Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  Though Fomenko’s theories hold no water and are easily disproved, it has not stopped the public from buying his books or indulging in speculation. Russian chess master Gary Kasparov became a willing convert, opining that Fomenko’s theories were a revelation because there “were too many discrepancies and contradictions that could not be explained within the framework of traditional chronology.”[397] While it is exhilarating to think that accepted knowledge could be wrong, and that humanity is on the verge of a major revision of its history, in fact the entire enterprise is constructed on a foundation of flaws, inconsistencies, and errors.

  44. Did the Hopi Predict the End of the World?

  Many alternative writers claim that the Hopi have “ancient” prophecies that foretold the Euro-American settlement of the continental United States as well as its ultimate destruction by nuclear weapons. Such prophecies are often said to have come from a spirit being from Sirius known as the Blue Star Kachina, whom ancient astronaut writers claim is an extraterrestrial being, one of the creatures Robert Temple imagined served as the prototype for the Babylonian myth of Oannes. However, I have not been able to trace the phrase “Blue Star Kachina” back before 1963, when the novelist and New Age mystic Frank Waters used the term in his The Book of the Hopi. I have also not been able to find any scholarly report confirming that this name for Sirius predated the New Age movement. It seems to be the result of another “revised” chronology, one project a modern invention into the ancient past.

  Where the term does appear, however, is in two “ancient” Hopi prophecies that have made the rounds across hundreds of alternative books and thousands of websites. The more detailed of these prophecies is attributed to a Hopi named White Feather. the prophecies foretell nine things, eight of which have happened: (1) European colonization, (2) pioneers in wagons, (3) cattle ranching, (4) train tracks, (5) telephone lines, (6) highways, (7) oil spills, and (8) hippies. The ninth seems to refer to a space station, and the coda at the end makes clear reference to nuclear war. The space station reference, however, may not be what was intended. The prophecy is so vague it could refer to a jet aircraft, or, more likely, to an event that happened in the past. In Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), Graham Hancock visited the Hopi elder Paul Sifki, who told him that he remembered a supernova in the early 1900s, “a star that exploded,” which his grandfather had told him foretold the destruction of the earth.[398] I wonder if the prophecies’ author, White Feather, wasn’t referring to this or a similar event. I can’t find a nova from the early 1900s, but one was observed in 1885 in the vicinity of the Andromeda galaxy; however, any number of rare astronomical events could produce similar light shows, not necessarily an actual supernova. Heck, for all I know, Sifki could have witnessed the disintegrating comet that caused the Tunguska event of 1908, when that comet (or asteroid) exploded over Siberia.

  My reference to the Tunguska event, I think, clues you in that the prophecies aren’t exactly what they seem. If these were truly “ancient” Hopi prophecies, this would be astonishing—and indeed many alternative writers claim them as such. (Even the 2005 encyclopedia Gods, Goddesses, and Mythology claims they are ancient—and accurate.[399]) However, these “prophecies” were concocted ex post facto in 1958, when at least eight of the nine prophecies had already happened, nuclear war was a pervasive fear, and science fiction had made space stations a probable future occurrence. The prophecies were supposedly uttered to the Methodist pastor David Young after Young picked up White Feather as a hitchhiker. The strong Christian apocalyptic themes in the prophecy make plain that Young was likely far more than the mere transmitter of the prophecies; the text was allegedly first circulated in Christian churches in 1959 in privately-printed handbills but is only known (to me at least) from the published sources, including Something in This Book Is True (1997) by Bob Frisell.[400] I cannot find references to the prophecy earlier than 1980, when it appeared in Rolling Thunder: The Coming Earth Changes by Joey R. Jochmans.[401] If this is in fact the case, the blue star referenced would therefore likely be dependent upon the blue star we are about to meet in the next prophecy.

  A second Hopi prophecy, today often paired with the first, also predicts a third World War, the destruction of the United States by nuclear weapons, and the rise of a single world government. Needless to say, this prophecy dates from 1963, as recorded by Frank Waters in The Book of the Hopi, and is similarly not ancient. Interestingly, though, this prophecy makes explicit that the end of the world will come when Saquasohuh Kachina dances.[402] The name “Saquasohuh” means “Blue Star,” the same “blue star” referred to by White Feather. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I am unable to find a clear reference to the “blue star” in any document published prior to the 1980 and 1963 texts, and it seems likely that if the White Feather prophecies are really from the 1980s, they therefore are merely expanding upon and reworking the prophecy from The Book of the Hopi. Jochmans’ attribution of words to White Feather surrounding the prophecies seems clearly influenced by Waters’ Book of the Hopi and its discussion of Hopi tablets and other myths, as is the nuclear apocalypse given after the common text of the prophecies ends, especially where both prophecies claim that the Hopi, by virtue of their wisdom, are exempt from destruction.

  The false Hopi prophecies came to a head in the summer of 1987 at the Harmonic Convergence, an event New Agers thought signaled a change in history. Many gathered at Prophecy Rock on the Hopi mesas, but the event there had no Hopi participants and was decried by Hopi elders, especially after New Age attendees invoked aliens. At the event, the alleged Hopi prophecies from the 1950s and 1960s were appropriated by (white) New Agers as “ancient” mysteries and associated with all manner of alternative beliefs, including Robert Temple’s Sirius Mystery, UFOs, and other unconventional ideas. As a result, the “prophecies” entered the alternative mainstream (if that’s what you’d call it) in association with space beings, Sirius, and other extraterrestrial mysteries.

  The association of the Blue Star Kachina from Waters’ book with the star Sirius then bled back into Native American beliefs from the New Age. The crystal healer Oh Shinnah Fast Wolf, who is not Hopi (she claims to be Apache and Mohawk and was born Penny McKelvey), told Grandmother Twylah Nitsch, a Seneca, that she felt the Blue Kachina had “something to do with Sirius.”[403] Oh Shinnah and Twylah Nitsch together concluded that the Hopi prophecies therefore meant that Sirius was associated with the apocalypse and with a new universal consciousness emerging when our three-dimensional world becomes “four dimensional,” and this would happen in December 2012, when the Maya prophesied the end of the world. Since that prophecy is well-known to be a Euro-American imposition on Native belief, the “Hopi” prophecies similarly seem to be Native peoples reflecting back the West’s own apocalyptic traditions!

  The authors of these alleged prophecies were drawing on a traditional Hopi cosmology in which the current world, the Fourth World, would eventually give way to the Fifth World, in a recurrence of the periodic destruction that gave birth to new world ages. This myth, which posits the return of Pahana, the White Brother, from the East, is almost certainly related to the Mesoamerican feathered serpent legend of Quetzalcoatl and the Mesoamerican idea of successive worlds. As in the case of the Aztec god, it is possible that the whiteness of the being was ascribed to him after the contact period to help place the arrival of white men from the east into a mythic context; there are no ancient Hopi texts, only oral accounts, so we simply can’t know what was believed before the first records were made. The traditional cosmology was continuously reinterpreted, however, in light of modern conditions.

  Armin Geertz studied Hopi prophecy and determined that no Hopi prophecy could be traced back before the event which it describes; in fact the Hopi have continuously recreated their prophecies to justify current conditions.[404] For example, when the Hopi split around 1900, they created a “prophecy” to support the split, and new prophecies were added to reflect new technologies: the �
�spider web” analogy for telephone wires came about only after the wires went up. The most famous ex post facto “prophecy” is the “gourd full of ashes” that supposedly represented the destructive power of the atomic bomb. The “gourd” prophecy wasn’t invented until 1956 (though some oral traditions claim 1948), long after the bomb it supposedly predicted. Thus, in short, the Hopi prophecies tell us much about the concerns of the people who uttered them, but very little about the future. Oh, and they also tell us that alternative writers will repeat anything they hear.

  45. Who Really Discovered America?

  Pity poor North America, a land whose history can never be her own. For centuries scholars, prophets, and cranks have tried to prove that the continent did not belong to the native peoples who populated it when the European explorers first arrived. Instead, America’s ancient monuments were assigned to a “lost race,” her people declared a lost tribe of Israel, and the continent’s first discovery credited to ancient Europeans, Atlanteans, or space aliens—anyone but the native Americans themselves.

  Today, a pair of archaeologists believe that they have found evidence that finks ancient Noah America to Stone Age Europe. Since 1999, Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution has been the most prominent spokesperson for the “Solutrean hypothesis,” a theory that claims the first people to arrive in the New World came from prehistoric Spain and brought with them a distinctive way of making stone tools. In a paper presented in 2004, Stanford and his colleague Brace Bradley outlined the proposed route the Spaniards took on their trek to the Americas.[405] However, a closer look at the Solutrean hypothesis shows that the idea does not prove what its authors claim.

  The Traditional View

  The peopling of the Americas has been a controversial subject since Columbus. But scholars reached a rough consensus in the twentieth century that nomadic hunters from eastern Siberia came to Alaska across the Bering Strait some 14,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, a time when sea levels were low enough to create a land bridge. These hunters followed herds of wooly mammoths and other large prehistoric animals (the wonderfully-named paleomegafauna). They traveled through an ice-free corridor in the Canadian Shield, between massive glaciers, into the heart of North America. From there they spread out across the un-peopled landscape and thereafter gave rise to the people we know as the American Indians.

  Support for this idea came from an unexpected place—Clovis, New Mexico. In that out-of-the way corner of the desert in the 1930s, archaeologists discovered a distinctive type of stone point, known afterward as the “Clovis point.” It was a spear tip, worked on both sides (“bifacial”). Clovis points had very distinctive characteristics. They were much taller than they were wide, had a concave base, and a long groove carved up the middle of both sides, called “fluting.” This fluting allowed the point to be wedged into a slit in a wooden or bone shaft to create a spear. This innovation separated the Clovis point from nearly all other contemporary stone tool technologies, a magnificent accomplishment for the people who used these points between 10,500 and 9,000 BCE.

  Clovis points were found throughout North America, although more often in the east. For over a millennium, it seems much of the continent used the same tools and hunted the same way. This became known as the Clovis culture, though whether it represented an actual cultural homogenization or just a sharing of a useful toolkit is not known. Because in the early twentieth century Clovis points were the oldest artifacts discovered, it was argued that the Clovis people were first to inhabit the New World and that America’s first human inhabitants were big game hunters—exactly what the Bering crossing hypothesis suggested.

  The Solutrean Hypothesis

  “Clovis-first” was the default position for most of the twentieth century, and it still has supporters today. But as early as the 1930s, some began to propose that Clovis technology was not an American development. Archaeologist Frank Hibben noticed the similarities between Clovis points and the stone points made by prehistoric European people called the Solutreans. They had arisen in modern France and Spain around 25,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic, and were famous for their finely-worked flint tools and their art. They were replaced by the Magdalenian culture, whose stone tools were less sophisticated.

  While other cultures simply hit one stone with another to chip away flakes by percussion, the Solutrean and Clovis peoples manufactured stone tools by a distinctive technique called “pressure flaking,” which used a sharp instrument for precision knapping of the stone. The Solutreans developed this technology around 20,000 BCE and spread across Western Europe before disappearing around 14,500 BCE (the dates vary slightly depending on whom you ask). Hibben believed the similarities with the later Clovis points showed that the Solutreans had peopled North America and brought their tools with them.[406] Strangely, however, little else of the Solutrean lifestyle, such as their art, came to the Americas with them.

  Not long after the Solutrean hypothesis was proposed, however, archaeologists dismissed the idea with three arguments: (1) though both cultures used pressure flaking, Solutrean points were not fluted like the Clovis points—many Solutrean tools had a roughly diamond shape while Clovis points often had a concave bottom; (2) the Solutreans, who had no boats, had no way to get to North America; (3) most important, there was a gap of thousands of years between the latest Solutrean points and the earliest Clovis points—it seemed chronologically impossible for the Solu-treans to have given rise to Clovis.

  By the late 1930s, anthropologist Theodore McCown further noted that linguistic ambiguity created a false similarity to those trained only in the archaeology of North America or that of Europe. The very word Solutrean had come to mean both the pressure flaking technique and the culture of prehistoric Spain. Since the word now had two meanings, it was sometimes hard for non-specialists to know in which sense the word was being used. Clovis points may very well have used a Solutrean pressure-flaking technique, but that did not necessarily make them a relative of the Spanish points.[407] (There are only so many ways to make a stone tool, so perhaps it is inevitable that some techniques will resemble one another.) Only later was the term Solutrean restricted to a specific culture.

  Lacking any firm evidence, the hypothesis died a quick death.

  New Challenges to Clovis-First

  In the second half of the twentieth century, new challenges to the Clovis-first theory began to undermine archaeology’s traditional view of ancient America. Sites with anomalous findings began to appear with dates older than the oldest-known Clovis sites. Although the media would often hype these findings as overturning the established theory about the peopling of the Americas, many archaeologists rejected the sites out of hand while others cautioned that more work was needed before abandoning the Clovis-first paradigm.

  Though several of the ancient sites would later turn out to be younger than first thought, a few made a compelling case for a peopling of the New World before Clovis. Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, in Pennsylvania, seemed to show continual use stretching from the colonial period back to 18,000 BCE or earlier. Many archaeologists accept the Meadowcroft site as valid, but others claim contamination has tainted the dating.

  The site of Monte Verde, Chile, however, offered the best proof for a pre-Clovis settlement in America. Radiocarbon dated to around 10,500 BCE or earlier, the site was older by a thousand years than Clovis sites in the Americas. As archaeologist Brian Fagan told Archaeology magazine, the age of the site was “so unexpected that some archaeologists, this reviewer among them, wondered if the site really was an undisturbed cultural layer. We were wrong. Dillehay (the excavator) has proved Monte Verde is a settlement, probably at the threshold of colonization of the Americas.”[408]

  For people to be in South America that early implied that they must have been in North America even earlier. This pushed back the likely date for human arrival in the New World by millennia. After heated debate, a blue-ribbon panel declared the Monte Verde site valid.[409] In another blow t
o the Clovis-first theory, Monte Verde’s evidence indicated that plant-based foods were more important than big game hunting to the early peoples, an indication that the first Americans may not have followed big game to the New World.

  These challenges to Clovis-first created a rush of new theories about how and when the first people came to the Americas. A new batch of ideas proposed numerous routes from Asia to America. Many of these new theories favored some type of Pacific crossing by boat anywhere from 15,000 to 50,000 years ago. A plausible alternative to the ice corridor migration is that the first migrants arrived by hugging the coasts and sailing from Asia to America. This theory predicted the oldest sites would be found on the coast instead of the interior of North America. Ironically, this helped explain why Monte Verde was found along the coast of South America: After the end of the Ice Age, ocean levels rose, drowning coastal sites in North America, but preserving those in South America, where coasts eroded less.

  By the end of the twentieth century it was generally believed that the New World was populated by waves of immigrants from Asia to America, traveling at intervals from the remote past to the very recent present. The last wave before the European conquest--the Inuit and Eskimos of the Arctic--arrived around 1000 CE. There was no one migration but instead a series of migrations over millennia. However, new controversies arose over whether at least one of those migrations came from Europe.