Mines of Ophir - S5:E3

Summary

Haunted Cosmos: Mines of Ophir - Season 5, Episode 3 Summary

Release Date: July 23, 2025

Hosts: Ben Garrett & Brian Sauvé
Podcast Description: Investigating a world that isn't just stuff.

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1. Cold Open: Mysteries and Legends

The episode kicks off with Brian Sauvé humorously declaring that Nicolas Cage movies are now considered canonical in American history. He also teases listeners about Ben Garrett’s adventurous but mishap-filled quest for Solomon's mines and the enigmatic secrets of the Grand Canyon.

Notable Quote:
Benjamin Garette: "The world is not just stuff."
[00:20]

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2. The Legend of GE Kincaid and the Grand Canyon

Ben Garrett narrates a gripping tale of GE Kincaid, an intrepid explorer who embarked on a perilous journey down the Colorado River in search of adventure. Battling the harsh sun and treacherous rapids, Kincaid discovers an unusual cave adorned with mysterious hieroglyphics reminiscent of ancient Egyptian scripts.

Key Points:

• Kincaid's relentless pursuit leads him to a cave sealed with ancient stairs, suggesting a deliberate architectural feat.
• Inside, he finds a network of chambers filled with artifacts, mummies, and intricate carvings depicting mythological interactions between gods and men.
• His findings prompt the Smithsonian to launch an expedition, led by a man named Jordan, involving 40 scientists to further explore and document the site.

Notable Quote:
Benjamin Garette: "It was what they thought Atlantis may have looked like."
[04:30]

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3. The Smithsonian Expedition and the Vanishing

The Smithsonian's team meticulously maps out the cavernous complex, uncovering symmetrical layouts and a central chamber dominated by a golden Buddha-like statue. Despite their discoveries, both Kincaid and Jordan mysteriously disappear, leaving behind only two obscure articles in the Arizona Gazette dated April 5, 1909.

Key Points:

• Speculations arise about the Smithsonian covering up the findings to preserve their historical narratives and financial interests.
• The absence of physical evidence or corroborating records casts doubt on the authenticity of Kincaid’s and Jordan’s adventures.
• The mystery deepens as no additional expeditions or artifacts related to the Grand Canyon cave have surfaced.

Notable Quote:
Benjamin Garette: "Was it all a ruse? No. Was it real? The ruse coming in afterward in the form of a conspiracy to erase the find from history?"
[09:45]

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4. Ophir: Searching for Solomon’s Mythical Land

The discussion shifts to the ancient land of Ophir, a biblical location renowned for its wealth in gold, ivory, and exotic animals. Various theories about its location are examined, with historical accounts placing Ophir in regions like India, the Arabian Peninsula, and sub-Saharan Africa. However, geographical and temporal inconsistencies challenge these placements.

Key Points:

• India Theory: Supported by Josephus and Father Jerome but criticized for proximity issues concerning Solomon’s maritime journey timeframe.
• Arabian Peninsula: Linked by association with Sheba and Havilah from Genesis 10 but lacks essential resources like ivory and peacocks.
• Sub-Saharan Africa: Considered due to parallels with the ancient city of Zimbabwe, though dating discrepancies weaken the argument.

Notable Quote:
Benjamin Garette: "What if Ophir was a land of brightness to the ancients, separated from them by a dark sea?"
[27:08]

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5. The Bat Creek Stone: A Controversial Artifact

Ben introduces the Bat Creek Stone, discovered in the late 19th century, which purportedly bears Paleo Hebrew inscriptions. Initially dismissed by Cyrus Thomas and his team at the Smithsonian, further scrutiny by Semitic language experts suggested possible authentic ancient Semitic script, fueling debates about pre-Columbian transatlantic contact.

Key Points:

• Discovery: Found in earthen mounds near the Tennessee River by Cyrus Thomas's expedition.
• Initial Analysis: Thought to be in the Cherokee Alphabet but later studies hinted at Paleo Hebrew script.
• Controversy: Lacks corroborative evidence, raising suspicions of it being a hoax orchestrated to support the Smithsonian’s theories on pre-Columbian contact.
• Similarities with Los Lunas Decalogue: Both artifacts suggest ancient Semitic presence in North America but remain unproven.

Notable Quote:
Benjamin Garette: "The Bat Creek stone remains one of the greatest mysteries of American archaeology."
[34:07]

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6. Conspiracy Theories and Suppression Claims

The hosts delve into theories suggesting the Smithsonian may have deliberately suppressed or discredited evidence supporting ancient Semitic presence in North America to maintain established historical narratives and financial interests.

Key Points:

• Lack of Official Proclamations: Despite being subjects of debate, neither the Bat Creek Stone nor the Los Lunas Decalogue have been officially declared hoaxes by academic institutions.
• Academic Skepticism: Predominantly due to the absence of additional supporting evidence and the complex logistics required to fabricate such artifacts convincingly.
• Potential Motivations: Preserving the integrity of mainstream historical accounts and preventing disruptions to established timelines regarding human migration and technological development.

Notable Quote:
Brian Sauvé: "Who’s to say we actually don’t know?"
[73:20]

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7. Linking Mythology and Ancient Texts

Ben and Brian explore connections between various myths, ancient texts, and legendary figures like Sir Walter Raleigh’s quest for El Dorado. They ponder the possibility of these legends intertwining with biblical accounts, suggesting a deeper, perhaps undiscovered, historical truth.

Key Points:

• Sir Walter Raleigh: His expeditions in search of El Dorado were inspired by reports of golden cities, paralleling the quest for Ophir.
• Mythological Integration: Stories like the Muisca’s Lake Guatavita rituals reflect similar themes of sacrifice and lost paradises filled with gold.
• Biblical Corroborations: Instances where archaeological discoveries later validated biblical locations (e.g., Nazareth) hint at the potential for undiscovered truths within ancient scriptures.

Notable Quote:
Benjamin Garette: "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."
[55:28]

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8. Conclusion: The Endless Quest for Ophir

The episode concludes with a reflection on the enduring allure of Ophir and similar myths, emphasizing the human fascination with uncovering hidden histories and the allure of lost treasures. Ben and Brian encourage listeners to remain open-minded yet critical, balancing curiosity with skepticism.

Key Points:

• Unresolved Mysteries: Ophir’s true location remains elusive, symbolizing the broader quest for understanding humanity’s ancient past.
• Call for Exploration: Encourages continued investigation and open dialogue about unconventional archaeological findings.
• Balancing Belief and Evidence: Advocates for a thoughtful approach, recognizing the value of myths while demanding rigorous proof.

Notable Quote:
Benjamin Garette: "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."
[09:35]

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Final Thoughts:
In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, Ben Garrett and Brian Sauvé navigate the intricate web of myths, archaeological mysteries, and historical conjectures surrounding the legendary Mines of Ophir. Through engaging storytelling and thought-provoking discussions, they invite listeners to ponder the tantalizing possibility that some of history’s greatest mysteries may still be waiting to be unearthed.

Transcript

[Brian Sauvay]

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, you discover that Nicolas 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

The world is not just stuff.

[Brian Sauvay]

Minus 111.9.

[Benjamin Garette]

The widely publicized mystery of the flying saucers may soon be solved.

[Brian Sauvay]

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 sent 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 temptress 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 spin, or worse, to capsize his small craft altogether. But each time he would catch it just at the final moment and right 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 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 hallway 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 a 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 tiers. 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 1500ft 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 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 or 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 12ft around and went straight into the stone for some 60ft 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 and 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 the but his story wasn't yet done. According to Kinkaid. Or we should say according to the article written about Kinkaid 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, Kinkaid 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 two 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 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 Kinkaid 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 Kinkaid himself can be proved to exist. Was it all a ruse? No. 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

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 stocked provisions, he knew would have to be stretched after the short first leg of the journey that 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 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. From from many long cycles of the moon, men fell over, 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 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 and sacrificed 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 10 months, collecting as much gold as possible. Ophir was, as usual, good to them. The few natives that they encountered there were not autochthonous 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 10 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 beasts of burden that the locals lent them for the journey 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, weighted 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. 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 in all, had taken a full three years. 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 Hyram. He ran to him and knelt and kissed the scepter Hyram 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 rare royal man the captain had ever seen in his life stepped onto 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 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 Ezion Geber, which is beside Eloth on the shore of the Red Sea in the land of Edom. And Hiram sent in the navy 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, 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 wrong? 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

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[Benjamin Garette]

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.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it then?

[Brian Sauvay]

You ignorant Normie? All you've needed to do is go to Indigo Sundries soap 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Okay, I am literally going to indigosundrysoap.com right now. Tell me what to buy, Ben.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

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.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description?

[Brian Sauvay]

Ben, you ignorant Normie. It's always in the show description.

[Benjamin Garette]

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.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah. Your skin looks so velvety smooth.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah, exactly. And if you need some design work from Chris, you should go to newdominiondesignco.com get started there. And he'll serve you right, man.

[Brian Sauvay]

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 Garette.

[Benjamin Garette]

Garette, the best a man can get. Hey. This episode of Hana Cosmos is brought to you by my very cool sweater that looks like a sailing sweater.

[Brian Sauvay]

No, it's actually brought to you by Ben's crippling back pain.

[Benjamin Garette]

This episode, Hanu Cosmos, is brought to you by the fact that I 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 times, making my life bearable.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

And the signs will be that all of a sudden, Haunted Cosmos, every episode will be, like, full of cgi.

[Benjamin Garette]

No, like.

[Brian Sauvay]

Like, it would be like Michael Bay directed every single episode of Haunted Cosmos.

[Benjamin Garette]

And we get sushi catered every single.

[Brian Sauvay]

That we're eating the whole time.

[Benjamin Garette]

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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Oh, yeah.

[Benjamin Garette]

Which is basically like El Dorado Ophir kind of vibe.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah. National Treasure is canon for America.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yes, yes.

[Brian Sauvay]

Like, it's, you know, you have, like, fan fiction of America and that's, you know, like, what they teach you in high school.

[Benjamin Garette]

Right.

[Brian Sauvay]

It's not canon. National Treasure is canon.

[Benjamin Garette]

I would say on a weekly basis.

[Brian Sauvay]

All of it happened.

[Benjamin Garette]

I go home and I look my wife right in the eye. And I say, it's time to get in the cage.

[Brian Sauvay]

And you say, and I'm talking about.

[Benjamin Garette]

Watching any Nicolas Cage movie absolutely ever made. Raising Arizona National Treasure.

[Brian Sauvay]

This is why. This is why we are on the same page.

[Benjamin Garette]

Con Air.

[Brian Sauvay]

This is why the chemistry dude on this set. Volcanic.

[Benjamin Garette]

This episode of Hana 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Conference planning.

[Benjamin Garette]

They're not unimportant things. But I'm like, yeah, but I'm gonna be hungry soon.

[Brian Sauvay]

That's a fair point. Guys, in this episode, here's what we're gonna 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?

[Benjamin Garette]

I thought you were about to say the most fascinating topic ever.

[Brian Sauvay]

Not ever.

[Benjamin Garette]

And I was going to be like, dang, that's a bold.

[Brian Sauvay]

That's like either Mothman, like, let's be honest here. But it's one of those classic, like, yeah, there's enough to it. At first it sounds crazy and you're like, zero percent chance that happened. But then you start to look at it and you hear the narrator from the. 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

All they do is dig. They don't find.

[Brian Sauvay]

No, the real treasure is the television show that they discovered on that island. The real Tree made, like, $100 million. 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 tells me, like, you know, son.

[Benjamin Garette]

They'Re going to find it.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

It's one of those things.

[Brian Sauvay]

And then the answer is like, no.

[Benjamin Garette]

Where every single episode, they make you think they're. That they're gonna find the cure for cancer. They're on the cusp or something down.

[Brian Sauvay]

There in Oak Island.

[Benjamin Garette]

Anyway, as you were saying, it's a.

[Brian Sauvay]

This is a classic Hana 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 1 Kings 9, where were these places? And nobody's been able to answer it with certainty. But there are some compellingly interesting arguments to be made that could it be it was in North America and he.

[Benjamin Garette]

Made it here in the Americas.

[Brian Sauvay]

In the Americas at all.

[Benjamin Garette]

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, 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about Kincaid's caves.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

Because this story, the first time I heard about this story was probably 10 years ago.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

And it was one of those like classic newspaper fragments from this period of American sensationalist journalism. You know, like early 1900s.

[Benjamin Garette]

1909.

[Brian Sauvay]

1909. You have to know that during the 19th century especially, but into the 20th century there was, you know, newspapers were kind of like. They were almost what you might think of today as like our Instagram or TikTok Reels.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

Where you have these accounts where there's a guy who's like, looked kind of wild eyed and he's like flashing AI images behind him and he's. He's like the nephilim hybrids are in the White House. And then it like shows a woman who blinks sideways with lizard eyes.

[Benjamin Garette]

Miley Cyrus.

[Brian Sauvay]

Miley. Miley Cyrus.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah. It's like, you know, early American 4chan.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah, exactly.

[Benjamin Garette]

Where these small time newspapers, The Arizona Gazette.

[Brian Sauvay]

Gazette, you know, which is now still a newspaper. I think it's called the Arizona Republic or something.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah, well, they had to change it. Cause of the nephilim.

[Brian Sauvay]

Well, yeah. Cause Smithsonian.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah. But it's crazy like this. The story is. In case you didn't get it from the cold open, the. The story is that this guy named Kincaid, great name.

[Brian Sauvay]

Honestly, I think we can all agree GE Kincaid.

[Benjamin Garette]

GE Kincaid, founder of GE the appliance company.

[Brian Sauvay]

Not true.

[Benjamin Garette]

That didn't happen.

[Brian Sauvay]

That's not true.

[Benjamin Garette]

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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Just two.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yes. Says that he was going on an adventure, which I love down The Colorado River. A little Bilbo Baggins action. Yep. Okay. He, he looks up, sees this weird tunnel or 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah.

[Benjamin Garette]

About 1500ft up from the canyon floor. And here's. And you might say, well, the river was higher back then. No, the stairs went all the way down.

[Brian Sauvay]

Oh, yeah, this was, this was always 1500ft.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

If it existed at all.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yes.

[Brian Sauvay]

He did what my kids constantly do when we go to southern Utah, which is try to kill themselves by climbing.

[Benjamin Garette]

By climbing on things. Yes.

[Brian Sauvay]

Sheer cliffs.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yes, exactly. Which, I mean, who among us doesn't do that?

[Brian Sauvay]

And I did the same thing and continue as an adult to do the same thing.

[Benjamin Garette]

I still do. We both did the same thing.

[Brian Sauvay]

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 gonna climb that.

[Benjamin Garette]

I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna get hurt.

[Brian Sauvay]

I'm gonna get on top of that.

[Benjamin Garette]

It's gonna be great.

[Brian Sauvay]

I'm gonna climb on that.

[Benjamin Garette]

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. Okay. 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

He telegraphed up the Institute, Smithsonian. He was like, hey, what's that? Send me your best Egyptologists. Yes, they send 40 of them.

[Benjamin Garette]

And they were like, happy to. Here they are. And they go back to the cave, map it out, like get a whole map of it. They find that it's this spider web, intricately mapped thing that leads to the central cavern with this Buddha type God.

[Brian Sauvay]

It's like Egyptian mummies and Buddha and Eastern mysticism.

[Benjamin Garette]

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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah, they're like.

[Benjamin Garette]

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.

[Brian Sauvay]

You can't go. And people have tried to go to them.

[Benjamin Garette]

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.

[Brian Sauvay]

They've been stopped.

[Benjamin Garette]

Stopped or scared off by armed guards. Yes.

[Brian Sauvay]

So heavily armed guards.

[Benjamin Garette]

Heavily talking dragon from Skinwalker Ranch. Armed.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah. Like not the flying fire breathing dragon, but the guy, the man who calls himself Dragon.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

And if they try to dig in.

[Benjamin Garette]

The Grand Canyon, Dragon's gonna have something.

[Brian Sauvay]

Can you imagine what Dragon would do to them?

[Benjamin Garette]

He would probably have a heart attack.

[Brian Sauvay]

He'd be like, this is a no digging.

[Benjamin Garette]

Anyway. So. Yeah, and those things are kind of also hearsay. You know, you may see it on Reddit, on 4chan, on some other supposedly more credible Internet accounts, which I believe all of them, of course.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Can't find any records on either guy.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah. These people, they may not exist, but.

[Benjamin Garette]

That makes me think they definitely did.

[Brian Sauvay]

So, yeah, I mean, circling back this period of American journalism is a period when you would have, like, 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 February in the early 1900s. And then they realized that literally there were no consequences for them writing whatever they wanted to. And everyone was like, dude, you have to get The Arizona Gazette, April 5th 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. I buy it and I buy it, thinking to myself, almost, no way this is true. However. However.

[Benjamin Garette]

But what if I buy it thinking to myself, true.

[Brian Sauvay]

This is like inside. Because inside every Haunted Cosmos listener are two wolves, Ben and Brian.

[Benjamin Garette]

It already confirms what I've always thought. Like, look, when I was a boy, when I was a lad.

[Brian Sauvay]

You were a lad.

[Benjamin Garette]

I remember I was like, I'm gonna read through my Bible in a year. I was in, like, seventh grade. First time I ever wanted to do it. I'm gonna do it. And I did. And, you know, and I remember getting to Ophir 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah.

[Benjamin Garette]

And it was like, yeah, no one knows where Ophir was. And I mean, that's where it started for me.

[Brian Sauvay]

Instantly. You were like.

[Benjamin Garette]

I was like, I'm going to become a podcaster one day.

[Brian Sauvay]

One day and talk about this.

[Benjamin Garette]

That talks about this.

[Brian Sauvay]

Can I ask you a question, Ben?

[Benjamin Garette]

Yes, you may as thank you.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

With them, how to deal with a mummy. I thought.

[Brian Sauvay]

Did you. Were you there? Like millennials. Is this true for you too?

[Benjamin Garette]

It wasn't true for me with mummies, but it was two. Two big things. Quicksand and piranhas.

[Brian Sauvay]

Oh, yeah. You know what I thought, I thought.

[Benjamin Garette]

Both quicksand and piranhas were gonna be a major issue that I'd have weekly monthly problem. Yeah, yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

Or the Bermuda Triangle.

[Benjamin Garette]

Anyway, point with Kincaid is that, yes, records of his existence are non existent, scarce.

[Brian Sauvay]

Well, they are in the Gazette.

[Benjamin Garette]

Except for the Arizona Gazette. Except for the Arizona Gazette. Yeah. Credit where it's due. But here's where there's two big things for me that come in and say, yeah, but maybe.

[Brian Sauvay]

But maybe.

[Benjamin Garette]

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 things that they don't agree with, alternate history things that would call all of their well accepted stuff into question. They did this with the North American giants.

[Brian Sauvay]

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 if the Smithsonian declassify the giant lore. Okay, I know you're our guy. I know you follow Hana Cosmos. President Trump. I know JD at least jd, VP Vance. I know he's in a haunted cosmos.

[Benjamin Garette]

He's a cosmos.

[Brian Sauvay]

And I wanna call on him personally right now and say on behalf of the American people, we deserve to know.

[Benjamin Garette]

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 feet up, maybe put on a nice wool robe next to a fire, crack open a Mountain Dew.

[Brian Sauvay]

Get a Mountain Dew.

[Benjamin Garette]

Okay. And just peruse through the files. You know what I'm talking about?

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah, well, he's gonna need that high fructose corn syrup, that little hit and that caffeine.

[Benjamin Garette]

Are we Forgetting National Treasure 2, the President's Book of Secrets.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah, it was.

[Benjamin Garette]

The secret certainly exists.

[Brian Sauvay]

No, it's real. It's real. So I do wanna make that personal call and say yes, a quick note here on some of the things at stake here that are very interesting to me. We have evidence in North America of large mines that existed in the thousands of years BC range. 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 peoples did not even enter the Bronze Age in terms of their metallurgical technology. And I mean all the way up till Spanish explorers and more advanced civilizations began to appear.

[Benjamin Garette]

They're still using obsidian arrows.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

New York. Iron is.

[Brian Sauvay]

You never, you would not have believed.

[Benjamin Garette]

What it was unless that was Obama giving Obama the money.

[Brian Sauvay]

Okay. I went to the, the, the Star center, what's it called? The planetarium. The planetarium in Salt Lake City with my kids like a couple months ago. And you know, you can go. They have like this big plexiglass case with this hundreds of pounds meteor. It's an iron meteor.

[Benjamin Garette]

That's cool.

[Brian Sauvay]

And it's made of iron. It's meteoric iron. 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah, it's rare. And it's not just meteor, it's meteoric iron. So it's ferrous iron.

[Brian Sauvay]

It's very dense.

[Benjamin Garette]

Don't say it like Martina's mom, Labuela McBride, if you're listening, I think Wella McBride, grandmother, she's a grandma. Martin has kids.

[Brian Sauvay]

Okay, that's fine, that's fair.

[Benjamin Garette]

Come on.

[Brian Sauvay]

I want to apologize.

[Benjamin Garette]

Labuela.

[Brian Sauvay]

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 gonna say something racist there, and I just wanna 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Let's just leave that there.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah. They used mainly lithic technology.

[Benjamin Garette]

What is that? What is lithic?

[Brian Sauvay]

It is of or related to working with stone.

[Benjamin Garette]

Ah. Like megalithic.

[Brian Sauvay]

Megalithic.

[Benjamin Garette]

That actually makes. All right, I feel like an idiot.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Sure.

[Brian Sauvay]

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 working 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 multiple places where. Where there's evidence of large scale metal mining, which makes you think we only see minor evidence of them using it decoratively and in a few. And not even that efficiently.

[Benjamin Garette]

So what were they doing with all the copper?

[Brian Sauvay]

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, 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?

[Benjamin Garette]

Well, so one. One way to maybe, you know, start to throw a rope across the chasm.

[Brian Sauvay]

To make a rope bridge over the Grand Canyon.

[Benjamin Garette]

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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Built, as well as enduring, very difficult to erase.

[Benjamin Garette]

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? Where did they come from? We don't actually know if they were Native Americans. We're just making that assumption. 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Mm, it's a good question.

[Benjamin Garette]

So maybe King Solomon was an Anasazi. That's what I'm saying.

[Brian Sauvay]

Definitely not. Definitely not. I'm not saying, like the other thing.

[Benjamin Garette]

Just the royal King Solomon, like, he came over to Ophir personally, but he sent guys royal.

[Brian Sauvay]

We.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yes, exactly.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah. So one, one other last note before we go into our next story section is that in the 19th century, so you have this brand of journalism that's, that's rising up. It's quite popular. It's, you know, even then, very much like kind of semi fiction.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

And in, you know, what's the word I'm looking for?

[Benjamin Garette]

Like, fantastical or put a little, like.

[Brian Sauvay]

Thinking bubble over my head. 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, there was a lot of. And at some point we're 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, 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 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

Now this morphs into some of the legend legendary origins of even like the Mormon culture.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

Where they. They grabbed, you know, Joseph Smith grabbed on to a lot of these sort of in the zeitgeist ideas that predated.

[Benjamin Garette]

His almost like folksy legends.

[Brian Sauvay]

Right. They were folk. It was folk legends. It predated his alleged, you know, interactions with an angel and this divine revelation or whatever and 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 weave together many of these folk legends into this pop folk religion of the Americas with this 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, 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 as like Bronze Age and beyond. When the native peoples never. There's no archeological 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. There's a clear Siberian, like Mongolian Eskimo kind of. Yeah. Kind of related peoples. However, in the 19th century this was 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 where 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 this lost tribe were the principal ancestors of the native peoples to just like a part of. 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 texts essentially. And said 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'd 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

But we hold it loosely and say, let's make sure that we don't end up going down the road and. And saying like, also, all of this Mormon lore is true, is just true when we genuinely know that it's not.

[Benjamin Garette]

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.

[Brian Sauvay]

You're like, whoa.

[Benjamin Garette]

You actually have to take every single finding with a grain of salt.

[Brian Sauvay]

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 lore, the more that it's exposed to critical examination, the more it falls apart. The Scriptures, the Old and New Testament, the more that it's exposed to critical examination, the stronger the evidence gets that it's describing real history.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yes.

[Brian Sauvay]

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 17th, 18th, 19th, even 20th century claims that he had been wrong. Or an example would be the Gallio Galio. 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 archeological finds. Discovers the Gallio pavement and it's a stone and it, it's Roman and it's from the period. And it referenced Gallio proconsul of Achilles, 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah. Have you seen that with YouTube channel?

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah. Dude, that is sick.

[Benjamin Garette]

So sick.

[Brian Sauvay]

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 by a city, an ancient city is wiped out.

[Benjamin Garette]

And.

[Brian Sauvay]

And he literally, they take these balls, he sets them on fire and they burn.

[Benjamin Garette]

Like, just holds up a lighter to him and they immediately.

[Brian Sauvay]

And you're like.

[Benjamin Garette]

So it's those.

[Brian Sauvay]

All the black kids running around like.

[Benjamin Garette]

Oh yeah, I'm going to end this, man. It's that super hot fire is what he's talking about. Super hot fire.

[Brian Sauvay]

I don't know what it is.

[Benjamin Garette]

It's super hot.

[Brian Sauvay]

Dude, that was a long excursion.

[Benjamin Garette]

Well, I also, I want to add a couple of things.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah.

[Benjamin Garette]

Okay, so let's.

[Brian Sauvay]

Let's make some layers into this cake, my guy.

[Benjamin Garette]

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. 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 whether or not the Phoenicians or Israelites or even like the Greeks ever made or the Egyptians ever made it to Americas. The. What we do know what's like widely accepted at this point is that pre Columbian expeditions from the Scandinavians did make it. Did. Yes, they did make it to the Americas.

[Brian Sauvay]

And there's. There's tons of evidence that that's true.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yes. And I would like to just say there is an alarming similarity in ship design between the Scandinavian Longboats.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah.

[Benjamin Garette]

And the Phoenician ships.

[Brian Sauvay]

Dang.

[Benjamin Garette]

And so it's worth, like, I'm just saying, like, it's not that the technology is impossible.

[Brian Sauvay]

So the story that you wove together in the second half of the cold open of the Phoenician sailor was fake. It was a. It was a historical fiction. I think it showed up. Like, I just want to make sure, like, people projected.

[Benjamin Garette]

How is the historical fiction.

[Brian Sauvay]

This is a. Could it be Moment. But the fundamental supposition is not insane.

[Benjamin Garette]

It's not like, it's really not.

[Brian Sauvay]

It's not crazy pseudo historical. Like, there's no possible way. The. These ancient peoples were, first of all, insanely bold. But they were legitimately skilled mariners, and they did long. They had discovered the huge value of oceanic trade 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

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 archeology have not found yet. That's happened multiple times. Of course, it's happened with Sodom and Gomorrah. It has yet to happen with Ophir and Tarshish. Actually, the Bible mentions both Tarshish and Ophir in similar sentences. And both of them, 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 Bethel.

[Brian Sauvay]

It's not real.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah, yeah, it's not real. And then it was fairly modern archeology 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

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 technon. 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Back very working class.

[Brian Sauvay]

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, think about how insane it would be to discover something that happened 6,000 years ago.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

4,000 years ago. How much has passed, what has happened? Like, think about putting something outside for 10 years.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

And the rest is gone. And in another hundred years, even that will be swallowed up and lost.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah, virtually.

[Brian Sauvay]

That's a couple hundred years. Right.

[Benjamin Garette]

Think about thousands of years. Thousands of years.

[Brian Sauvay]

An upheaval and civilizations rising and falling. So I can't remember what our next story is.

[Benjamin Garette]

It's about something called the Bat Creek Stone.

[Brian Sauvay]

I'm gonna take us into the story of the Bat Creek stone. In the 1880s, archaeologists in America were head 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 US 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 earthen 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 wading 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, the they finally caught sight of a 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 team split up and descended upon their work of digging and collecting and documenting. The archaeologists, shirt soaked through with 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 3ft 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 anytime 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. There, 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 confirmation bias. Remember that the Bureau of Ethnology for the Smithsonian IS 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 Hebrew 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 earthen 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 Hibben 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 Hibben upon learning about the professors 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 Hibben. The pair walked between the chaparral under the chill of the early morning with a pair of lamps. Hibben 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 Hibben'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. Hibben asked what it was. The guide carefully picked the lichen away. 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. Hibben 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 Hebrew 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 untrue, open debates among scholars and historians. Hey Ben, I just read that our great grandparents probably experimented with butter on their dry skin as a moisturizer. Is that why you look so radiant?

[Benjamin Garette]

Maybe it's Grandma's Butter Butter Recipe. Or maybe it's Gray Toe Tallow.

[Brian Sauvay]

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[Benjamin Garette]

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[Brian Sauvay]

For more information and to get a sample pack, check out graytoadtalo.com don't forget to use the code COSMOS15. That's all caps COSMOS15 for 15 off your order.

[Benjamin Garette]

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[Brian Sauvay]

But what if it was 3,000, you know, 4,000 years ago? Like evidence goes away after a given time. You know what I mean? 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. 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?

[Benjamin Garette]

I mean, I've watched the show White Collar with I was gonna bring up White Collar popular. Really?

[Brian Sauvay]

Dude, we are locked in when he's like scraping painting from old paintings and doing his hoaxes.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah, yeah. In like the wine, the bottle that he makes, he like injects this gas into it. Anyway, pretty cool show. One thing that I was Gonna That I was gonna say though, is that if you think about how they would. 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. 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah.

[Benjamin Garette]

So it was actually hard to not only get your hands on, but to recreate it in a way that made sense and that 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, 8 or 9 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

He's like, oh, look over there.

[Benjamin Garette]

Everyone. Look at the samurai in the tree. Look, the ninja in the tree.

[Brian Sauvay]

I don't know what the. Only we're making them Japanese just to continue alienating members of our audience who do not like our ethnic impersonations.

[Benjamin Garette]

I wanna be ninja.

[Brian Sauvay]

So it is true that it would be difficult to hoax. They either all would have had to been in on it.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yes. Or they're the dumbest people in the world.

[Brian Sauvay]

Or they're really dumb.

[Benjamin Garette]

Or it's real.

[Brian Sauvay]

Or. Those are the only three possibilities, aren't they? There's nothing. The one that's the crazier one actually to me is the decalogue stone under the wicked Ten Commandments.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah, dude, it's so cool because what.

[Brian Sauvay]

Does the back creek stone say? Is it the Ten Commandments?

[Benjamin Garette]

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 like a tetragrammaton. So it would say like the Yahweh form, but in a much older Semitic script than like Second Temple Judaism, for example. Okay, gotcha.

[Brian Sauvay]

But the decalogue part.

[Benjamin Garette]

So I think really what I'm trying to say, dude, I just had a crazy Idea.

[Brian Sauvay]

Okay, this is nuts.

[Benjamin Garette]

I'm gonna start with saying Noah died in America. Okay? I'm then gonna 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Shadow of a doubt, I mean, that.

[Benjamin Garette]

Noah died in America.

[Brian Sauvay]

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.

[Benjamin Garette]

I'm trying to remember how I was going to relate. Oh, I guess like Noah would have had an ancient Semitic script, maybe.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah. So Noah was there. Like, he was scratching on rocks.

[Benjamin Garette]

Like Noah wrote the Decalogue before.

[Brian Sauvay]

Before Moses ever stuck it under a creek like this. This theory, I'm gonna say, is churlish and tangentious.

[Benjamin Garette]

I'm gonna say, have mercy on my soul for this just terrible idea. But it's interesting.

[Brian Sauvay]

The artifacts are very interesting. And who's to say. Who's to say we actually don't know?

[Benjamin Garette]

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. Neither one. No, you don't know neither one. Smithsonian hates them. Okay, but the Smithsonian's dumb. We know that.

[Brian Sauvay]

The 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

At least five nickels.

[Brian Sauvay]

I would be like. My pocket would be a jangling.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah. You could hear me running down the street.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Benjamin Garette]

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 in pre Columbian North America.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah, we absolutely could.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yet more reason to think that North America could be or the Americas could be a candidate for the region of Ophir.

[Brian Sauvay]

Before we take you out in this glorious hot close.

[Benjamin Garette]

I mean, a golden episode on the Mind's movie.

[Brian Sauvay]

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 [e-mail].

[Benjamin Garette]

Yeah.

[Brian Sauvay]

And get access to the dusty tome and also be able to stream this whole season on Demand.

[Benjamin Garette]

I keep forgetting that we're doing that. Yes. Yeah, we are filming this right now on Thursday, March 20, which means by the time you're hearing this, the entire Season 5 is available to the top two tiers of Patrons already on Supercast.

[Brian Sauvay]

Yeah, they can listen to the whole thing.

[Benjamin Garette]

You watch or listen, like on Demand. You can binge it right now if.

[Brian Sauvay]

You want ad 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 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.

[Benjamin Garette]

So we take your money and give.

[Brian Sauvay]

You and we just go on vacations until you cancel it.

[Benjamin Garette]

It's called we do a little be above reproach, people. Okay. Ever tried it? That's what I thought.

[Brian Sauvay]

All right, that's all. Do you have any more on this? Because I'm itching for this hot clip.

[Benjamin Garette]

No, I'm actually just. Yeah, I'm excited to tell the story.

[Brian Sauvay]

I want them to hear this. We're gonna leave you with this. Some of the. We saved some of the best for last.

[Benjamin Garette]

Yes. So come with me.

[Brian Sauvay]

Buckle up your seatbelts.

[Benjamin Garette]

Or should I say in the native tongue of this story? Yeah. Hey, homie, come with me to El Dorado. 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, through the writings of late antiquity and the medievals, a consensus begins to form. But that consensus is then shattered by the Columbian 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 in tow. India just doesn't seem far enough away to make that time 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 Sheba and Havilah in Genesis 10, both Sheba and Havilah 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 autochthonis 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 Carony, which lay on the outskirts of modern Venezuela. The report leading him there was one 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 Carony'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 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 Koroni 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. 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Gold.

[Benjamin Garette]

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 Carony 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 a 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 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 Chemist, 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, Quemus 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 El Dorado Ophir 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 Muiscas. 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 gold. It is said that in the days before the sun and moon, those men Canaan from the depths and founded the city state that would eventually become the Muisca 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 Namwiska worshiped, died and fell into the waters of her home and and brought the early empire down with her. One way or another, the golden city sank into Guatativa and was never enjoyed by the Muiscas 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 Muisca cities around Guatativa when Spanish conquistadores arrived on its shores in 1537. Upon their arrival, they witnessed the sacred rite 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, thick golden paint made of rich gold dust and sticky SAP from the trees. The priest, now a golden 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 went 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 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.

[Brian Sauvay]

Sa.