrior tribes. Yet the pale-faced interloper had the audacity to tell them that those cities hadn’t been built by such as they, that some superior race had constructed those cities, and that they deserved to be driven from their lands and hunted to extinction because they had done the same to the builders of those cities—their cities! It is difficult to find a more appropriate word for our treatment of Native American peoples than “genocide.” Indeed, our push westward for more land to settle and our concomitant annihilation of the Native Americans that stood in our way would eventually inspire Hitler and the Nazis in their push for lebensraum, and the race myths they used to justify genocide were not unlike our own.

As belief in the myth of a lost Mound Builder race became the political dogma of the U.S. government during Indian Removal and thus became common among the public, it gradually came to be considered empirical truth even by the scientific community, thus entering textbooks and furthering its propagation. During the 1840s, the most ambitious survey of these earthworks, excavating some 200 mounds, was undertaken between 1845 and 1847 by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, and their report, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, ended up being the first publication of the Smithsonian Institution. In it, they draw the conclusion that, since the earthworks themselves and some artwork found within was supposedly “immeasurably beyond anything which the North American Indians are known to produce, even to this day,” the mounds must have been the work of some superior race, likely related to Central or South American civilizations. With this work’s flawed conjecture, the myth was for several decades enshrined as unassailable science, and in 1847, we see the first example of a textbook, History of the United States of America, Designed for Schools, promulgating the falsehood. A quarter century later, the myth was still going strong in history primers like that written by George Quackenbos, and even in grammar texts, like that of John Jacob Anderson. One of the most ambitious history publications of the 1870s, the mostly cribbed and ghost written 39-volume history of eastern North America by Hubert Howe Bancroft, further disseminated the myth. Among the evidence leveraged by many of these scientists, historians, and textbook compilers were a variety of hoaxes that had been perpetrated with the express purpose of providing evidence for the lost race hypothesis. One was The Traditions of De-Coo-Dah, a book written by antiquarian and Mound Builder myth believer William Pidgeon, published in 1852, in which he dubiously claimed that a mysterious old Native American man had entrusted him with the secret truth about the Scandinavian origin of the ancient Mound Builders. Likewise, in 1859, one Nelson Lee falsely claimed to have been a captive of the Comanche and to have been told by a Chief Rolling Thunder about a race of ten-foot white men who had built the ancient earthworks. Most of the fraudulent evidence for the myth came in the form of inscribed stone hoaxes, though, most of which I previously discussed in my episode “Written in Stone: The Archaeological Frauds of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories” and some of which I dramatized in fiction that I released in patron exclusive audio productions. These include Dighton Rock, the Grave Creek Stone, The Newark Holy Stones, the Bat Creek inscription, and the Michigan Relics. There was one such inscribed stone fraud which I mentioned only in passing at the time, though, which I think illustrates well the false evidence leveraged by writers promoting the myth of a lost Mound Builder race during these years, and I will tell its story here, intertwined as it is with the final scientific repudiation of the myth.

Illustration of the fictional De-Coo-Dah

In 1877, a Lutheran minister named Jacob Gass who spoke only German fluently and thus preached principally to German immigrants, made a seemingly astounding discovery during some of the mound explorations on a farm near Davenport, Iowa, that he had undertaken out of a great interest in antiquities.  At the time, the most pressing questions, the resolution of which would make any local scientific academy world famous, were, of course, the identity of the mysterious Mound Building race, and also whether man existed contemporaneously with the mastodon. Astonishingly, Gass pulled inscribed tablets out of the mound that seemed to conveniently resolve both of these mysteries. First, they appeared to bear written language, alphabetic signs that thus proved the ancient existence of a culture separate from that of known Native Americans, who never developed a syllabary until the Cherokee created a writing system in 1821. The presence of writing was common among inscribed stone frauds, of course, but the Davenport Tablets went further. With illustrations, it depicted the earthworks of the Mound Builders being used as altars for human sacrifice. Another illustration depicts a mastodon or elephant, handily answering the question of whether that animal lived simultaneously with the Mound Builders. The plate was further found with some pipes carved into the same elephantine shape. And lastly, a separate tablet appeared to depict astrological symbols and the makings of a calendar, firing further speculation about the Old World origins of these mound-building people. The Davenport Tablets made Gass and the Davenport Academy fantastically famous, and numerous scholars supported their authenticity, citing these artifacts and their questionable translations of the characters inscribed thereon as proof that the Mound Builders were descended from Noah after the Flood, or that they were Hittites, or whatever pet theory they wanted to spread. Eventually, though, some scholars expressed doubt, most notably Cyrus Thomas, the new head of archaeology for the Smithsonian Institution who would go on to finally destroy the Mound Builder myth in academia. He pointed out the ludicrous coincidence of these items conveniently answering all the most popular questions of the day, all being found by the same man. He pointed out that Gass’s own descriptions of the find indicated that the burial place where he found the items appeared disturbed, with bones scattered, unlike the orderly burials with complete skeletons observed elsewhere at the same site, suggesting some intrusive and more recent burial during which the tablets may have been planted. And finally, he cited rumors that Gass had been involved in the discovery of several fraudulent artifacts before. The controversy did not die easily, but almost a hundred years later, in 1970, University of Iowa professor Marshall McKusick appears to have solved the mystery, demonstrating that a conspiracy of men had planted the artifacts, which they had carved from slate roof shingles stolen from a local brothel, and planted them as a prank on Reverend Gass, whom they called a “windjammer and a liar.” When the sham items suddenly became valuable because scientific academies wanted to buy them, though, they ended up covering up their fraud, in many cases with the assistance of the academics who so yearned for the artifacts to be genuine!

The Davenport Tablets.

This demonstrates how thoroughly the myth of a lost Mound Builder race had taken hold of not just the public but scholars as well by the 1880s, when, as it happened, the Smithsonian and its Bureau of Ethnology had come under the leadership of John Wesley Powell, who strongly, and correctly, doubted the myth. Such was the pressure from the government that the Bureau served that Powell at first had to appoint a believer in the Mound Builder myth to head up their investigation of earthworks, but thankfully, Powell found reason to fire him and hire Cyrus Thomas instead, knowing full well that Thomas would not shy from refuting the myth. After nearly a decade of systematic research as the principal archaeologist in the Bureau’s Mound Exploration Division, Cyrus Thomas published his 700-page Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, in which he methodically disproved the myth of a lost Mound Builder race and demonstrated that they were, indeed, the work of the ancestors of known Native American peoples. He unceremoniously demolished the supposed evidence of inscribed stones, showing them to be frauds, and he denied the claims that Native American culture was too undeveloped to have organized such civilizations. Evidence provided by De Soto’s chronicler reveals, after all, that at the time of first European contact, many Native Americans lived in populous walled cities that demonstrated large-scale agricultural cultivation. Thomas further refuted the claim that Native Americans had no knowledge of who had constructed the earthworks and had never been seen to build such mounds themselves, citing specific historical accounts of both. He further disproved the claim that metal artifacts discovered in mounds revealed metallurgical skills that Native Americans had never been seen to possess, revealing that these objects had been made from copper native to Michigan, requiring no metallurgy, and since such copper artifacts were discovered even at a great distance from Michigan, it just served as further evidence of the sophistication of Native American civilization prior to European contact, as they must have had established trade networks from Michigan all the way down to Florida. Cyrus Thomas’s final conclusion that “the theory which attributes these works to the Indians [was] the correct one” reverberated through the scientific community. No scholars worth their salt would ever again make such fools of themselves as to resurrect the myth of the Mound Builders.

Cyrus Thomas, the man who disproved the myth of a lost race of Mound Builders.

Unfortunately, such a sea change in academic thought does not always filter down to public opinion, and as Jason Colavito shows in his thorough work, the popular press continued publishing books that promoted the myth long after Cyrus Thomas had decimated it in his report, just as newspapers continued to publish giant hoaxes that fed into it. The myth seemed to disappear during the middle of the 20th century, but in the late 1960s, the myth was folded into the growing UFO myth when Erich von Däniken published his book positing the visitation of ancient astronauts. Suddenly the American earthworks were not just the work of a lost white race, or of giants, but of aliens. Anybody, it seems, but Native Americans. Other fringe pseudohistorians, Most notably Graham Hancock, have since taken up Däniken’s torch, and broadcast and cable television have been some of the worst purveyors of this nonsense, producing slick and sensationalist specials on the topic. The History Channel is perhaps the party guiltiest of propping up this long-disproven racist myth in series like Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed. Meanwhile, on the Internet, promoted by mystic wackos and conspiracy theorists who believe the Smithsonian is involved in covering up the truth, the Mound Builder myth thrives, co-opted and supported, unsurprisingly, by White Nationalists who appreciate its claims of superior white antecedents. Even as recently as 2019, Graham Hancock published a bestselling volume titled America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization, in which he perpetuates a mythical connection between Native American earthworks and the lost continent of Atlantis. So as we have seen with countless topics, even if an idea has long been debunked, it seems there will always be a market for frauds, hoaxes, and myths, even when, at their dark heart, they represent an evil and destructive ideology.

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a “Lost While Race.” University of Oklahoma Press, 2020.

Feder, Kenneth L. Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. 10th ed., Oxford University Press, 2020.

McKusick, Marshall. The Davenport Conspiracy. The Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa, 1970.

Silverberg, Robert. Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth. New York Graphic Society, 1968.

No Bones About It! Part Two: GIANTS in the "New World"

During the era of European exploration and colonization, as the Columbian Exchange created a flow of crops, diseases, and beliefs between continents, new legends of giants came back from overseas. Early European settlers came to believe that some native inhabitants of the “New World,” that seemingly mythic and alien land across the globe, were themselves giants. But were these merely the exaggerations of explorers seeing for the first time a new people that impressed them, just as in biblical times the Israelites saw the robust inhabitants of Canaan and feared them as giants, as I discussed in part one of this series? For example, it is said that Tuscaloosa, the chieftain of Mississipian tribes in the modern day state of Alabama was a great giant whose stature impressed conquistador Hernán De Soto. But how tall was he really? Apparently he towered at about a foot and a half over all of De Soto’s Spaniards, but this is no precise measurement, and it is a well-known fact that the average height of European colonizers was relatively low, at about five and a half feet, give or take some inches. So it sounds more like Tuscaloosa was just a tall man well over six feet, and given that he was said to be the most impressive of his chiefdom—unsurprising, since an imposing physical presence has helped many a man in many a culture rise to power—we can otherwise infer that the rest of his subjects were of rather more average height. Similarly, when John Smith explored and mapped the Chesapeake region in 1608, he reported a “giant-like people” inhabiting the Susquehanna River’s mouth. Specifically, he described “the greatest of them…The calfe of whose leg was three quarters of a yard about, and all the rest of his limbs so answerable to that proportion.” Now, this description seems rather more focused on the brawn of the tribe he ended up calling the Susquehannocks, with mention of their height curiously absent. And again, like the Israelite spies in Canaan saying, “Hey, we  may not want to mess with them, they’re giants,” John Smith gives this description on his maps as a warning to colonists, and we have no way of knowing how exaggerated it may be. We do know that over the next hundred years or so, these Susquehannocks had further contact with European settlers in Maryland and with the French during the Beaver Wars, and there is little further mention of them being giants. So was it hyperbole, or had Smith just seen one really big guy, but not preternaturally large? Even among Native Americans themselves, there are legends of giants, and we see them engaging in the same kind of exaggeration of the other as being gigantic. Among the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, there was legend that the Erie tribe were a bunch of giant cannibals, but again, European contact with the Erie does not bear out such claims. It seems, rather, that the Iroquois Confederacy were just slandering their enemies, whom they would eventually destroy, along with all their allies. As we saw in part one, ancient folklore and poetry cannot be treated as credible evidence, and now we may categorize the reports of explorers in the same realm, as unreliable oral traditions. What is needed, as I stated previously, is an osteological record, one single preternaturally lengthy human femur, to prove the existence of giants in the past.

In 19th century America, the claims of giant bones became part and parcel with baseless claims about the ancient builders of the impressive tumuli, or earthen mounds, that are found across the U.S., throughout the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi River Valley. These burial places fired the imaginations of white farmers and antiquarians alike, who propagated the racist myth that the builders of these mighty structures could not have been related to the Native American peoples they knew, so there must have been some lost race that had inhabited the New World before European settlement. This lost race of mound-builders, unsurprisingly, was said by many to be a lost white race, and in the 1800s to be a lost white race of giants, whose enormous bones were said to be found within these mounds by many a farmer and antiquarian turned grave despoiler. So what of these giant bones? Where are these bones, that we may measure them and determine whether they may indeed belong to mastodon rather than man? Funny story. These bones were often said, rather conveniently, to have self-destructed shortly after discovery. One Harvey Nettleton, writing on the history of Conneaut Township in northwestern Ohio, claimed in 1841 that around 1800 a man named Aaron Wright had been digging up graves in the area, and the bones he discovered not only were gigantic but also “on exposure to the air soon crumbled to dust.” In fact, 20 years prior to Nettleton’s account of Wright’s discovery, an antiquarian named Caleb Atwater, a major proponent of that lost Mound Builder race myth, had actually published a report of his findings in burial mounds near Conneaut, which specifically stated that he had “found skeletons of people of small stature,” but despite that, Nettleton’s larger than life account proved more popular and long-lived. Specifically one image seems to have struck a chord, that a skull Wright had discovered was so large he had been able to place it over his own head like a helmet. Nettleton’s story about Wright was widely reprinted, and reproduced and summarized by various historians, until elements of it became a kind of meme. We see in further stories produced by other antiquarians and recorded by different historians the same claims about massive skulls fitting over the heads of those who find them, and of other giant bones that are witnessed upon excavation but, alas, cannot be examined by experts because they had disintegrated as soon as they had entered local folklore. It may be impossible to tell if elements of this tale were invented out of whole cloth by Harvey Nettleton forty years after the fact, just to spice up his sketch, or if they were told by Aaron Wright and passed into legend and local oral tradition. A simple genealogical search turns up a real Aaron Wright born in 1775 who lived in Ashtabula County, Ohio, and was buried at Conneaut Township. This was likely the same Aaron Wright who gave evidence against the authenticity of Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon in an affidavit collected by Dr. Philastus Hurlbut around 1833. It may be that this little-known individual, who contributed somewhat to the skeptical view of early Mormon claims, also made a hoax claim that has long outlived him and added greatly to the legacy of this false notion.

Diagram of mound excavations at Conneaut.

The same holds true for other supposedly large bones said to have been recovered from burial mounds throughout the 19th-century. It proves difficult to ascertain whether they were hoaxes or mistaken identifications of mastodon bones or perhaps a combination of the two. One antiquarian, T. Apoleon Cheney, who was known as Doc even though he had not earned the honorific through formal education, claimed to have discovered more than one giant skeleton in a Western New York mound that he excavated with a partner, a bona fide medical doctor, Frederick Larkin. As one of my principal sources, Brad Lockwood’s On Giants, clarifies, Cheney’s most widely cited work, Illustrations of the Ancient Monuments in Western New York, 1859, is actually widely misquoted, since this work really only contains illustrations and no text. However, it is clear, from later editions of his work and from the passages in other works that summarize his supposed findings, that Cheney did indeed claim he had found giant skeletons in a mound, that in fact he staked his reputation and founded a career on the claim. At a mound on Cassadaga Creek, near the town of Conewango, he claims that he “discovered nine human skeletons, which had been buried in a sitting posture…The skeletons were so far decayed as to crumble upon exposure to the atmosphere, but were all of very large size.” Here again, the meme of the self-destructing evidence is reproduced, but Cheney claims that one femur remained, whose measurement of 28 inches proved the stature of the man to whom it belonged. That’s about ten inches longer than the average adult male’s femur, and if such a bone were genuine, and determined by a paleontologist to belong to a human being, it would indeed constitute evidence that it was the remains of a tall person. You’ll find some online claiming that a femur is about a quarter of one’s height, so a 28-inch femur would make for a height of over nine feet. However, from what I have been able to determine, forensic anthropology tells us such a calculation is too simple, and to calculate the likely height of a male by the length of a femur, converted to centimeters, one must instead multiply by 2.32 and then add 65.53, which in the case of the 28-inch femur gives us a likely height of seven and a half feet. Unusually tall indeed, but no monster. The further problem, though, is that this 28-inch femur was never preserved for analysis, and more than that, after Doc Cheney’s death, his excavating partner, Frederick Larkin, the only medical professional on the scene to examine these supposedly gigantic skeletons, ended up writing his own book, Ancient Man in America, in which he revealed Doc Cheney’s claims to have been exaggerated. As Brad Lockwood reveals, having tracked down a copy of this rare text, Larkin writes, referring to Cheney’s claims about the giant skeletons at Cassadaga, “That the Mound-Builders were a trifle larger than the present type, is very probable; but that they were giants eight and ten feet is all fabulous. I have seen many skeletons from mounds in different states, but have seen none that will much exceed the present people now living. … The subject under consideration has enough of the marvelous about it to gratify almost any imagination without resorting to giants.”

As we have discussed more than once, in the 19th century, newspapers regularly ran stories of dubious origins that made improbable claims, hoping that sensational content would increase their circulation. For more on this, see my episode on the prolific newspaper hoaxer, Joseph Mulhatton, or my episode Unfit to Print: A History of Bad News. Anyone today who points to 19th-century newspaper reports about the discovery of giants as ironclad evidence of its truth should rightly be laughed at and mocked until they delete their accounts. Only rarely in the 19th-century might a newspaper follow up on such a report. For example, in 1883, after printing a report about the discovery of a nine foot skeleton in a gravel pit, the Indianapolis Journal afterward published the report of a local physician who investigated and refuted the claim, saying they were more like the remains of a five foot eight inch man, calling the incident “a giant fraud and an imposition on the credulity of the people.” The problem is, such follow-up reports were rare. 19th century newspapers in many states published story upon story of giant skeletons without ever bothering to follow them up with the reports of experts who had determined them to be frauds. It became so common that Mark Twain actually decided to pen his own hoax, getting a spurious tale of a petrified giant published in a Virginia City, Nevada, newspaper, with the telltale detail that the mummified giant had his thumb pressed to the side of his nose and his fingers spread, a well-known gesture showing contempt or derision, as if the giant were taunting the reader, saying “Na-na, na-na, boo-boo. Stick your head in doo-doo.” In this atmosphere of rampant giant hoaxes, it is no surprise that the greatest of them all, the Cardiff Giant hoax, about which I spoke in detail and which I dramatized in fiction in my recent patron exclusive episode, was so credulously received by the public. Mark Twain found this hoax, and especially the fact that P.T. Barnum created a fraudulent version of this fraud, quite hilarious, inspiring him to write a short story about the Cardiff giant’s ghost haunting the wrong remains. The fact that these widespread hoaxes about giant skeletons were publicized so avidly by newspapers but their debunking was not, and the fact that Doc Cheney’s claims about giant bones in burial mounds became so widely read while his more educated partner’s denial of those claims was mostly lost to history, is just clear evidence of the old saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots.” Ironically, that quotation is typically misattributed to Mark Twain, when really it is a common corruption of an older quote by Jonathan Swift.

Illustration of the Petrified Man from 1882 edition of Twain's Sketches, New and Old, depicting position of the supposed giant's hands.

So it seems fake news in newspapers then begets fake news on the Internet today. These tall tales about giants having been discovered in burial mounds in America may have taken a hiatus of several decades, but with the advent of the Internet, they have seen a resurgence. If you spend much time searching for giants online, you’ll find a bevy of paranormal and conspiracy blogs claiming that a race of red-haired, cannibalistic giants was spoken about in the lore of various Native American tribes. One story has it that the Paiutes trapped this race of red-haired giants in a cave, where they suffocated them with smoke. The evidence is the fact that a cave was discovered by guano miners in western Nevada, and there were indeed many artifacts and remains of the native tribe that had lived within, and the hair of some, having been preserved, looked reddish. The problem is, as Brian Dunning has pointed out in an episode of Skeptoid on the topic, none of the remains recovered were actually of an unusual size, nor did the artifacts appear made for the use of larger people, and the redness of their hair was just the loss of pigmentation in hair that was formerlydark. Moreover, the actual Paiute legends do not appear to include red hair or gigantism. As usual, though a genuine archaeological find is cited, the find did not actually support the claims made online. And other stories don’t even rely on real finds. For example, Steve Quayle, a self-proclaimed giantologist, promoted to his website’s readers a claim made on a random blog, perhaps as satire, that mummified giants had been discovered in Iowa by a farmer named Marvin Rainwater on his land near Kossuth Center. According to the story, Rainwater happened upon a stone tomb while digging, and inside he discovered the mummified remains of seven figures, each ten feet tall and with long red hair. The find was apparently even verified by archaeologists from Georg von Podebrad College in the nearby town of Zoar. What is even wilder is that this report was supposed to have been made recently, as it spoke about materials being held at the State Historical Society awaiting DNA testing. However, when someone actually contacted the Historical Society, they discovered not only that such a find had never been reported, but also that, Kossuth Center and Zoar are both ghost towns, and no college named after the 15th-centuiry Bohemian king Georg von Podebrad has ever existed. Moreover, the farmer that the story says discovered the tomb, Marvin Rainwater, appears to have been named after a country-western singer from the 1950s. The Internet abounds with blog posts that to this day repeat this story. If you’re lucky they may include a disclaimer that it may be a false story, urging readers to “please research it out and judge for yourself.”

Another strange fake news story regarding giants appeared in 2016. This one connects to the biblical story of a giant with extra toes and fingers from Gath, Goliath’s stomping ground, which I spoke about in Part One, and it also incorporated the popular red hair trope of these recent giant hoaxes. The story, which originated from a dubious interview with a supposed military contractor on the YouTube channel of a fringe conspiracist who produces a lot of content on the topic of giants. Already it doesn’t have a lot of credibility. The interview subject, called only Mr. K, described an encounter between an American Special Forces unit and a 13-foot-tall giant wielding a sword. The giant was described as having red hair, of course, and extra toes, a bonus, and also more than one set of teeth—a common detail from old 19th century giant skull discovery stories, which archaeologist Andy White has proven was actually just a common 19th century phrasing used to describe nice teeth, meaning a skull have two intact rows of teeth, top and bottom. Essentially, this hoax purposely incorporated elements from other hoaxes and from old fake news reports and from the bible in order to bolster its claims. Snopes reported a denial of the incident from the Department of Defense, but that isn’t going to do much to convince conspiracy nuts. Hoaxes like these are designed to be nearly impossible to disprove, since any denials are simply proof of the cover-up. Typically, fake giant news on the internet arrives in the form of an image of uncertain origin, shared and gone viral online, purporting to show a person crouched over some ridiculously massive skeleton or skull, with no actual information to fact-check and just the simple claim that the discovery of giants has been covered up. Snopes and National Geographic have debunked such images as manipulated photos and even tracked down the origin to a photoshop contest called “Archaeological Anomalies,” which challenged participants to fake strange pseudo-archaeological discoveries. Yet despite being revealed as fraudulent images, they continue to be spread along with the claim that the scientific community is hiding the discovery of these giants.

This is one manipulated image from the photoshop contest that has been passed off as real in conspiracist memes.

One extremely popular story is of gigantic skeletons with horns having been discovered in Sayre, Pennsylvania, and this one too is typically accompanied by a dubious image of a horned human skull. Even as recently as March this year, fake news memes circulated Facebook about this archaeological discovery in the 1880s, stating that besides the bony projections above the eyebrows of skulls recovered at the site, the skeletons themselves were of an unusual height, averaging 7 feet. The image concludes with the claim that “The bones were sent to the American Investigation Museum in Philadelphia, where they were stolen—never to be seen again.” In fact, there was no such institution as the American Investigating Museum, but there was indeed an excavation in Sayre, which took place in 1916 rather than the 1880s as the Facebook posts claim. Conducted by the so-called “Dean of American Archaeology,” Warren King Moorhead, as well as Pennsylvania historian George Donehoo and Alanson Skinner, archaeologist, ethnographer and curator of the Museum of the American Indian, or the American Indian Museum, which may be the origin of the false American Investigating Museum. This excavation was the culmination of an expedition to find the relics and remains of the Susquehannock tribe that Captain John Smith had long ago suggested were giants, so there may have already been some expectation that the remains uncovered might be those of giants. The New York Times and a variety of other newspapers reported on the find, specifically claiming that the remains of 68 men were found, averaging seven feet, “while many were much taller,” and with them were buried artifacts of unusual size to match their stature. The column further describes their notorious “protuberances of bone.” On first blush this would appear well-documented, but we have seen that we should not trust old newspaper articles and must look further for subsequent corrections. Indeed, only 2 weeks after the first news reports about gigantic, horned skeletons spread far and wide, the archaeologists themselves set the record straight in a lengthier feature article in the Times. In it, they make no mention of horned skulls, and state more specifically that they estimated the height of the skeletons at about six feet six inches, certainly tall enough to appear imposing to a European of average height making first contact with the tribe. In another newspaper column that has been uncovered, Alanson Skinner is quoted as setting the record straight on July 14th, 1916. He states that they had excavated 57 skeletons rather than 68, and that they appeared to be “perfectly normal individuals with the usual relics.” He further explains the origins of the horned skull as the result of a reporter misunderstanding or being misled about, or perhaps purposely misrepresenting, what was actually found: “a deposit of dear antlers,” laid over the bones, “hence, I suppose, the skull with horns on it!” In the Times feature article, they further describe other artifacts placed atop the bones: “Over the head of one of the skeletons was a bear’s jaw, indicating the bearskin headdress,” which the man had presumably worn in life. One wonders that this did not start a further rumor that this had been a fearsome race of men with two sets of jaws!

Beyond the claim about horns, which is rather unique among such stories, the claims of gigantism among the skeletons excavated at Sayre are pretty tame. A height of seven feet is not unheard of, though it may have been unusual for that to be the average among more than fifty people in a group. However, the archaeologists themselves corrected that to more like six and a half feet, which of course is even less difficult to believe. But it must be pointed out that determining the actual height of any of these persons in life would have been exceedingly difficult. As mentioned previously, modern forensic anthropologists have gotten it down to a science, able to determine the likely height of a man or woman based entirely on the length of a femur, but in the infancy of the science, skeletons were often measured as they lay, or if found in a sitting or curled position, manually laid out to be measured, a process that would not yield an accurate result. The reason for this is that once the flesh and cartilage of vertebrate remains have decomposed entirely, skeletons become more spread out and scattered than they would be when the bones are tightly attached with tendon and ligament and encased within the body’s musculature. This process is called disarticulation, and the effects of bone dispersion during disarticulation was not the subject of much scientific study until the 1970s. Indeed, the fact that skeletons dug out of burial mounds in the Americas were often reported to be unusually tall could be entirely explained by the fact that the farmers and antiquarians measuring them did not adequately understand the spreading of disarticulated bones. Even among the experts digging up the Susquehannock graves at Sayre, Pennsylvania, all were archaeologists and ethnographers, not anatomists or experts in fossilized remains, and therefore might not even be expected to know how best to measure the remains they disinterred. Moreover, their description of the graves they excavated seems to indicate that assembling a single skeleton would not have been a simple task. In the New York Times feature, they explain that “in some cases the bones had been buried long after death when the flesh had disappeared, and in these instances, the skull was usually deposited in the grave, and the long bones, fingers, and ribs heaped beside or over it. …in some of the graves a number of skeletons were found heaped together.” Just how they reassembled and measured remains deposited in such communal graves is a pressing question, as are the calculations they may have used if they reached their height estimations based on the measurements of long bones.

This image of the supposedly genuine horned skull that accompanies most online claims about giants skeletons in Sayre, Pennsylvania, can only be found online at Surnateum, the Museum of Supernatural History, which claims to have the object in its possession. It is easy to see here that it is NOT a giant skull.

So the horned giants of Sayre, Pennsylvania, appears to have been a fake news story from a bygone era recycled as a fake news Internet meme today that continues to convince Facebook aunties that preternatural skeletons have been discovered in Native American burial grounds. Further investigation into the image that always accompanies the post, of a seemingly human skull with horns and a kind of wreath around it, unsurprisingly reveals that it is not related to the Sayre, Pennsylvania, excavation at all. The paranormal podcast Astonishing Legends did some admirable investigation into this image in their series on giants, The Tall Ones, particularly in Part Two, and determined that the skull is supposedly held by an online Museum of Supernatural History called Surnateum, and they claim it is of normal human size but originated in France as a ceremonial object for cult worship of the Horned God of Wiccan belief. The fact that this website has more than one photo of the skull, the image typically spread with the Sayre excavation story and another with the skull sitting atop a basket—an image that I have been unable to find on any other website using reverse image searches—tends to support their claim that it is in their possession. However, as Astonishing Legends rightly pointed out, Surnateum appears to just be a website, with no physical location to visit and view exhibitions. Moreover, the Internet Archive shows their website has been active for about 10 years, since 2012, and searches of Google Books and the Ngram viewer turn up no publications mentioning the museum, which tends to cast doubt on their claim of having acquired the skull in 1952. However, using reverse image search and the Wayback Machine, I was able to track down the earliest surviving posting of this image, to an old StumbleUpon post in 2006 that mentions Surnateum and its claims that the skull came from France in the first half of the 20th century. However, on this post, which appears to be one of the first times the image was shared on the Internet as far as I can determine—the poster links to a mysticism messaging board page at Thothweb.com that is no longer working and is not archived in the Wayback Machine—the poster states that the skull’s whereabouts were at the time unknown, contradicting the museum’s current claim. All that remains would be for an expert in photo manipulation to examine the images for signs of falsification. But even without such analysis, I think it is fair to conclude that this artifact, if it even exists, is a fake. If the person or persons running Surnateum want the public to believe their claims that they possess this object, have examined it and have determined that “the horns are genuinely part of the skull,” they need to make the object available for scientific examination and public scrutiny. Regardless, even according to them, it is not the skull of a giant.

Believers in such giant hoaxes, though, fail to be convinced by the point that such bones do not appear to exist, for none are today exhibited publicly or have been surrendered for scientific examination. Instead of this logical evidence that such bones do not exist, conspiracists take it as evidence that the bones have been hidden away and covered up! We see some insinuation of this in the text on the viral horned skull image, and it was there all the way back in 2006 on the obscure StumpleUpon posting of the image I managed to find. The notion that the scientific community’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of giants was tantamount to a cover-up is not exactly new. Even during the Cardiff Giant hoax, critics of the statue passed off as a petrified giant were dismissed as obfuscators attempting to make the public doubt the truth of the Bible. But today, this conspiracy theory has gelled into a specific claim found on many websites and in numerous conspiracist books that the Smithsonian Institution is in particular responsible, taking giant bones and then purposely losing them so that they can never be examined again. These conspiracists even see NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, as part of the plot. This admirable law, passed in 1990, made it illegal to dig up burial mounds and required the return of items to culturally affiliated Native American tribes. Well-known scholar and skeptical writer Jason Colavito has written the most extensively on the absurdity of this claim and has even traced it to its recent origins. Having done the research, Colavito makes a strong case that no claims of a Smithsonian cover-up ever existed before fringe researcher David Childress began to make them in the 1990s. Childress is not much of a reliable researcher, as he is known for making a lot of baseless claims about lost civilizations, UFOs and sasquatch, many of which rely on conspiracy speculation. Childress seems to have started the idea of “Smithsoniangate” in 1993, in defense of his racist ideas about a lost white race of Mound Builders, and the entire idea, ludicrously, may have been inspired by the iconic scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, cited by Childress as an analogy, in which the crate containing the Ark of the Covenant is hidden away in a massive warehouse. As Colavito points out, though, it is strange to think that these conspiracists believe the Smithsonian is some monolithic organization that controls the entire narrative of physical anthropology in the world. Such a conspiracy would need to be global, including every museum and research university on the planet. We know that such a conspiracy just defies simple logic. Furthermore, he points out that NAGPRA is only enforced on Federal land, so any extant giant skeletons out there on private or state land would not be subject to this supposed cover-up, yet we still find no big bones to support these claims. Lastly, though since the 1860s the Smithsonian has been on board with the Cuvier explanation of massive bones as belonging to extinct megafauna, it has been pointed out that, in the late 19th century the Smithsonian was still known to publish the work of antiquarians and archaeologists who claimed to have measured skeletons between 7 and 8 feet uncovered in mound explorations. Though these heights are not superhuman, and could still be explained by the spreading of disarticulated bones improperly measured, the reports seem to prove beyond doubt that back when such claims were commonly made, the Smithsonian was just as likely to amplify them as to silence them.

To conclude this series, perhaps it is time to take a wider and simpler view of the phenomenon, taking into account some relevant findings of modern science. If the claims about giants were accurate, it would mean that mankind has greatly reduced in size over the millennia of our existence. This is the concept of the degeneracy of humanity that lies behind all these tall tales. But modern science tells us that we are not shrinking over time, but rather growing. The average height of Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries was in the mid-five-foot range, and today we creep closer to a six-foot average. There are many reasons for a growth or reduction in average height among populations, though, and it tends to be dependent upon local conditions, making any calculation of worldwide averages misleading. Think about the shorter Europeans arriving in America and encountering the taller Native Americans that they thought to be giants simply because the natives might have had a half a foot or a foot’s greater height. Scholars who study average height across the ages argue that the height we reach depends on health trends related to climate and the availability of food. Considering this, it may be no surprise that Europeans were of shorter stock than the Native Americans they encountered. Science tells us that childhood nutrition has a lot to do with eventual height. A welcoming climate and plenty of food signals to the hypothalamus that living conditions are optimal, and thus the body should grow as quickly as possible in order to develop sexually and procreate. This further explains why heights have continued to grow on average in modern times, as nutrition and medicine have improved. However, rather than a steady growth over time, studies show cycles of height fluctuation. In the Middle Ages, it appears mankind was taller, but then heights began to fall before rising again centuries later. Fossil records of archaic man and subspecies like Neanderthals tend to show that we started out shorter, around five foot, five foot two, not as towering monstrosities or as diminutive little gnomes. And all the data we’ve gathered shows that our fluctuations in height have remained within a certain range, between about 5 feet and six feet, where average height tends to plateau. Of course there are exceptions, outliers typically related to physical conditions like those I’ve already discussed, but all signs point to the existence of giants as nothing more than fantasies that have always loomed large in our collective imaginations.

*

Until next time, remember the words of not Mark Twain, but rather Jonathan Swift, who in full, wrote, “[a]s the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. “How David Childress Created the Myth of a Smithsonian Archaeological Conspiracy.” Jason Colavito, 31 Dec. 2013, www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/how-david-childress-created-the-myth-of-a-smithsonian-archaeological-conspiracy.

---. “Is the Smithsonian Conspiring to Suppress the Truth about Giants?” Jason Colavito, 28 July 2013, www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/is-the-smithsonian-conspiring-to-suppress-the-truth-about-giants.

Dunning, Brian. “The Red Haired Giants of Lovelock Cave.” Skeptoid, 26 Nov. 2013, skeptoid.com/episodes/4390.

Lockwood, Brad. On Giants: Mounds, Monsters, Myth & Man; or, why we want to be small. Dog Ear Works, 2011.

Hill, Andrew. “Disarticulation and Scattering of Mammal Skeletons.” Paleobiology, vol. 5, no. 3, 1979, pp. 261–74. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2400259.

Leutwyler, Kristin. “American Plains Indians Had Health and Height.” Scientific American, 30 May 2001, www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-plains-indians-h/.

“A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes.” Quote Investigator, 13 July 2014, quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/.

“Mummified Giants ‘Found’ in Kossuth County.” Iowa Historian: The Newsletter of the State Historical Society of Iowa, vol. 17, no. 2, Spring 2003, p. 4, www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/45917253/spring-2003-state-historical-society-of-iowa/5.

Palma, Bethania. “Did U.S. Special Forces Kill a Giant in Kandahar?” Snopes, 31 Aug. 2016, www.snopes.com/fact-check/u-s-special-forces-killed-a-giant-in-kandahar/.

“The Petrified Man.” The Museum of Hoaxes, hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_petrified_man.

White, Andy. “The Modern Mythology of Giants: ‘Double Rows of Teeth.’” Andy White Anthropology, 28 Nov. 2014, www.andywhiteanthropology.com/blog/the-modern-mythology-of-giants-double-rows-of-teeth.

“Why Are We Getting Taller as a Species?” Scientific American, 29 June 1998, www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-we-getting-taller/#.

No Bones About It! Part One: GIANTS in the "Old World"

In the wake of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, believers in the literal truth of scriptures struggled to reconcile the new scientific understanding of prehistory with the biblical story of two progenitors in paradise and a global flood wiping out all but a pair of specimens of each animal species. In the 1870s, one uneducated man named George Smith got a job at the British Museum mainly because he was always hanging around there and scrutinizing the shards of clay tablets they displayed from Mesopotamia. After studying the artifacts for a decade, he one day deciphered an account of a deluge destroying humanity, all except for one man and his family. Smith leapt out of his chair and tore articles of his clothing off in his excitement, for he believed, and would convince others to believe, that he had just discovered evidence confirming the truth of the biblical flood story. What he had actually discovered was the world’s oldest known poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and for the rest of his life he would track down further shards, completing the text. What we can determine from the fact that this poem contained a flood tale similar to that of Genesis, along with the fact that many other cultures have produced comparable legends, is a worthy topic, but not the one we investigate today. In seeking to hold up the translated Epic of Gilgamesh as a primary source document proving the truth of the Bible from a literalist view, George Smith also promoted another fantastical claim made in the scriptures, for the ancient poem he had discovered was about a giant who stood seventeen feet tall. Long had it been believed by biblical scholars that in ancient prehistory, there had been a race of giants who inhabited the Earth, or that humans used to be much larger but had been growing smaller and smaller through the millennia, a process they called the degeneracy of the human race. The Bible gives us stories of mighty giants, Og and Goliath, whom it traces to the races of giants, the Rephaim and the Anakim. But more than this, it tells us of the origin of giants in Genesis 6, when it reveals that bene elohim, or “sons of god,” believed to be angels, came to the daughters of men and had children with them. These children, identified by biblical scholars as the original giants, were called the Nephilim in the original text. So while some might believe that mankind was created as a race of giants and has grown gradually more diminutive, such as French savant Mathieu Henrion, who in The Degeneration of the Human Race calculated that Adam was 128 feet tall and Eve 118 feet tall, others see a race of giant springing from an unholy union between fallen angels and human women, a kind of hybrid species that must have been destroyed by the flood. But of course, a poem, like Gilgamesh, whose historical accuracy cannot be confirmed, can never serve as evidence of the existence of such giants, whether they be early humans or angelic hybrid beings. The only scientific evidence for their existence would be bones, an osteological record of their existence. Many are the reports and repeated claims that such bones did exist and were at one time seen and even displayed, recorded by such ancient chroniclers and natural philosophers as Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Flavius Josephus, Plutarch, Philostratus, and Augustine, but words are not bones and can prove nothing but that stories of giants have long existed. Early editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica reprinted a lecture delivered to the Academy of Science at Rouen in 1764 by one Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, a French science writer and surgeon, which lists dozens of enormous skeletons found throughout the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Therefore, to many in the 19th century, the Epic of Gilgamesh’s depiction of an enormous protagonist was not fantastical. In the science literature and in newspapers of the day, as well as in sermons shouted from the pulpit, they were told that the evidence of ancient giants was endless, that it had been definitively proven. So they believed, without ever having seen gigantic human bones for themselves. And why hadn’t they seen them? Because they were nowhere to be found. If there were so many reports of colossal skeletons proving the existence giants, where are they? As one of my favorite musical groups, They Might Be Giants, once sang, “They might be giants/ They might be fake/ They might by lies/ They might be big, big, fake, fake lies…”

As we undertake this massive study (sorry, I might be making a lot of giant puns), we must start with what seems to me the root of all giant mythology, the Nephilim of Genesis. For biblical literalists, everything comes back to proving this throwaway line accurate. As mentioned, the verse in question, Chapter 6 verse 4, seems to indicate that Nephilim were the product of a union between angels and human women, but that is not the only interpretation. The words bene elohim, translated as “sons of god” and interpreted to mean angels, have alternative interpretations. Second century rabbis held that this verse described nobility interbreeding with commoners, while Augustine, writing in the 5th century, argued that it referred to intermarriage between the godly sons of Seth and the women of the lineage of Cain. But what is really interesting is the word Nephilim, which is the word usually translated as “giants.” There is no consensus of what this word means, and some versions of the scriptures just use the word Nephilim and make no attempt to translate it. Some argue that Nephilim is actually a form of the verb naphal, or “to fall,” making Nephilim more accurately a plural noun designating these people as “the fallen ones.” So why was it ever translated as giants? The only hint in this verse is that it says the Nephilim were “mighty men” and “men of renown.” We must look elsewhere in the Bible, where the word Nephilim is also found, to discover a link between Nephilim and giants. In Numbers chapter 13, verse 33, in the story of the 12 spies sent from among the Israelites to surveil the inhabitants of Canaan, we are introduced to the Anakim, the sons of Anak, who it says were descended from the Nephilim. Never mind how descendants of the Nephilim survived the Flood God sent to destroy them, I guess. Here, again, some versions of the Bible translate Nephilim as giant, but it is the description of the Anakim in Canaan that gives us the first hint of great size, as some spies reported that, compared to the Anakim, the Israelites were “like grasshoppers.” OK, but if we are to take this literally, considering a grasshopper maybe an inch high, compared to maybe an average five foot height among the Israelites, that means the Anakim must have been at least 300 feet tall. And if we are not to take this literally, if as seems more likely it was a matter of hyperbole, then it opens up the possibility that the spies were not talking about physical stature at all, but rather an indication of how powerful their foes seemed, perhaps in their fortifications or armaments. It is noteworthy that not all of the dispatched spies appear to have remarked on the Anakim being giants, which it would seem must be the first thing observed if they had been 300 feet tall, and their buildings large enough to house men of such height. Therefore, perhaps saying they felt like grasshoppers compared to them was simply another way of saying they appeared impressive, or “mighty,” as the earlier verse described the Nephilim. However, if we look at the preceding verses, we actually do see them mention the inhabitants of their promised land being “great in stature,” but hilariously, it is explicitly stated that this is a “bad report.” Verses 31-32 state: “But the men who had gone up with him replied, ‘We cannot go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are!’ So they gave the Israelites a bad report about the land that they had spied out: ‘The land we explored devours its inhabitants, and all the people we saw there are great in stature.’” It is then that they raise the legend of the Nephilim. Read with this context, it almost appears that the spies simply felt they were outmatched by the Canaanites and therefore tried to dissuade the Israelites from attacking them by lying about them being giants. Even a biblical literalist can take this meaning from the text.

Return of the Spies, 1860 woodcut by Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld depicting the return of the 12 spies to the Israelites with their report of giants in Canaan.

The story of the 12 spies raises another possible rational explanation for all biblical giants, a viable alternative to the notion that any of these peoples were actually physically gargantuan to any preternatural degree. Instead, perhaps all of them were just what you might call giants among men, or men of renown, as the first verse mentioning Nephilim calls them. Just as the Canaanites whom the Israelite spies claimed were Anakim descendants of the Nephilim may have just been imposing figures that struck fear into their heart, perhaps that was case for many another supposed giant. We see Nimrod depicted in later generations as a giant, when the book of Genesis only calls him a mighty warrior. Then there is Og, a king said to be descended from the Rephaim, another group said to be connected to Anakim and Nephilim and thus to have been giants. Og is said to be a giant because the Bible describes his bed as being very large, but of course, a king might be expected to have a very large bed. So is being remembered as a giant simply one of the perks of being rich and powerful, or renowned as a great warrior or leader? That certainly seems to be the case with the notorious and mysterious Gog of Magog, corrupted to become two figures, Gog and Magog, later associated with Mongol horde and, due to the growth of fearful legends, becoming giants and even beasts. And this myth was translated by Geoffrey of Monmouth into a legend of a giant in Albion named Gogmagog. Reputation breeds legend, which invariably ascribes superhuman qualities to figures. Scholars now believe that Gilgamesh was indeed a real king, who perhaps inspired the writing of poems in which he was depicted as physically larger than he actually was. We see the same thing happen more recently, in America, with our tall tales. Any U.S. citizen is probably familiar with the legend of Paul Bunyan. Many are the roadside attraction carvings of this gigantic lumberjack and his equally massive pet blue ox. Some researchers have suggested that the oral tradition that started this tall tale had its origins in a real lumberjack. One suspect is a French-Canadian lumberjack named Fabian Fournier, nicknamed “Saginaw Joe,” while another is a little know soldier who fought in a Canadian rebellion named Paul Bon Jean. These claims remain unverified, but it illustrates well the idea that, even in more modern times, the exploits of a real person might end up blowing that figure up to outsized proportions.

It is harder to make such interpretations work with stories that explicitly mention a figure’s measurements, however. We may dismiss vague statements about stature and contrasts to insects, and we might disregard Gilgamesh’s seventeen-foot height, recorded as it is in an epic poem, which we expect to be fictionalized. But what are we to make of the character of Goliath in 1 Samuel chapter 17, verse 4, the Philistine, champion of a city called Gath, said to be a descendant of the Rephaim and described quite precisely as having a height of “six cubits and a span.” In today’s common measurements, that would make Goliath almost nine feet 9 inches tall, or nearly three meters. There is no getting around this precise measurement. In fact, it is the only specific height recorded in all of the Bible. Well, not so fast. As I said before, words are not bones that can be so easily measured. So we must examine further. In modern times, an archaeological site known as Tell es-Safi has been revealed to be the Philistine city of Gath from which originated Goliath, as well as numerous other giants, if the scriptures are to be believed on this account. Professor of Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies Jeffrey Chadwick, who is involved in excavations at the site, argues that such measurements actually varied from place to place in the ancient world, and that at Gath, a cubit would have been around 54 centimeters, or 1.77 feet, and a span, sometimes thought of as half a cubit, was actually reckoned there as being about 22 centimeters, or 0.72 feet. So by his reckoning, if Goliath was 6 cubits and a span by Gath metrics, that would have made him over eleven feet tall. However, some earlier versions of this Bible verse, discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, have Goliath ringing in at only 4 cubits and a span, which would only be about 6 foot 9, or if Chadwick is correct, more like 7 foot 10. While the former is tall but not abnormal, by our standards today, the latter does seem pretty gigantic—but not unheard of. The tallest man on record, Robert Wadlow, measured nearly 9 feet in height! Still, Chadwick suggests that the 4 cubits and a span measurement may be suspect as well. He notes that the composer of 1 Samuel would not have had the chance to measure Goliath, so the measurement must have come from oral tradition. He further observes that a wall he has excavated in what was once Gath happens to measure exactly 4 cubits and a span wide, and he speculates that applying this exact measurement to Goliath may have been a way to indicate, metaphorically, how stout and impenetrable he was as their champion, likening him to their protective wall. That does little to explain the supposed great weight of Goliath’s armor, also mentioned in those verses, but it does make the exact measurements of the figure seem far less certain. And if you need further evidence that Gath was no city of giants, take the words of Professor Aren Maeir of the archaeology department of Bar-Ilan University, who was in charge of the Tell es-Safi dig site as he describes the excavation’s findings: “There are no skeletons of people who are taller than NBA centers.”

David and Goliath, a color lithograph by Osmar Schindler (c. 1888)

Another tale out of 2 Samuel, chapter 21, verse 20, tells us of yet another man from Gath of “stature,” said to have been descended from the Rephaim, and so typically translated as a “giant.” This figure lacks any specific height, but we are given the further interesting detail that he “had on every hand six fingers and on every foot six toes.” Interestingly, this story raises the idea of a giant as a kind of monster, or some sort of mutation with other differences from humans besides his great height. It leads one to think of the giants of Greek mythology, such as the Gigantes, described by Ovid as having a hundred arms and serpents for feet, or the Cyclopes with their single eyeballs. It leads one to wonder if there might be medical explanations for such tales. The giants of Greek myth may be more difficult to explain in this way, but Goliath and other biblical giants said to be from Gath might be explainable. For example, modern science and the annals of the Guinness Book of World Records tell us that, indeed, giants do exist, but not as the towering monstrosities of myth. Rather, they are unfortunate people who suffer from pituitary disorders that are passed hereditarily, causing conditions such as gigantism, or acromegaly when onset occurs during adulthood. These individuals suffer greatly from their conditions and do not tend to live to any advanced age. The tallest man on record, Robert Wadlow, who was eight foot eleven and over 400 pounds, passed away at 22 years old. As has been argued in at least one scholarly paper, the Bible’s mentioning of more than one supposed giant in Gath may suggest a family in the area whose member’s suffered from just such a familial pituitary disorder. The researchers further speculate that one member of said family may have had the genetic mutation polydactyly, the growth of extra fingers and toes. There are even known overgrowth syndromes, such as Simpson-Golabi-Behmel syndrome, which result in facial and skeletal abnormalities and polydactyly, causing one to wonder if some ancient giant stories might not be accurate records of individuals living with physical disorders that sadly made them appear monstrous to others. If this were the case, it would have been rare then, as it is now, explaining why their remains tend to be elusive.

While we would expect the remains of such medically afflicted persons to be rare, ancient reports of the discoveries of such gigantic remains actually seem quite common, as previously stated. Herodotus talks of the discovery of a “coffin seven cubits in length,” or about 10 and a half feet, and the report that the body inside was equal in length. Plutarch talks of the discovery of “a coffin of a man of extraordinary size,” thought to be Theseus. Phlegon of Tralles, in his On Marvels, shares a report credited to Apollonius about the discovery of “a sepulchre of one hundred cubits in length, in which there was a skeleton of the same dimensions,” and further tells the tale of some Carthaginians digging up “two skeletons placed in coffins, one of which was twenty-three, and the other twenty-four cubits in length,” or between 34 and 36 feet. Perhaps my point is already becoming clear. These reports describe the dimensions of coffins or tombs, only sometimes with further assertions that the remains within were of the same length, when of course, a thing cannot fit within a container of the same length. Never mind the fact that these reports are all secondhand or even further removed, none having been observed by the persons writing about them, and thus are no better than legends, even if there is truth to them, there is a simpler explanation. Sir Jean Chardin, a travelling French scholar of the Near East, was among the first to observe that ancient peoples were known to make tombs and sarcophagi much larger than the bodies they contained. For the same reason, mummified remains often gave the further impression of great size when the remains within were not unusually large. It seems to have been a way to give a strong impression of the dead. Some such reports throughout history mention actual massive bones, though. For example, in Crete alone, there are reports of earthquakes and floods opening chasms and revealing skeletons between 50 and 69 feet in length, if we can trust standard modern cubit conversion. The question remains: Where are these skeletons? Do we actually have a bone to pick, so to speak?

While the massive bones and giant skeletons reportedly discovered in ancient times have long since been lost to history, we have a simple explanation for them derived from the supposed bones of giants that have been displayed in more modern times. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, near the castle Chaumont in France, a series of huge bones were unearthed and thereafter exhibited in various cities throughout the country. According to their exhibitor, they were the bones of a Teutonic barbarian king, and according to a Jesuit priest, Jacques Tissot, who helped publicize their existence, their size proved the claims of giants in scriptures. These bones are kept today at the French National Museum of Natural History. Certain gargantuan bones discovered in the Americas even convinced one of the fathers of paleontology, Franciscan naturalist José Torrubia, that the legends of antediluvian giants must be true, prompting his composition of the influential work:  La gigantologia Spagnola. In the American colonies of the 18th century, Puritan minister Cotton Mather, early adopter of smallpox inoculation practices and erstwhile instigator of witch hunts in New England, firmly believed that enormous bones unearthed in America definitively proved the existence of the Nephilim. In 1705, a discovery of huge fossilized molars and leg bones near Albany sent Mather into a tizzy, declaring to the world that proof of antediluvian giants had been discovered in the New World. There were already rumblings, however, from critics, that all these enormous bones, some of which were even being displayed in houses of worship, venerated as gifts from God to validate the beliefs of His faithful, were not actually giant human bones at all, but rather from large beasts. The skeleton of Teutobochus, the barbarian king exhibited throughout France, was exposed by a member of the Medical Faculty of Paris, Jean Riolan the Younger, as being the bones of something like an elephant, perhaps one of Hannibal’s, left behind during his campaigns in Gaul. Certainly, the anatomist Riolan could discern that its exhibitors had merely arranged the bones into a vaguely human form. And the famed naturalist Georges Cuvier was among the first to suggest that the large fossilized bones and teeth found in the Americas and promoted by Torrubia and Mather appeared to belong to the extinct mastodon. Think back to the many reports of dead sea serpents that I discussed in my series on the subject, and the so-called globsters that washed up on shores and were presumed to be sea monsters but were in fact whale carcasses or the remains of other known marine animals. As the science of paleontology has progressed, all such giant bones have been proven to be the remains of mastodons or other creatures. In fact, with the cartilage having decomposed away, the mammoth skull appears to have one large hole in the center, giving the impression of a single massive eyeball; thus it has been argued that mammoth bones were also the origin of the myth of Homer’s giant Cyclops.

An example of an elephant skull with a central nasal cavity that may have been mistaken for a single cyclopean eye.

Claims of the bones of giants being discovered continued throughout the 19th century, many of them said to have been dug out of Native American burial mounds in America, and I will discuss these in great detail in part two of this series. Let us conclude part one by examining the so-called Giant of Castelnau, which is really just a few bone fragments excavated from a Bronze Age cemetery near Montpellier, France, in 1890. The anthropologist who dug them up and afterward promoted them as evidence of a giant, was Georges Vacher de Lapouge. According to Lapouge, it was “unnecessary to note that these bones are undeniably human, despite their enormous size,” but it’s unclear how he determined that they were human and not, for example, those of a mammoth or some other creature. In the surviving sketch of the fragments, which is all we have to judge by, we see half a femur and a portion of what he claims is a tibia, but the length of neither could have been measured, broken as they are. For scale, they are sketched with a “normal” humerous recovered from the same site, which itself is fragmentary. It begs the question, why not depict them in comparison to intact bones of the same kind, his fragment of a femur next to a normal whole femur? It seems sketchy, if you’ll excuse the pun. Lapouge states, “The volumes of the bones were more than double the normal pieces to which they correspond,” which would tend to indicate they may not have been human, or at least not “undeniably” so. An anatomist from Montpellier reportedly examined them and called them “abnormal in dimension,” but perhaps they were only abnormal if one was insisting on seeing them as human. The same anatomist stated that they were “of morbid growth,” or “diseased.” Is this evidence that they were simply fragments of the skeleton of a person with some pituitary disorder or overgrowth syndrome that resulted in skeletal abnormalities? Another professor from University of Montpellier, according to The Popular Science News of Boston, August, 1890, determined the bones were “normal in every respect.” So what are we to believe? The bones were reportedly given over to the French Academy of Sciences, where they have since, apparently, disappeared. Perhaps this is because they were nothing more than unremarkable bone fragments that didn’t actually warrant much attention and thus were filed away and forgotten, but as we will see in part two of this series, such cases today tend to encourage baseless conspiracy theory.

Further Reading

Acocella, Joan. “How To Read 'Gilgamesh.’” The New Yorker, 7 Oct. 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/14/how-to-read-gilgamesh.

Bressan, David. “Fire burn, and cauldron bubble… Bones of Giants.” Scientific American, 29 Oct. 2013, blogs.scientificamerican.com/history-of-geology/fire-burn-and-cauldron-bubble-bones-of-giants/.

Cole, J.R. “It Ain't Necessarily So: Giants and Biblical Literalism.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, Winter 1985, pp. 49-53. National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo/it-aint-necessarily-so-giants-and-biblical-literalism.

Dahlbom, Taika Helola. “A mammoth history: the extraordinary journey of two thighbones.” Endeavor, vol. 31, no. 3, Sep. 2007, pp. 110-114. ScienceDirect, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160932707000610?via%3Dihub.

Donnelly, Deirdre E., and Patrick J. Morrison. “Hereditary Gigantism-the biblical giant Goliath and his brothers.” The Ulster Medical Journal, vol. 83, no. 2, May 2014, pp. 86-88. National Library of Medicine, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4113151/.

“Fragments on Giants.” Jason Colavito. www.jasoncolavito.com/fragments-on-giants.html.

Jarus, Owen. “Biblical Goliath may not have been a giant.” LiveScience, 1 Dec. 2020, www.livescience.com/was-biblical-goliath-a-giant.html.

Lockwood, Brad. On Giants: Mounds, Monsters, Myth & Man; or, why we want to be small. Dog Ear Works, 2011.

“New Excavation Reveal Goliath’s Birthplace Was More Giant than Believed.” Israel Faxx, vol. 27, no. 149W, July 2019, p. 11. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=n5h&AN=137768865&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

“New World Giants: The Study of American Fossils by ‘One of the Founders of Paleontology.’” Martayan Lan, www.martayanlan.com/pages/books/B5726/jose-torrubia/la-gigantologia-spagnola.

“A Pre-Historic Giant.” Popular Science News, vol. 24, Aug. 1890, www.google.com/books/edition/Popular_Science_News/vmHnAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Giant+of+Castelnau&pg=PA113&printsec=frontcover.

“A Race of Giants in Old Gaul.” The New York Times, 3 Oct. 1892, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1892/10/03/106086633.pdf.

White, Andy. “Cotton Mather: America's First Nephilim Enthusiast.” Andy White Anthropology, 26 Feb. 2015, www.andywhiteanthropology.com/blog/cotton-mather-americas-first-nephilim-enthusiast.

The Lost Empire of Tartaria

You have heard of the ancient lost civilizations of Atlantis. Perhaps you’ve also heard about the lost continents of Lemuria and Mu. You’ve heard me talk about beliefs in the lost cradles of civilization Hyperborea and Ultima Thule. But have you heard about the lost empire of Tartaria? Depending on your interests and thus the calibration of your YouTube recommendation and search algorithms and the pages you find promoted to you on Facebook, you may have learned a great deal about this globe-spanning mega-civilization in recent years. For example, you may have been surprised to find out that this ancient civilization, which originated in central Eurasia as a vast kingdom encompassing most of Siberia, was so successful that it spread around the world, even into the Americas, and that even today we can see the remnants of the civilization’s grand architecture. Your surprise may have turned to wonder and dismay as you learned of a great worldwide catastrophe, a flood akin to Noah’s but composed of mud that destroyed most evidence of this magnificent civilization. Your wonder and dismay likely further turned to shock and outrage as you learned of a global conspiracy to suppress the history of the Tartarian Empire, to cover up the existence of this mud flood, and to claim the impressive accomplishments of their advanced culture as our own. So throw out everything you know about the history of the world, disregard everything you think you understand about ethnology, geography, architecture, and geology, and prepare to be awakened from the sleep of ignorance, liberated from the herd of the sheeple, and initiated into the mystery of Tartaria!

*

If you’re still reading, I’ll come clean. I don’t actually believe this claptrap. But there is something very satisfying to me about the idea that some proponent of the Tartarian Empire conspiracy mythos might stumble upon or seek out this blog post and think at first that I’m promoting this nonsense, when actually this is perhaps the most absurd pseudohistorical conspiracy delusion I’ve ever heard. It cannot be taken seriously, making it a perfect topic for my April Fools episode. However, there are other reasons I feel compelled to address this somewhat obscure claim now. First, it is new and growing. Some have likened it to Qanon because of its agglomeration of other conspiracy claims, and while it is still in its infancy, it seems important to make the public aware of it and its rather surprising implications. According to Brian Dunning, whose Skeptoid blog and podcast covered it briefly about a year ago, the Tartarian Empire claims exist solely online, having first appeared on Youtube conspiracist channels around 2016 and gaining traction in 2017 and beyond on Reddit, Facebook, and elsewhere. He confirmed this using Google Trends (though when I tried to reproduce his findings, I was seeing it spike more in 2018). A quick search of word frequency in publications using Google Ngram corroborates that the topic became more common in the mid- to late 2010s but also suggests that it was not a purely online phenomenon, although any early conspiracist publications could very well have been inspired from online content, rather than vice-versa. However, the reliability of these tools in determining the origin of such pseudohistories and conspiracy claims is decidedly questionable. For example, it is entirely possible that these conspiracy claims crossed over into the English-speaking world from foreign language publications that aren’t mined in an Ngram search, or from online content in another language that, if I understand the tool correctly, wouldn’t show up in a Google Trends search, even if it were set to conduct a worldwide search, because the keyword used is in in English. This appears to be the case with the claims about a global Tartarian Empire, as there is good reason to believe this pseudohistory originated in Russia and may have spread to the West as online propaganda or disinformation. So, surprisingly, this ridiculous topic is actually very relevant to current events, particularly the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in the Ukraine. But I will get to that. Let us start with a simple refutation of the Tartaria mythos.

Historical map designating most of Inner Eurasia and Siberia as “La Grande Tartarie”

It has been suggested that the entirety of the Tartaria conspiracy myth can be blamed on conspiracists looking at historical maps and getting confused because of their ignorance of certain aspects of history. In truth, there appears to be something far more insidious behind this conspiracy myth than simple misunderstanding and well-meant speculation, but let’s have a look at this explanation just the same, as we will have to address the name Tartaria anyway. So the idea goes that the whole thing is due to the fact that many old maps label massive swathes of inner Eurasia as Tartaria, or Tartary. It is claimed that, lacking the knowledge of what this term referred to, conspiracists jumped to the conclusion that there must have been a huge kingdom or nation-state called Tartaria that has since disappeared. From there, the theory goes, they let their speculation about this presumably lost civilization run wild. It is certainly true that these old maps using the label of Tartary or Tartaria are frequently raised as evidence for these outlandish conspiracy claims, and their proponents do indeed reject the simple and historically accurate explanation for why these regions were called Tartary. Prior to the 18th century, the West lacked much knowledge about the peoples and societies within Siberia and Central and Inner Asia and simply called all of them “Tatars”, which then became “Tartars,” and their lands “Tartary.” It was a blanket term, similar to the way ancient Greeks called all the lands northeast of Europe Scythia, and any nomadic people from that vague area came to be called Scythians. Some scholars suggest the initial name “Tatar” derived from a Chinese word, dada, which dated to the 9th century C.E. and was used to refer to any nomads north of China. Indeed, it was the bellicose northern peoples of the Eurasian Steppe that the Chinese had built the Great Wall to keep out who would eventually come to be called “Tatars” by the West, such as the Manchu and Mongol peoples, as well as Turkic tribes. As mentioned in my episode on Prester John, a legend that somewhat coincides with Tartaria claims since it talks of a magical kingdom in the same region, the term “Tatar” appears to have become “Tartar” because of a racist pun. According to Matthew Paris, King Louis IX of France, hearing news about the hellish ravages of Mongol forces invading Europe, said of the so-called Tatars, “Well, may they be called Tartars, for their deeds are those of fiends from Tartarus,” which of course was the Latin name for Hades. Thus the corruption “Tartars” was supposedly coined, basically calling the Mongol hordes demons from hell. As the West did not have much concrete knowledge of the political geography of the region from whence these hordes had come, European cartographers indiscriminately slapped the name Tartary, or Tartaria, onto vast tracts of land. In subsequent centuries, the label was persistently applied to a wide range of distinct peoples and regions, such that later maps might distinguish Lesser from Greater Tartary, or Eastern from Western Tartary. Eventually, as ethnological knowledge of the region’s peoples grew, further distinctions had to be made, such that those in Manchuria were called Manchu Tartars, and those in the eastern reaches of the Russian Tsardom were called Muscovite Tartars. Gradually, the term was dropped altogether, with only the occasional remnant to be found. As will be seen, the origin of the Tartarian Empire conspiracy claims found online today are not the result of simple ignorance of the story behind some old cartographic labels, but this ignorance is clearly exploited by or feeds into the conspiracy claim, providing plenty of fodder for supposed primary source evidence that may seem convincing to a lay person who encounters these conspiracy claims online. 

It is because of such out of date and inaccurate maps, along with a heaping portion of racial stereotyping, that the belief in a Tartarian Empire in the Americas can be found. That’s right, we are not only talking about an inner Eurasian lost civilization. As I indicated in the beginning, believers claim the remnants of a lost Tartarian Empire can be found all over the United States as well. As evidence, they will cite maps from the 17th century that happen to have the word “Tartorum” near the Bering Strait and visually group North America with Eastern Asia according to the same color. With a simple translation of the Latin, they would be able to tell that the blurb with the word “Tartorum” is describing the Mongol tribes on the other side of the strait, not in North America, and describes a simple rural life that is very different from the technologically advanced civilization they imagine Tartaria was. Likewise, they will bring up a 19th century map of the “Distribution of Races in the World” that, again, color codes sections of Eurasia and much of North America to indicate the presence of the same culture. This racist 19th century map chooses the color yellow for Asia and these portions of North America, and tellingly, it labels these areas Mongolian, not Tartarian. The cartographer appears to have mistakenly conflated Mongolian and Inuit cultures, as the portions of North America identified as Mongolian are predominately north of the Arctic Circle. Of course, in the distant past, Native American peoples likely did migrate across the strait and were distantly related to Eurasian nomads. Specifically, ethnologists recognize that the Yupik aboriginal peoples dwell in both Alaska and Siberia. But again, we are talking about rural nomads, not an advanced civilization that, according to believers, is responsible for the construction of architecturally magnificent edifices. Nevertheless, to the proponents of the Tartarian Empire fiction, these cherry-picked maps are evidence that Grand Tartary, the mythical civilization that they have built up in their minds to Atlantean proportions, was present in the Americas, and though their own false evidence would suggest it could only be found above the Arctic Circle, they claim it was present everywhere. As proof, they point to almost any ornate building constructed in any architectural style other than modern, and they say that must have been a Tartarian structure, because we don’t build things like that in our culture. This may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. They really do point to any pre-modern structure that is especially impressive and elaborately decorative, and they claim it was not built, could not have been built, by builders of our culture.

Racist 19th century map asserting Mongolian cultures are present in North America.

In some ways the conspiracist proponents of a global Tartarian Empire are traditionalists, or nostalgists. They seem to value only an old-fashioned or ancient style of building and reject all modernist architecture as ugly, nondescript, and thus inferior. One Norwegian Youtuber focused on Tartaria, Joachim Skaar, lumps all of modernist, and therefore non-Tartarian, architecture together under the label of Brutalism, although that is a very specific offshoot of Modernist architecture that emerged in the 1950s and declined in the 1970s. However, the name and the aesthetics provide a striking counterpoint to what he and others call Tartarian architecture, which again lumps together many known styles, from Classical, Baroque, Gothic and Renaissance to Beaux Arts, Neoclassical, Second Empire and Greek Revival. Again, any sufficiently ornate building, with columns supporting entablatures with carved friezes and cornices with scrollwork, or any building with an especially elaborate roof like a mansard or a cupola or a large dome, seems, in their fevered imaginations, to be a relic of this lost civilization. As evidence, they hold up old photos from 19th century America, in which can be seen such grand edifices, usually municipal buildings like city halls or state capitols, rising above simple wood frame houses and shacks, or on otherwise empty stretches of dirt fields. To them, these are evidence that 19th century Americans were living among the ruins of this vanished civilization, when in fact the photos depict nation building. With a basic grasp of the fact that the construction of such government buildings was well funded, and that architects were specifically sought out and well paid to design impressive architectural structures, it’s quite clear why such projects were initially surrounded by empty space and simple A-frame clapboard hovels. But like most conspiracists, the Tartarian Empire proponents believe there are secrets to uncover in almost any old book or photo they pore over, no matter how widely available they might be. They find beautiful old buildings that no longer exist, and they decide they have uncovered another clue about the destruction of Tartarian structures. For example, the Chicago Federal Building, whose dome was larger than the U.S. Capitol’s dome, but which was demolished after about 60 years, or the slender, 27-story Singer Building in New York City, which for a time was the tallest building in the world but was leveled in the 1960s. Their speculation about the ancient and mysterious origins of such buildings simply disregard their known history. To wit, the head of the Singer Manufacturing Company, makers of the famous sewing machines, commissioned the Singer building as their New York Headquarters and hired architect Ernest Flagg to design it. Such historical details, to the Tartaria conspiracists, are just more lies covering up the truth.

Perhaps the most absurd claim they’ve made is that the impressive temporary complex of ornate facades built out of straw and plaster of Paris for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—the so-called White City—was actually a grand Tartarian metropolis that “they” have pretended was not real. Much of their idiotic claims boil down to not just ignorance of history, but amateurish misunderstandings about architecture that I imagine would really gall any actual architects. They point to the fact that grand buildings of certain distinct styles can be found all over the world, but of course that is because architectural trends spread internationally. They claim that the shift away from these ornate buildings that are so aesthetically pleasing to them, and the movement toward the concrete and steel architecture of modernism, is a clear sign of the disappearance of the Tartarian culture, when in fact, there are plenty of books written by Modernist architects and city planners like Le Corbusier that expound on their reasoning and argument for moving away from more classical styles. And finally, they claim that our culture simply couldn’t have produced such beautiful structures, and yet plenty of New Classical architects design such buildings even today. Take for example, the neo-Gothic Whitman College at Princeton, built in 2002, or the Classical Greek architecture of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center built in Nashville, the so-called Athens of the South, in 2006. Simply put, one gets the impression that these Tartarian Empire Youtubers and Reddit posters are just basement dwellers in boring towns who have only recently discovered the beauty of fancy buildings and simply cannot believe such structures are American. Instead, they envision a massive mega-culture of advanced builders. Joachim Skaar, the aforementioned Youtuber, has been quoted as claiming, “The same people that built the Capitol in Washington built the pyramids in Egypt,” and that gives us a sense of the great depths of ignorance displayed by these conspiracists.

An image of the State Capitol of Iowa, with less impressive buildings surrounding it. Just the sort of image that looks like proof to a Tartarian Empire believer.

Equally absurd are their explanations for why there does not exist ample archaeological evidence of this widespread culture, aside, from, oh, say, all the surviving buildings they claim are artifacts of the culture and all the photographs of their buildings that are no longer standing. Well, they say there was a worldwide catastrophe that destroyed much of their culture. It was much like the Flood of Genesis, in that it swept into every Tartarian city across the globe, destroying the inhabitants and their records and monuments. They call it the “great reset.” Unlike the biblical flood, though, this was a “mud flood,” and in its wake, entire grand Tartarian cities were left entirely or partially buried. Just what would cause such a global flow of mud is not typically clarified. Some have suggested that it was the result of a worldwide volcanic event, caused by mud volcanos. Mud volcanos are real, and instead of producing magma flows they produce slurries of warm mud. However, even some cursory research into mud volcanos would reveal that they are typically small and don’t cause mass destruction. In fact, they are often identified more as hot springs, and can be enjoyed as natural mud baths. It’s pretty clear some Tartaria “researcher” went looking for a feasible reason for the “mud flood” they invented, found mention of a mud volcano, and said “Bingo!” not bothering to read much more into the topic. But of course, anyone who would believe in a global mud flood isn’t thinking too hard about the science of geology or the analysis of strata performed at any dig site that could handily disprove their “theory.” But they still find supposed evidence for their mud flood, once again in old photos. They bring up black and white photos from the 19th century that show people digging, whether employing hand shovels, mule teams, or steam shovels, especially if there is a fancy building around them. Of course, civic engineering requires a lot of digging like this, even today. Hills must be flattened and depressions filled in order to make streets flat. It’s no great mystery. But Tartarian Empire conspiracists go further, pointing to photos of Gilded Age buildings with windows at ground level and saying that they all appear to be sunken into the ground. Again, these “theorists” seem woefully unfamiliar with buildings generally, but maybe they aren’t basement dwellers after all, since if they were, they would easily recognize these as basement windows. But perhaps the most ridiculous thing about this mud flood aspect of their claims is that, since they’re using photos from the 1800s as evidence, they played themselves and had to place their supposed worldwide mud flood catastrophe in the 19th century. That’s right. These geniuses claim that a global catastrophe happened sometime between the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, and there is no record of it anywhere, and they don’t even bother explaining how it only seemed to affect the Tartarians and us lousy non-Tartarians escaped it just fine.

But hold on! The other element of the so-called “great reset,” besides the global destruction caused by the mud flood, was the purposeful erasure of Tartarian history. Or at least, that’s what they claim. In fact, believers in Tartaria claim that most major armed conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries were actually about Tartaria. They say Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia was really a war against Tartaria, and that after the mud flood, the World Wars of the 20th century were all actually just excuses to destroy all remaining traces of Tartaria. What is their evidence of such a cover-up? Well, they too use Google Ngram, and they find it suspicious that use of the words “Tartaria” and “Tartary” plummet to nonexistent following the 19th century. But of course, we know why that is. It’s because we stopped using an inaccurate blanket term that was actually a pun suggesting they were from hell and instead started calling them Mongols or some other more accurate name. However, never let it be said that conspiracy speculators aren’t ingenious, for they managed in their blindly focused keyword searches to turn up an obscure declassified CIA report on “National Cultural Development under Communism.” In it, there exists a paragraph that is presented as smoking gun evidence of a cover-up of Tartaria’s history. It reads as follows:

…let us take the matter of history, which, along with religion, language and literature, constitute the core of a people’s cultural heritage. Here again the Communists have interfered in a shameless manner. For example, on 9 August 1944, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, sitting in Moscow, issues a directive ordering the party’s Tartar Provincial Committee “to proceed to a scientific revision of the history of Tartaria, to liquidate serious shortcomings and mistakes of a nationalistic character committed by individual writers and historians in dealing with Tartar history.” In other words, Tartar history was to be rewritten—let us be frank, was to be falsified…

The obvious problem here, of course, is that the CIA appear to be condemning Communist revision of “Tartar” history, which simply isn’t in keeping with the idea that the erasure of Tartarian history was a global conspiracy, which likely would have to involve the CIA. But the real issue is that this oft-used quote is taken entirely out of context. Only this paragraph in the entire report mentions “Tartaria,” and this is only because they are quoting a Communist committee that uses the term. The rest of the report makes it clear that the CIA is talking about Communist attacks on Islam and the Muslim peoples within their authority. Furthermore, if they even gave enough context to quote the entirety of the last sentence, it would be revealed that the history of these Muslim people was being rewritten, or falsified, “in order to eliminate references to Great Russian aggressions…so that the Russians always appear in a good light.” And this, the fact that Russians have long been engaged in a revision of history, producing a pseudohistory intended to serve their political purposes and falsely burnish their image, leads us to what may be the true origin and sinister purpose of this batshit crazy conspiracy claim.

Mud Volcanoes at Gobustan State Reserve. Not exactly a global threat. Image credit: Nick Taylor, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The way that the Tartaria conspiracy claims blithely do away with massive parts of world history somewhat reminds me of the claims of chronological revisionists that I previously discussed at great length in a three part series. Indeed, searching Google Trends for Tartaria, one sees Phantom Time, the chronological revision theory of Herbert Illig that I spoke about in my series, listed as a related query. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the origins of the Tartaria claims can actually be traced to the chronological revisionist writings of Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. I encourage listeners to go back to my Chronological Revision Chronicles series, specifically Part One, The Fomenko Timeline, to hear more about this figure and his theories. In brief, Fomenko claims to use statistical analysis and astronomical data to prove that entire eras of accepted history didn’t actually occur. Instead, he argues that much of accepted history is actually duplicated from medieval history. He has been nicknamed The Terminator due to his penchant for finding reasons to delete vast swathes of history, and his rewriting of biblical history has drawn the ire of the Russian Orthodox church. But Fomenko found popularity and success in writing about history, with his “New Chronology” book series, History: Fiction or Science, bringing him far more fame than he had ever earned as a mathematician. He claims to be politically impartial, but historians and critics of his work, especially Konstantin Sheiko, who wrote extensively about the implications of Fomenko’s claims in his PhD thesis, point out that Fomenko’s work fits clearly into an ethno-nationalist tradition of producing pseudohistory and alternative history that presents the Russian people and their history in certain favorable ways. As the CIA report I referenced indicates, this historical negation, denialism, and revisionism had been perpetrated by the Soviets, but as Sheiko describes, it continued, in a somewhat different vein, after the fall of the Soviet Union, as Russia sought out some post-Soviet identity. Among these pseudo-historians, Russian identity, its greatness, is in its power and control of space on the world map, thus they find reason to suggest that a great Russian Empire existed long before the Soviet Union or the Tsardom of Rus. Others in this category see Russian identity wrapped up in racial heritage, and they trot out the old myth of an Aryan people. Though he feigns academic impartiality, Fomenko’s work is at the forefront of this movement to forge a false ethno-nationalist historical identity for Russia. When he eliminates entire periods of history, he typically claims that they are duplications of Russian ancient history. The Holy Roman Empire? Well that is just the appropriated history of a great Russian Empire. His alternate history is at its heart, one in which the accomplishments of Russia are far greater, and its greatness has been stolen from it and attributed to other regions and historical periods. According to Fomenko, the Mongols, formerly known as Tatars or Tartars, did not exist, as such. Instead, he claims that there existed a vast Slav-Turk Empire, not a Mongol Horde but rather a Russian Horde. In this way, he and other Russians can deny that they ever came under the Mongol Yoke. The Mongol invasion, he claims, was a myth invented by the Romanov Dynasty and the Church. In fact, Genghis Khan was a Russian, complete with European features. So under it all, all the mathematical reasoning, the elaborate statistical and astronomical proofs, behind Anatoly Fomenko’s New Chronology, we see the ugly head of Aryan mythology, of white supremacy, rearing.

Is the Tartaria nonsense actually the New Chronology repackaged? In turn, is it just Russian ethno-nationalist propaganda as the work of Fomenko is revealing itself to be? Well, you could describe both as the myth of a vast Siberian / Inner Asian empire whose history has been stolen and erased. Tartarian conspiracy nuts also scrutinize old portraits of Genghis Khan and speculate that he may have been more European-looking, more white, than he is otherwise portrayed. In their reaction against the historical distortions of Tsarist and Church propaganda, Communists initiated their own revision and falsification of history, as the CIA observed in the aforementioned report, and after the fall of Communism, a new false history has emerged, still intent on painting Russia in the best light, and justifying its geopolitical powerplays. Just as Vladimir Putin today justifies his invasion of the Ukraine with falsehoods, claiming that it has always been a part of Russia and has no historical right to independence, his nationalist rhetoric is validated by, or perhaps inspired by, the pseudo-historian Anatoly Fomenko, who claims that Ukraine has no identity apart from Russia, for its people were always only part of his “Russian Horde.” This pseudo-history tacitly justifies war crimes. So what am I arguing? I suppose I am arguing what others before me have argued: that the Tartarian Empire conspiracy myth originates from Russian disinformation, spread online to the Western world by professional Russian propagandists, and transforming along the way, through a weird digital version of the telephone game, to something almost unrecognizable. This may itself sound like conspiracy speculation, but the fact that Russian propaganda programs are active in spreading disinformation through bots and puppet accounts run out of troll farms is well known. We also know that they are involved with the encouragement of the growth of conspiracy claims. Hell, that goes back a long time before Qanon and COVID-19 conspiracies on social media. Back in the 1980s, the KGB ran a disinformation campaign aimed at encouraging the baseless conspiracy claim that the U.S. government was responsible for the creation and spread of HIV/AIDS. Now, there is a fast-spreading conspiracy theory about the existence of an ancient, suppressed mega-empire that originated in their region, and it is remarkably similar to the ethno-national propaganda Russia’s president spouts as a pretext for expansion, asserting the Russians are just reclaiming what has always been theirs. Tell me that doesn’t sound like there is a connection. What’s really scary is if Putin starts to assert that the ancestral claim of the Russian people extends all the way to America, where the Tartarian Empire is said to have formerly reigned.

Anatoly Fomenko, mathematician and ethnonationalist propagandist masquerading as a legitimate historian. Don’t @ me.

As with that other conspiracy mythos, Qanon, that has likely been encouraged every step of the way by Russian disinformation campaigns online, the Tartarian Empire hoax has grown to become a mega-theory as its proponents take a buffet-style approach, incorporating into the myth complex any pet theory or crazy notion they fancy. One can imagine that it’s especially hard to control a conspiracy narrative once it has been fed to the conspiracy nut community. Thus we see claims about the Illuminati come in to explain the worldwide cover-up, or of the Jewish World Conspiracy, which isn’t that surprising considering its connection to Russian claims of Aryan supremacy. To further explain why the existence of Tartaria had to be covered up, conspiracists have incorporated elements of the fantastical claims about Atlantis or hollow earth civilizations: namely that the Tartarians had advanced technology, free wireless energy technology to be more specific, and that the powers that be conspired to hide this from the energy dependent masses. And then, there is the doozy—that Tartaria was actually peopled by giants. Never mind that all the buildings they identify as Tartarian are made for regular size people. They found a few photos of grand, oversized doors, and of course they found statuary and paintings depicting, you guessed it, giants. They link the existence of giants in the lands of Tartary through the tales of Gog and Magog, which have historically been associated with Mongolians, as I discussed in my episode on Prester John. And from there, it just devolved into photoshopped hoaxes of gigantic bones. But the argument against the historical existence of giants deserves to have its own episode and would be too much of a digression here at the end of this one. To conclude, let’s just hope that the fringe nutcases who have taken up the Tartarian standard and run with it online continue to take the idea in such ridiculous and fantastical directions that it becomes ever more laughable, and thus, if we’re lucky, useless as Russian propaganda.

 Further Reading

Dharma, Nagato. “Tartary / Tartaria — The Mystery of an Empire Lost in History.” History of Yesterday, 2 July 2020, historyofyesterday.com/tartary-tartaria-the-mystery-of-an-empire-lost-in-history-a99abb5cc9b6.

 Elliott, Mark C. “The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, 2000, pp. 603–46, https://doi.org/10.2307/2658945.

 Mortice, Zach. “Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture.” Bloomberg, 27 April 2021, www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-27/inside-architecture-s-wildest-conspiracy-theory.

“National Cultural Development Under Communism.” Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room, 11 Nov. 2016, www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-02771r000200090002-6.

Sheiko, Konstantin. “Lomonosov's bastards: Anatolii Fomenko, pseudo-history and Russia's search for a post-communist identity.” (PhD thesis) School of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, 2004. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/222.

“Tartaria: The Supposed Mega-Empire of Inner Eurasia.” Reddit, uploaded by u/EnclavedMicrostate, www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/ieg2k0/tartaria_the_supposed_megaempire_of_inner_eurasia/.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Four: The Vigilante

At the moment the first shot was fired on Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963, a motorcycle cop named Marrion Baker, recognizing the sound of a rifle shot from on high, looked up toward the Book Depository and saw some pigeons take flight from the building. While other authorities were engulfed in confusion, looking first at the grassy knoll, Baker sped over to the Depository, ran inside, and demanded to know where the elevator was. The building manager, Roy Truly, led him to the elevator, but it appeared to be unresponsive. Truly afterward came to believe that Oswald had purposely left the elevator’s grate open so that it could not be called back down. If this is the case, then it was poor planning. While it meant that authorities could not take the elevator to investigate his sniper’s perch, it also meant they would have to take the very same stairs that he was taking. After firing his three shots, Oswald exited his sniper’s nest between the stacks of books, rushed to the staircase, ditched the rifle, and began his descent. However, as he approached the second floor, he heard the sound of other footsteps on the stairs below and exited toward the nearby lunchroom. That was when Officer Baker, who had given up on the elevator and taken the stairs, saw him “hurrying” off, and called out for him to stop, which Oswald did. Officer Baker, presuming that the presidential assassin must not be an employee at the Depository but rather someone who had gained entrance to the building for the sole purpose of taking a sniper position in its upper windows, asked the building manager with him if he recognized Oswald. Roy Truly answered that indeed, Oswald was an employee, and Baker let him go. This left Oswald in a perfect position to establish the alibi he would later provide police—that he had been in a lunchroom at the time of the shooting. He bought a soda pop from the machine, and lingered momentarily. If he had remained in the building, it certainly would lend some weight to the notion that he had been framed and knew nothing about the assassination, provided one ignores the physical evidence on the 6th floor and the witness testimony that shows his premeditation and planning of the murder. However, he did not stay in the building. Instead, he fled, and his flight is further strong evidence of his guilt. After buying his Coke, he walked through the second floor offices toward a different staircase, and he was seen by another Depository employee as he passed near her desk. She said something about the President being shot, and he mumbled an indistinct reply. She found the encounter “strange.” Then he went down the front stairs and out the front doors of the Depository, which had not yet been locked down as only three minutes had passed since the fatal head shot and chaos still reigned on the Plaza. Later, when the police had the building locked down, they gathered all of its employees for questioning, and Oswald was the only one missing. And even later that day, when giving his alibi, he gave the lame excuse that he had immediately left, without checking with his boss, because he assumed work would be canceled for the day because of the assassination. Outside, his movements indicate not the leisurely trip home of a man unexpectedly given a half day off, but rather a man trying to get away from the scene of a crime. He would normally have waited for a bus on Dealey Plaza, but on this day, he walked resolutely east on Elm, away from all the commotion, in the opposite direction from his boarding house. Ten blocks away, he ran up to the door of a bus in transit and pounded on it to get it to stop and let him on. On the bus, unnoticed by Oswald, happened to be one of his former landladies, who later described him as looking “like a maniac” when he boarded the bus. Sirens increased, and traffic kept the bus from continuing on, and Oswald suddenly rose and demanded a bus transfer, exiting the bus and walking to the station two blocks away. However, instead of boarding another bus at the station with his transfer, he instead hopped into a taxi cab, something he later admitted himself that he had never done before, a further indication that he was in panicked flight. Also telling is that he directed the taxi driver to take him not directly to his boarding house, but some blocks away from it. After walking the remaining distance to his room, he entered, and a couple minutes later, he left again. A housekeeper who saw him said he was “in a hurry” and “all but running.” Though it was warm, he left with a jacket on, because he was carrying his revolver in the waist of his pants.

*

In this final installment of the series, I want to tell Oswald’s story to the end, which means also telling Jack Ruby’s story, but I also want to address some of the larger logical flaws of conspiracy claims generally, as well as the difficulties inherent in refuting them. Many conspiracy proponents will not even attempt to exonerate Oswald, since the evidence of his involvement is so overwhelming. But there are those who will try to assert that he was a complete patsy. As one of my sources, JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy by John McAdams, observes, one can talk until one is blue in the face about Oswald’s psychological and ideological predisposition toward political violence—as I have in this series—and all it does is help make the case that Oswald would have been a perfect patsy, since he was just the sort of person one would expect to take a shot at the President, and therefore the perfect person to frame for it. Those conspiracists who attempt to find corroboration for Oswald’s alibi—besides requiring their audience to disregard witness statements about Oswald smuggling his rifle into the building, to doubt physical evidence that the rifle found was Oswald’s and that he had been in the improvised sniper’s nest, and to disbelieve testimony that placed Oswald on the sixth floor at the time of the assassination—rely instead on outlier witness statements that are easily discredited. For example, the secretary of the Depository’s vice-president, Carolyn Arnold, claimed she had seen Oswald in a booth in the second-floor lunchroom at 12:15pm. Never mind the fact that Oswald’s actual alibi claimed he had been eating in the first-floor lunchroom and had only gone to the second-floor lunchroom to buy a soda. The fact is that numerous workers who were in both lunchrooms have stated that Oswald was not present in either location, and Ms. Arnold never started saying she had seen him there until 15 years afterward, when a conspiracist author questioned her. In statements to the FBI not long after the assassination, she said she wasn’t sure whether she might have seen him fleetingly in a hallway, and then that she certainly had not seen him. We see this time and time again. Conspiracy speculators get a witness alone in a room and somehow, magically, get them to remember entirely different details years after the fact. Others claim that Oswald could not have been in the stairwell immediately after the shots were fired, before Officer Baker saw him rushing toward the second-floor lunchroom, because those critical witnesses who had been in the fifth floor window below his sniper’s nest, Junior Jarman, Bonnie Ray Williams, and Harold Norman, had afterward taken the stairs themselves and not encountered him. However, according to those men’s testimony, they remained upstairs for ten to fifteen minutes. Other employees who said they had been in the staircase following the shooting also can be confirmed not to have been in there until several minutes after Oswald would have taken them and then ducked out upon hearing Officer Baker’s footsteps approaching from below. But more than any of these refutable claims, Oswald’s shocking actions after leaving his boarding room with his revolver prove beyond any doubt that he was no innocent on that day.

The soda machine from which Oswald bought a Coke following the assassination in the Book Depository’s second floor lunch room.

The armed Oswald waited at a bus stop, but seeing no buses, he got impatient and started walking. He still had the bus transfer, and after walking about a mile, he was only a few blocks from catching a bus that would have connected him to a Greyhound headed for Mexico. We can’t know for sure that that was where he was headed, though, because he never made it. A Dallas police officer in a patrol car, J.D. Tippit, saw Oswald walking hurriedly and, probably recognizing that he matched the description of the assassin being broadcast to all police units based on witness statements, he pulled over and stopped him. Police had done this numerous times elsewhere in Dallas that day as the manhunt for the gunman unfolded. Numerous witnesses saw what happened next. Oswald said something to the officer, and Tippit got out of the vehicle and came around toward him. That’s when Oswald brandished his revolver, shot Tippit dead, leaving four slugs in his body, and fled down the street, emptying his spent shells as he ran. The witnesses to this murder include a woman waiting nearby for a bus, two women in their nearby home who came to the front door upon hearing the shots, and a cab driver parked nearby eating his lunch. All picked Oswald out of a lineup that day. A man driving a pickup only about fifteen feet away saw the entire thing, and though he was not brought in for a lineup—a failure of the police that conspiracists claim means he could not identify Oswald—he later, with high certainty, identified Oswald as the shooter from photographs. Numerous further witnesses saw Oswald fleeing the scene as he ran past some used car lots, and identified him in lineups and from photographs. As he ran through a gas station, he even dropped his jacket, which his boardinghouse’s housekeeper identified as the one he had left wearing, and which Marina identified as one of the only jackets he owned. Moreover, the shells he emptied were recovered and later matched ballistically to his revolver, to the exclusion of all other weapons. One of the slugs recovered from Tippit was also matched conclusively to his weapon, which would be on his person when he was apprehended not long later. The evidence in the Tippit murder case was just as clear and conclusive as that that of the assassination case, but of course, conspiracists still find reason to speculate. They ignore the wealth of witness and ballistic evidence, instead investigating Tippit’s personal relationships and suggesting he was actually murdered by someone else in retaliation for a torrid affair he was having. Or they suggest Tippit was part of the conspiracy—since conspiracies can apparently be as massive as one needs them to be, so why not?—insinuating that he may have been there to aid Oswald’s getaway but then turned on him, or that he may have been sent to kill the patsy but Oswald got the drop on him. When conspiracist writers find Oswald’s murder of Tippit too problematic, they sometime just gloss over it, mentioning it only in passing, and presenting it as an unresolved murder that can’t be conclusively tied to Oswald. As you can see, though, that’s the furthest thing from the truth.

Still fleeing from the scene of the Tippit murder, Oswald entered a shoe store. Sirens were in the air, and the shoe store manager saw Oswald enter the lobby of his store, looking scared, and staring out at the street. After some squad cars passed by, the manager watched Oswald walk back outside, look toward where the police had gone, and then head the opposite direction. He felt Oswald was acting very suspiciously, and since he had been listening to the radio broadcasting reports about the assassination, he began to suspect it could be the assassin. He followed Oswald, who ran toward the nearby entrance to the Texas Theater, and when the clerk in the box office wasn’t looking, walked inside without paying. The shoe store manager spoke to the ticket clerk, making her aware that a man had just gone in without paying and voicing his suspicions that the man was running from the police. After ensuring that the exits were secure, they called Dallas police, who arrived shortly, entered the theater, and as officers with shotguns fanned out, they raised the lights. When the officer walking up the aisle scrutinizing the filmgoers came to Oswald, he told him to stand. Oswald stood, raised his hands, shouted, “Well it's all over now,” threw a punch into the policeman’s face, pulled out his revolver, and pulled the trigger. Thankfully, it failed to fire. Oswald was subdued, handcuffed, and taken to a patrol car. The police found his ID on him as well as his false ID with the name Alek Hidell, the one he had made himself. “Which one are you?” they asked him, and he smirked, replying, “You figure it out.” At the station, Oswald was interrogated on and off for twelve hours over the course of about 45 hours, during which he lied about everything, saying he had no knowledge of the name Hidell, even though he had a fake ID with that name on him, claiming the Marines had never given him an undesirable discharge, that he’d never lived at the address where he’d taken photos with the rifle, that he’d never handed out leaflets for Fair Play for Cuba, and that he’d never been to Mexico. Conspiracists who want to believe the alibi he gave during those interrogations just tend to gloss over all the other lies he told, or they suggest that nothing in the interrogation can be trusted, claiming it is highly suspicious that the police did not record any of their questioning of Oswald. In fact, there is nothing suspicious about this at all if you investigate the practices of the Dallas police in 1963. At the time, an early version of Miranda rights was state law in Texas, and according this law, any statements made during interrogations had to be produced in writing and signed by the person being questioned before they could be used in court. So their questioning of Oswald was purely for informational purposes, since even if he confessed on tape, they would have had to get him to sign a confession before they could use it. Because this law effectively made the recording of interrogations pointless, from their view, the Dallas police did not even have a tape recorder at the time. But regardless, the record of Oswald’s statements during his interrogation have been corroborated by more that twenty-five detectives, district attorneys, Secret Service Agents, and FBI agents who participated. Hell, some postal inspectors were even present, questioning him about his use of post office boxes, and confirmed the statements made during interrogations. So I suppose this vast conspiracy implicates even the U.S. Postal Service, if we’re to believe a veil of secrecy was kept over his interrogations as part of the plot.

The murder scene of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Image courtesy University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

The Dallas police were somewhat overwhelmed by the press during the weekend they had Oswald in custody. At one point, over three hundred journalists had gathered on the third floor, making it nearly impassable with all their equipment and wires. The police were walking a tightrope between ensuring security and granting press access to the biggest story in history. When it came time to transfer Oswald, they weren’t sure how to manage it. At first they wanted to use an armored car, but the two cars that they acquired were either too small for Oswald and his guards, or too tall to pass through the ramp to the basement from which they intended to depart. Eventually, they settled on using the armored trucks as decoys and simply hustling him out in an unmarked car. They cleared the basement of everyone but about 30 members of the press, and posted a guard at the top of the ramp, but just before Oswald was brought out, the guard at the ramp left his post to direct traffic as one of the decoy vehicles departed, giving the opportunity for someone to descend the ramp from the street and blend in with the press unnoticed. Oswald was brought down the stairs and out before the bright lights of the reporters, and then a man pushed through the crowd and fired a pistol into Oswald’s abdomen. The shot was fatal, and the act of vigilantism would forever ensure the common belief that there had been a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, and that the conspirators had sent someone to silence Oswald. The shooter was a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby, and entire books have been written just focused on him and his supposed involvement with a conspiracy. Conspiracists will claim he knew Oswald, that he had been on Dealey Plaza during the assassination, that he had ties to the mafia. To place the endcap on this entire story, and to evaluate the claims about Oswald’s murder, we must know who Jack Ruby was, why he was there, and why he did what he did.

Jack Ruby’s birth name was Jacob Rubenstein, born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Chicago. Like Oswald, he was of below average intelligence according to IQ tests and his educational attainments—he only ever finished the 6th grade. Also like Oswald, he may have suffered some psychological disturbance, some of which can be traced back to his parents. His father beat his mother and was frequently arrested on assault and disorderly conduct charges. After their separation, his mother beat him regularly. Eventually, she was deemed unfit, and Ruby was placed in foster care. She would later be committed to a mental institution. Whether inherited from his father or instilled in him by years of abuse at the hands of his mother, Ruby developed a problematic temper and violent tendencies, earning a reputation as a street fighter in his youth. In his twenties, after a few years in California working menial odd jobs, he returned to Chicago, where he found work through a friend as a union organizer. Many conspiracists suggest this shows he was involved with the mafia, but in fact, when he had been working for the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union there, it had been legitimate. Later, the local mafia did take over the union, at which point Ruby lost his job with them. After that, he went into business for himself, selling novelty items like plaques, keychains, salt and pepper shakers, bottle openers, etc. He was never successful, and after serving in the Army Air Force in World War II, he ended up moving to Dallas, where his sister Eva ran a nightclub. For the talkative Ruby, who loved to be in the middle of the action and make acquaintance with anyone he came across, it was the perfect industry, and he threw himself into it. Some conspiracists believe he was a mafia front man, bringing the Chicago mob’s business interests to Dallas, but in truth, he was never solvent. By 1963, he was running two nightclubs with his sister, but over the years he had been involved with six and lost money on all of them. FBI investigators who were intimately familiar with all aspects of organized crime in Chicago actually questioned informants after the assassination, both low level and high ranking, and none even knew who Ruby was. Some Dallas mafia figures sometimes attended his clubs and knew Ruby, but so did a great many police officers. In fact, one Dallas mafia figure actually visited Ruby in jail after his murder of Oswald, which actually seems to prove that the Dallas mafia had nothing to do with Oswald’s murder, as a mafia leader would not go and visit one of his hitmen in jail after they were caught. Finally, some of Ruby’s business dealings prove he had no ties to the mafia. During the years leading up to the assassination, he was having problems with a stripper’s union, the AGVA, which was itself involved with the mafia. So the clearest link between him and the mafia puts him at odds with them. Finally, those who knew Ruby best insist that the mafia would never have wanted anything to do with him because he was a snitch, always ingratiating himself with the Dallas police, inviting them to his clubs, and running his mouth in conversations with them.

A young Jack Ruby in his Army Air Force Uniform. Image tweeted by TheSixthFloorMuseum

Understanding the aspect of Ruby’s character that drove him to befriend police officers is important to understanding why he was there at the police station, likely having walked down the ramp just as the officer posted there had left it unguarded. After he shot Oswald, he said, “I am Jack Ruby. You all know me,” and it was true. Most did know him. In fact, he had been in and out of the police station over and over since Oswald’s capture, drawn to the center of this historic moment and trying to make himself useful to those who were present, whether they be policemen or reporters. Again, like Oswald, he seemed to relish any attention. For years he would loiter around police stations and newspaper offices, offering help to these professionals and inviting them to his clubs for free drinks. Many thought him a “kook,” a “creep,” or a “psycho,” while others viewed him as a colorful character, which seems to be how he viewed himself as well. In addition to his efforts to befriend police officers by offering information about petty crime, he frequently gave tips to newspapers, and their description of him gives a clear sense of his activities: “He is just a guy that calls on the telephone, and he knows everybody in town,” according to a newsman who took his tips. There is some sense that he actually thought, in his simple way, that he was an amateur reporter. That is certainly one of the ways that he gained entrance to the police station during the weekend that Oswald was being interrogated, and according to those who observed his activity in the station, he was just being his awkwardly amiable self, inviting people to his club, attempting to help people where he could, and chatting with people about his hatred for the “lousy Commie” who had murdered his President. Those who knew him afterward described his tendency to seek publicity and be attracted to centers of important activity. “He was a known goer to events,” said Seth Kantor, a member of the press corps who saw Ruby on the day of the assassination hanging around Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy had been taken, and thought it was “perfectly normal to see Jack Ruby standing there.” Another reporter who knew Ruby told a researcher, “If there was one Ruby trait that stands out, it is that he had to be where the action was. He was like horseshit, all over the place.” This perfectly describes his activity between the assassination and his murder of Oswald. After learning of the assassination, and by all accounts being severely shocked and dismayed about it, it appears he may have driven directly to Parkland Hospital, and later that evening, on two separate occasions, he managed to get onto the third floor of police headquarters, even standing outside the room where Oswald was being questioned and at one point trying to enter but being stopped by police. The next day, Saturday afternoon, he was again seen wandering around among the press and police, handing out passes to his nightclub. To many, this appears to be a concerted effort to infiltrate the police department. But most there knew him, and he was introducing himself to those who didn’t. And it simply makes no sense for Ruby to have been part of a longstanding plot to kill the President’s assassin, or the patsy taking the blame for it, since if Oswald’s capture had gone any differently, if he had been arrested by state troopers or the FBI or anyone but the Dallas police, Ruby would not have been to able to get so close to him. Also, if Ruby had been tasked with murdering Oswald and intended to do so despite his own certain capture, he had an opportunity to do so on the night of the assassination, when Oswald was led past him, passing just a couple feet away from him. It appears, based on a lump in his jacket visible in photos of him that day, that he was likely carrying his pistol the entire time. Ruby later denied carrying his pistol and also denied his frequent presence within the police station that weekend, but witnesses and photographs refute him, and he was probably lying because he intended to fight the charge of premeditation in court, and all this seems to show he was stalking Oswald. But was he?

On the morning of Oswald’s transfer, Ruby was at a nearby Western Union office, wiring money to one of his dancers. The clerk who helped him did not believe he seemed in a hurry. In fact, he could have had no idea when Oswald was to be transferred because it had been delayed by some further interrogation and because Oswald had asked to change his clothes at the last minute. When he walked over to the police station afterward and made his way down the unguarded ramp toward the press gathered there, according to him, the opportunity just kind of presented itself to him. In his own words, it would have had to have been “the most perfect conspiracy in the history of the world” to work as precisely as it did. Conspiracists claim that such coincidence is impossible. They point to discredited witness statements claiming Ruby knew Oswald, or placing him at Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, even though numerous witnesses have sworn that Ruby was in a newspaper office placing an ad for his nightclubs when the assassination occurred. Whether or not it was a premeditated or an spontaneous act, his true motives are clear. Witness after witness describe his terrible dismay and grief at having learned of Kennedy’s assassination. During his visits to Parkland and the police station, it was all he could talk about. He was openly crying throughout the weekend, despite reportedly not being the type of person to cry in public. Between his visits to the police station, he was at his nightclub, which he decided to close indefinitely, despite his dire financial situation, out of respect for the President and his family, and his employees said that he was inconsolable and incoherent in his anger and depression. His sister, who he sat and watched news reports with on Friday between visits to the police station, said he was crying so hard he was “sick to his stomach.” She described him as “a broken man,” and quoted him as saying, “I never felt so bad in my life, even when Ma and Pa died…. Someone tore my heart out.” In numerous conversations that weekend, people spoke about how someone ought to take Oswald out, and it has further been stated that Ruby was highly suggestible. After killing Oswald, when police asked why he had done it, he said, “Well, you guys couldn’t do it. Someone had to do it.” And finally, his sister further described his great sadness upon reading a newspaper article that said the First Lady may have to return to Dallas to attend Oswald’s trial. Many statements by Ruby suggest he thought he would be treated as a hero, and felt persecuted when he was afterward not released from jail and instead tried for murder. So was there premeditation? Had he been hanging around the police station hoping to take Oswald out? Or did all these feelings and motivations just overwhelm him in that moment when he saw Oswald, and his well-established temper flared when, according to what Ruby’s brother Earl claimed Ruby told him, “there was a smirk on his face, and he thought, Why you little s.o.b.” Regardless of what the truth may be about premeditation, what seems apparent is that it was a classic case of vigilantism.

One of many images capturing Ruby’s murder of Oswald taken. Via Dallas Morning News

Even if we were to disregard the evidence that Ruby had no connections to the mafia, to Oswald, or to a larger conspiracy, simple logic tells us that there was little point in sending someone to silence Oswald. By the time Oswald was killed, he had already been interrogated for 12 hours. He’d had plenty of time to spill the beans on any conspiracy about which he might have had knowledge. Likewise, the many claims about those with special knowledge being silenced by murder squads just doesn’t hold up. Conspiracists claim there are more than a hundred suspicious deaths related to the assassination. More than half of these died of natural causes, and more than half also died more than ten years later, which gives them ages to have divulged anything they might have known. It’s the same problem with the idea that George de Mohrenshchildt was silenced in the 1970s, a decade and a half after he testified before the Warren Commission. Of those supposedly mysterious deaths that occurred within a year of the assassination, some were even convinced of Oswald’s guilt, which makes it seem like there was no reason to silence them, and many had very minor connections to the case. There is the further problem of selectivity. For example, one witness of Oswald’s murder of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit would be shot dead by an intruder in his home a few months later. The claims that this was an act of a conspiracy to silence a witness begs the question why this one witness was brutally murdered while a dozen others who saw the same thing were allowed to live. Furthermore, we must ask why none of the plethora of witnesses on Dealey Plaza are included on this list of witnesses that had to be silenced, while many of them are simply journalists who afterward published about the case. This just illustrates the central problem with most conspiracy speculation: the refusal to acknowledge coincidence. My source JFK Assassination Logic by John McAdams highlights numerous logical problems with conspiracist thinking just like this. Conspiracy speculators rely on cherry-picked, outlier testimony that is demonstrably less credible than other witness claims, they engage in the creation of false memory in leading interviews with witnesses years after the fact, they mislead readers by presenting evidence stripped of important context, and they present an argument that suggests most evidence points to conspiracy, when if that were the case, official investigations would have come to far different conclusions. Finally, they demand that believers suspend disbelief in the face of truly odds-defying scenarios. Simply put, large-scale conspiracies are not plausible. As McAdams demonstrates, even if the odds are extremely low that one member of a given conspiracy might betray the rest and reveal the plot publicly, for any number of reasons, the more people involved in the conspiracy, the higher the probability it will be revealed to the world. Conspiracists like to point to real, genuine conspiracies in their efforts to demonstrate that their claims hold water, but any conspiracy that really occurred stands as evidence against the believability of their claims, since all such genuine conspiracies have been uncovered by whistleblowers and journalists.

After the release of the first part of this series, I was accused of playing down the events surrounding the JFK assassination, of taking a “nothing to see here” point of view. This from conspiracy believers, perhaps unsurprisingly, began to think that I myself have something to hide, that I am engaging in cover-up. I’d like to conclude this series by addressing this. Of course I’m not saying there is “nothing to see here.” This is the longest series I have ever produced on one topic for this podcast. There is a ton to see here. I’m saying that what there is to see here is far different from what many have been led to believe. And far from suggesting that the Dallas police and the FBI have done nothing to contribute to this confusion, they have given the public real reason to be suspicious of them. For example, the night after the assassination, while Oswald was being questioned and Jack Ruby was slapping backs around police headquarters, an assistant district attorney leaked to the press that they intended to indict Oswald for killing Kennedy “in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy.” Later, he invented another story to anonymously provide the press, that Oswald was an FBI informant. In explanation, the attorney, Bill Alexander, explained that he “never much liked the federals” and put out the phony stories to keep them occupied. It’s things just like this that have led to many thinking massive conspiracy is more likely than any mundane explanation, and distrusting authorities who insist the opposite. Then there is the FBI, who appear to have genuinely engaged in a cover-up after Oswald’s capture. Before the assassination, the FBI agent tasked with looking into Oswald after he turned back up on their radar had gone to the Paines’ house and spoken to Marina. Oswald had been so upset, continuing to believe the FBI was hounding him, that he went to the FBI office in Dallas and left a note for the agent (whose name he misspelled) demanding he leave his wife alone. After Oswald death, this note was destroyed. According to the FBI, this was because there was no need to keep it if Oswald could no longer be tried in court, having been killed. In truth, though, this appears to have been a genuine cover-up. Far from a wide-reaching conspiracy, though, the simpler explanation is that Dallas special agent-in-charge J. Gordon Shanklin ordered the note’s destruction just to cover his own butt. J. Edgar Hoover was already certain that Oswald was guilty, and it appeared there would be no need of the evidence, so the only purpose it might serve would be to indict Shanklin and his office as having dropped the ball and not recognized Oswald as the threat he was. So am I convinced law enforcement never acted improperly or was never negligent in this case? Absolutely not. But for all the reasons I’ve given over the course of this series, a massive conspiracy to murder the President is simply not supportable. Of course, it makes a great story, though, and when told by a competent, if unscrupulous, storyteller, it can even convince someone who knows better. That is the case with Marina, Oswald’s wife, who knew her husband better than anyone, and whose testimony demonstrates so clearly that Oswald was a desperate and disturbed individual acting alone. Today, the 80-year-old Marina, despite everything she knows about his temperament, his attempt on Walker’s life, and his behavior the last time she saw him, believes that her husband was innocent, because “[t]here are just too many things,” things conspiracist writers have told her and convinced her are true. In the 1980s, in fact, some conspiracist writers convinced her to approve of Oswald’s exhumation in an attempt to prove that a KGB impersonator had been buried in Oswald’s place. Unsurprisingly, forensic pathologists confirmed using medical and dental records that the remains in his grave were indeed that of Marina’s husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

“Exhumation of Lee Harvey Oswald's casket at Rose Hill Cemetery (Fort Worth) for examination of the body in Dallas, Texas.” (1981) Courtesy Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. UTA Libraries Digital Gallery, https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/10009894.

 Further Reading

 Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.