What if everything you know is wrong? Once a society has accepted something as truth, or agreed to a common myth, it builds high walls around it to protect it, to repel all boarders. Think of those professors who have recently said that universities should refuse to give anyone a Ph.D. in science — any science — if that person is found to be a creationist. Or think of the Weather Channel weather expert who wants any weather person who doesn’t accept man-caused global warning kicked out of the AMS. 

Or think of Kennewick Man. July 28th, 1996 the nearly complete skeleton of a man was found in a recently eroded bank of the Columbia River. Law enforcement officers quickly realized it wasn’t a murder scene but an archaeological one. Scientists were called in and the bones were dated at 9200 years old. That’s when the problems began, for the bones were of a Caucasian man, one who would have lived and died here long before most Native Americans came across the land bridge from Asia. Indian tribes immediately demanded the bones back for burial. They wanted them gone so that they could continue to be considered the first Americans. The Clinton administration ordered the bones handed over and the scientists took the matter to court. The Army Corps of Engineers was ordered to rebury the bones and did so under several metric tons of rubble. A law was passed making it illegal to dig there or to study the bones that escaped reburial! The standard history of man in America couldn’t be allowed to be broken. There were too many political interests involved to allow the truth to come out.

Some bones were kept for research purposes and that continues. Recent research indicates that Kennewick Man might have been a European/Asian mix as his bones and DNA show characteristics of both groups. Controversy rages, of course.

An isolated event? Not really. A cave full of skeletons of a red haired, caucasoid people was found in the Western desert of Nevada after local Indian legends concerning a long battle between red haired white people and Indians was taken seriously and examined. Roman coins have been dug up in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Ohio. I have twice been to a very strange place just outside of Poteau, Oklahoma. There, in the northeast of that State, is a tiny village called Heavener. Above the town on the side of a beautiful mountain is a large rock, twelve feet tall, ten feet wide, and 16 inches thick. On its surface are several deeply carved characters. When it was discovered in 1874 the locals called it Indian Rock, assuming that the natives had carved it. When asked, however, every tribe said it was there when they got there! In the last 30 years it has been found to be runic carvings of a Norse alphabet that died out by the year 1350 and which we did not discover and understand until fifty years ago — meaning it cannot be a hoax. The runes say that the valley belongs to someone named Glomi. Three other runic stones have been found in Oklahoma alone along with Roman coins and northern European pottery.

It is known that a Scandinavian King named Magnus sent a party towards Greenland in several ships in the year 1355. It was a large party designed to settle there and solidify the Swedish claim on that territory. The ships never arrived. Historians thought the party must have perished at sea until 1898 when a local man plowed up a runestone in Minnesota. The runestone was dated 1362 and spoke of a stranded party of Norwegian and Goth explorers (Norway belonged to Sweden at this time) and an attack that was made on them. It is only a few sentences long but the splash it made was huge. It has often been declared a hoax but in 2000 a large number of archaeologists, geologists, and linguists met in St. Paul to announce their findings: the stone is genuine. Its carvings are much, much older than 1898, the year it was found. Everything about the stone, the carvings, the characters, the style of language, etc. point to the 1300’s.

The point? Long before the settlement at Jamestown people were coming to this country. Sometimes they came by design and other times it was by accident, but they made it here and survived for short times before being killed, dying out, or intermarrying with tribes they found and, thus, disappearing from history forever except for some writings, some coins, and some goods that are "out of place and time." This is no mass migration such as appears in the Mormon myths, but it is significant for it changes the possibilities, the explanations, for things found in the US that have no good, standard explanation.

Such as the forts of Madoc. Madoc was a Welsh prince who took a large party with him to the west across the sea to find new land and opportunities. Years after he left, he came back and gathered a second group. After they left, history has nothing else to say about him. Maps left behind in Wales where he rallied a second group of settlers are exactly like the southern coast of Alabama around Mobile. Indian legends in Alabama are full of stories of white settlers that arrived at the time of Madoc (1139). Forts built in the area around Chattanooga, TN are copies of the home of Madoc in Wales; the floorplans are exactly the same. Local Cherokees say they didn’t build the forts but that a white people did long ago. Reverend Morgan Jones was captured by the Tuscararos Indians in 1669 and was about to be executed when the chief heard him speaking in Welsh… and replied to him in the same language. Again and again history records people coming into contact with "Welsh Indians."

Are any of these people left among us? Do they know who they are? How do they pass on their history and yet keep their own societies, their own bloodlines, intact? How about the many tales of stranded Portuguese sailors, groups of whom made their way into the interior of the Southeast before being lost to history? Or what of the six Spanish expeditions that were launched into the Southeast and then disappeared? Are there traces of these people left in the rocks or in the DNA of Americans? We’ll continue this story in a few days and begin to answer some of the questions I posed in the last column.

And how did the Scots get involved in all of this….?