Haunted Cosmos - The Mines of Ophir: King Solomon's Ancient American Mines? (S5, E3)

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Who reached the Americas and when did it happen? Solomon’s mines in Ophir have endured as one of the most fascinating biblical legends, but where were they?Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Want to keep nefarious fairy Bigfoots away and also avoid icky seed oils, preservatives, artificial colorants, and other nasties in your daily shower routine? Then check out the vast array of homemade soaps from our friends at Indigo Sundries Soap Co.! Go to http://indigosundriessoap.com to learn more—and as our gift to you, use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!Armored Republic: Making Tools of Liberty for the defense of every free man’s God-given rights - Text JOIN to 88027 or visit: https://www.ar500armor.com/ This episode is sponsored by New Dominion Design Co. Visit their website here and learn more! http://newdominiondesignco.com/This episode is sponsored by Gray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order. https://graytoadtallow.com/Mt. Athos Performance, exists to fuel a generation who rejects passivity, embraces discipline, and pursues excellence for the glory of God—body, mind, and soul. Get your premium goat milk supplements for 20% off using code: NCP20 https://athosperform.com/This episode is also sponsored by Stonecrop Wealth Advisors! Go to this link to check out their special offers to Haunted Cosmos listeners today. https://stonecropadvisors.com/hauntedcosmosSupport the show

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, you discover that Nicholas Cage movies are canon for American history, that Ben grievously injured his back on the hunt for Solomon's mines in North America and the secrets of the Grand Canyon. Is not just stuff. The widely publicized mystery of the flying saucers may soon be solved. The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi, the old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease, or by wandering bands of marauders,

quit these parts ages since, and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghosts in this land, and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building, these things stand in judgment on the latter races. Excerpt from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The high desert sun beat hard down.

It burned the skin on the back of Kincaid's neck until little boils of rash formed. It looked very much like his blood was boiling inside of him, but he didn't care. He didn't care because of the excitement of what lay before him. A ribbon of rushing water tinted blue and green and the absolute freedom to explore it as he would. The blistering sun was no match for the cold waters of the Colorado that rose up to mist his sun-baked face. This, along with the breeze that struck him as he entered the vast, shaded regions of the cliffs that towered above him, even set a shiver down his spine.

The water demanded his focus, and he loved it for that. Thus it was that G.E. Kincaid charged headlong down the Colorado River through the deepest heart of the Grand Canyon in search of that flighty tempterous adventure. His boat heaved up one side before plunging down the other again.

With each rolling, boiling wave, he felt his balance grow more precarious. The aft side of the boat would kick out right, threatening to hurl the boat into a storm. spin or worse to capsize his small craft altogether. But each time he would catch it just at the final moment and write his canoe just in time to face the next rapid head on. On and on this went, day after day, with small breaks of calmer deep waters in between the death-defying rushes of rage on the wild river. He was tired, but not tired enough to stop. Indeed, he was only about halfway

through his expedition when the most unexpected thing happened. He exited a start. He exited a stretch of particularly brutal rapid and spent a few minutes catching his breath in the water's repose. He held the oar in his hand, but rested his forearms on his knees and sucked in deep waves of breath. He started to notice once more the painful burning on his neck from the sun, and so lifted his eyes to the burning sun above. He squinted and blocked most of his vision, glaring defiantly back at the withering light in the pale sky. Eventually, he entered the next stretch of shade and brought his eyes back down to study the vast canyon walls above. High and foreboding, the red hallways seemed to stretch up endlessly at points. Even the sun moved through the sky and took a

break every night, but the canyon was always there, unmoving and unfeeling and utterly uninterested in the affairs of the wider world. He scanned the walls for features of interest, a bird's nest here and the copse of vibrant green trees high above there, but then he noticed something he had not seen before. A hole in the side of the wall whose entrance appeared stained somehow. The hole was very high up on what appeared to be a delicate network of sandstone tears. He couldn't figure out how it was formed and couldn't really bring himself to lose interest in it and look elsewhere. The stains on the rim, what were they? Water? Burning? Kincaid, still looking at the hole and without quite consciously knowing why, turned his little boat to the small stretch of shore beneath the

anomaly. He tied it off to a juniper and whacked his way through the foliage that saturated the bottom of the canyon. Soon enough, he stood at the base of the wall. The sandstone, shaded all day by the high walls, was cool to his touch. He looked up and wondered at the cave once more. He felt the urge that has crept into the heart of every young boy and grown man for reasons he can't explain rise in his chest. The wild urge that has mystified mothers and schoolteachers and doctors splinting broken arms for time immemorial. He wanted to climb it. And so almost without conscious decision, Kincaid began to feel and look around on the wall for what might be a decently easy way to climb up. He estimated the cave to rest some 1,500 feet over his head. The way would have been easy indeed

if he expected not to tire out and fall off of it. After about 30 minutes of looking near to where he'd beached his boat, he gave up and started walking further down the shore. At the first, the far side of it, a thick grove of bushes started climbing up a small ledge in the cliffside. He wondered if he might not use those to support his climb. But when he reached the bushes and started pulling them to test their strength, a wonderful thing happened that might not initially sound so wonderful. They pulled right out with very little effort. Of course, this would have been a terrible thing were it not for what lay beneath the bushes. Stairs, Ancient stairs, clearly weathered with countless floods and seasons of rain.

But they were stairs nonetheless, and Kincaid had no doubt about it. He began to scramble up at an excited pace, yanking the bushes out as he went, until they stopped and only the stairs remained. They took him up, up, up. Until after an hour of climbing on the narrow path, he reached the entrance to the strange cave. What followed was the stuff of legend. The intrepid man, without a thought of how perilous the climb down would be later, turned on his flashlight and walked into the cave. He was met right away with strange writing on the wall.

It was writing the likes of which he had only seen in books. Words and pictograms that resembled Egyptian hieroglyphics were everywhere. He hated that he could not read them. He was shocked that they were there. He thought so many different things at once, but all of them were underpinned by a dreamlike disbelief. He pinched himself before pressing further into the cave, this tunnel that he'd accidentally found. The tunnel was deep, and the walls, as far as he could see, were covered in the writing and chiseled pictures. The pictures themselves depicted what he could only assume to be some forgotten pagan myth,

gods meeting men and men fighting the gods and receiving both gift and punishment from them, sometimes both at the same time, or so he thought. The tunnel was 12 feet around and went straight into, the stone for some 60 feet or so before the first side tunnel appeared. It was not just one passage, but a network of many. He went into room after room and found marvel after marvel, shelves with glazed pottery, tables and chairs reminiscent of dining halls, iron bits of tools and weapons, even mummies, dozens of mummies wrapped in black cloth that lined the perimeter of what he assumed to be a crypt. He explored the forgotten complex for hours all alone until finally he forced himself

to leave. He pocketed what few artifacts he could carry on the down climb and then, not forgetting to be careful, rushed back to his boat and made for home. His trip down the river was over, but his story wasn't yet done. According to Kincaid, or we should say, according to the article written about Kincaid in the Arizona Gazette on April 5, 1909. he sent the pieces he took to the Smithsonian, who responded by sending him a team for further study. With the help of a man named Jordan and his team of 40 scientists, Kincaid went back to the tunnel and guided them up the wall

and into its labyrinth of wonders. They mapped its every nook and cranny and discovered that its layout was symmetrical and deliberately planned. All the tributaries led to a central chamber that was truly massive, The vaulted ceiling of stone made the quietest whisper echo loudly. In the center of this central theater, there stood a golden statue that, strangely, resembled a Buddha, a cross-legged deity with flowers in either hand. They found gold, and they found idols, and they found everything that one might expect to find in an ancient megaplex somehow preserved in time. It was what they thought Atlantis may have looked like.

It upended every idea that the men had about the ancient Americans. The only thing any of them could compare it to on our continent was the mysterious work of the even more mysterious Anasazi peoples. Maybe they mused it was the same group who did it all. Neither Kincaid nor Jordan were ever heard from in history again. All that remains of their supposed adventure into the Grand Canyon's ancient secret are too somewhat difficult to find articles written by an unknown author in the Arizona Gazette in 1909.

Some say this is because the articles were a hoax, a fabrication, drawn up for reasons known only to the author and newspaper editor at the time. Others say that it was all real, and the Smithsonian covered it up because of the threat it posed to their narrative of world history. After all, if what Kincaid found in that tunnel was real, it would mean a lot of people losing a lot of credibility and, not to mention, money. To this day, no evidence of artifacts or,

expeditions or even of Kincaid himself can be proved to exist. Was it all a ruse? Was it real? The ruse coming in afterward in the form of a conspiracy to erase the find from history. What is the answer to all of the riddles of Kincaid's cavern? But in the face of such wonderful stories, it never hurts to ask the question. Could it all be real? And to that we say, Maybe. A long time ago, a Phoenician sea captain boarded his vessel as his crew fell upon their final checks and loading of luggage before disembarking. It was a rainy day off the Mediterranean coast, circa 940 BC.

What was to come was a long journey this particular captain had made three times before, twice as a mate and once as a captain. The stock provisions he knew would have to be stretched after the short first leg of the journey, saw them call to port at the pillars of Hercules, so he checked carefully to ensure his crew had done an adequate job of organizing the dry goods. After this, all that remained was to cast off. Sacrifice was made to the gods on the shore, and even in the rain, a small river of blood followed a channel in the sand to the water's edge to kiss the ship's prow. The trip would be blessed. Through the swirling waters ran the small fleet for days and days until breaking out

of the Mediterranean safety, they entered the maelstrom of what we now call the Atlantic Ocean. What they called it then, we do not know. But they pressed into that water world of darkness and mystery with the fearless confidence of the ancient man and weathered its brutality for many long cycles of the moon. Men fell overbrew, men fell ill, and as the captain predicted, food reserves wore very thin. Navigation was a fickle thing in those days. The stars had only just begun to speak to man again, and they were slow in sharing their secrets. But with a few prudent moves into strong and long currents, the ragged bunch of Phoenicians eventually spotted a mountainous horizon one morning,

a full year after they left their eastern home. The first morning on land was as frustrating as it was relieving. Relieving on the one hand because it meant the journey was half over, frustrating on the other hand because the men struggled to force their sea legs to remember their native function again. Only a day of rest was planned, and the captain had no intention whatsoever of generously extending that. Work was to be done and quickly. The next morning saw everyone waking up before the sun.

Wine was poured out in sacrifice to the gods before the expedition further inland began. The men walked over mountains and into dry places, all the while pulling and pushing empty carts over the wilderness. The captain marveled, how could a place so often visited, still bear no lasting marks of its visitors. He felt that each time he arrived it was a new place entirely, a shifting place with shifting sands and hills that morphed into new shapes over the course of mere years. But enough landmarks remained for him to be confident they were going in the right direction.

Thus they walked for a week through the badlands of Ophir, deep into its heart where radiant mines of glistening gold waited. Finally, they arrived to their people's permanent settlement at the mines in the middle of the eighth day. After resting that afternoon, they set themselves the next day for the task which would consume their every waking hour for the next ten months, collecting as much gold as possible. Ophir was as usual good to them. The few natives that they encountered there were not Odecthonus anymore, but were only descended from Ophirians, who had intermarried with the Phoenicians who stayed in the mines.

Thus, there was never any fear of war. The climate was warm, but no less so than summers spent on the eastern shores of their home sea. More than that, the great variety of climate the men experienced over the course of ten months in Ophir was a novelty that they enjoyed. The work was hard, but it was not discouraging. Gold was far too abundant in that place for any day to feel unsuccessful or wasted. And soon enough, the carts were loaded and hitched to beast of burden that the locals lent them for the journey back. back to the boats. After some more weeks of slow going across the great changes of Ophir's landscape, the men caught sight of their boats hidden in the small port from a hill that they had just

gained. They looked down in front of them and wondered at the pristine blue. They turned to look from where they'd come and wondered all the more at the rich green juxtaposed with bloody red. It would be long before any of them returned, if any of them returned. They watched the line of green that would someday be the Americas, slowly fade into a thin line of dark blue before it vanished entirely beneath the horizon. The boats rode low in the water, waded down with vast holdings of the world's finest gold. The captain, fatigued by the thought of the journey that still remained, sighed and stared up at the stars beginning to twinkle to the east, while the final traces of sunlight kissed his back with its fading warmth. As with the trip there, so it was with the trip home.

days wore by and turned to weeks and weeks became many months. Trial came to them and went away just as suddenly. In all of it, the men dealt with the rigors of the sea, and the boats carried the gold with only the complaint of groaning timbers on rough seas. Finally, after a night of fitful dreams, the captain woke to see the pillars of Hercules standing before him again. Some days after that, he started to smell the familiar winds of home, pushing him to the same shore he had so long departed,

the same shore they had bathed in sacrificial blood. The prows pushed deep into the sand, and work was started immediately. Camels loaded to the limit with stores of gold bound for the lands further south. The great king, the captain had only heard of. The trip and all had taken a full three years. He hurried his men to their work, eager to finish the day and return to his own family. Suddenly, in the heat and fray of the bustle, a great host of soldiers arrived, with two ornate palanquins in their midst.

From one of the mobile thrones there came the captain's own king, Hiram. He ran to him and knelt and kissed the sceptre Hiram put to his face. The king bid him rise, the king bid him save his reverence for one greater who had come. The captain looked over to the other palanquin. The hand of a youthful woman came from behind the purple curtains and pushed them over to the side. She was helped out by the soldiers who stood by. Her face was veiled, but the captain could sense her beauty as if it hung like storm clouds in the air. Next there came solid legs of bronze, the legs of the king, arrayed in

his splendor and yet not swallowed up by it. The most royal man the captain had ever seen in his life stepped on to the same dirt that he stood upon. He walked slowly closer with a friendly look on his face. He turned his palms to the captain and raised them up in some informal kind of friendly greeting. The captain fell at King Solomon's feet and kissed them. He now. He now, longed to go back to Ophir, not to escape the wonderful presence of this most wonderful king, but only so that he might get more gold for this man to array himself in. For the captain knew, were all the gold of Ophir brought to him, he would still be owed more.

Somehow he knew that all the gold in the world would still not be enough. And King Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezzion Geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea in the land of Edom. Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea with the servants of Solomon, and they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, 420 talents, and brought it to King Solomon. First Kings 9, 26 through 28. Could it be that the legendary minds of Solomon, the legendary regions of Ophir, were actually in the Americas? Scholars, of course, scoff at the idea, at least some of them, but they offer very few concrete alternatives.

They say India, they say Saudi Arabia, they say Africa, and they say it only because those places are closer. But what if they're raw? What if Ophir was a land of brightness to the ancients, separated from them by a dark sea? What if they found it? What if Solomon and Hiram of Tyre founded the Americas from the Fertile Crescent? What if Kincaid was real?

And what if he found what Solomon had also found and used, so long before. Maybe this is not as crazy an idea as it may at first sound. Join us in this episode of Haunted Cosmos as we search for the strange country of Ophir and the golden depths of Solomon's minds. The nighttime is crawling with dangerous creatures. Bigfoot, sleep paralysis demons, the moth man. Now imagine what would make them even more terrifying. That's right, guns. Criptids with guns. That's where Armored Republic comes in. They equip law-abiding citizens to stand against the unthinkable,

even if it's a gun-wielding devil-worshipping Bigfoot. From combat-tested coatings to high-performance carriers, every piece of their ballistic armor and tactical gear is built to protect. Visit armored republic.com or text join all caps J-O-I-N to 88027 to get involved in the preparedness effort. Brian, I got bad news. The other day I was using one of the big box soap products. to wash myself. And I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in like a heavy

wool blanket. And then also, I started Googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts. Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone disrupting chemicals? They're probably turning you into a girl. Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ben, you ignorant. Normie. All you've needed to do is go to indigo sundry soap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties. Okay, I am literally going to indigo sundry soap.com right now. Tell me what to buy. Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you.

You could get the men's six pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle. Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men's six pack. because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't. So true, King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry Soap Company is offering 10% off your order. If you just use all caps, discount code, Haunted Cosmos, no spaces.

Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description? Ben, you ignorant normie. It's always in the show description. Okay, so I'm going to go to Indigosundrysoap.com. I'm going to pick the men's six-pack bundle. And I'm going to use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout, all caps, no spaces.

And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show. Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things. And maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something dignified. Man, Ben, I knew we were handsome, but I didn't know we were that handsome until I saw our recent Haunted Cosmos thumbnails. Yeah, your skin looks so velvety smooth. I mean, it's unbelievable. Chris at New Dominion Design Company did an absolutely fantastic job, not only on those thumbnails,

but on our recent book cover as well. Yeah, exactly. And if you need some design work from Chris, you should go to New Dominion Designco.com, get started there and he'll serve you right. Man, he will make you look 50% as handsome as Ben guaranteed. Well, welcome everybody back to another episode of Haunted Cosmos. I'm Brian Sauvay, joined by my good friend Benjamin Gorette. Garet the best a man can get.

Hey, this episode of Hanna Cosmos is brought to you by my very cool sweater. It looks like a sailing sweater. No, it's actually brought to you by Ben's crippling back pain. This episode in Hanna Cosmos is brought to you by the fact that I like tweet something in my back deadlifting yesterday. And so it's brought to you by this tennis ball that's being shoved into my back at all time. It's true. Making my life bearable. Can I just say that if we ever discover a cave full of like lost gold,

artifacts that we won't tell anybody, but there will be signs. Yeah. And the signs will be that all of a sudden haunted Cosmos, every episode will be like full of CGI. No. And like, it would be like Michael Bay directed every single episode of haunted cosmos. And we get sushi catered every single time that we're eating the whole time. I would like to say that something that I'm just now realizing we did not, I didn't mention

it in the outline whatsoever, but I'm going to do it now. the best modern take on Ophir by far is National Treasure. Oh, yeah. Which is basically like El Dorado Ophir kind of vibe. Yeah, National Treasure is canon for America. Yes, yes. Like, you know, you have like fan fiction of America, and that's, you know, like what they teach you in high school.

Right. It's not canon. National Treasure is canon. I would say on a weekly basis. All of it happened. I go home and I look my wife. right in the eye and I say it's time to get in the cage. And I'm talking about watching any Nicholas Cage movie ever made,

Raising Arizona, National Treasure, Gone on seconds. This is why we're on the same page. Conair. This is why the chemistry on this set, volcanic. This episode of Hanna Cosmos has been brought to you by Ben really wanting to start recording the show, but Brian and Martine McBride endlessly talking about other things. They're not unimportant things. Conference planning.

They're not unimportant things. but I'm like, yeah, but I'm going to be hungry soon. That's a fair point. Guys, in this episode, here's what we're going to be doing. We're talking about one of, to me, the most fascinating conjectural. It's a classic haunted cosmos where you're like, is this true? I thought you were about to say the most fascinating topic ever. Not ever.

And I was going to be like, dang, that's a bold statement. That's like either moth, man. Like, let's be honest here. But it's one of those classic like, there's enough to it. At first it sounds crazy. 0% chance that happened. But then you start to look at it and you, you hear the narrator from the Oak Island series. Who's like, you know, they're constantly digging on Oak Island. A topic Ben refuses to cover for some reason. Because they never, all they do is dig. They don't find anything.

The real treasure is the television show that they discovered on that island. They made like a hundred million dollars. But there's a, my dad watches this. He's watched it for like 10 years. They're like searching for treasure on Oak Island. And he always, you know, he, he, he, he, he's, he, he's, he, he's, he, He tells me like, you know, son, they're going to find it. They're very close. And then he makes fun of the narrator because they, you know, they'll be talking about digging for something and they'll find like an interesting pebble. And then the narrator will come in and he'll be like,

could it be a pebble from the Knights Templar as they guarded the Ark of the Covenant? Every, it's one of those shows. And then the answer's like, no. Where every single episode, they make you think they're going to find the cure for cancer. They're on the cuss or something. down there in Oak Island. Anyway, as you were saying. This is a classic Hanna Cosmos

because the idea is people have conjectured that King Solomon, who brought in this crazy global shipping trade of gold and copper and like exotic animals and all this stuff, he had one of the greatest empires in history. And people say, well, where were these places? Where was Ophir?

And from First Kings nine, where were these? places. And nobody's been able to answer it with certainty. Yeah. But there are some compellingly interesting arguments to be made. Yeah. That could it be, it was in North America. And he made it here in the Americas. In the Americas at all. And it could be, and it could have been a big, this is the thing. Ophir is not like just one little city, you know, it's a region. It's a vast region. And so could it be in the Americas in general? Maybe it extends from down from Martinez home in Mexico all the way up into true American land, which is North America. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

So let's talk a little bit about Kincaid's caves. Yeah. Because this story, the first time I heard about this story was probably 10 years ago. Yeah. And it was one of those like classic newspaper fragments from this period of American sensationalist journalism, you know, like early 1900s. 1909. 1909. You have to know that during the 19th century, especially, but into the 20th century,

there was, newspapers were kind of like, they were almost what you might think of today as like our Instagram or TikTok reels. Yeah. Where you have these accounts where there's a guy who's like, look kind of wild-eyed.

And he's like flashing AI images behind him. And he's like, the Nephilim hybrids are in the white house. house and then it like shows a woman who blink sideways with lizard eyes. Riley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus. Yeah. It's like,

you know, early American 4chan. Yeah, exactly. Were these small time newspapers, the Arizona Gazette, you know? Which is now,

it's still a newspaper. I think it's called the Arizona Republic or something. Yeah. Well, they had to change it because of the Nephlin. Well, yeah, because Smithsonian.

Yeah. But it's crazy. Like this, the story is, in case you didn't get it from the cold open, the story is that this guy named Kincaid. Great name. Honestly.

I think we can all agree. Kincade. G.E. Kincade. Founder of GE, the appliance company. Not true. That's not true. And the story that is given to us

in two articles from the Arizona Gazette from like April 1909. And that's all we have on this. It's just two. Yes. Says that he was going on an adventure, which I love, down the Colorado River,

a little Bilbo Baggins action. Yep. Okay. He looks up, sees this weird tunnel or a cave, and he's drawn to it, he finds the stairwell that goes up into it, and he's like, oh, dang, this is a man-made thing. Yeah.

About 1,500 feet up from the canyon floor. And you might say, well, the river was higher back then. No, the stairs went all the way down. Oh, yeah, this was always 1,500 feet if it existed at all. Yes. He did what my kids constantly do when we go to southern Utah, which is try to kill themselves by climbing up. By climbing on things, yes.

Shear cliffs. Yes, exactly. Which, I mean, who among us doesn't do that? And I did the same thing and continue as an adult to do the same thing. We both did the same thing. That's why, you know, in the cold open, we talked about the universal instinct of young boys to older men to be like, I'm going to climb that. I'm going to do it. I'm going to get hurt.

I'm going to get on top of that. It's going to be great. I'm going to climb on that. So he goes into these caves. It's like 12 foot diameter or something like that. And he shines his light sees all these hieroglyphics. He goes a little bit deeper, starts to find side caverns and rooms that go into other areas. He picks up a few trinkets to prove that he found this place.

Comes out, goes back, gets in touch with the Smithsonian Institute, because you could just do that back then. You could just call up the Smithsonian. Yeah, he telegraphed up the Institute, Smithsonian. He was like, hey, go, found a cave. Send me your best Egyptologists. Yes. They send 40 of them.

And they were like happy to. Here they are. And they go back to the cave, map it out. Yeah. Like get a whole map of it. They find that it's this like spider web, you know, intricately mapped thing that leads to the central cavern with this Buddha type god. Weird, but it's like Egyptian mummies and Buddha. And like Eastern mysticism.

Yeah, very, very bizarre. But it's filled with precious artifacts. They leave again and they're wanting to do a third expedition. But then the Smithsonian Institute starts to put the kibosh on everything. Yeah, they're like, so they shut it down. And now the claim is, the claim is. that now in the Grand Canyon National Park, there are places that are effectively off limits.

You can't go. And people have tried to go to them. They've tried to find this cave. They can't find it. And they've also tried to go into some of these supposedly restricted areas. And they have been... They've been stopped. Stopped or scared off. By armed guards.

Yes. So... Heavily armed guards. We're talking dragon from Skinwalker Ranch armed. Yeah. Like not the flying fire breathing dragon, but... The guy.

The man who calls himself dragon. Yeah. And if they try to dig in the Grand Canyon, Dragon's going to have something to say. Can you imagine what Dragon would do to them? He would probably have a heart at that. He'd be like, this is a no dig. No dig.

Anyway. So, yeah. And those things are kind of also hearsay. You know, you may see it on Reddit, on 4chan, on some, on some other, you know, supposedly more credible internet accounts, which I believe all of them, of course. And the first article was the initial story of the discovery in the Gazette. And then the second article was like Jordan, and it mentions this other guy who got involved

from the Smithsonian. Jordan fascinated or whatever. Can't find any records on either guy. Yeah, these people, they may not exist. But that makes me think they definitely did. So, yeah, I mean, circling back, this period of American journalism is a period when you would have like here's here's what may have happened at least in some cases is that journalists and newspaper writers in these small towns they realized that not a lot of interesting things happened

all the time in phoenix erasota in arizona yeah in the early 1900s and then they realized that literally there were no consequences for them doing writing whatever they wanted to and everyone was like dude you have to get the arizona gazette april fifth edition a guy found a cave full of mummies in the Grand Canyon. And I mean like which one of us, I see that newspaper, I buy that newspaper. And I buy it thinking to myself, almost no way this is true.

However, however, but what if? I buy it thinking to myself true. This is like inside, inside every haunted cosmos listener are two wolves. Ben and Brian. It already confirms what I've always thought. Like, look, when I was a boy, when I was a laugh. You were loud.

I remember I was like, I'm going to read through my Bible in a year. I was in like seventh grade. First time I ever wanted to do it, I'm going to do it. And I did. And I remember getting to O'Fir and it was talking about all these gold nuggets

and these peacocks, you know, and I was like, that sounds like a cool place. And I looked it up online on the interwebs at the time. Yeah. And it was like, yeah,

no one knows where O'Fier was. And I mean, that's where it started for me. Instantly you were like, I was like, to become a podcaster one day. One day and talk about this. It talks about this.

Can I ask you a question, Ben? Yes, you may. As, thank you. As a young man, I feel like I was led to believe that mummies were going to be a significant part of like the problems of my life. Like needing to know how to deal with them.

How to deal with a mummy. I thought, were you there? Like millennials, is this true for you to? It wasn't true for me with mummies, but it was two big things. Quicksand and piranhas.

Oh, yeah. You know what? I thought both Quicksandan and Parano's were going to be a major issue that I'd have to. Weekly, monthly problem. Yeah, yeah. Or the Bermuda Triangle. Anyway, point with Kincaid is that, yes, records of his existence are non-existence. Scarce.

Well, they are in the Gazette. Except for the Arizona Gazette. Yeah. Credit words do. But here's where there's two big things for me that come in and say, yeah, but maybe. But maybe. And I admit it's a heavy maybe. Maybe he's doing a lot of lifting in that.

sentence, but just bear with me. Okay, the one is we know that the Smithsonian has a history of kind of memory-holing. Yeah. Things that they don't agree with. Alternate history, things that would call all of their, you know, well-accepted stuff into question. They did this with the North American giants. They, they, there is a room somewhere full of nine-foot-tall skeletons and artifacts. From America. And the Smithsonian, you know who you are. And I call upon President Trump to declassify. I don't even know if he's allowed to do this. Like it's Smithsonian.

Declassify the giant lore. Okay? I know you're our guy. I know you follow Honoccosmos. President Trump. I know J.D. at least. J.D. VP Vance. I know he's in a Honda Cosmos.

And I want to call on him personally right now and say on behalf of the American people, we deserve to know. Here's what I want you to do. Mr. Vice President J.D. May I call you that? I want you to sit down, prop your first. feet up, maybe put on a nice wool robe next to a fire. Yeah. Crack open a mountain dew. Get a mountain dew. Okay. And just peruse through the files. You know what I'm talking about.

Yeah. Well, he's going to need that high fructose corn syrup, that little hit. It's, that caffeine. Are we forgetting National Treasure 2, the president's book of secrets? Yeah, it was the certainly exists. No, it's real. It's real. So I do want to make that personal call and say yes. A quick note here on some of the, some of the things at stake here that are very interesting to me. We have evidence in North America

of large mines. Yeah. That existed in the thousands of years BC range. Yeah. So thousands of years before Christ. And when we look at the technology of the Native American population, we find some interesting things.

The ancient Native American people, peoples had a, did not even enter the Bronze Age in terms of their metallurgical technology. And I mean all the way up until Spanish explorers and more advanced civilizations began to appear. They're still using obsidian arrows. The most they did was they found two things. Meteoric iron, which is like meteors made of largely iron. So you don't have to have any smelting technology. That's what it is. Dude, I'm serious. New York iron is you never working in You would not have believed what it was unless I told you. That was Obama giving Obama the metal.

Okay. I went to the Star Center. What's it called? The planetarium, the Clark Planetarium is all like city with my kids. Like a couple months ago. And you know, you can go there. They have like this big plexiglass case with this hundreds of pounds meteor. It's an iron meteor.

That's cool. And it's made of iron. It's a meteoric iron. It's a fairest meat. And you can reach through like and touch the thing. And it's crazy because of how high the iron content is. It's unlike iron ore that you would get from the, you'd have to be able to smelt it

and remove the iron from the rock and purify it and then use it. So they didn't even achieve Bronze Age technology. The most they did is they found meteoric iron and they used it for a few things, but then they all, which is very rare also. Because it's meteors. Yeah, it's rare. And it's not just meteor, it's meteoric iron.

So it's ferrous iron. It's very dense. Don't say it. Like Martina's mom. I think we on. La Buella McBride, if you're listening. I think we own. La Buela McBride.

She's a grandma. Martin has kids. Okay, that's fine. That's fair. Come on. I want to apologize. La Buela. So the other thing they did is they found copper

and they would use copper that was in higher concentrations, like still in rock and that sort of thing. They mainly used it decoratively because they never really figured out metallurgical technology. And I know you were going to say something racist there. And I just want to say on behalf of my Chippewa ancestors.

It's kind of all true. They were pretty backwater when it comes to it. Okay. Here's the thing. Let's just leave that there. Yeah, they used mainly lithic technology. What is that? What is lithic?

It is of or related to working with stone. Ah, like megalithic. Megalithic. That actually makes, all right, I feel like an idiot. So you have metallurgical civilizations and you have lithic civilizations. You have ones that worked in stone primarily, and then ones that had figured out metallurgy, how to remove ore of different metals from rock,

and even through various smelting processes, create other combinations of metals, which you're quite familiar with as an engineer, sure, working with different types of grades of steel and aluminum and all that sort of thing. So it's not until the Spanish and the European settlers start coming to America that they're introduced even to things like working with,

iron, which at that point, we're already more advanced metals at that point already. So they didn't have these technologies. And yet, there are these massive copper mines, I think in Michigan that they found. There's been, there's multiple places where there's evidence of large scale metal mining, which makes you think, we only see the minor evidence of them using it decoratively and in a few. Right. And not even that efficiently. So what were they doing?

with all the cops. So this is some of the evidence that has led people to say, but what was that about? Because it was so far ago as well. I mean, we're talking 4,000 years ago yeah, ish to 5,000 years ago that some of this evidence,

at least is generally dated, which, you know, take it for what it's worth. It does just leave you asking, like were there more advanced civilizations in the past that were here, or were there more advanced civilizations coming here? Well, so one way to maybe,

start to throw a rope across the chasm to make a rope bridge over the Grand Canyon, over the Grand Canyon is the Anasazi people that we alluded to at the very beginning of the show from that quote from Blood Meridian. The Anasazi people are the ones that built those cities into the side of cliffs. It's insane. I mean, it's like absolutely astonishing. And it's the only record of that level of ingenuity that we have in the early Americas. But the problem is we know that they did it.

We know that there was a people that did that thing. But then they disappeared. The Anasazi people completely vanished, like almost overnight. And the only artifacts that we have from them are those cities that they built into Iraq. During very difficult to erase. And no other known Native American Indian tribe before or after them could ever come close to replicating. Like I said, that level of ingenuity. Now, it was a lithic thing.

It wasn't metallurgical. But the reason I'm bringing it up at all is because other metallurgical societies like ancient Greece, for example, bronze age societies like ancient Greece, they still built most of their houses out of stone, out of lithic technology. And so when you have a high-level lithic structure,

it can sometimes, there's correlation to be found that would point to a society that does have metallurgical technology somewhere. And so it makes you wonder, since we don't have any artifacts from the Anasazi, first of all, where did they go? Yeah. Where did they come from?

We don't actually know if they were Native Americans. We're just like making that assumption. Yeah. And then also what technologies did they have? Because it could give us some insight into who was mining, who could even have mining operations that big, like the copper mines in Michigan. And then also what they may have been using the copper

and other metals for. Mm-hmm. It's a good question. So maybe King Solomon was an Anasazi. That's what I'm saying. Definitely not. Definitely not. I'm not saying like, the other thing, just the royal King Solomon.

The royal we. He came over to Ophir personally, but he sent guys. The royal we. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So one other last note before we go to our next story section is that in the 19th century, so you have this brand of journalism that's rising up, it's quite popular. It's, you know, even then very much like kind of semi-fiction.

Yeah. And, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? Like, fantastical or? Put a little, like, thinking bubble over my head. Dun, dun, dun, dun. Yeah, it's fantastical. Oh, okay. Right?

That's a good word. It wasn't the word I was looking for in the minds of Ophir in my mind. But, you know, it was, they were fantastical. But one of the ideas that was quite popular at this time, And there was a lot of, and at some point we're going to have to do an episode on this, like the magic, the culture of magic and treasure hunting and intrigue. Like this was still a time in American exploration. Yeah.

And people are like, what's out there? There's a lot of mystery to even the Americas still. We're trying to figure out like the history of this place. There was a quite common trope that the ancient Israelites came to North America. Yeah. And had, you know, that they had like a civilization. And actually specifically, a lot of this trope was that there was a lost tribe of Israel that populated North America and was related to the Native Americans.

Yeah. Now this, this morphs into some of the legend, legendary origins of even like the Mormon cult. Yeah. Where they, they grabbed, you know, Joseph Smith grabbed on to a lot of these sort of in the zeitgeist ideas that predated his. Almost like folksy legends. Right. They were folk. It was folk legends. It predated his alleged, you know, interactions with an angel and this divine revelation or whatever in the golden tablets, et cetera. But you can see this all over that Joseph Smith did a lot of this prior to the Rosetta Stone being discovered. So before we could translate Egyptian hieroglyphs and a lot of this stuff. And so he would, you know, weave together many of these folk legends into this pop folk religion of the Americas with this whole. whole tale of the Lamanites and the Nephites that were the ancient Native American peoples. And there's a lot of tells in the story that it's 19th century folk religion and not true

history. I mean, you know, the story includes things like horses being present in North America in the native times, which didn't come until the Spanish brought horses, metals that didn't exist. They, you know, depicting the technology is like bronze age and beyond when the native people's never, there's no archaeological evidence, you know, virtually that we've, that they had this sort of technology, but it was supposedly widespread. We've since discovered that the Native American peoples did not descend from the same group of people as the Hebrews, but came probably via like Siberian Land Bridge from more Asian peoples, which makes a lot of

sense when you look at sort of Native American physiognomy and what they, it, there's a clear Siberian, like Mongolian, Eskimo kind of related peoples. However, in the 19th century, like very much a popular idea. And to such an extent that since these discoveries, a few things have happened in the Mormon church. And we're in Utah, so this is all kind of relevant, being Protestants in Mormon land, that they have since changed

the introduction to the Book of Mormon. This happened in my lifetime. Like this happened even when I was in high school. They changed the introduction from saying that the native, that this lost tribe were the principal ancestors of, the native peoples to just like a part of. Yeah.

Because DNA evidence and a lot of things had shown like that was just not true. And they also, Joseph Smith had allegedly translated an Egyptian document that became a part of their sacred text essentially and said it, you know, it said this and this and this.

And then they discovered the Rosetta Stone and they actually translate that document and it's just a burial text. It has nothing to do with what Joseph Smith alleged it had to do with. So you see this idea, in the zeitgeist in the 19th century in America. It's very much seized on the popular imagination.

And so you can see how some of these ideas are related and grew out of this folk, just this spirit of adventure and mystery and discovery and wanting to connect our land to the biblical scriptures. So I want to always have a little bit of a break where you go, we joke, you know, about believing everything we read on 4chan immediately and without evidence.

We don't really, you know, but I always want to have a break where I go, yeah, you do need to be careful when you're trying to find, like there's a balance between what was Ophir? That's fascinating. Where did that come from?

And really, could it be like this, this? And it was somewhere, and we don't know where that somewhere was. And then there are, as we'll see, some interesting ideas that maybe it was here. Yeah. But we hold it loosely and say, let's make sure that we don't end up

going down the road and saying like, also all of this Mormon lore is true. is just, is true when we, we genuinely know that it's not. Yeah, yeah. And it's like when the spirit of the age in America at the time is one of wanting to find some pre-Columbian connection from the Americas to the European and Asian continent, then yeah, you have to, you have to. You'd be like, whoa.

You actually have to take every single finding with a grain of salt. And it's interesting that, so the distinction I would make as well is that the book of Mormon, doctrine and covenants, like the Mormon, like the Mormon lore, the more that it's exposed to critical examination, the more it falls apart. Yeah. The scriptures,

the old and the New Testament, the more that it's exposed to critical examination, the stronger the evidence gets that it's describing real history. Yes. Just as, you know, an example would be in the book of Acts. There's a book that I got maybe 12 years ago. It's called The Book of Acts

in the setting of Hellenistic history. And it's a scholarly work. And the author lists, something like 50 to 60 points on which Luke the historian who wrote Acts is vindicated against, you know, 17th, 18th, 19th, even 20th century claims that he had been wrong. Yeah.

Or like an example would be the Gallio, Galeo, I don't know how you say it. There was this ruler in Rome that is mentioned by Luke and they had no record of his existence. And it was like till recently. And then lo and behold, further archaeological finds, discovers the Gallio pavement and it's a stone and it's Roman and it's from the period and it referenced Galeo, pro-consul of a key, like exactly the guy.

And there's like 50 to 60 points like that where just recently Luke is vindicated. And you can point to, you know, all of the textual evidence of the Bible, the Old and New Testaments, even like we have to do something on the location of Sodom and Gomorrah. Yeah. Have you seen that with the...

YouTube channel? Yeah, dude, that is sick. So sick. They're like, just little spoiler, discovering little balls of sulfur embedded in these creeks from this period where this like landscape that was inhabited, inhabited it by a city, an ancient city is wiped out. And he literally, they take these balls. He sets them on fire and they burn like. Just holds up a lighter to him and they immediately. And you're like, so it's those, all the black kids running around like, oh yeah.

I'm going to end this man. It's super hot fire is what he's talking about. It's that mean. He's talking about super hot fire. I don't know what it is. It's super hot fire. Dude, that was a long excursion. Well, I also, I want to add a couple things.

Yeah. So let's make some layers into this cake, my guy. Yeah. You don't want to be a Mormon. Right. That's period. You know, but you also don't want to be Mormon-ish in your mythology and history of America. Yeah.

You actually want to be accurate. Having said that, now I'm not about to, it's not going to be a big having said that. It's just going to be, though we do not know for absolute certainty. Yeah. whether or not the Phoenicians or Israelites or even like the Greeks, yeah, or the Egyptians ever made it to the Americas. What we do know, what's like widely accepted at this point, is that pre-Columbian expeditions from the Scandinavians did make it.

Yes. They did make it to the Americans. And there's tons of evidence that that's true. Yes. And I would like to just say, there is an alarming similarity in ship design. Okay. between the Scandinavian longboats

and the Phoenician ships. Dang. And so it's worth, like, I'm just saying, like, it's not that the technology is impossible. So the story that you wove together in the second half of the cold open of the Phoenician sailor.

It was fake. It was a historical fiction. I think it showed up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to take sure, like, this is a projected area. How is a historical fiction? This is a could it be moment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the fundamental supposition is not insane. No, it's really not. It's not. It's not crazy. pseudo-historical, like there's no possible way. These ancient peoples were like, first of all, insanely bold. Yes.

But they were legitimately skilled mariners and they did long, they had discovered the huge value of oceanic trade. Yes. And bringing in spices. And then you go and you read the account of Solomon and he's bringing in. He's doing that. Global seafaring trade into his land. It's just a matter of how much of it he's doing.

Now, the other thing that I just really quick, I know this is a long intro. The other thing is that the Bible is not foreign to having places in it that modern history and archaeology have not found yet. Yeah. That's happened multiple times.

Of course, it's happened with Sodom and Gomorrah. It has yet to happen with Ophir. The Bible, and Tarshish, actually. The Bible mentions both Tarshish and Ophir in similar sentences. And both of them, you know, we don't know for sure where they are. But another one,

that you may not know about is Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth. And for a really long time, people were like, well, the problem is Nazareth was not a city in Bethany. It's not real. Yeah, it's not real. And then it was fairly modern archaeology, finally discovered this very small, meek settlement that was indeed Nazareth.

So even things as big as that, that we kind of take for granted as Christians when we read the scripture, of course, Nazareth was real. Who could ever deny that? Well, a lot of people denied it for a very long time until recently. So it's never too late to find these places and actually see not only our hunger for mystery and curiosity sated, but also the Bible vindicated yet again. And it also showed the discovery of Nazareth. We found that it was a town that many of the people were likely builders, which Joseph, it's often translated a carpenter, but it's like a builder.

a tecanon. He worked in materials like wood and others to build things. And people from that little town would go and travel to a relatively nearby larger settlement where they would do a lot of work, kind of contract work on a long-term basis and come back. Very working class. So again, many details vindicated from the biblical account. And we just, I think, overestimate our own knowledge and how much has been lost. Because we think like, of course, we know everything. Yeah. think about how insane it would be to discover something that happened 6,000 years ago. Yeah. 4,000 years ago.

How much has passed? What has happened? Like, think about putting something outside for 10 years. Yeah. Going back to a settlement, I mean, we can go back to in like Washington logging settlements and discover where there clearly was a house, but all that's left is a few stones from the foundation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the rest is gone.

And in another hundred years, even that will be swallowed up and lost. Yeah, virtually. And that's a couple hundred years. Right. Imagine thousands of years. Thousands of years. And upheaval and civilizations rising and falling. Yeah.

So I can't remember what our next story is. It's about something called the Bat Creek Stone. I'm going to take us into the story of the Bat Creek Stone. In the 1880s, archaeologists in America were head over. over heels with the question of what sort of pre-Columbian contact the new world had with Europe, if any. Part of what fueled the speculation was the presence of earthen mounds all through the southern, Appalachian, and Midwest regions of the U.S. that closely resembled other mounds in Britain, France, and Germany, the Gaelic regions. This coupled with the widespread report among the ancients of distant lands,

rich with resources, and inhabited by a strange people separated from them by an endless sea, made archaeologists eager to find the proof of some sort of Silk Road between the eastern and western hemispheres of antiquity. Thus, the Smithsonian Institute formed the Committee for Mound Exploration within the Bureau of Ethnology. For years, the team of geologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists searched and studied the presumed burial mounds of forgotten people anywhere they could find them. The explorations were apparently wildly successful in confirming their theory of transatlantic contact long before Columbus. The massive report compiled by the program's chief Cyrus Thomas

stated in its pages that the team did find evidence of ancient Saxon, Phoenician, and Nordic artifacts within earth and mounds that were otherwise filled with Native American paraphernalia. It was an astonishing conclusion that took the archaeological world of the Americas and Europe by storm. However, this excitement invited further study, and with further study, came more precise critique of the artifacts. By the time of the early 1900s, almost all of the pieces which supposedly proved pre-Columbian contact across hemispheres were, in fact, found to weigh against the thesis. Well, that is, all but one. Near the midmost of the bureau's work, Cyrus Thomas and friends found themselves waiting

through a boggy tributary off of the Tennessee River called Bat Creek. It was hot, as it always was in the summer, and the men were being eaten alive by clouds of mosquitoes. Every few seconds, the sound of someone slapping their own neck rang through the muggy and overgrown creek, another mosquito dead. After miles of this torturous rucking with no reward, they finally caught sight of the small clearing through the trees and climbed up the muddy banks of the creek. After pushing a few branches aside, they found themselves standing in the midst of three earthen mounds that were very

nearly reclaimed entirely by the forest. No trees had grown on them yet, at least not big ones, but they were blanketed in bundles of privet. The team only knew them for what they were because they had been told that they were there. And sure enough, three random miniature hills lay before them. Right away, the teams split up and descended upon their work of digging and collecting and documenting. The archaeologists, shirt soaked through a sweat, carefully uprooted the fauna on a section of its side and then brushed the dirt away. They took some of the stones out, again, very carefully, but the shell was so delicate that a chunk of shale about three feet wide collapsed under the disturbance. This was not the ideal way to enter an ancient mound, but it happening was far from good reason to

stop the work. The first man furtively stepped inside with a lamp to guide his way and helmet to protect him against any more collapse. On the floor, there lay skeletons of ancients, sprawled out in patterns of concentric circles around a central pylon of clay and stone that supported the outer shell. The inner perimeter of the mound was built up into a kind of bench or shelf that was covered in pottery and tools and jewelry and even what the scientists took to be children's toys. They excitedly wrote as fast as they could, smudging the paper with clouds of graphite as they wiped drops of sweat off the page any time one fell from their brow. It was all, as I said, very exciting. But it was only when they examined the stones building up the middle

column that these activities took on the legendary status that it later would. They're halfway up the stonework and surrounded by other flat rocks that were completely blank. There was one that was engraved with strange markings. It was removed with all caution, taken outside, and given to Cyrus Thomas for examination in the sunlight. Initially, though he marveled at the level of preservation, he did not think it to be a special token in proving the existence of a lost race of European migrants to America. He took the etchings in the surface for the characters or phrases of the old Cherokee alphabet, but he was wrong. As the years have gone by and more eyes have studied, the enigmatic Bat Creek stone, the consensus of its relative unremarkableness had only ever waned.

American eyes led to European eyes, that led to Mediterranean eyes. Those pointed still further east until the ones studying the stone were eyes belonging to researchers of ancient Semitic languages from the southern Levant. All of it led to the shocking realization that if this stone was authentic, it represented a pre-Columbian North American artifact that was engraved with Paleo-Hebrew script. The Bat Creek Stone remains one of the greatest mysteries of American archaeology. Again, if it is authentic, it essentially proves that some form of connection between the ancient Israelites or Phoenicians and the distantly ancient natives of North America.

But there's reason to call the stone into doubt. Namely, there is one glaring reason, confirmation bias. Remember that the Bureau of Ethnology for the Smithsonian Institute wanted to find evidence supporting their thesis that Columbus was not the first European or Asian to reach the new world. Not only that, but the supposed Paleo-Hebrews script found on the stone, though extremely old, was already known and documented at the time of the stone's discovery. It's therefore not outside of the possibility that the stone was forged as a hoax and planted there in the earth and mound later discovered on the shores of Bat Creek in the backwoods of Tennessee.

What's more, this would not be the only time such a potential hoax was discovered. In 1933, an archaeologist from the University of New Mexico named Frank Hibbon was taken on a long journey through the desert by a local guide who had lived in the area his entire life. Earlier that week, the guide had come to Hibbon upon learning about the professor's interest in the area with a secret he had kept since his boyhood. It wasn't that the secret was shameful or frightening. It was simply that the guide had never known what to do with it. That was until he met Hibbon.

The pair walked between the chaparral under the chill of the early morning with a pair of lamps. Hibbon marveled at the guide's knowledge of the terrain. To him, it all looked the same, but he could tell his friend knew exactly how, every single dry creek bed differed from the one next to it. Finally, the sun rose behind the pair and cast the world in golden light interrupted only by their long shadows. Just as the first beads of sweat were forming on Hibbon's neck, the guide stooped down under the overhang of a massive sandstone boulder

and pointed at another large block of stone at its base. It was covered in lichen and the patina of long years of undisturbed resting. Hibbon asked what it was. The guide carefully picked the like in a way. He took off his waistcoat to brush the dirt free from its web of tiny roots and shine his light right up on the unmasked surface of the rock. Hibbon stepped up with his mouth hanging open in Frank Amazement. Before him stood an 80-ton monolith that contained detailed engraved writing.

But it was not just any writing. It was, there could be no doubt in his mind, the Ten Commandments, written in the same Paleo-Hebrews, script he had studied years prior on the Bat Creek Stone. So what do we make of these things? Are they mere modern hoaxes? Or are they echoes of some visitors? Perhaps some of Abraham's own children from time long forgotten? To this day, the validity of the Bat Creek Stone and the Los Lunas Decalogue both remain open debates among scholars and historians. Hey Ben, I just read that our great-grandparents probably experimented with butter on their

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or registered investment advisor with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Great reading, Brian. Thank you so much for that insightful commentary on the Back Creek Stone and the last low... Dang, I messed it up. Here's what I'm going to say. It's really fascinating to me that after... Nearest makes no difference, 100 years or 150 years of these two stones being known about in academia,

there has been not a single research institution that has officially proclaimed either the Back Creek Stone or the Los Lunas Decalogue as a hoax. All they've said is that they doubt the validity of it and they give reasons for the hoax, most of which surround the non-existence of other hard evidence for, for pre-Columbian contact between Semetic and North American cultures and the fact that there was confirmation bias risk at the time. Sure. Those are literally the only two reasons that they cite. But what if it was 3,000, 4,000 years ago?

Like, evidence goes away after a given time. You know what I mean? Like you just, it's hard to say because some of these things aren't actually difficult to hoax. I mean, there are difficulties to them to hoax. You would have to know the language and be able to replicate it in a convincing way. Yeah.

But it's not like you could, I mean, how hard is it to scratch himself in a stone and make it look weathered? Or like actually weather it for a long period of time. You know what I mean? I mean, I've watched the show White Collar with... I was going to bring up White Collar. Really?

Dude, we have locked in. When he's like scraping painting from old paintings and doing his hoaxes. Yeah, yeah. And like the wine bottle that he makes, he like injects this gas into it. Yes. Anyway, pretty cool show.

One thing that I was going to that I was going to say, though, is that if you think about how they would have hoaxed, the Bat Creek Stone especially, it would have been very, very difficult. So the Bureau of Ethnology was entirely above board. No one really questions their academic honesty. And so it would have taken the team that was on site that day outside of Knoxville. One guy, at least, would have had to smuggle in this stone that he made. Yeah. And by the way, the knowledge of that kind of paleo-Hebrew Semitic script, yes, like, we knew about it. It was documented, but it was cutting-edge stuff. Yeah. So it was actually hard to not only get your hands on, but to recreate it in a way that made sense. And it was like not just gibberish, you know? So he would have had to do that. That's one thing. He would have had to gotten a stone that could be dated to the proper time period. And then he would have, and it's like not small, you know, it's like a, foot long and, you know, eight or nine inches tall, then like take it out of his pocket or something. Like you bring in like a full pizza into the movie theater. He takes it out of his pocket and just puts it up in this like middle column.

He's like, no one notices. He's like, oh, look over there. Everyone, look at the samurai in the tree. Look at the ninja in the tree. I don't know. I don't know. The only reason we're making them Japanese just to continue. alienating members of our audience who do not like our ethnic

impersonations. I want to be ninja. So it is true that it would be difficult to hoax. They either all would have had to be been in on it. Yes. Or they're the dumbest people in the world. Or they're really dumb. Or it's real. Or it's, those are the only three possibilities. Aren't they? There's nothing. The one that's the crazier

one actually to me is the deck log stone under the Yeah, dude is so cool. Because what does the back creek stone say? Is it the Ten Commandments? No, it's not the Ten Commandments. It's just like one phrase. They think that the, I can't remember what the first little bit says, but then the second one appears to be a, like a tetragrammaton.

So like it would say like the Yahweh form. But in a much older Semitic script than like Second Temple Judaism, for example. Okay, gotcha. But the decalogue part. So I think really what I'm trying to say, dude, I just had a crazy idea. Okay.

This is nuts. I'm going to start. with saying Noah died in America. Okay? I'm then going to back up and show my work. Now, I don't actually believe that's true. But let's make this connection.

This is fun. So in the epic of Gilgamesh, after Enkidu dies, and Gilgamesh is like, there's no purpose to life. The only person that I really loved is gone. What are the gods doing? He eventually goes on this journey

to a hermit in the woods, who tells him, hey, you know who you should talk to? You should talk to Noah, the Babylonian version of Noah, who was the only man to survive the flood. And he was given immortality as a gift from the gods for his obedience to them. And so Gilgamesh is like, fine, how do I do it? And he's like, easy. All you have to do is row across this vast, perilous ocean

where you'll be faced with trial after trial. You get to the other side, boom, Noah's there. I can't remember his name in the epic, but whatever. Noah's there. You can talk to him. He'll tell you the secrets of life. And then you can just come right on back and you can enjoy. Maybe he'll give you immortality. And you can enjoy the gods in life again. And so basically that proves without a shadow of a doubt that Noah died in America. Inside me, there are two wolves. One of them believes this entirely. And the other one also believes this entirely. Both wolves agree. You know, like two out of two wolves agree that this story is true. I'm trying to remember how I was going to relate. Oh, I guess like Noah would have had an ancient Semitic script to make it. Yeah, so Noah was there. Like he was scratching on rocks.

Like Noah wrote the decalogue before Moses ever stuck it under a creek like this. This theory I'm going to say is churlish and tangentious. I'm going to say have mercy on my soul for this just terrible idea. But it's interesting. The artifacts are very interesting. and one, who's to say? Who's to say? We actually don't know.

The only reason we bring up that story, A, I mean, it's just interesting on its face, but B, it really, like, I can't emphasize enough. They have not been proven to be hoaxes. No, you don't know. Neither one. Smithsonian hates them, okay? But the Smithsonian's dumb. We know that.

Smithsonian's constantly hiding. Like, if I had a nickel for every time the Smithsonian hit a nine-foot skeleton from me personally, I'd have at least five nickels. I would be, like, my pocket would be a jangling. Yeah. You could hear me running down the street. Yeah, absolutely. Like a dog with a collar. So just know that.

Know that they're very well, could be at least two really well-preserved artifacts showing Paleo-Hebrew script and pre-Columbia North America. Yeah, we absolutely could. Yet more reason to think that North America could be or the Americas could be a candidate for the region of Ophir. Before we take you out in this glorious hot clothes. I mean a golden episode on the minds of it. Truly golden with even more speculation from experts and us on the true location of Ophir.

I do want to say that if you'd like to support our show, you should go sign up at hauntedcosmos. Dot supercast.com and get access to the dusty tomb. And also be able to stream this whole season on demand. I keep forgetting that we're doing that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We are filming this right now on Thursday, March 20th, which means, By the time you're hearing this, the entire season five is available to the top two tiers of patrons on Supercast.

Yeah, they can listen the whole thing. Watch or listen. Like on demand, you can binge it right now if you want. Add free. We're thinking about putting out another tier on Supercast that's like 150 bucks a month where we would edit out all of the things that offend liberals. So all of the your mom jokes, the ethnic impersonations. but then what happens if you sign up, it just says, psych. It steals your credit card information.

So we take your money and give you nothing. And we just go on vacations until you cancel it. It's called we do a little be above reproach people. Okay? Ever tried it? That's what I thought. All right. That's all.

Do you have any more on this? Because I'm, I'm itching for this hot close. No, I'm actually just, yeah, I'm excited to tell the story. Yeah, I want them to hear this. We're going to leave you with this. Some of the most, we save some of the best for last. Yes.

So come with me. Buckle up your seat belts. Or should I say, in the native tongue of this story, Yeah. Eomi, come with me to Eldorado. Ever since the time of Christ and just before, explorers, theologians, and mystics have wondered and speculated

on the location of Ophir. What place could contain all of the abundant wealth and exotics mentioned in the accounts of the kings? What place could have gold that was more plentiful than dust, ivory, peacocks, and the like. As one journeys through the writings of late antiques, in the Medieval's, a consensus begins to form. But that consensus is then shattered by the Colombian Age of Exploration, and the new avenues of the world it opened up. Beginning in the first

century, the Jewish historian Josephus places Ophir in the subcontinent of India, citing their known abundance of gold, ivory, and exotic creatures as proof. He was followed in the Christian era by the Latin Church Father Jerome. However, India presents a major problem, one that other theories fall victim to as well. It wasn't far enough away. The scriptures tell us that Solomon and Hiram's ships took full three-year trips to go and to get back from Ophir with all of its lucks and toe. India just doesn't seem far enough away to make that time frame anything better than excessive and unrealistic. Other scholars looked for some reason even closer than India, finding Ophir in the Arabian Peninsula, since the man whose name was Ophir

is listed next to Shiba and Havela in Genesis 10. Both Shiba and Havela were in the Arabian Peninsula, and so to proponents of this theory, Ophir would be guilty of the same by association. However, not only does this make Ophir far too close to Israel and Phoenicia for the timeline to make sense, it also lacks ivory and peacocks, one of the exotic animals notably mentioned. Still others hypothesized Ophir as being an ancient advanced society somewhere in sub-Saharan or far-east Africa. Admittedly, this is a compelling theory given the legend of ancient Zimbabwe in its great city of ruins, many of which can still be admired today. The ruins betray an old metropolis, flowing with wealth, and heavily interactive with surrounding countries, even countries

very far away. However, the ruins do seem to date to a period after the time of Solomon. What's more, Zimbabwe, like India and Arabia, doesn't seem to be far enough away from the Levant to make sense as the location of Ophir. With all of these options given, the world started to settle on India as the most likely mythical place of gold. But, as was already said, that all changed when the Spanish explorer landed on Hispaniola and ushered in the modern age of exploration. More explorers joined in the rush of possibility for fame and riches and glory for God and country. As they did, they started to find strange places in the new world, places of immense jungle that seemed reminiscent of India,

but also somehow different, somehow older and holier. Forests perched atop the high places of the Andes, scars in the earth a mile deep, with tired river gods flowing at the bottom of them, and deserts of waste that nonetheless did not feel like wastelands. And not only did they find these incredible places, they also started to hear rumors about them too, rumors of strange gods and strange sacrifices,

rumors of ritual that made the air thick and dark, rumors of mystery and mysteries that gave the autothonous people they met everlasting youth. They even heard tell of entire. cities made out of pure gold. On Thursday morning, February 6, 1595 was the precise date. Sir Walter Raleigh watched as his beloved homeland vanished into the distance. It had been a full year since he first laid eyes on the Spanish report that made this trip a necessity for him. The trip, of course, saw him bound for the southern reaches of the new world. He was looking for the Delta of the River Coroni, which lay on the outskirts of modern Venezuela. The

The report leading him there was when he picked up from a Spanish explorer in 1594 that told of a great golden city that sat on top of a hill at the coroni's source. Raleigh turned to face the west. His visage was stern and his will was steeled against all the peril that lay ahead. Oh, if Raleigh only knew the fullness of the trouble he brought on himself by taking that first voyage to the land of Ophir. Nearly two years to the day, saw the British captain drifting steadily back into the port of his home. He, or so he claimed, had been successful.

He told the people and parliament and the monarchy all about the mountains of gold he walked along in the otherwise forested place. He told them about the mysterious city of Manoa that he found at the origin of the Karoni and the exotic people that lived there. He brought back some gold, yes, but he brought far more stories with him. Immediately upon stepping off of the ship, he began to sue for the right to lead another expedition, one with great cargo holds, so that he could return and claim Manoa for the English crown. Raleigh had found the fabled paradise of El Dorado, the city of gold, or so he claimed. His plea for funding, though passionately given, fell on deaf ears for many years. These years saw Raleigh take a turn as England's own Icarus,

flying up to the sun of exploratory and military heroism, before falling into accusations of treason against the newly crowned king, James I first in 1603. The king's court found Raleigh guilty of all the charges, but King James nonetheless wanted to spare the man's life. He therefore sentenced him to live out his days in a not entirely uncomfortable quarters within the Tower of London. And here Raleigh sat, a husk of a great man that he once

used to be for 13 years. Finally, in the early months of 1617, the king pardoned Raleigh for one reason and one reason only. Gold. James had heard the legends, Manoa, El Dorado, just sitting somewhere in the new world and waiting to be claimed. He enlisted Raleigh's expertise and gave him allowance from the Royal Treasury to draft a crew and set sail once more for the mouth of the Coroni River far into the West. He was not let loose without qualification, though. The king had Raleigh on a tight leash. He knew the old man, for Raleigh was now quite old, could still get into trouble with his hot head of hastiness and his hatred of the Spanish. He bid Raleigh swear not to engage any Spanish ships he encountered and to stick to the schedule with perfection. Raleigh agreed to the terms.

Indeed, he bet his life on them. And thus it was that after months of hard travel over the world's oceans, he arrived once more at the familiar river that led to uncountable wealth at its headwaters. The aged man, uncertain of his ability to keep on pace with the younger crew, stayed on the ship while they, led by his lieutenant and his very own firstborn son, went into the deep forests of South America in hopes of finding Manoa once again. But everything went quickly wrong. The detachment of crewmen stumbled upon a Spanish encampment on the shores of an indigenous adjacent river, the Orinoco, and brutally attacked them.

The Spanish were caught completely by surprise and lost the fight, but not without taking some form of revenge first. One among them, an unnamed and unknown Spanish defender, fatally shot Sir Walter Raleigh's son. His lieutenant, a man named Chemis, fled back to the ship Raleigh stayed on. He broke the news of the attack and the death of his son and begged for forgiveness, but Raleigh did not give it. realizing his shame and certain death at the hands of an angry father,

chemist threw himself into the waves and ended his own life. Raleigh, grieved and afraid for his own safety now, called off the expedition and returned to England to beg for mercy from James. Though he had not fired any shot, and though he had not even given the order to attack, he knew the blood of those Spanish soldiers fell on his hands. He knew his hopes of clemency were small, but they were not gone. His appeals to the king, though, were useless.

James, furious at his commands being disobeyed and under pressure from the Spanish ambassador, commanded the swift execution of Sir Walter Raleigh. He was beheaded in the courtyard of Westminster Palace on October 29, 1618. His death marked England's loss of one of their greatest and most influential men. What's more, it marked the end of England's search for Manoa, Eldorado. O Fear, forever. To this day, the legendary place has never been found. And perhaps it never will be.

In the heart of the Andes, there lies a lake. From time immemorial, it was held sacred by the people that lived near it, the Muisca's. It is named Lake Guadavita. In Muisca mythology, it is a sacred lake. One that saw the birth of a race of beings like men but far greater, giant men, strong, and made entirely of It is said that in the days before the sun and moon, those men came from the depths and founded the city-state that would eventually become the Mwiska Confederacy. But that glorious city did not last.

The legends do not say how it fell, only that it did. Perhaps the sun grew jealous of the shimmering world around the lake that vied for its own glory. Perhaps the queen of heaven, the goddess that Mwiska worshipped, died and fell into the waters of her home and brought the early empire down with her. One way or another, the golden city sank into Guadito and was never enjoyed by the Moiskas again. But they remembered it was there, and their worship formed around the central hope of it someday coming back up to the land for their enjoyment and vindication. So the priests sacrificed to the lake and gave themselves to the lake, and bid the people, pray to

the lake, confident that one day it would give them what they asked for. And this was the state of things in the Moiska cities around Guadetiva when Spanish conquistadors arrived on its shores in 1537. Upon their arrival, they witnessed the sacred right that held all of the native hope. One priest, the high priest of that time, was ceremoniously disrobed by the people and was covered from head to toe in a thick golden paint made of rich gold dust and sticky sap from the trees. The priest, now a golden night. man reminiscent of the glory days walked calmly into the cold and crystal waters before diving under and swimming as deep as he could. When he returned to the surface, he was himself again. Gone

was the gold, eaten and taken by the water as an offering. He swam back to the shore and walked up to the beach to the solemn faces of his people before they, in an ordered and strict manner, threw all of their finest gold articles of finery into the lake. They did this every year. sending countless pounds of wealth into the belly of the hungry mountain. But every year nothing was ever given back to them. Their Ophir was gone, and perhaps it was the real Ophir, swallowed by the wrath of the gods, and it was never coming back. In the darkness of that lake lies mountains of gold,

but it is not gold available to man anymore. It only takes, it never gives. Solomon's mines have never been found. Want more Haunted Cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content, as well as exclusive content, in regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself.

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