Author: Brian Nettles

Written by Fred Rydholm: About a century ago there was a great controversy in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Illinois over strange artifacts found between 1874 and 1915 in Indian mounds (mainly in seventeen counties of lower Michigan). Among these artifacts were many large tablets made of clay, slate, stone and (in a few cases) copper. […]

Written by Fred Rydholm: The question which arises is: why this great interest in a cave filled with artifacts, when the people who are used to working with artifacts say the whole thing is a fraud? Barry Fell, founder and president of the Epigraphic Society, claims that these artifacts are all copied from his book […]

Written by Russell Burrows: The series of events which I am now going to relate are so strange that they just do not seem real. They could well have been a script from a James Bond movie. I received a call from my brother; he lives in Virginia and knew about the cave and its […]

Written by Fred Rydholm: Jim Whittall wrote to Burrows saying he was going to come out to Illinois and explore the cave himself. He also said he was going to bring along a man by the name of Chris Bird, to photograph the cave. If Whittall had had the slightest inkling of what Russ Burrows […]

Written by Russell Burrows: Jim Whittall runs the Early Sites Research Society out on the East Coast, and he certainly should have been a good contact for our group. According to what Virginia said, he was into epigraphy, archaeology and other fields relating to Old World diffusion. She thought that he would be a lot […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: On the way back to New York that fall I visited friends who all became excited by my photos of such unusual artifacts. One told me about Oscar Muscarella, a genius in authentication at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who was restudying Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy. He had been invited to […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: Finally, Russell said the owner had agreed, and if I came to Olney on my way back to New York he would take me to the cave. I could hardly wait. Most of the summer was gone by the time I got there and checked into a motel, and then Russell […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: Because we’d had a pleasant conversation the day after a very unpleasant one with Barry Fell, I phoned Barry’s friend Wayne Kenaston to tell him I was coming to San Diego. “Be sure and call me right away,” said Wayne. “I’m dying to see those pictures.” So as soon as I […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: [There is an error in the book where apparently 1 or 2 pages did not get properly included in the final printing. Therefore, this chapter is missing the beginning.] That’s Gloria. Well, at least I didn’t have to try to persuade her that it was a good idea. We arrived in […]

Written by Russell Burrows: In 1987 I was at the end of my rope or very close to it when some people appeared that gave the project a great lift. It started with the visit of a little hunch-back man named Warren Cook. Warren was a PhD from Castleton College in Vermont. He was an […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: Somehow I was able to get everything done, and on Monday I loaded up my motorcycle and took off. My plan was to get to Vincennes before Bart and Robin, and confront him there. I arrived in Vincennes in mid-afternoon on Wednesday, checked into the same mom-and-pop motel and then took […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: One day in March of 1987 I found myself in the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, for the first time in years – the Mid-Manhattan Branch is where they keep the books I usually want – and as I sat on a stool bending […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan One night in February of 1987, the phone rang. It was a call from Warren Cook in Vermont, with his friend the photographer Warren Dexter on the other line. They had just received the slides of photos (finally) from Jim Whittall and were jumping up and down with excitement. Well, Warren […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: In late October I had some slides made from my prints and rode my “new” bike up to Rowley, Massachusetts, to the meeting of the Early Sites Research Society at the home of Jim Whittall. Someone had withdrawn from the program and Jim put me in his place to drop my […]

(Ed.) Herewith a summary of the various narrators’ accounts of this controversy (from #s 36, 38, 39, 44, 50, 54, 56). The Crespi Collection, in Cuenca, Ecuador, contained a stone tablet, a “stele,” with an elephant at top and an inscription below. This “Cuenca elephant stele” apparently disappeared at the death of the collector, Padre […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan I arrived home with seventeen rolls of print film, all but one containing thirty-six shots. I spent hundreds of hours finding a shop to print them adequately, sorting out the best views, obtaining duplicates, cataloging and numbering them and putting them into an album for display – not to mention hundreds […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan As it happened, someone offered me a good deal on a “new” used motorcycle and I bought it. I had come home earlier then usual and had some three weeks to myself before I would have to go back to work. I decided to try out the bike with a trip […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: As I parked my motorcycle at the curb in front of the sleepy little Sonoftobac Museum nestled at the foot of an Indian mound in Vincennes, Indiana, that hot August afternoon in 1986, I rather expected to be disappointed again. The book I’d seen back home in New York City had […]

Written by Russell Burrows: The next event that I consider to be important is the arrival of Virginia Hourigan. This occurred in the late summer or early fall of 1986 if my memory serves me correctly. Now Virginia is something. She is a big gal, not fat mind you, just big. She takes her summer […]