This story can only be called appalling… and bizarre. And yet, it is true and easy to check. It once again demonstrated what happens when you find something that doesn’t fit into the Current Accepted Official Story. I thought of this story recently as I drove on a back road through north central Indiana. I spotted a mound in a farmer’s field. The mound had not been studied (90% or so have never been opened) and it showed some signs of leveling due to agriculture. I stopped the car and looked at it for awhile, wondering if the farmer knew what he had. I remembered the story that unfolded in 1939 Ohio and thought, “Maybe it’s just as well…”

Two postmen who worked a route in New Benton (outside of Youngstown), Ohio noticed what they believed was an Indian mound in a farmer’s field. It was an impressive earthwork almost 100 feet long and six feet high on average. They talked the owner of the land, John Malsberry, into allowing some amateur archaeologists (Willis Magrath and Roy Saltsman) from Alliance, Ohio to excavate the mound. No official archaeologists were interested, per usual. Three weeks of careful, documented digging later they uncovered one of the oddest, most amazing finds in American history. Inside the mound were the remains of a circular building 70 feet in diameter, 20 feet tall. There was a stone wall all around the outside of the building; sandstone slabs laid carefully by — most likely — the Adena/Allegheny. Beyond the stone wall were the remains of posts that once encircled the building. They had been burned before the building was buried for reasons we can’t even guess at.

The whole thing was reminiscent of New Grange in Ireland, a massive tomb complex that is now a major tourist attraction. The find in Ohio would never get to that point, though, because it was too far out of the Mainstream Story. The building had a single entrance with a corridor 30 feet long flanked by wooden posts. Inside was a fire pit, a large eagle effigy made out of sandstone sitting on a clay platform (32 by 16 feet), and human remains. A man’s remains were on the left wing of the eagle, a female’s on the right wing. Both were surrounded by offerings of copper, flint, bone, pipes, and jewelry. Two smashed skulls were at the man’s feet, one at the woman’s. What seems to be an altar made of rough, undressed stone was along the wall. Two more rooms were found eventually containing smaller altars and cremains. Then, beyond that, the skeleton of a very large man. Measuring the skull, Magrath said his hat size would have been nine. He stood 6 feet, 10 inches tall. He was much larger than the other skeletons.

The local paper, the Youngstown Vindicator, documented each stage of the excavation including the find of a swastika symbol on one slab. The swastika is a very, very ancient symbol that is still used by many cultures and religions. Hitler ruined it, of course, turning it into a symbol of unimaginable evil. Many eastern religions use it and it appears in ancient European sites repeatedly. I am no expert on symbols and don’t know the whole history of the thing, but finding it in a mound would have been a shocker, I’m sure.

The amateurs realized they were way, way over their heads. They called in a professional, Dr. Richard Morgan of the Ohio State University. He scrupulously documented every find, every photograph, every artifact. He sent detailed reports to the Smithsonian Institute… and they didn’t respond. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t get the Washington gurus interested in their find. It was too… odd. It didn’t fit the simple “savages traveled across the Bering Strait and found an empty land nobody had ever seen before” story that politicians relied upon. Universities didn’t get money from the government if they displease the head honchos in Congress, so the Ohio find was ignored… completely. Fact is, a lot of things sent to the Smithsonian never see the light of day again. Sad, but true.

After a year of trying to interest the Smithsonian, Dr. Morgan gave up. He ordered the site recovered to protect it from the crowds that were gathering every day (one actually trod on a skull, destroying it. That was the last straw). Three feet of dirt was piled on top of the site and that is where it stands today. Whoever built this ceremonial center, this incredible burial ground, did it again and again. There are three other known eagle effigy mounds, two in Wisconsin and one in Georgia. Fact is, the one in Georgia is almost an exact copy of the one in North Benton, Ohio. Also unexplained — and perhaps unexplainable — is one artifact found in both: a hollow copper ball. How in the world did they make that?

We’ll never know. Because the Keepers of the Official Story don’t care to find out.