Three Odd Collections: Two Duds and a Maybe, part two.

This is a picture of Charles Hapgood on his visit to Waldemar Julsrud's home in 1955 to look at the Acambaro figurines. Some of the falling-all-over-one-another chaos of the collection can be seen. This is the same chaos that Ivan encountered when he showed up at the house in 1959. As quoted at the end of part one of this posting, despite the chaos, Ivan was struck by "complete awe", seeing the vastness and the artistic designs of the pieces. This awe was replaced quickly by a feeling of hopelessness to the task of actually doing anything scientific and comprehensive with this disorganized array. But try he would.

One thing about "living in" the mind of a person through their collected writings and files, is that you get some affection for the person, while losing any fantasy image about how fabulous or perfect they were. I have come to really like Ivan Sanderson, and would have been happy to have had him as a colleague. I have also come to realize that he was apparently a FAR "looser thinker" than I would have preferred, and on the scale of "romanticism" I am not anywhere in his league. Picking up his report on his study of these figurines, therefore, I wasn't expecting much. Ivan surprised me again. His report was quite good; his approach was smart and doggedly exhaustive; and I believe that he did as well as anyone could do. Bravo!! Ivan!

There is A LOT in these pages. I can't unravel them in perfect intellectual order anymore than Ivan was able to perfectly unravel the collection. Like him, I'm going to try to give you a roughly organized description of what he did and found, punctuated by significant but not always tightly tied together observations that he was making on the fly. To make this make some kind of sense, hopefully, I'll not follow a strict sequence of what Ivan did first then second then etc.... With luck we'll survive the chaos with some comprehension of the whole.

To begin, it did not take Ivan long to realize that certain approaches to cataloging this mass of things would not work. He discarded the idea of trying to group things by apparent cultural grouping, or by apparent date of production, etc. He fell back on the only way to get started --- a sort of Baconian, almost-mindless sorting of the things into groups based on what substances the things were made of. As it turned out, this wasn't a bad start afterall, and allowed some interesting conclusions.

Ivan decided that the collection could be broken down into seven types of objects.
1]. small, solid pieces of ceramics, yellowish colored and "semi-baked" --- he called these "The Crude";
2]. small to large fully baked pieces with yellow-to-brown or reddish exteriors and gray interiors; sometimes made by separate parts joined--- he called these the Julsrud collection;
3]. unfinished pieces gray throughout with rough surfaces and solid --- called "Grey-blacks";
4]. fine finished pieces, black in color and turning horn-colored at extremities; hollow and highly polished, but not glazed --- called "Horny-black";
5]. finest productions of the collection, beautiful designs, highly polished blue-black color --- called "Blue-black";
6]. Reddish-brown clay glazed ware, typically ancient Greek looking material with golden to red ochre finish --- called "Samian-types";
7]. massive items of dark gray, worked to simulate stone, and having Mayan type designs --- called "Imitation stone".

These were the categories Ivan felt encompassed everything and which were for him very distinctive.

Julsrud's own lists for acquiring this collection has 31,512 items between 1944-1952, when he says his supplier left the area for Mexico City. Ivan's own estimates agree that this seems a minimum.

Julsrud himself broke down the collection into some sort of "cultural" categories ["Chinese", "Mongolian", "Indian" and "Germanic"], in which Ivan could see no sense in at all, and bore no resemblance to the ceramic-type categories which seemed clear to him.

Having no reasonable simple/obvious guide to proceed, Ivan went to his strength, Zoology, and selected out all objects seeming to portray animals [or humans/humanoids]. This was smart as it not only placed him in a position of authority, but also covered the main controversy of the collection, the alleged "dinosaurs". Ivan found that approximately two-thirds of the collection [of all subjects] was in category #2, which he termed "The Julsrud collection" as stated above. Of these, about three-quarters or more were presenting animals or humans or both. You can do the rough math, but this means about 15,000 of such figurines.

Ivan seems to have looked at them all. He then says to us in the future: NOT ONE OF THESE JULSRUD TYPE FIGURINES [The type #2s] REPRESENTS ANY KNOWN OR ANY EXTINCT ANIMAL!!!

What's he saying? These are NOT dinosaurs. These are artistic chimaeras of [in his eye] very good art and craft, formed out of pieces of animals or past animals perhaps. Many of the figures project impossible physical characteristics [ex. necks far out of the range supportable by known bone strength] and mixes of significantly divergent species [ex. reptilian forms with mammalian feet]. Because the craft is so good, Ivan cannot wave off these biological gaffs as poor artistic eye or just bad detail work. He is emphatic that these figurines do not represent dinosaurs of any type.

But if not, then what?? Some of the parts of these dream-animals are quite like dinosaur pieces. How did the artists come to dream them up?? This, for Ivan, is the conundrum. It is a conundrum of major proportions, he believes, if the pieces are old [ at least say pre-1850 or so ]. If that, then Ivan thinks that no normal/mundane theory explains how the craftsmen knew these physical features. If the figurines are recent, however, Ivan feels that a good artist, knowing of dinosaurs, could well have created these fantasy forms. The issue is: how old??

Some of the answers given to this question are apparently bogus. One museum curator suggested that the artifacts weren't old because "they didn't look right". Well, that level of analytical brilliance deserves no respect, so onwards. Another so-called expert said that the artifacts couldn't be from any sort of dig because it was suspicious that none of them was broken. Ivan must have been scratching his head in confusion about that as he searched through more than seven full drawers of broken objects harvesting specimens for testing back in the states. Another "expert" said that they were bogus because they were all perfectly clean having no in situ "matrix" [of surrounding soil etc] clinging in cracks et al, and that any crack in the surfaces was new. Ivan had gotten to the point of exasperation at this point in his report and said:

"He was either unversed in his work, most unobservant, or lied". Ivan then went on to explain that none of the "observations" by the archaeologist were true even with the most casual of study. Some of the statuary even had feet caked with clay.

This means to me that there is no reason to believe anything that these early assessors of the collection said. So what else do we have??

Well we might try science. Hapgood had written to Sanderson telling him about a new method of dating pottery. [This method turned out to be Thermoluminescence]. This is why Ivan was scraping around in the seven drawers-full of broken images to find examples of interesting category types which Julsrud would cooperatively give him to take back to the US for testing. And so he did that. Ivan would of course not know anything of results until many months later, but we know them.

Hapgood's and Sanderson's new-found colleague in this adventure, Arthur Young, had enough cachet to get the samples brought by Sanderson tested by the University of Pennsylvania ["of whom there is no whomer" in the field of archaeology]. Not knowing the "drama" associated with the pieces, they tested out a date range for different specimens of between 6300 and 2900 years old. Well, THAT would have blown Ivan's mind for sure. The story then goes that the University found that their dates were being used to support "obviously fraudulent" ideas about humans and dinosaurs in the Americas, and went about producing a whole new document explaining why the initial readings were so terribly wrong.

The explanation, which could be correct for all I know, is that thermoluminescence doesn't work if the pottery objects were initially fired in a relatively low-temperature kiln. I am perfectly willing to believe that, while at the same time severely doubting the lab's competence therefore on the first results, and one should wonder what-in-the-heck else they must have completely screwed up in their lab on other requests? But the Penn people, desperately anxious to save face, then invented an ad hoc algorithm which fudged the "real" date to just around the 1939-1940s, just right for the needed recent production dates to debunk the whole show. I am sorry. Pennsylvania's behavior here makes it impossible for me to take anything they say seriously on this, especially some strained fudging around the data producing a convenient and dismissive answer.

So my on-site archaeologists stink, my august thermoluminescence lab stinks, do I have anything but dearly beloved Ivan at all? I have apparently some radiocarbon results.

This aspect of this messed up affair is as mysterious to me as anything in it. Somehow, someone got some radiocarbon dating done. This time Young and Hapgood took the samples to an establishment named Isotopes Inc. in New Jersey. The results on three different samples read: c. 3500 years old, 6300 years old, and 3000 years old. The fact that these three dates are different should pose no dilemma in that Ivan purposely selected different broken figurine types for tests. [In fact I'm surprised that we don't have more than three types of readings].

OK. more out-of-the-question data readouts. Now what?? Now, apparently, nothing. I'm not hearing anything more about this. Apparently everyone is talking about the thermoluminescent dates, but I get nothing more about the C-14 tests. DUHHHHH...What? Obviously, I am missing some key resources.

But how could ANY advocate of the anomalousness of these things not be making a big deal out of these results? Thrashing about for at least a speculative answer, I decided that "Isotopes Inc of New Jersey" must be a tinpot amateur outfit, which no one takes seriously. UH, that's a great big NO to that one.

I found some records of testing that they had done in essentially the same time period. Who were their clients? US Geological Service, National Parks Survey, USNavy, National Geographic Society, Geological Survey of Canada, American Museum of Natural History, Princeton, McGill, Columbia, Colorado, Indiana, Williams, UWashington, Arizona, Freer Gallery of Art --- this really can go on for quite a bit longer. You get the idea: EVERYBODY trusts them!! Well, then, how can...pbpbpbpbpbpbpop pop pop pop.....crash----------------------------- [sound of brain collapsing].

Ivan says and continued to assert that no item in the category three "Julsrud" category represented anything but a melange of fancifully merged together animal parts. But one figurine from a different group did, and this truly puzzled him. This was a very well-formed object of the Horny-black set of figures, which seemed to depict some representative of the Brontosaur/Diplodocus group of dinosaurs. This is four inches long and three inches tall and for Ivan was too good to dismiss [though not at all like the famous and universally-pictured Julsrud types.] The item pictured above is touted widely [particularly in Creationist sites] as the "dinosaur" Ivan was talking about--- it is NOT it. The thing above is one of Sanderson's Julsrud Chimaeras. Sanderson thought that the real item was extremely important, and convinced Julsrud to put it away in safety. None of the other photographers from outside may have ever seen the real deal. [Ivan MUST have taken and kept photos of this one, and they may well be somewhere in the SITU collection. I can only tell you that they weren't here with the report. If/When I find them, I'll post them and you and I will be in on the secret].

Note, however, the continued dilemma --- the "brontosaurus" will NOT have been tested by science. Even if it's the most brontosaury brontosaur ever, we still don't know when IT was made.

So what do we have? I don't know what YOU have, but I've got a lot of irritation. I'm irritated with the University of Pennsylvania; I'm irritated with quack archaeologists; I'm irritated with Hapgood and Young for not getting more testing done; I'm irritated with Julsrud for losing his collection and slamming the Truth Door, I'm irritated with Creationists who use these things with disregard for the facts that we CAN know [and therefore polarizing the discussion] --- I guess I'm just an irritable dude.

The one entity that I'm NOT irritated with is Ivan. Bless him. Without him I don't think that I'd know anything about this mess at all.

This is not to say that Ivan didn't spin some pretty Out Proctor ideas to try to cope with this. He fixed his attention precisely on the nub of the matter: the figurines are not modeled as real animals, but their PARTS are. So how did the artist[s] know about these accurately figured parts?? Ivan had one mundane hypothesis [the figurines were indeed modern, and the artists did what the artists did for Cabrera and Fr. Crespi --- made neat stuff up]. BUT. He also struggled with the "what if they're old?" possibility. Here he said the following amazing paragraph:

"We then have to ask ourselves whether a]. men were contemporary with many now extinct animals mainly reptilian, b]. some people developed palaeontological research beyond the point we have today, long ago, c].whether some outside intelligences supplied the models to men in the neolithic or prehistorical, non-literate ages, and were extramundane, d]. or whether there is truly a Buddhistic "universal soul" that prompts men's imaginations to come up with the same solutions that an overall Power has devised through what we call nature."

Well, old friend, I think you just threw a curveball right by me on that one.... but I like you.

Three Odd Collections:Two Duds and a Maybe.

There are three famous [infamous??] collections of alleged archaeological objects in the anomalies literature which will not die. Two of them should. The third? I'm not yet sure. In each case, when I first heard about the collection, I thought: "Too good to be true". Most of the time you're right when that happens. What's the case here?

Let's take the easiest first [and quickly]. The Ica Stones, or as they were called when I first encountered them: Cabrera's Rocks. These things are pebbles of fairly heavy Andean Mountain rock, some of quite large size, which emerged in Ica Peru [Ica is near the Nazca Plain and a nice little Peruvian vacation town]. The owner of the things is a local Doctor named Cabrera. He has an office in the downtown square and appears well-to-do. I know a bit more about this, vividly, because I once was there.

Originally the claims for the collection were astounding but actually became moreso as "new" ones were found and released to the public, publication-wise. Initially one would hear about dinosaur carvings but not humans actually riding a Triceratops. But there was plenty of over-the-top stuff from the beginning going on.

Above is the Cabrera Rock version of Jurassic Park. I didn't see any of these either when I was down there in the 1980s. What I did see were boulders carved with maps and scenes from very prehistoric times, claiming to be representative of things from the Atlantaean Civilization. The owner claimed to have, with great labor, cracked some symbolic code on the rocks and could read their story. This writing [I never saw anything remotely resembling even the unexpected nature of Mayan Glyphics while I was in the private rooms of the collection] allegedly was learned by primitive slave humans, observing their Atlantaean superiors, just before those superiors abandoned them for Outer Space fleeing world catastrophe. These stones were therefore a "library" of Atlantaean knowledge scratched down by our loyal human ancestors, and stored away for someone [Cabrera] to locate and reveal.

Well, hey, great!! I showed up at Cabrera's and was greeted by the gentleman in the spotless white suit behind his desk in a perfunctory manner. He was happy to accept our money to visit the stones in the next rooms, but that was it. He called for a servant or an associate [he spoke Spanish and I didn't] who walked us [I had a guide] through the rather dark and dusty "museum". The associate kept pointing to different stones and actually yelling out things like "CAPTATION ENERGY!!!". Which I thought was rather odd itself. Anyway, the fee was well spent --- no regrets at all. High entertainment actually.

After this trip "Out Proctor on a side road", my guide asked me if I'd like to meet the fellow who really makes all the stone carvings that Cabrera buys? I thought that would be a really good idea. Well, we couldn't that day, and it was the only free day that I had in southern Peru, so too bad. But he did show me several stones that the fellow had recently carved --- looking exactly like Cabrera's in style and content but a lot cleaner --- and I bought [CHEAP] my own Atlantaean collection of a dinosaur and a Heart-transplant operation.

Didn't see the Dragon while I was down there --- really upset about that --- would probably have paid triple to get that one. Suffice it to say, these rocks are bogus; well, the rocks are real, but the carvings "date" from about yesterday.

The second collection is just as bogus, well very likely anyway, but with a nicer story. The not-so-nice element of it is that these objects became used by Erich von Daniken, lying through his teeth, as the central "proofs" for what he was selling in the book Gold of the Gods. That, and von Daniken in general, stand as some of the lowest points in the history of UFO-related publications --- completely negative on almost any scale of valuation one chooses to construct. The nice thing about the collection is that it is/was owned by an old priest who was a walking saint.

The Crespi collection is also a Latin American collection of several thousand objects. Father Crespi was a Salesian priest who worked in Ecuador, doing most of his service for poor local peoples even to jungle mission work. He was a nice man, and from all accounts the people loved him. Thus came about his collection. Father Crespi was a man who loved the people but was also a man who took delight in physical things. Art and Craftworks were great joys to him, and his local people began to bring him all manner of such things, many mindboggling in what was pictured upon them.

Just as happens with all these things there were whispers of Egypt and Atlantis and, inevitably, even dinosaurs. Some of the artifacts really DO seem to have been made of beaten gold, very thin but gold nevertheless. {I'd REALLY like to see a responsible study of the collection, but I can't find one anywhere}. Some items seem to be thin gold verniers over baser metal. Some seem to be bright brass which Crespi only thought was gold. Some are completely obvious NOT to be gold. So, the collection is a very mixed bag, and wholly uncharacterized to my knowledge. [and probably eternally so, as a story is out there than fire destroyed much of it, as well as conspiracy theories saying that much was stolen from him in the last years of his life --- the conspiracies being "by whom?"; even out-of-date rampant Nazis are fingered].

Well, what's in the darned thing? The item above is a carved stone I believe. Jurassic Park again. When I got into this shallow study about the Crespi collection, I discovered that apparently NO ONE really had any handle on it as to a decent description. This was stressing so I quit my studies briefly, cooked Ohgi uh Bokum, consumed a large portion, and felt a lot better about the Universe. I then discovered that I was still bonehead ignorant about the subject [at least; no further comments necessary, please], but didn't care nearly so much. It HAD, however, become clear to me that no one should be making many authoritative claims about this collection if no one really knows what it is.

We can say a few useful things though. These artifacts have nothing to do with the infamous Tajos caves in Ecuador lied about by von Daniken. Both those candidate caves have been explored [even by tourists] and there is nothing there. The vast Metal Library of Atlantis [or Shangri-la West or Patiti or the Deros of Richard Shaver] does not exist at least there. Secondly, local people admit that they brought Fr. Crespi many things because that always made him happy. Thirdly, even von Daniken admitted in a weak moment, that Fr. Crespi couldn't distinguish between gold and polished brass. Fourthly, some of the artifacts are obviously completely in fun.

Case in point: Fr. Crespi loved music and in his youth was a musician himself. So one of the locals made him a giant "ancient" guitar/ viola as a present. Yep, "ancient astronauts rock".

With no proper study to draw upon, we are left with our prejudices which will then be interpreted by us as "probabilities". We know that "some" of these things are modern-made. Everyone seems to give in to that. We have to ask ourselves whether we believe that local "indians" have discovered a massive treasure trove of Atlantaean or astronautic or Out-of-place Egyptian artifacts,or something-quite-astounding, and began delivering them as presents to this nice old man.

Because a]. the von Daniken/Juan Moricz story of the golden caves is known to be bogus; and b]. the collection contains many items agreed to be bogus; and c]. there was plenty of reason for locals to craft and give as presents items which are bogus; and d]. the subject matter depicted on these things is often unsupported by even responsibly-gained data from sympathetic anomalies researchers, which leaves one stranded without any lifeline to reality.... well, call me prejudiced but this looks... uh... bogus.

But it's hard not to like Father Crespi.

So, onwards? The third collection is the Julsrud collection, often called the Acambaro figurines. And this is the reason that I decided to make a post. Poking about in the SITU trash boxes, out spilled a document which indicated that Ivan Sanderson himself, while doing a biological survey in Mexico [yep. Ivan did real science occasionally alongside his writing about nature and anomalies], took a close sidetrip to Acambaro and had a few days to study the figurines [with the complete and friendly cooperation of Waldemar Julsrud].

This was a very nice report --- MUCH better data to work from than one gets with the Cabrera or Crespi stuff. But first a thumbnail intro: Julsrud was an immigrant from Germany of Scandinavian descent who came to Mexico and had a modestly successful business. He enjoyed many things, archaeology being one of them. It is said that one day he noticed some artifacts exposed near a hillside, and later asked a local man/ employee to see if he could retrieve them. This was done at small cost, and led to an ongoing stream of artifacts produced by this man for Julsrud's purchasing and storing. Over the years the collection grew into thousands of items and dominated every surface of Julsrud's home turning it into a chaotic and too-crowded-to-walk-through utter mess. It was this mess that Ivan and a friend walked into.

Ivan's interactions with this collection began very early in the game, when he was contacted about it by Julsrud's son in 1948. The son had read Ivan's Saturday Evening Post article "There Could Be Dinosaurs". The son sent photographs of several of the dinosaur-like figures, Ivan corresponded then with the father, and received a booklet written by him [in Spanish, I believe], and in that booklet were Julsrud's early theories about the figures as coming from some very ancient society.

Two years later Ivan was introduced to Arthur Young and Charles Hapgood, both of whom had learnt of the collection and were interested. They both visited Acambaro and saw the figurines. Hapgood then in 1955 wrote up a report on his trip, but it lacked any systematic approach to studying the collection. In 1956, all of them were going to travel there together, but this fell through. Only Young went. In 1959 then came Sanderson's chance to parlay his biological species trip into a sidetrip to the Julsrud collection.

I'm going to call it quits on this and say that it's part one of two {my back is killing me and has slid out at least three times during this session} { I refuse to believe that Ohgi uh Bokum has anything to do with this --- tricksters maybe, broccoli possibly, Korean Spicy Squid, never! --- don't even want to hear about it}.

I'll leave you with an Ivan quote: "The first impression of the whole is of complete awe."

Till next time, in a couple of days.