ested in pre-Columbian arrivals
in the New World by overseas visitors. Her Pale Ink, an
examination of possible Chinese contacts in British Columbia
2,000 years ago, and The Wine Dark Sea, re-thinking Jason
and the Argonauts as transatlantic voyagers in quest of a South
American Golden Fleece, are still sought after by diffusionists.
But Mertz was a professional trained in forgery identification,
and it was in this capacity that she was challenged to either
prove or disprove the authenticity of the Michigan tablets.
After 30 years of research, her conclusions were about to go
into print, but she passed away unexpectedly before publication.
A few years later, her nephew released Henrietta's Mystic
Symbol, Mark of the Michigan Mound Builders. The book argues
that the Michigan relics are largely authentic, and urges their
preservation as genuine relics from a lost American civilization.
During her long years of research, Mertz was able to track down
a large number of artifacts originally collected by the Catholic
priest, Father Soper. After his death, they had been sent to
Notre Dame University for storage.
In all, some 4,000 such items were shipped to Notre Dame in poorly
packaged cracker barrels. About 2,500 objects, more than half
the collection, were badly damaged in transit to the university.
Originally made of brittle clay, many fractured and broke, often
crumbling to pieces. Henrietta requested permission to examine
their surviving collection with an eye to its ownership. She
was allowed to research the artifacts in the company of a Catholic
priest, but university officials were reluctant to give them
up for purely academic purposes.
In the midst of her investigation, the Father with whom she had
been working on the Michigan tablets was coincidentally contacted
by missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day
Saints, commonly known as Mormons. Aware of their second scriptural
book (the Book of Mormon) that testified to the presence of Christ
in America, the priest invited them to inspect the Soper-Savage
collection. Intrigued, the missionaries wasted no time in contacting
Milton R. Hunter of Salt Lake City, Utah, a researcher of American
antiquities.
After several months of communication and visits to Notre Dame,
the school officials chose to turn over |
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the collection to Hunter rather than Henrietta. She was nonetheless
afforded enough time with the artifacts to complete her research
for The Mystic Symbol. Elliot Soper, son of Daniel Soper,
offered his father's collection to Hunter after having learned
of Notre Dame's transference of its artifacts.
Hunter's expanded collection of Michigan plates and related items
is today warehoused in the historical archives of the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Their historical department recently allowed Ancient American
staff and Triple A Productions to photograph Mr. Hunter's
collection in its entirety for continued study.
Enter Burrows Cave
 n 1982, a discovery apparently unrelated
to the Michigan tablets was alleged to have been made by Mr.
Russell Burrows of Olney, Illinois. He claims to have found a
cave in the southern part of his state loaded with the treasures
of foreign visitors who crossed the seas from the Near East,
Europe and Africa about 2,000 years ago.
He claims the site is also a rich repository of stone records
belonging to some unknown people who possessed a high level of
culture. I have known Mr. Burrows since 1993, and compiled a
photographic library of some of his items, which number over
2,000 such stones. I personally examined about half of them,
and have concluded they are authentic artifacts. Although he
refuses to divulge the location of his cave, the sheer number
and sometimes fine workmanship of the artifacts he allegedly
took from the site tend to support their identification as genuine
artifacts.
Even so, many of my fellow diffusionists have condemned the Burrows
Cave finds as part of a hoax. Admittedly, the tangle of frustrating
obstacles, legal and otherwise, preventing any kind of access
to the location's whereabouts have disenchanted very many investigators.
But the full story of Burrows Cave, while yet to be told, is
gradually unfolding with the gradual release of objects never
before seen, and someday we may learn everything there is to
know about this site. There may be a parallel here with the Dead
Sea scrolls, discovered in 1948. Even now, a complete accounting
of this find has still not been disclosed to the public.
Mr. Burrows telephoned me
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two years ago to say that he had purposely withheld some inscribed
stones from sale because of the imagery they featured; namely,
identifiably Christian scenes, mostly Old Testament. He was uncomfortable
with these items, because he feared critics would use such obvious
themes to further debunk his discovery. Mr. Burrows knew some
Indians had knowledge of Old World traditions and Old Testament
stories. But what concerned him was, as he put it, "the
Jesus stones."
At my request, he sent me photographs of them, and I was able
to compare their images of evidently Old Testament themes with
similar representations found on the Michigan tablets. I was
astonished to notice that both sets not only featured scenes
of Jesus Christ, but also the same "Mystic Symbol  ." The same symbol appears
in southern Illinois 62 years after the last published
information concerning the Michigan mound builders using this
identical mark. Approximately 20,000 to 30,000 Michigan
artifacts were excavated from 1848 to the 1920's, compared with
the 6,000 to 7,000 Burrows Cave stones of southern Illinois removed
between 1982 and 1986. These fundamental facts render any possibility
for either collection being a hoax extremely remote, if not impossible.
The predominant glyph found on the Burrows Cave objects is the
so-called "Helios symbol," coined by epigrapher, Paul
Shaffranke. Even this important character is found in conjunction
with the Michigan symbol to suggest some type of inter-action
between these two otherwise distinct groups. Maybe these glyphs
have the same meaning. There appear to have been vital differences
between these two groups of ancient Americans: non-Christian
imagery dominates the Burrows Cave stones.
 till, there are legitimate doubts among our
own diffusionist supporters concerning these "Christ stones,"
due largely to some relatively minor variations in the placement
of glyphs, together with the anomalous appearance of a particular
symbol on the Michigan objects (see page 39). Clearly, much work
still needs to be done in any comparisons of these two diverse
collections. But the evidence of the Michigan Tablets and Burrows
Cave stones suggests that some fundamentally important culture-bearer
visited our Western Hemisphere in pre-Columbian times. Was it
actually the...
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