Regarding Childress and Egyptians in the Grand Canyon, featured in the "American Nephilim" video above. He's very, very mistaken. If guys like Childress did their homework as guys like Calavito do, some of this foolishness could be corrected before it enters "legend". Here, Cavalito explains Childress's fundamental error. The entire story is a fantasy. And that is not really surprising, either. It was not uncommon for newspapers of the mid 19th-early 20th century to print tall tales, for want of a better name. No side bars saying "this is fiction", just in there with the rest of the actual news. Journalistic standards were different. It was not unique to the western states, but the yarns were often located there.
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/1/post/201 ... asure.html
"The "Egyptian" Grand Canyon Cave
Against this rather straightforward progression of fringe ideas about Egyptian voyages to America is the story of the Grand Canyon cave where modern legend imagines that the Egyptians had some sort of magical tomb, temple, or base. This story was the subject of one of the very first skeptical articles I ever wrote, back in 2002, and nothing has changed any of the conclusions that were already obvious back then.
The story begins in March of 1909 when on a newspaper called the Arizona Gazette began recording the adventures of an explorer called G. E. Kinkaid. On April 5, 1909 it published under the headline “Explorations in the Grand Canyon” the story of how a Smithsonian scholar named S. A. Jordan and an adventurer named G. E. Kinkaid had found a series of caves in the Grand Canyon stuffed with artifacts of no certain provenance and room for 50,000 (!) people. I have of course placed the full text of the article in my Library.
The article is and remains a hoax, not dissimilar to the great Moon Hoax of 1835, Mark Twain’s Petrified Man hoax of 1862, or, more closely still, the Atlantis hoax of 1912, when William Randolph Hearst’s New American ran a two page “report” about an archaeologist’s discovery of proof of Atlantean influence on ancient cultures worldwide. We’ll look into the characters involved more below, but suffice it to say that 1909 was in the middle of a period of rampant hoaxing, what by some accounts was the heyday of hoaxing. In 1899, reporters from four Denver newspapers hoaxed the claim that American businesses were bidding for the right to demolish the Great Wall of China. In October 1899 McClure’s Magazine published a story claiming that a live wooly mammoth had been found and killed. The magazine had to apologize that it wasn’t labeled as clearly as it could have been that it was fictional after readers complained to the Smithsonian about the death of the last mammoth. In 1909, Wallace Tillinghast hoaxed a super-advanced airplane that supposedly could travel 120 miles per hour.
More darkly, the Russian government hoaxed the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903, and someone—it’s still not known for certain who—faked the Piltdown Man skull in 1912, impacting scientific understanding of evolution for four decades.
The Arizona Gazette article, backed by no contemporary documentation, very clearly falls in line behind its more famous contemporaries. This becomes still clearer when we look at other troubling signs. The article never quotes S. A. Jordan, and it mistakenly calls the Smithsonian Institution the “Smithsonian Institute.” No records document the existence of S. A. Jordan, G. E. Kinkaid, or any Smithsonian expedition to the Grand Canyon in 1909. (There was a real S. A. Jordon—note the spelling—but he was a European field archaeologist.)
While fringe writers see this as proof of a conspiracy, the Smithsonian itself has repeatedly fielded questions about the 1909 article. In 2000, the Smithsonian wrote in response to one inquiry from the old Sightings website:
The Smithsonian Institution has received many questions about an article in the April 5, 1909 Phoenix Gazette about G. E. Kincaid and his discovery of a 'great underground citadel' in the Grand Canyon, hewn by an ancient race 'of oriental origin, possibly from Egypt.' According to the article, Prof. Jordan directed a major investigation of the 'citadel' that was mounted by the Smithsonian.
The Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology, has searched its files without finding any mention of a Professor Jordan, Kincaid, or a lost Egyptian civilization in Arizona. Nevertheless, the story continues to be repeated in books and articles.
Note the peculiar phrase in quotation marks. It will come up again.
The Smithsonian gave a nearly identical reply to Jack Andrews in 1999.
Contrary to modern claims that the cave system described in the article was the work of Egyptians, the article suggested that its closest connection was to the Tibetans, in keeping with Theosophical ideas about the mysterious East. Consider the ancient statue supposedly found in the caves: “The idol almost resembles Buddha, though the scientists are not certain as to what religious worship it represents. Taking into consideration everything found thus far, it is possible that this worship most resembles the ancient people of Tibet.” The article has Kinkaid tell readers that the cave was filled with objects like those from “oriental” (i.e. Asian) temples and Malay-style figures.
At no point does the article ever claim that the caves are Egyptian. That connection comes from confusion over a few lines of the article, where the writer tries to use Hopi myths about the tribe’s origin in an underground civilization to suggest, as Theosophy had done, that a lost civilization from Asia or Atlantis was the origin point for both Egypt and the Native American cultures:
Egypt and the Nile, and Arizona and the Colorado will be linked by a historical chain running back to ages which staggers the wildest fancy of the fictionist. […] There are two theories of the origin of the Egyptians. One is that they came from Asia; another that the racial cradle was in the upper Nile region. [German historian Arnold Hermann Ludwig] Heeren [1760-1842], an Egyptologist, believed in the Indian origin of the Egyptians. The discoveries in the Grand Canyon may throw further light on human evolution and prehistoric ages.
Heeren was not an Egyptologist, though as an early nineteenth-century historian of antiquity he did speculate on the ancient Vedic origins of Egypt, in keeping with the then-popular theory that India was the cradle of the Aryan race and thus the oldest civilization on earth.
The author of the newspaper article is trying to imply that the cave was a prehistoric relic of the lost civilization that gave rise to Egypt and the Americas—that the Native Americans were the degenerate remains of a once noble Asian civilization. This is entirely in keeping with turn of the twentieth century speculation about the origins of Native Americans and the longstanding belief that Native peoples were degenerate, decayed, and doomed to cultural extinction.
Modern fringe writers, ignorant of the historical context, misread this as suggesting that the Egyptians had occupied the Grand Canyon caves. This is not at all what the obviously more educated hoaxer intended. That hoaxer was trying to fabricate evidence for a Theosophy-style lost civilization that spawned both Egyptians and Native American cultures from a heartland in central Asia, then believed to be the oldest civilized area on earth, in keeping with early claims for the antiquity of Sanskrit, the presumed language of the most ancient Aryans.
This hoax was not interesting enough for other newspapers to pick up, probably because it was so easily disproved with a simple telegram to the Smithsonian. It languished until David Hatcher Childress dug it up and published a discussion of it in Lost Cities of North and Central America, which was reprinted in Nexus magazine in 1993.
Childress misread the article and announced that the inhabitants of the cave were Egyptian—and that the Smithsonian was engaged in a cover-up, even though to confirm it he did nothing more than call the switchboard. He talked to a staff archaeologist who denied the story, and he concluded that this suggested a conspiracy:
Is the idea that ancient Egyptians came to the Arizona area in the ancient past so objectionable and preposterous that is must be covered up? Perhaps the Smithsonian Institution is more interested in maintaining the status quo than rocking the boat with astonishing new discoveries that totally overturn the previously accepted academic teachings.
Childress claimed as evidence two “facts”: First, he said that the Grand Canyon was filled with Hindu and Egyptian place names, which he believed were used to signal the true history of the caves. Second, he claimed that the government forbids all public access to the “Egyptian” areas of the Grand Canyon. As it happens, in the 1880s (before the newspaper hoax) the U.S. Geological Survey tried mapping the Grand Canyon and, having run out of local names, the surveyors used names from Greek, Roman, Germanic, Egyptian, and Hindu mythology. A known individual—Capt. Dutton—began using the Hindu and Egyptian names because he found Native American names “ugly.” Other members of the Survey team disagreed violently, and there were many arguments before the names were finally officially accepted in 1923 simply through inertia. (Some were still angry about it decades later!) The “Egyptian” area of the canyon is open to tourists, with the caveat that there is little water and few trails, so it is recommended only for experienced hikers. The only area closed to the public under any circumstances is Furnace Flats (AG9), an unstable archaeological site with masonry. Limited other areas, mostly access roads, are also off limits.
As should be obvious, the 1909 Arizona Gazette hoaxer took the Tibetan and Egyptian inspiration for the article from the pre-existing Hindu and Egyptian place names applied by chance to the canyon two decades earlier.
After a pirated copy of Childress’s article was published online on May 8, 1993 with a directive to repost and share, the story became a staple of fringe history. David Icke, among others, adopted the tale of the cave for his The Biggest Secret: “My own research suggests that it is from another dimension, the lower fourth dimension, that the reptilian control and manipulation is primarily orchestrated.” He further claimed that the Freemasons hold dark rites in the cave to honor the reptilians. In so doing, he originated the phrase “oriental or possibly Egyptian origin” to describe the caves, which you will recognize from the Smithsonian’s statement. (See, I told you it would pop up again!)
Weirdly enough, all of this ended up tying back to Edgar Cayce when 1990s-era writers began to speculate that John Ora Kinnaman, a maverick archaeologist who sought to validate Cayce’s prophecies, had provided proof of the caves’ existence. In the 1950s, Kinnaman tried to prove that the Great Pyramid was 35,000 years old and claimed that a giant crystal under the pyramid allowed the Egyptians to send instant telepathic messages to the Grand Canyon. For 1990s writers, this became “evidence” that Kinnaman knew of the Grand Canyon “find” but conveniently failed to mention it. Kinnaman also claimed to have found the Atlantean Hall of Records, which housed the Ark of the Covenant. Does Scott Wolter know about this?
As always, not a shred of evidence exists that this cave ever had a physical existence.
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For me, the jury is very much in, at least on Egyptians in the Grand Canyon. Childress is a joke of a researcher and if an interview of him is supposed to elevate the conversation, it won't. Throwing everything in sight against the blackboard to see if it will stick, which is the research methodology employed by Childress, does not elevate the conversation, it lowers it. Pop Alternative History. Fluff.
Let your imagination run wild, and by all means leave your discriminating intelligence at home. Oh, yeah, we're bound to find the truth that way.
Science can be an arrogant stinker: rocks don't fall from the sky! They do. Clovis was here first! They wern't.
But, what Marzulli has crafted is much more akin to the hierarchachal universe of the Christian Gnostics then it is to anything else. Uni, if you think the jury is still out and these skulls might be part alien or angels, that's your call. Nothing here makes such a suggestion apparent to me.
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But, have no fear, defenders of America's "true" history! Scott Wolter to the rescue! He is calling for a Congressional Investigation of the Smithsonian! How dare they hide our history, that Egyptian cave is down there somewhere:
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/1/post/201 ... n-dna.html
