On my most recent American road trip, to Michigan and back, I heard not once but twice, from different people, about a man who had just given a TED talk about the discovery, throughout America, of eight-foot-tall humanish skeletons with double rows of teeth. The claim sounded bogus, but I had nothing but respect for the people who reported this to me, nor anything bad to say about the intellectual level of most TED talks. I was intrigued and figured I would watch the talk when I had opportunity to get on the internet for an extended period of time.
By chance my entire trip ended up being relevant to this talk, as I will detail shortly. The lecture, delivered by Jim Vieira, did not impress me too much in the end. It is not difficult to sniff out something bogus, once you get into the habit. I used to listen at times to a late-night radio show called “Coast to Coast,” the topic of which was anything paranormal. The show was obviously entertainment and not science, though of course in order to keep it entertaining it had to pretend to be science. It had a host who managed – sort of like the first and third Indiana Jones movies – to be reasonable while talking about what was actually pretty goofy. That host retired and a new one took his place, and the man behind the curtain became a little more evident. Each guest who came on to present his “research” – about aliens, multiple universes, time travel (these some people take quite seriously as science), as well as yeti, the Loch Ness monster, extrasensory perception, ghosts, and all other sorts of things which are unfortunately just bogus – fell into the same pattern. They all leaned heavily on authorities and credentials – it was important to try to quote reseach from “Harvard” or “Cornell” or someone who had “a Ph.D.” The second thing they all did was use the word “documented.” You might not be able to replicate something in a lab, but it had been “documented,” which apparently meant “true.” This kind of reasoning is used, for instance, to support Joseph Smith’s claim to have found golden plates with several hundred pages’ worth of scriptures written in “reformed Egyptian”: he rounded up a group of men, all honorable men, we are told, who swore affidavits that they had seen the plates. It is, hence, documented. How can you not be convinced?
So I was not too impressed when Jim Vieira, giving his TED talk about eight-foot giants with double rows of teeth, after running quickly through several Moundbuilder sites in the United States – which are impressive, by the way, and real, though not technologically very complex – proceeded to provide screen shots of dozens of newspaper articles from the 19th century about the discovery of giants in these mounds – even from The New York Times!!! Needless to say, a million such articles would not make the “discovery” any more true – only more documented. What we require is for Mr. Vieira to follow through on at least one case. Of course what we really want are the bones. He notes that some of the bones were sent to the Smithsonian – well, it is his duty to find them, or find the report on them, or make sense of the institution’s official denial of their existence. And if the military-industrial complex is suppressing the information, then he will have to go outside the system to get his bones. Surely if there were hundreds of such discoveries, not all the bones have been locked away in the secret vault (with the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail and everything else the military-industrial complex has squirreled away). And if hundreds of discoveries have already been made, a talented archaeologist can probably find one more site to excavate.
Mr. Vieira has done none of this, and so I think he has earned himself an appearance on Coast to Coast but not any respect from the truth-seeking empiricists out there. Documents are not data, just as an I.D. doesn’t make you twenty-one.
But as I said before, my road trip, quite coincidentally, brought me to not just one but two sites of importance to Jim Vieira’s talk. My trip was bringing me through the Ohio Valley, which is famed for its Moundbuilder sites, and in particular near Moundsville, West Virginia, which I had wanted to see for years. This was my chance.
One of my first questions with these mounds was how we knew they were artificial as opposed to natural formations, but all doubt on that count is immediately dispelled when you see the mound. It does not look, at all, like a natural earth formation. It looks immediately different. That said, this difference has to be experienced in person, as the photograph I took (and other photos I saw) do not do the mound any justice at all. When you climb to the top it feels much, much larger than it looks in pictures, larger and steeper and more impressive.
There is an interpretive museum next to the mound, with some information on the Native Americans who built it. The museum indicates that skeletons and artifacts, some displayed there, were found on the site, but there is no mention of giants or anything unusual besides a single, tiny (three-inch) piece of pottery with ciphers carved into it, which look like letters. The genuineness of this shard, discovered before systematic archeology, has been called into question. It certainly would not be difficult to fake. It resembles many dozens of other similar finds throughout North America, all of which were discovered about the same time as Joseph Smith’s plates, and all of which found dozens of people willing to translate them. They often were interpreted as testimonies to Jesus. None have been found since the Joseph Smith fad faded out of the American mainstream.
Similarly, no giants have been found since the late 19th century, a curious coincidence. Perhaps the military-industrial complex started getting good at suppression around then, and they just recently started faltering, and that would explain why the Biblical/Mormon Truth about giants has been covered up until now.
TED has of course gotten into some trouble for putting their name on this bunkum, and they have pulled the talk. This has made the conspiracy theorists go wild, of course. The thing that would be of most interest to the crazies – and actually the reason why I think this has emerged as part of the story, though no one has produced a skull as proof – is the double row of dentition. Dentition lasts, so it is especially important in paleontology, and it has proven to be a reliable indicator of species, and so it is a large part of the material evidence for evolution. A race of human beings with duplicated dentition would at least probe the evolutionary theory. And so to suggest such a thing to some religious Americans is like throwing fish to dolphins – they will jump through any number of intellectually degrading hoops to get it.
The fact that the skeletons are of giants, though, is important as well, because of the line in the Bible “there were giants in those days.” Bible-thumpers are always on the lookout for giants. Of course, Vieira (and TED) should know this, and should be looking for very solid evidence when dealing with something that people rather desperately want to believe. Desire is the mother of credulity, and credulity is the ore from which confidence men make gold.
And so it was with some satisfaction that my trip home, by chance, brought me to the area in New York state just south of Syracuse, on US-20, a beautiful old highway, where I passed the very spot, right there on the highway (convenient for visitors), where the Cardiff Giant was discovered. A sign indicated the site of the discovery. This was not a planned part of my itinerary, but it certainly was suggestive.
I had seen the Cardiff Giant as a child, when visiting Cooperstown, where it is now kept. My father knew the story of its discovery well, and regarded it with all the good-natured contempt that a born storyteller feels for some old-fashioned hokum. The hoax had been commissioned by a cynical skeptic, specifically to demonstrate how stupid the American religious mind was on the topic of giants, fossilization, the Bible, and the past. After having the giant carved by a sculptor, he had it buried on his property and then hired two men to dig a well a year later on the precise spot where the giant had been hidden. The discovery caused a sensation. It was documented in newspapers across the country. The owner erected a tent over the giant and charged people a quarter just to see it; the crowds were so vast, however, and the profits so tempting, that he doubled the price the next day. People trekked out to pay the fee for months. One local clergyman, a man of wealth and taste in town, after seeing the Giant, noted how hard-hearted the gentiles must be, to fly in the face of such evident Biblical truth. On the other hand, people with even average intelligence noted that the Giant was nothing but a bad statue and that there was no reason to be digging a well in the spot where it had been found.
The owner, having had about enough of the hoax, sold it to a group of entrepreneurs for $25,000, who immediately took the Giant on the road, heading south towards the Big Apple where they expected to mint a fortune. P.T. Barnum, coming a bit late to the party, offered to buy it off the entrepreneurs for $50,000, which they refused. ($50,000 at the time was 2500 ounces of gold, about $4 million today). Barnum having been frustrated came up with a scheme which revealed that as much as he was a scoundrel so much was he a genius: he sent a minion to get measurements of the Giant, then had a copy made of plaster, which he had aged appropriately and began showing in New York before the original fraud made it to town. When the owners of the Giant remonstrated, Barnum brazenly declared their Giant was a fraud and he had the real Giant. The reply of Barnum’s opponents (“there’s a sucker born every minute”) has gone down in history as a bit of American wisdom native-grown and ever-green. They sued, but since their Giant was a fraud, they lost the case in court, a hoax of a hoax being before the law as genuine as any other hoax, an undoubtedly important legal principle not satisfactorily appreciated today. This is Mark Twain material, and sure enough, he did not disappoint, writing a story about the ghost of the Cardiff Giant, who got a bit turned around in all the travelling and started haunting Barnum’s copy, and had to be told that he was haunting the wrong remains:
We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked tired, and spoke of it. “Tired?” he said. “Well, I should think so. And now I will tell you all about it, since you have treated me so well. I am the spirit of the Petrified Man that lies across the street there in the Museum. I am the ghost of the Cardiff Giant. I can have no rest, no peace, till they have given that poor body burial again. Now what was the most natural thing for me to do, to make men satisfy this wish? Terrify them into it! — haunt the place where the body lay! So I haunted the museum night after night. I even got other spirits to help me. But it did no good, for nobody ever came to the museum at midnight. Then it occurred to me to come over the way and haunt this place a little. I felt that if I ever got a hearing I must succeed, for I had the most efficient company that perdition could furnish. Night after night we have shivered around through these mildewed halls, dragging chains, groaning, whispering, tramping up and down stairs, till, to tell you the truth, I am almost worn out. But when I saw a light in your room to-night I roused my energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness. But I am tired out — entirely fagged out. Give me, I beseech you, give me some hope!”
I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement, and exclaimed:
“This transcends everything — everything that ever did occur! Why you poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing — you have been haunting a PLASTER CAST of your- self — the real Cardiff Giant is in Albany! Confound it, don’t you know your own remains?”
Since the business of giants was so good, the Cardiff Giant soon had other imitators besides Barnum. One, the Solid Muldoon, was apparently a more artful effort, involving real bones and flesh and dirt and plaster and sand and wax and other ingredients to create something that really looked like a petrified giant. (This is the proper context for the pictures Vieira shows). But of course the Cardiff Giant had proven that you didn’t need to go to great lengths to turn a profit in this business (for all its fame, it is nevertheless a ridiculous-looking, patent fraud). And newspaper editors could be counted on to document the whole thing, because stories like this got readers and weren’t bad for business in town either.
Mr. Vieira has yet to prove that he is talking about anything other than this massive 19th century humbug, and I’m not expecting anything scientifically promising to come out of his quarter. Because of the pertinacity of the printed and Biblical word (which, as the Scripture tells us, kills), people are still looking for precisely the same bunkum they were looking for a hundred fifty years ago, and they are still willing to pay cash. It is a curious religion, that insists that the only proof of God is to be had from the Bible; hence these people will trample on the goldenrods and fireflies of the field – which are great miracles of the Maker but unfortunately not the subject of any Bible-verses – to get a glimpse of a Biblically predicted fraud.
And a hundred years later, we can go through the same nonsense, but all from the comfort of our homes, on our computers, powered by fossil fuels. We don’t even have to visit the fields to show our stupidity. We can trample on the fireflies from afar: I mention this because the area around the Cardiff Giant is underlain by the famed Marcellus shale. People might be digging a large number of new wells in the area quite soon, in pursuit of more profitable hokum. It takes a lot of fossil fuels to power all our electric gew-gaws.
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