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 of help to us and, well, he should have been.
I decided to get in touch with him and find out just what our next step should be.
Jim’s first suggestion was that I write him a letter explaining what had been found in the cave and provide a description of the cave and what was in there.
In the meantime, Virginia had been to one of the Early Sites meetings and had shown the photos that she had taken on her visit to Vincennes. She also displayed a few artifacts that I had given her, and according to her those attending were quite impressed with both the photos and the artifacts.
Shortly thereafter I received another letter from Jim. In this letter he said that he had studied the artifacts under a microscope and that he had observed microscopic plant material embedded in the stone which indicated to him that the stones had been in the ground in excess of a hundred years.
Well now! It seemed that we were finally getting somewhere.
Written by Fred Rydholm:
Russell Burrows was by now getting very gun shy. It seemed that as soon as an outsider entered the scene they wanted to take over and started making demands. They stopped asking and started telling and usually implied that Russell should just bow out now – not even gracefully.
This was Russell’s discovery and his baby. He wanted to see it studied and studied correctly. These people who were always so willing didn’t seem to realize that they had to prove themselves first, offer suggestions, make
recommendations, offer to work with whatever was being done.
Many times, when Russell Burrows started to become suspicious, these people would become even more aggressive and demanding. The pattern was that Russell would usually counter in no uncertain terms. Then instead of seeing the failure of their ways, retracting and coming back with a softer or more acceptable approach, it just became obvious to them that everything was fraudulent, the stuff was manufactured and there probably wasn’t even any cave at all. It seems that none of the experts ever realized what they were dealing with. No one ever got the whole story, none ever even got near the cave, and none seemed to know how to (or even wanted to) gain the confidence of Russell Burrows.
A case in point was Jim Whittall, probably a very capable scientist in his field, but he and Russell Burrows ended up going out of their way to defame each other.