Written by Russell Burrows:
Now just what does a person do when they have stumbled onto something like this? Should you make a mad dash to the local newspapers and report the fact that a cave has been discovered? I would advise against it, at least until you know more about it. At the time I didn’t know whose land it was on, and there is always the possibility of hordes of curious people crowding in. Things could disappear at a rapid rate before somebody took charge, and then it could be the wrong people. I decided to move slowly. I couldn’t let the whole world know, but I figured I should get to the proper authorities. After all, you would think there are many people in the relevant scientific fields who are out there just waiting for someone to make this kind of discovery, so that it can add one more piece to the puzzle of human existence on earth. Well, this does not seem to be the case.
It seems that what you are supposed to do is turn everything over to someone else and then fade out of the picture. Well, the find makes it a part of me, and I want to be in on each step of the discovering, not in the way, but in on it. Unless you are willing to relinquish all your rights, all your time, expense, ingenuity and efforts to the scholars and then back away from it all, you are called a fraud and a liar, or at best just a publicity seeker.
And even if you do turn it over, you are liable to be told that your discovery is of no value. Then it may lay quietly hidden away and forgotten, possibly for no other reason than that it just doesn’t fit into the over-all criteria in which academia is entrenched. Believe me, I speak from first-hand knowledge and experience. There are true open-minded, investigative scientists out there, but they seem to be in the minority. And how do you find them?
While I did not turn everything over I did try to do what I thought was the right thing. I reported the cave and its contents to some scholars, and presented some of the artifacts to them for their consideration. Their reaction was that the whole thing was a phoney, and if not phoney it certainly was not old.