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- DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR VOTE WENT DEPARTMENT -

GAO Report Confirms Key 2004 Stolen Election Findings

As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.

The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the General Accounting Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage.

The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its through, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as "conspiracy theories" adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.

Nearly a year ago, senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines as they were used during the November 2, 2004 presidential election. The request came amidst widespread complaints in Ohio and elsewhere that often shocking irregularities defined their performance.

According to CNN, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee received "more than 57,000 complaints" following Bush's alleged re-election. Many such concerns were memorialized under oath in a series of sworn statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations conducted in Ohio by the Free Press and other election protection organizations.

The non-partisan GAO report has now found that, "some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."

The United States is the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software. Rev. Jesse Jackson, among others, has asserted that "public elections must not be conducted on privately-owned machines." The CEO of one of the most crucial suppliers of electronic voting machines, Warren O'Dell of Diebold, pledged before the 2004 campaign to deliver Ohio and thus the presidency to George W. Bush.

Bush's official margin of victory in Ohio was just 118,775 votes out of more than 5.6 million cast. Election protection advocates argue that O'Dell's statement still stands as a clear sign of an effort, apparently successful, to steal the White House.

Among other things, the GAO confirms that:

1. Some electronic voting machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, thus making it possible to alter them without detection." In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory.

2. "It is easy to alter a file defining how a ballot appears, making it possible for someone to vote for one candidate and actually be recorded as voting for an entirely different candidate." Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.

3. "Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards" can easily be done, according to the GAO.

4. The GAO also confirms that "access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network." This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a "widespread conspiracy" but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.

5. Access "to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords," says the GAO. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.

6. "The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy," says the GAO, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.

7. "One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail," says the GAO, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.

8. "GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel," confirming still more easy access to the system.

In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.

The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a tiny handful of operatives -- or less -- to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.

The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:

* The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.

* A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County

* Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry's name saw Bush's name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems in Franklin County (Columbus). Kerry's margins in both counties were suspiciously low.

* A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.

* In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called "electronic transfer glitch" gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the "loaves and fishes" vote count.

* In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.

* In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county's central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote - 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.

* In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.

* Prior to one of Blackwell's illegitimate "show recounts," technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.

* In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.

* In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation---only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.

* In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that "by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon - the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better."

But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.

Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear that's exactly what happened.

Source: The Free Press
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1529

- BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRINT DEPARTMENT -

Secret Code Discovered in Color Printers

WASHINGTON - It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn't. The pages coming out of your color printer may contain hidden information that could be used to track you down if you ever cross the U.S. government.

Last year, an article in PC World magazine pointed out that printouts from many color laser printers contained yellow dots scattered across the page, viewable only with a special kind of flashlight. The article quoted a senior researcher at Xerox Corp. saying that the dots contain information useful to law-enforcement authorities, a secret digital "license tag" for tracking down criminals.

The content of the coded information was supposed to be a secret, available only to agencies looking for counterfeiters who use color printers.

Now, the secret is out.

Tuesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco consumer privacy group, said it had cracked the code used in a widely used line of Xerox printers, an invisible bar code of sorts that contains the serial number of the printer as well as the date and time a document was printed.

With the Xerox printers, the information appears as a pattern of yellow dots, each only a millimeter wide and visible only with a magnifying glass and a blue light.

The EFF said it has identified similar coding on pages printed from nearly every major printer manufacturer, including Hewlett-Packard Co., though its team has so far cracked the codes for only one type of Xerox printer.

The U.S. Secret Service acknowledged yesterday that the markings, which are not visible to the human eye, are there, but it played down the use for invading privacy.

"It's strictly a countermeasure to prevent illegal activity specific to counterfeiting," agency spokesman Eric Zahren said. "It's to protect our currency and to protect people's hard-earned money."

It's unclear whether the yellow-dot codes have ever been used to make an arrest. And no one would say how long the codes have been in use. But Seth Schoen, the EFF technologist who led the organization's research, said he had seen the coding on documents produced by printers that were at least 10 years old.

"It seems like someone in the government has managed to have a lot of influence in printing technology," he said.

Xerox spokesman Bill McKee confirmed the existence of the hidden codes, but he said the company was simply assisting an agency that asked for help. McKee said the program was part of a cooperation with government agencies, competing manufacturers and a "consortium of banks," but would not provide further details.

Source: Dirtwire
http://boulderdirt.com/sports/article.cfm/4656/

- THEM'S FIGHTING WORDS DEPARTMENT -

Man Claims Antigravity Used Since 1930s

"The X-PRIZE is nothing but a big hoax. I think hoax means a lie, doesn??�t it?" Fred Wilcoxson says.

Wilcoxson, 82, a retired Holloman Air Force Base airplane mechanic, has long been critical of American governmental ???secrecy??? he says is crippling the economy. There are other ramifications because of the secrecy, he says, which include denying today??�s youth tomorrow??�s opportunities in space and needless deaths from worn-out technology.

The X-PRIZE is an effort to commercialize space through private enterprise, and is expected to bring millions to southern New Mexico??�s economies over the coming years. Wilcoxson, though, claims the X-PRIZE is a ???hoax??? because anti-gravity technology ??� which negates expensive rocketry ??� has been usable since the 1920s.

???Anti-gravity is the clue to space travel, it??�s the clue to space commercialization and yet you never hear it mentioned. It was missing from Apollo, it was missing from all the NASA programs,??? Wilcoxson says. ???If you take (out) anti-gravity you don??�t have a space program. Those anti-gravity (craft), or what UFOs as they are well known, some of them weigh 30 tons. But if you overcome gravity you could lift it with your little finger.???

That the Air Force and NASA continue using rocketry wastes billions of taxpayer dollars, according to Wilcoxson. He says the space shuttle astronauts who were killed would not have died if the government had not kept a cloak of secrecy around anti-gravity.

???The first successful flights of anti-gravity took place in about 1932,??? Wilcoxson claims. ???One could have been here. A friend of mine told me it was in 1932 that he saw this bright light out west go from the ground up and he was a guard on the lumber mill at the time.???

Subsequently, Wilcoxson says the military established a UFO base at Orogrande in 1941 to test their newly built craft. The infamous Roswell UFO craft that crashed might well have originated there, he believes. In the mid-1940s, Wilcoxson joined the Army Air Corps.

He moved to Roswell not long after the 1947 crash.

Like countless other people, Wilcoxson says for two decades he bought into the UFO ???hype??? that aliens had arrived on planet Earth.

Until, that is, in 1966 when he was vacationing at Halls Crossing, Lake Powell, Utah. Wilcoxson sighted UFOs.

The craft, he says, were flying in Air Force formation: a lead ship with others following to either side in a swept-wing formation. At that moment he says he realized that if they were extra-terrestrial they would not be traveling that in that manner.

???Maybe the crash wasn??�t alien,??? Wilcoxson said he realized of Roswell. ???You??�re getting down into the military, where the military operates, so you can put two and two together.???

He cites other dates he says are key to the alleged secrecy.

???(The year) 1953 was ... important because the CIA formed the Robertson Panel. They were going to discuss whether or not UFOs existed,??? Wilcoxson says. ???(President) Truman suggested to the CIA to investigate those UFOs,??? Wilcoxson says. ???The CIA convened the Robertson Panel, which was a bunch of bunk.???

The group was officially known as the ???Office of Scientific Intelligence Advisory Panel On Unidentified Flying Objects.??? The Web site parascope.com states the group was created when ???the CIA??�s science officials had resolved to form an expert panel to come up with police recommendations on how to minimize public concern about UFOs and prevent panic during large national flaps.???

They determined any ???threat posed by UFOs to national security was psychological rather than physical,??? the site states.

About the same time, Wilcoxson says, the United States established moon bases to mine the resources. ???We have never left the moon. Never, never, never. We were on the moon in the early ??�50s and are still there,??? he says.

So why continue to perpetrate fraud? From Wilcoxson??�s point of view, thousands of jobs would instantly go away if rocketry-based science were to end.

???They??�re after your money,??? Wilcoxson says. ???We??�re also misleading the kids. Why don??�t we tell (the students) the truth????

Not doing so, he says, limits their future employment opportunities, which he believes will greatly expand to make up for the end of the rocket era. If not, Wilcoxson believes when the secret house of cards comes tumbling down, industry built on the lie will crash and the economy will follow. He points out that Alamogordo is highly dependent upon Holloman and the F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters.

The latest event he characterizes as propping up the house of cards is X-PRIZE, which he insists was ???instigated by NASA??? to push the ???hoax??? along.

???They had professional hypers. That show was quite well organized. It wasn??�t for the good of southern New Mexico. It wasn??�t to benefit space travel. It was a well put-on sideshow,??? Wilcoxson says. ???It all stinks.???

Source: Alamogordo Daily News / NM - 10/19/05 - Far Shores
http://www.farshores.org/ufo05xp.htm

EARTH MYSTERIES AND UFO/ET CONGRESS
NOV 12 - 13, 2005

The Days Inn Route 206 & NJTP Exit #7 North, Bordentown, NJ
By Pat J. Marcattilio - Dr. UFO

SPEAKERS INCLUDE: George J. Haas, Hans Holzer PhD, Cmdr. Graham Bethune, Dr. Ruben T. Ong, Rob Simone, Rich Smith, Phil Reynolds, Donald R. Morse, DDS, Jefferey C. Hogue.

For more info, phone Pat Marcattilio at: 609-631-8955
or visit his website at: www.drufo.org

- GUEST AUTHOR DEPARTMENT -

Supernatural - Meetings With The Ancient Teachers Of MankindBy Graham Hancock

My intention at the outset was to write a book exploring the mystery of human origins. There are many gaps in the fossil record between about 7 million years ago (the date of our supposed last common ancestor with chimpanzees) and the emergence of the first civilisations recognised by historians around 5000 years ago. My thought was that if I probed these gaps diligently enough something might emerge ??� some insight, some scrap of previously neglected information ??� that might shed light on the great puzzles of the human predicament. Why, alone amongst animal species, have we developed culture and religion, beliefs in life after death, beliefs in non-physical beings such as spirits, demons and angels, elaborate mythologies, the ability to create and to appreciate art, the ability to use and manipulate symbols, consciousness of ourselves and of our place in the scheme of things? Did these abstract, even ???spiritual???, qualities develop slowly, over millions of years, or were they switched on suddenly, like lights in a darkened room?

To cut a long story short, what I discovered is that during most of the first 7 million years of human evolution there is no evidence at all for the existence of symbolic abilities amongst our ancestors. No matter how intensively we probe what is known about the fossil record, or speculate about what is not yet known about it, all that we see evidence for throughout this period is a dull and stultifying copying and recopying of essentially the same patterns of behaviour and essentially the same ???kits??? of crude stone tools, without change or innovation, for periods of hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. When a change is introduced (in tool shape for example) it then sets a new standard to be copied and recopied without innovation for a further immense period until the next change is finally adopted. In the process, glacially slow, we also see the gradual development of human anatomy in the direction of the modern form: the brain-pan enlarges, brow ridges reduce in size, overall anatomy becomes more gracile ??� and so on and so forth.

By 196,000 years ago, and on some accounts considerably earlier, humans had achieved ???full anatomical modernity???. This means that they were in every way physically indistinguishable from the people of today and, crucially, that they possessed the same large, complex brains as we do. The most striking mystery, however, is that their behaviour continued to lag behind their acquisition of modern neurology and appearance. They showed no sign of possessing a culture, or supernatural beliefs, or self-consciousness, or any interest in symbols. Indeed there was nothing about them that we could instantly identify with ???us???. Dr Frank Brown, whose discovery of 196,000-year-old anatomically-modern human skeletons in Ethiopia was published in Nature on 17 February 2005, points out that they are 35,000 years older than the previous ???oldest??? modern human remains known to archaeologists:

???This is significant because the cultural aspects of humanity in most cases appear much later in the record, which would mean 150,000 years of Homo sapiens without cultural stuff??�???

Brown??�s colleague, John Fleagle of Stony Brook University in New York State, also comments on the same problem:

???There is a huge debate regarding the first appearance of modern aspects of behaviour??� As modern human anatomy is documented at earlier and earlier sites, it becomes evident that there was a great time gap between the appearance of the modern skeleton and ???modern behaviour??�.???

For Ian Tattershall of the American Museum of Natural History the problem posed by this gap ??� and what happened to our ancestors during it ??� is ???the question of questions in palaeoanthropology???. His colleague Professor David Lewis-Williams of the Rock Art Research Institute at South Africa??�s Witwatersrand University describes the same problem as ???the greatest riddle of archaeology ??� how we became human and in the process began to make art and to practice what we call religion.???

I quickly realized that this was the mystery, and the period, I wanted to investigate. Not that endless, unimaginative cultural desert from 7 million years ago down to just 40,000 years ago when our ancestors hobbled slowly through their long and boring apprenticeship, but the period of brilliant and burning symbolic light that followed soon afterwards when the first of the great cave art of southwest Europe appeared ??� already perfect and fully formed ??� between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago.

A most remarkable theory exists to explain the special characteristics of these amazing and haunting early works of art, and to explain why identical characteristics are also found in prehistoric art from many other parts of the world and in art produced by the shamans of surviving tribal cultures today. The theory was originally elaborated by Professor David Lewis-Williams, and is now supported by a majority of archaeologists and anthropologists. In brief, it proposes that the reason for the similarities linking all these different systems of art, produced by different, unrelated cultures at different and widely-separated periods of history, is that in every case the shaman-artists responsible for them had previously experienced altered states of consciousness in which they had seen vivid hallucinations, and in every case their endeavour in making the art was to memorialise on the walls of rock shelters and caves the ephemeral images that they had seen in their visions. According to this theory the different bodies of art have so many similarities because we all share the same neurology, and thus share many of the same experiences and visions in altered states of consciousness.

There are lots of ways of inducing the necessary altered state. The bushmen of South Africa get there through night-long rhythmic dancing and drumming, the Tukano Indians of the Amazon do it through consuming the hallucinogenic beverage Ayahuasca. In prehistoric Europe I present evidence that the requisite altered states may have been reached through the consumption of Psilocybe semilanceata ??� the popular little brown ???magic mushroom??? that is still used throughout the world to induce hallucinations today. In Central America the Maya and their prececessors used other psilocybe species (P.Mexicana and P. Cubensis) to induce the same effects.

I took LSD once in my twenties, at the Windsor Free Festival in 1974, and had a fantastic, exciting, energizing 12-hour trip in a parallel reality. When my normal, everyday consciousness returned ??� and it did so quite abruptly, like a door slamming ??� I felt grateful for such a wonderful experience but so much in awe of its power that I vowed never to do it again. Suppose things had gone the other way? Suppose instead of an exciting medieval Otherworld through which I had been allowed to travel like a knight-errant, I had been ushered into some hell-realm for 12 hours? How would I have handled that? Would I have handled it at all?

Now, in my 50??�s I had to confront the psychic challenges of major hallucinogens again. In order to research my subject properly, and to know what I was talking about when I spoke of altered states of consciousness, I drank Ayahuasaca with shamans in the Amazon and self-experimented with DMT, psilocybin and the African visionary drug known as Iboga ??� ???the plant that enables men to see the dead.???

The extraordinary experiences I went through convinced me that David Lewis-Williams is right and that visionary states of this sort, brought on by the accidental discovery of plant hallucinogens, did indeed provide the inspiration for ancient cave and rock art traditions all around the world. Lewis-Williams is also right to insist that it is to the proper examination of such altered states of consciousness that we should turn if we wish to discover the source of the first religious ideas ever entertained by our ancestors.

It was precisely at this point, however, that I began to part company with Lewis-Williams and his theory. Whatever the cave artists saw in their trances, and no matter how devoutly they may have believed that what they were seeing was real, the South African professor is adamant that the entire inspiration for 25,000 years of Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings reduces to nothing more than the fevered illusions of disturbed brain-chemistry ??� i.e. to hallucinations. In his scientific universe there is simply no room, or need, for the supernatural, no space for any kind of Otherworld, and no possibility that intelligent non-physical entities could exist.

I found I couldn??�t leave the matter there, with the inspiration for cave art and the birth of religion neatly accounted for by disturbed brain-chemistry, with the earliest spiritual insights of mankind rendered down to mere epiphenomena of strictly biological processes, with the sublime thus efficiently reduced to the ridiculous. To have established the role of hallucinations as the inspiration for cave art is one thing ??� and David Lewis-Williams, in my opinion, has successfully done that. But to understand what hallucinations really are, and what part they play in the overall spectrum of human experience and behaviour, is another thing altogether, and neither Lewis-Williams nor any other scientist can yet claim to possess such knowledge, or to be anywhere near acquiring it. Gifted and experienced shamans the world over really do know more ??� much more ??� than they do. So if we were smart we would listen to what the shamans have to say about the true character and complexity of reality insteadof basking mindlessly in the overweening one-dimensional arrogance of the Western technological mindset.

Because I had been shaken to the core by my experiences with Ayahuasca and Iboga I decided to take my investigation further and to explore the extraordinary possibility that science is unwilling even to consider and that David Lewis-Williams dismisses out of hand. This is the possibility that the Amazonian and African hallucinogens had obliged me to confront face-to-face and that shamans contend with on a daily basis ??� the possibility that the spirit world and its inhabitants are real, that supernatural powers and non-physical beings do exist, and that human consciousness may, under certain special circumstances, be liberated from the body and enabled to interact with and perhaps even learn from these ???spirits???. In short, did our ancestors experience their great evolutionary leap forward of the last 40,000 years not just because of the beneficial social and organisational by-products of shamanism but because they were literally helped, taught, prompted and inspired by supernatural agents? Could the ???supernaturals??? first depicted in the painted caves and rock shelters ??� and still accessible to us today in altered states of consciousness ??� be the ancient teachers of mankind? Could it be they who first ushered us into the full birthright of our humanity? And could it be that human evolution is not just the ???blind???, ???meaningless??? ???natural??? process that Darwin identified, but something else, more purposive and intelligent, that we have barely even begun to understand?

* Why did Nobel Prize-winner Francis Crick keep concealed until his death the amazing circumstances under which he first ???saw??? the double-helix structure of DNA? And why did he become convinced that natural laws are unable to explain the mysterious complexity of the DNA molecule itself?

* Why does the 97 per cent of DNA that scientists do not understand ??� so-called ???junk DNA??? ??� contain chemical ???sequences??? arranged in patterns and frequencies that are otherwise only found in the deep coding of all human languages?

* Why do Western lab volunteers, placed experimentally under the influence of hallucinogens such as DMT, psilocybin, mescaline and LSD, report visionary encounters with non-physical ???beings??? in the form of animal-human hybrids identical to those described by Amazonian shamans and to those painted by our ancestors in the prehistoric caves?

* What is the significance of the astonishing similarities between the entities known as ???aliens???, ET??�s??? or ???greys??? in modern popular culture, the entities known as ???fairies???, ???elves??? and ???goblins??? in the Middle Ages, and the entities that shamans in surviving tribal cultures know as ???ghosts???, ???gods??? and ???spirits???? Why are such figures also depicted in prehistoric art as far afield as Africa, Europe, the Americas and Australia?

Such questions, I know, sound preposterous and pointless to anyone committed to ???objective??? science and the Western logical positivist tradition. The more closely I pursued them, however, the more convinced I became that they point towards matters of extraordinary substance, and that science has done us an immense disfavour by its policy of ridiculing and discouraging all rational inquiry in this area.

Supernatural: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers of Mankind, by Graham Hancock, 720pp with 16 full-colour illustrations and 150 black-and-white line drawings. Published by Century.

Source: Graham Hancock
http://www.grahamhancock.com/supernatural/article_01.html

70026/97988_alabamastone.jpg nt-weight: bold;">- ANCIENT AMERICA DEPARTMENT -

Mystery of the Alabama Stone

American Archaeology had its roots in the early days of the United States republic. Military leaders, surveyors, and other frontiersmen, compelled only by curiosity, began to investigate the ancient monumental earthworks they discovered in the frontiers of the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys, as well as other mysteries the exploration of new territory uncovered. The American Antiquarian Society, founded in 1812 by a Massachusetts printer, collected many of the reports and artifacts these men sent back east. The first governor of the Mississippi Territory, Massachusetts-born Winthrop Sargent, gave the fledgling society one of its earliest treasures: an ancient stone figure known as the "Natchez Idol." A few years later in 1824, an artifact known as the "Alabama Stone" was given to the society by another New Englander making a name for himself on the southwestern frontier, Silas Dinsmoor.

In 1824 the fifty-eight-year-old Dinsmoor was a businessman and city planner living in Mobile. This must have been a period of relative peace and quiet in his life, since he had spent most of the previous decades on the frontier. The New Hampshire-born Dinsmoor had served as agent to both the Cherokee and the Choctaw, advancing a program of cultural assimilation through the promotion of European-style agriculture. As the head of the Choctaw Agency from 1802 to 1815, Dinsmoor gained a reputation throughout the Mississippi Territory for fairness and for his irreverent humor. During Aaron Burr's 1807 rebellion, a jocular Dinsmoor invited friends back east to "come and help me to laugh at the fun."

But this spirited personality made Dinsmoor enemies as well. He insisted that all travelers show papers for slaves they sought to transport through Choctaw territory, and when an outraged Andrew Jackson-the country's most famous war hero-refused to comply, Dinsmoor made a lasting enemy by pretending never to have heard of him. Later Dinsmoor lost another Federal post in the newly created Alabama Territory for writing a sarcastic reply to the inquiries of his Washington superiors.

As a businessman, surveyor, and city planner, Dinsmoor became one of Mobile's leading citizens and sought to join the American Antiquarian Society, which counted many of the nation's leading men as members, including President James Monroe. "To repay the complement" of being elected to such company, he had the artifact known as the Alabama Stone shipped as a gift to the society's Worcester, Massachusetts, library.

A slab of sandstone weighing just over two hundred pounds, it bore a crooked inscription in Roman letters, "HISPAN ETIND REX,"-short for "Hispaniarum et Indiarum Rex," or "King of Spain and the Indies," in Latin-and underneath that, in strangely formed Arabic numerals, the figure "1232."

Dinsmoor had acquired the rock from Levin Powell, Tuscaloosa County's first tax collector, who credited a seventeen-year-old boy named Thomas Scales and his father with discovering the stone in 1817. While clearing land on a peninsula formed where the Big Greek enters the Black Warrior River, the two men found the stone partially buried at the foot of a tulip tree. Befuddled by the inscription, they lugged it to the log cabin that served as Powell's office. Until it was given to Dinsmoor, it had been sitting outside Powell's front door as a curiosity for visitors.

A historical marker in Coker, Alabama, near the site of the stone's discovery, proclaims the Alabama Stone "one of the earliest pieces of evidence of the white man's exploration in America." But archaeological and anthropological experts have long been suspicious of this assertion. Though small items such as bells and beads connected to later Spanish expeditions have been found at many Indian sites, there is almost no physical trace of the most famous and earliest venture of Hernando de Soto in 1539. The desire to read the Alabama Stone as Soto's calling card blares from a Washington Post headline of 1925, "Antiquarians Given Relic of De Soto's Eldorado Search."

Most nineteenth-century discussions accepted without question the stone's connection to Soto, but they needed to explain the puzzling number "1232." One historian confidently proclaimed that the "inscription had been copied from an old Spanish dollar by a portion of [Soto's] men, who had been sent out in various directions searching for gold." This explanation was called "scarcely tenable" by Henry W. Hayes, presenting his findings to the American Antiquarian Society in 1888, because no coin of "Spain and the Indies" could show a date of 1232, before Columbus's discoveries.

In fact the numismatic evidence is even more telling than Hayes perceived at the time. The royal title, "King of Spain and the Indies," was not in common use until nearly a hundred years after Soto. Furthermore, from the middle of the eighteenth century the formula was abbreviated on most coins to "HISPAN*ET* IND*REX," exactly as it appears on the stone. Since Spanish coins of this period were in circulation as monetized currency well into the nineteenth century, almost any American on the southwest frontier could have pulled this inscription out of his pocket.

Others speculated that "1232" was a simple mistake for 1532, or that it represented the distance Soto's men had traveled from Tampa Bay. But twentieth century scholars did not share their predecessors' confidence in the conquistador connection. When the 1939 De Soto Commission report compiled the day's best opinion about the explorer's route, the Alabama Stone was not mentioned even as a footnote.

Although professional opinion had hardened against the Alabama Stone, its mystery still captivated members of the public. In 1963, inspired by his history teacher at Tuscaloosa High School, seventeen-year-old Donald Guyer began a campaign to bring the artifact home to Alabama. He wrote to the governor of Massachusetts and to the Massachusetts Historical Society before being directed to the American Antiquarian Society, which agreed to return the stone. The Tuscaloosa Chamber of Commerce and the Alabama National Guard coordinated with their Massachusetts counterparts to transport the stone, and after a week of display in Tuscaloosa, it was delivered to the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery.

At first displayed in the Indian relics room, the Alabama Stone was moved behind the scenes by the Archives director, Peter Brannon, who considered it "just a fake." Speaking to the Montgomery Advertiser in 1965, Brannon said that the stone was probably carved where it was found by someone who "just didn't have anything to do" one afternoon. Brannon's dismissal of the stone was unusually harsh. While experts today reject a sixteenth-century date for the stone's carving, most remain noncommital on the subject of the stone's origin-who carved it, when, and why. In 1995 a pair of amateur historians, Antonio Ferrell and geologist Whitney R. Telle, wrote an article in the Tuscaloosa News connecting the stone with a period of Spanish colonial activity in the 178Os, when Spain reclaimed an old fortified post, Fort Confederation, through a treaty with the Choctaw. They argued the stone may have served as a territory marker. The site of the Alabama Stone's discovery was almost exactly 1,232 furlongs upriver from the fort, according to the men's calculations.

But it is unlikely we will ever learn the truth. The stone presents a problem to professional archaeologists and historians in that it cannot be authenticated by comparison because it is unique and anomalous, something a workaday object rarely is. This elusive quality has made a simply inscribed stone into a fascinating mystery that has endured for nearly two centuries.

Bard Cole is an essayist, short story writer, and assistant editor at Alabama Heritage.

Source: Alabama Heritage, Winter 2005/Far Shores
http://www.farshores.org/a05as.htm

- A NATURAL PART OF LIFE DEPARTMENT -

The Power of Magical Thinking

Across the room at the Vampire and Victims Ball, I saw a dapper gent in shiny white and black shoes. His hair was closely cropped, his face pale, and he stood stiffly without smiling.

"Are you a vampire or a victim?" I asked.

"Do I look like a victim?" he responded, smiling so his teeth didn't show.

"Weeeell," I said, stalling.

"Are you a victim?" he asked, too calmly.

"I don't want to say."

"You have to choose."

If I said victim, he was likely to start gnawing my neck. If I said vampire, he would demand proof. I hadn't fangs enough to back that pretension. Spotting an angel across the room and eager to shift Dapper Gent's attention, I said, "That takes some nerve in this crowd."

"Why do you say that?" he asked. "An angel and a devil are only a breath away."

I was only beginning my research into America's magical beliefs, and this was only a Halloween party in Salem, but already I was coming to understand that underneath America's allegiance to rational thinking was a river of magical thinking that ran broad and deep.

I was soon to discover that, rooted here since the beginning of our country's history and despite all science to the contrary, magical thinking is on the increase.How am I defining magic? As all those paranormal, occult, otherworldly and supernatural ideas that science will not allow.

Why are such beliefs rising? Some people blame ignorance. Others blame perversion, sin, video games. Others credit the new theories of physics that make human perception seem more important and actions seem more interconnected. Some think near-death experiences play a role. Others say that magical beliefs popular in the 1960s and '70s never disappeared but instead went mainstream. They became powerful kinds of positive thinking, for instance, and began to be heard in statements such as, "What you can envision, you can create."

After studying this trend for five years, I blame life. Everyday, ordinary, just-trying-to-get-through-it and make-a-little-sense-of-this-muddle life. Life is now and always has been filled with mystery. For the scientist, all mystery must be solved. For the rest of us, it must be managed, lived through, learned from.

I've heard hundreds of stories in dozens of settings about spirits that appear in various forms. They come in dreams and in waking visions. They give evidence of themselves by emanating perfumes, calling on telephones, flashing lights, moving significant things.

Magical synchronicities seem to occur in many people's lives. Wishes get granted. Coincidences reveal meaning. Who says? We do. Scientists have explanations, but we don't particularly care whether our awareness comes from a spike in brain chemicals or an error in processing. They give us hope that life isn't random or meaningless. They tell us that what we do, what we want, what we pay attention to have force. They assure us we can have control and maybe even a happy ending.

Magical thinking. Every bit of it is magical thinking.

As America celebrates its scariest holiday, lots of people won't be merely playing make-believe. When stories begin to fly of ghosts and goblins, haunted houses and innocent people possessed, a good portion of tellers and listeners will be quietly believing that the gist of these fabulous tales has some truth.

Forty percent of Americans think ghosts and haunted houses truly exist, up from 27 percent since 2000. Sixty-six percent believe demons can possess humans, up from 40 percent. That would mean that almost 200 million people in the world's most technologically advanced, scientifically sophisticated culture believe bizarre, even murderous behavior might be the result of possession by evil spirits.

Surprised? Maybe not. You could be one of them. Don't be embarrassed. Mother Teresa had an exorcism, and Pope John Paul II performed one. Among Roman Catholics and Episcopalians, exorcisms are in such demand that the number of priests who do them has been increased. The Roman Catholic Church recently revised its rules for exorcism for the first time in four centuries and started a school in Rome for training exorcists.

Fifty-four percent of Americans believe in psychic and spiritual healing, so many that the Episcopal Church, that most staid of denominations, includes healing among its important ministries. Pentecostals, the country's fastest-growing denomination, are famous for exorcisms and healings.

More than a third of Americans believe in clairvoyance. Seventy-five percent believe in angels.

There may be something healthy about all that. So this Halloween, I'd suggest, go ahead, party down, believe the magic. You're certainly not alone.

Journalist Christine Wicker, who lives in Brookfield, Wis., is the author of "Not in Kansas Anymore: A Curious Tale of How Magic Is Transforming America." Readers may contact her through www.christinewicker.com

Source: Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-wicker_
26edi.ART.State.Edition1.734e781.html