Squirrels – Inhabitants of Mars?

 

Situation: On September 28th back in 2012 NASA released a photo to the public taken by the Curiosity Rover depicting the red tinted barren landscape that we have been condi-tioned to believe is what Mars looks like. The problem is that several intrepid souls over the years have matched up the scenery from Mars photographs as being a dead ringer for the Mojave Desert located in Nevada and California sans a little red tint to the photoshopped outcome. While it could be argued that Mars and the Mojave Desertscapes look re-markably similar, what can’t be refuted easily at all by NASA is why is there a Mojave ground squirrel in their pho-tograph. NASA refuses to address the fact that the squirrel is in their photo maintaining that the climate of Mars is com-pletely inhospitable for animal growth with an atmosphere of 95.32 percent Carbon Dioxide. So NASA where did the squirrel come from? Maybe this is why relatively few photos are ever released to the public of the final frontier.

Guy S. Stanton, III

**

German Hyperinflation 1923

 

The true facts of this financial disaster do not appear in any history textbooks today.  Today’s history uses this inflation to twist the truth into its opposite.  It cites the radical devaluation of the German mark as an example of what goes wrong when governments print their own money, rather than borrow it from private cartels run by the banksters.  In reality the exact opposite is the truth as with so much of our accepted historical wisdom today.

The Weimar financial crisis actually began with the impossible reparations payments imposed at the Treaty of Versailles. Hjalmar Schacht (who was never a Nazi Party member and now it appears clear why that was the case), the Rothschild agent who was currency commissioner for the Republic, opposed letting the German government print its own money…

 “The Treaty of Versailles is a model of ingenious measures for the economic destruction of Germany.  Germany could not find any way of holding its head above the water, other than by the inflationary expedient of printing bank notes.”

Schacht echoes the history books’ deception that Weimar inflation was caused when the German government printed its own money; however, in his 1967 book ‘The Magic of Money’, Schacht revealed that it was the privately owned ‘Reichsbank’, not the German government that was injecting new money into the economy. Thus, it was that this Elite-owned and run private bank caused the Weimar hyperinflation.

Like the US Federal Reserve, the Reichsbank was overseen by appointed government officials, but was operated for private gain.  What drove the wartime inflation into hyperinflation was speculation by foreign investors, who sold the German Mark short, betting on its decreasing value.  In the manipulative device known as the ‘short sell’, speculators borrow something they do not own, sell it, and then ‘cover’ by buying it back at the lower price.

Speculation in the German Mark was made possible because the privately owned Reichsbank (not yet under Nazi control) made massive amounts of currency available for borrowing.  This currency, like all first-world currency today, was created with accounting entries in the bank’s books and then this ‘magic’ money was lent at compound interest.  When the Reichsbank could not keep up with the voracious demand for Marks, other private banks were then allowed to also create Marks out of nothing and to lend them at interest.  The result was runaway debt and inflation.

On the 24th June 1922, right-wing fanatics assassinated Walter Rathenau, the moderate German foreign minister.  Rathenau was a charismatic figure and the idea that a popular, wealthy and glamorous government minister could be shot in a law-abiding society shattered the faith of the German people, who needed to believe that the country was in safe hands after the trauma of the previous decade. The wealthier, by now extremely nervous citizens were already taking their money out of banks and investing it into ‘real goods’ such as diamonds, works of art and safe real-estate, with true intrinsic values, unlike currency which the Elite will manipulate up or downwards to suit their own agendas. Eventually, the ordinary German citizens also began to trade their Marks for real commodities.

 The British historian Adam Fergusson noted that pianos were being bought, even by non-musical families.  Sellers held back because the Mark was worth less every day and as prices soared, the amounts of currency demanded became greater and greater and the German Central Bank responded to these demands through the printing of more, increasingly worthless paper.  Yet still the ruling authorities did not acknowledge that there was anything amiss.  A leading financial newspaper at the time, reported that the amounts of money in circulation were not excessively high but nevertheless Dr. Rudolf Havenstein, the president of the Reichsbank (German equivalent to the Federal Reserve / Bank of England) told an economics professor that he needed a new suit but wasn't going to buy one until prices came down.

 Why did the German government not act sooner to halt the inflation?  The problem was partly that it was a shaky, fragile government, especially after the assassination of Rathenau.  The vengeful French sent their army into the Ruhr to enforce their demands for reparations due under the Versailles Treaty and the Germans were powerless to resist due to the virtual disbandment of their armed forces and they feared unemployment far more than inflation.  In 1919, Communists had attempted a coup and severe unemployment may have given the Communists another opportunity to seize power.  The great German industrial combines Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farben and Stinnes welcomed the inflation and survived it well by astute forward planning and possibly foreknowledge of what was to come.  A cheaper Mark, they reasoned, would make German goods cheap and easy to export and they needed the export earnings to buy raw materials abroad.  Inflation kept everyone working.

 And so the printing presses continued producing the ever-decreasing in value Mark and once they began to run, they were impossible to stop.  The price increases became unmanageable.  Menus in cafes could not be revised quickly enough to keep up with the speed of the inflation.  A student at Freiburg University ordered a cup of coffee at a café and the price on the menu was 5,000 Marks per cup.  He had two cups but when the bill arrived, it was for 14,000 Marks.  ‘If you want to save money and you want two cups of coffee, you should order them both at the same time’, he was told by the proprietor.

Things became so bad that people would not even bother to bend down to pick up a one hundred million Mark note carelessly discarded by a passer-by as by that time it had become worth less than the paper upon which it was printed.  There was a famous case of a man walking along a street on a shopping trip to buy bread, carrying his money in a large wicker basket, such was the quantity and bulk of the notes he needed to carry.  Upon unsuccessfully attempting to enter a particularly busy shop, he reasoned that he could quite safely leave most of his money outside in the basket as no-one would bother to risk stealing such a bulky yet paltry amount of money.  He was absolutely correct.  When he returned, he found his money was all still there but someone had stolen his basket!

 The presses of the Reichsbank could not keep up to demand, even though they ran through the night.  Individual cities and states began to issue their own money and Dr. Havenstein, the president of the Reichsbank, did not get his new suit.  A factory worker described payday, which was every day at 11 am: ‘At 11:00 in the morning a siren sounded, and everyone gathered in the factory forecourt, where a five-ton lorry was drawn up loaded to overflowing with paper money.  The chief cashier and his assistants climbed up on top.  They read out names and just threw out bundles of notes.  As soon as you had caught one you made a dash for the nearest shop and bought just anything that was going.’  Teachers, paid at 10 am, brought their money to the playground, where relatives took the bundles and hurried off with them.  Banks closed at 11am as by this time they had invariably run out of cash anyway.

 The flight from currency that had begun with the buying of diamonds, gold, country houses and antiques now extended to minor and almost useless items, bric-a-brac, soap and hairpins to name but a few.  This hitherto law-abiding country crumbled into petty thievery, petrol (gasoline) was siphoned from cars and people bought things they didn't need and used them to barter.  A pair of shoes for a shirt or some crockery for coffee.  Berlin had an unreal atmosphere, prostitutes of both sexes roamed the streets and cocaine was the fashionable drug.  When the 1,000-billion Mark note was first issued in 1923, few bothered to collect the change when they spent it.  By November 1923, with one dollar equal to one trillion Marks, the breakdown was complete and the German economy had become one of barter.  The currency had completely lost its meaning.

 Then, a new president took over the Reichsbank, Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht, who came by his first two names because of his father's admiration for an editor of the New York Tribune.  The Rentenmark was not Schacht's idea, but he executed it and as the Reichsbank president, he got the credit for it.  For decades afterward he was able to maintain a reputation for financial wizardry and he became the architect of the financial prosperity brought by the Nazi party.

 Obviously, although the currency was worthless, Germany was still a rich country with mines, farms, factories, and natural resources aplenty.  The backing for the Rentenmark was mortgages on the land and bonds on the factories, but that backing was a fiction; the factories and land could not be turned into cash or used abroad.  Nine zeros were struck from the currency, that is, one Rentenmark was equal to one billion old Marks.  The Germans wanted desperately to believe in the Rentenmark, and so they simply did. 

But although the country slowly began to function almost normally again, the savings of the middle-classes were never restored, nor were the values of hard work and decency that had accompanied the savings.   With the currency went many of the lifetime plans of average, ordinary citizens.  It was the custom for the bride to bring some money to a marriage; so many marriages were called off and many widows dependent on insurance found themselves destitute.  People who had worked for a lifetime and built up a sizeable pension fund, found that their pensions would not even buy a cup of coffee.  Such are the ways that the ordinary citizens of the world are cheated out of the money by these vultures. 

“The cities were still there, the houses not yet bombed and in ruins, but the victims were millions of people.  They had lost their fortunes, their savings; they were dazed and inflation-shocked and did not understand how it had happened to them and who the foe was who had defeated them.  Yet they had lost their self-assurance, their feeling that they themselves could be the masters of their own lives if only they worked hard enough; and lost, too, were the old values of morals, of ethics, of decency.”  Pearl Buck, American author

Thus, according to Schacht himself, the German government did not cause the Weimar hyperinflation.  On the contrary, the government brought hyperinflation under control.  It placed the Reichsbank under strict government regulation and took prompt corrective measures to eliminate foreign speculation.  One of those measures was to eliminate easy access to loans from private banks and eventually Hitler regained Germany’s financial stability through the issuance of Government Treasury Certificates.

Schacht, the Rothschild agent, disapproved of this government fiat money (obviously) and was consequently dismissed as head of the Reichsbank when he refused to issue it.  Nevertheless, he acknowledged in his later memoirs that allowing the government to issue the money it needed did not produce the price inflation predicted by classical economic theory, which states (for obvious reasons) that currency must be borrowed from private cartels.

What really causes hyperinflation is uncontrolled speculation.  When speculation is coupled with debt (owed to private banking cartels) the result is always disaster.  On the other hand, when a government issues currency in carefully measured ways, it causes supply and demand to increase together, leaving prices unaffected.  Hence there is no inflation, no debt, no unemployment, and no need for income taxes.

Naturally this terrifies the bankers, since it eliminates their powers and it also terrifies the Elite, since their control of banking allows them to buy the media, the government and everything else.  Were the nations of the world to revert to Government-only money issuance, then the world financial crisis would be solved overnight, as would much of the ever-increasing poverty and suffering we are currently witnessing.

Significantly, it was in the midst of this financial carnage that further devastated an already prostrate nation, that an unobtrusive, former army corporal was thrust into the spotlight and promoted as a great ‘leader of men’.  The prevailing conditions of the time providing a perfect stage for anyone with any aspirations of greatness and the ability to ‘mesmerise’ his audiences with nationalist, patriotic rhetoric.  And thus the world was introduced to the soon-to-be world public enemy number one, Adolf Hitler…

The Falsification Of HistoryOur Distorted RealityBy

John Hamer

They try to portray all of life as very simple

 

Darwinists’ deception techniques are generally based on not permitting people to think. One of the most effective ways of doing this, they foolishly imagine, is to completely ignore the extraordinary complexity of life and portray is as really very “simple.”

Darwinists say that, "The cell came into being in muddy water.” They try to deceive people with the idea of the cell “forming in muddy water,” despite being at a complete loss to explain how a single protein might have formed by chance and are still striving to fully unravel the mystery of the cell in the most technically advanced laboratories.

Darwinists also claim that fish emerged onto dry land and gradually turned into amphibians, that reptiles suddenly grew wings and began to fly, that bears turned into whales while romping by the shore – which is Darwin’s own claim, and that chimpanzees (or, since Darwinists regard the words chimpanzee or monkey as slightly disparaging, fictitious “ape-like creatures,” as they themselves put it) turned into scientists, professors, and scholars who examine their own brain cells in laboratories. the glorious complexity in life is a huge dead-end for Darwinists. the only way out for them, is to explain everything in terms of chance; to depict life and the complexity within it as actually very “simple.”

To that end, the idea that Darwinists want to condition people with is essentially this: Muddy water + chance + time = Life! According to Darwinists, when coincidences, to which Darwinists attribute a creative power, combine together they can work miracles (surely Allah is beyond that) and turn life forms into one another, no matter how impossible that may actually be. the Darwinist claim is a ludicrous one that seeks to portray everything as very simple.

This is a cunning act of indoctrination performed on people. This indoctrination has such an effect on some people that they are immediately able to believe in utterly nonsensical concepts. They are able to believe that man is a slightly more developed form of chimpanzee, that fish can emerge onto dry land and turn into terrestrial life forms when they so choose, that a cell can really form in muddy water and that dinosaurs managed to grow wings and turn into birds. That is because they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated, almost to the level of brainwashing. This constant indoctrination is worked into them by well-known professors, wielding incomprehensibly strange formulae and peculiar scientific terminology on the covers of world famous magazines.

The fact is that there is nothing “simple” about life at all. Everything set out under this indoctrination is a lie. With all of its infrastructure and organization, a single cell is far more complex than a giant metropolis such as New York City. Despite much wide-ranging laboratory research over the last few years, only a very small part of this extraordinary structure has been clarified. but there is no way in which it can be replicated. Not one of the thousands of proteins in the cell can be artificially manufactured. Living things are literally works of art in terms of their complexity, sensitivity, symmetry, order, detail, equipment and systems. for that reason, the simplistic explanations offered by Darwinism’s adherents are simply intended to deceive.

In relating all of this nonsense, Darwinists are of course well aware that there is nothing simple in life. They are of course well aware that not a single cell can spontaneously emerge from muddy water, let alone a complex, multi-cell organism, and that a fish can never emerge onto dry land and start flying. We must not forget that Darwinists relate these accounts for purposes of casting a psychological spell; a kind of hypnosis. Moreover, the Darwinists who so shamelessly do all this are quite unable to account for how even a single protein came into being. This represents a huge and absolute defeat for Darwinists right from the beginning. One must never forget this fact as one listen to Darwinist fairy tales.

Secret backing is provided for the major press so they will support Darwinism.

Darwinists have been making propaganda through the press for 150 years and have used the press for all of their psychological conditioning techniques. If they didn't control such a major force as the press, it would be impossible for the Darwinist dictatorship to have established a false dominion across the world and for the nonsense of evolution to have found its way into institutions of state, schools and universities.

The first decision for Darwinism to be disseminated by the press, to make such a fantastical idea in some way believable, was taken in a senior masonic lodge made up of atheist freemasons in Darwin’s time. Members of the 33rd Degree Mizraim Freemasonry Supreme Council in Paris announced the need for evolution to be supported by depicting it as science, but had no qualms about ridiculing the theory amongst themselves;

It is with this object in view that we are constantly by means of our press, arousing a blind confidence in these theories. the intellectuals... will puff themselves up with their knowledge and without any logical verification of them will put into effect all the information available from science, which our agentur specialists have cunningly pieced together for the purpose of educating their minds in the direction we want. Do not suppose for a moment that these statements are empty words: think carefully of the successes we arranged for Darwinism...”2

Thus it was that Darwinism spread to the masses of people in the light of this decision taken at a French lodge made up of atheist freemasons. Ever since then it has always been under the atheist Freemasons’ protection. Atheist freemasons, who have established a global dominion and therefore possess a press army capable of shaping the world as they choose, can thus produce whatever reports they wish, raise whichever subjects they choose, and thus manage people as they desire. This cunning policy of management continues to this day.

Successes in eliminating Darwinism make atheist masons very uneasy. at such times they immediately embark on an intensive policy of conditioning, as already described, through the press. the Darwinist press is immediately unleashed and a false fossil is immediately discovered. a Darwinist scientist is trotted out, and tall tales are written about this fossil. That is how the atheist freemasons’ system works.

It is noteworthy as to why reports about Darwinism are supported by certain sections of the press. the press in question produces their reports solely in line with the instructions they receive from atheist freemasons, and not because of any scientific fats, data or information. This needs to be borne in mind in evaluating the false, global dominion of the Darwinist deception.

Darwinist Propaganda Techniques

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)

Ota Benga

 

In 1904, an American missionary brought Ota Benga, a pygmy from the central Congo, to the United States. He was placed in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in New York City, where his filed teeth, disproportionate limbs and tricks helped attract 40,000 visitors a day. He was exhibited alongside an orangutan, with whom he performed tricks, in order to emphasize Africans’ similarities with apes. An editorial in the New York Times, rejecting calls for his release, remarked that “pygmies are very low in the human scale.... The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.”
Jason Stearns

***
PREFACE

In 1906 a young man from the Congo known as Ota Benga became the subject of headlines around the world when he was exhibited in a cage with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo Monkey House. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers flocked to the zoo to behold the so-called pygmy, who stood four feet eleven inches and weighed a little over one hundred pounds. That this occurred in a preeminent American city in the twentieth century would seem enough to cause astonishment. But there’s far more to the story than meets the eye.

While on the surface this appears to be the saga of one man’s degradation—of a shocking and shameful spectacle—on closer inspection it is also the story of an era, of science, of elite men and institutions, and of racial ideologies that endure today. Benga left no written account of his own, and others have filled the gap with conspiratorial silence, half-truths, and even flagrant deception. As a result, what has been officially recorded and recycled in hundreds of accounts around the globe is a flourishing, ever-expanding fiction. So this book is also a story of secrets, lies, denial, and overdue reclamation.

Through a forensic-type inquiry we can unearth missing chapters from Benga’s extraordinary journey and in the process retrieve portions of our past from the waste bin of history. As we retrace Benga’s footsteps from Central Africa through Europe and America, we find him in the shadow of a lettered elite. In its correspondence, journals, books, photographs, and other historical documents, he clings to the margins, doggedly asserting his humanity; insisting that his story—that our story—be truthfully told. If we lean in we may hear the muffled voice of a man long thought silenced, and see ever more clearly who we were as the century turned in America’s imperial city.
**
Waves of women in long skirts and bonnets and men in suits and derbies streamed along the path from Fordham Road, scaled the graceful winding stairways, and went past the pool of sea lions. They had come from mansions along Fifth and Madison Avenues, and from teeming ghettos on the Lower East Side and in the Tenderloin District. They eagerly flocked to the left side of the court, to the elegant beaux arts pavilion flanked by columns with the words “Primate House” etched into the stone lintel above its ornate archway.7 High above the doorway, carved into the triangular tympanum crowning the building, was an intricately depicted family of orangutans, foreshadowing what lay ahead.

They filed along the narrow, dark corridor, through the stench of humid feces and monkey musk. Undaunted, they marched over a carpet of discarded peanut shells, carefully scanning the monkeys, lemurs, chimpanzees, orangutans, and baboons, until they reached the far end, where they found, displayed in an iron cage, Ota Benga, his slight 103-pound, four-foot eleven-inch chocolate-colored frame sheathed in white trousers and a khaki coat. His small brown feet were bare.

“Ist das ein Mensch?”—Is it a man?—one woman asked in German.
“Something about it I don’t like,” said another.8

Could this caged creature be, many no doubt wondered, the incarnation of one of the characters in best-selling books like Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast, published in 1900, or the “half child, half animal,” described in Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, published the previous year, “whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger”?

Could he be the missing link, the species bridging man and ape that preoccupied leading scholars?

Some were probably made uneasy by eyes that radiated understanding. This small being with smooth brown skin and small solemn eyes sat erectly and neither swung from an apparatus nor made seemingly vile gestures. He was composed, if somewhat sad. In fact, except for his child-size stature and teeth meticulously filed to sharp points, he appeared no different from an ordinary “Negro.” But if he was wholly human, would he be in a cage in a fetid monkey house?

As many as five hundred people at a time crowded around to gawk at the diminutive Ota Benga while he preoccupied himself with a pet parrot, deftly shot his bow and arrow, or wove a mat and hammock from the bundles of twine placed in the cage. Children giggled and hooted with delight while adults laughed, many uneasily, at the human spectacle.
**
The cage Benga inhabited had been built at the southern end of the Primate House to keep the monkeys warm and make the orangutan easier to observe. Benga’s cage, like those of his housemates, was connected to a room inside the building. And like the orangutan and monkeys, he was at the mercy of the keepers, who decided when he could enter the building and elude the crowds. Until then, he was unavoidably on display and, like his housemates, subjected to the disquieting hysteria and stares of a seemingly endless stream of spectators.

Benga became the object of pointing fingers, audible gasps, and bellowing laughter. Alone and locked in a monkey house cage he could, in the September Indian summer heat, smell the stench of ape feces, urine, and musk laced with the foreign odors of hundreds of spectators packed into the steamy, cramped quarters. He did not initially comprehend their language but could feel both the sting of their scorn and the pang of their pity. In their wide eyes he could see his humanity, like one’s image in a fun house mirror, monstrously distorted. He was cornered, and exposed to cackling hyenas under a glaring spotlight.

We cannot know exactly what Benga felt, but research on the psychological trauma associated with shame suggests that it is not substantially different from the effects of physical torture. Studies also consistently show a strong correlation between event-related shame and post-victimization symptoms including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, withdrawal, and phobias.2 One researcher, J. P. Gump, found that the most profound shame results from the destruction of your subjectivity when “what you need, what you desire, and what you feel are of complete and utter insignificance.”3

That would certainly apply to Benga as he endured the gawking of spectators utterly indifferent to his feelings. They howled. Gasped. Gaped. Pointed. Jeered.

Benga frequently walked to the door with eyes pleading for his keepers to release him from public view.

“Shame is such a searing painful experience that its characteristic defense is turning away from the stimulus situation,” another researcher has said.4 Andrew Morrison observes, “Shame induces a wish to become invisible, unseen, to sink into the ground or to disappear into the thick, soupy fog that we have just imagined.”5

Occasionally Benga was mercifully permitted to roam the forest under the watchful eye of park rangers. However, once discovered, he was hungrily pursued by park-goers, and returned to his cage. He was a sensation.

“Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes” was the headline in Sunday’s New York Times. The five-hundred-word article described Benga’s captivity as a dark comedy, in which the tragic hero was, in the view of the Men of Science, an inferior creature. The article would cast the newspaper as a central character in Benga’s unfolding trauma.

“The human being,” the article said, “happened to be a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale. But to the average non-scientific person in the crowd of sightseers there was something about the display that was unpleasant.”6

However unsettling, the exhibit on the respectable grounds of a world-class zoological park had been sanctioned by Hornaday, one of the world’s leading zoologists, and by Henry Fairfield Osborn, among his era’s most eminent scientists.
(...)
For Benga, each second may have seemed an eternity, but for Hornaday, the debut was a resounding success. He assured a reporter that the exhibition had been authorized by the Zoological Society. Madison Grant, the society’s secretary, had in fact been intimately involved in the negotiations to secure Benga. As an exhibit, Benga personified the society’s mission, expressed by Osborn on the park’s opening day: the zoological park was meant to educate the masses who could not travel and explore, and to serve as “a delightful pleasure ground.”10

Hornaday also insisted that the exhibit was in keeping with human exhibitions in Europe, breezily suggesting the Continent’s indisputable status as the world’s paragon of culture and civilization.11 Hadn’t Sara Baartman, a southern African woman, been exhibited, barely clad, throughout London and Paris as the “Hottentot Venus” until her death in 1815? The famous scientist Georges Cuvier, professor of comparative anatomy at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and founding father of vertebrate paleontology, believed Baartman’s ample derriere was evidence that her people, the Khoikhoi, were oversexed. After her death he performed an autopsy and concluded that she and the so-called Hottentots were more akin to apes than to humans. He made a cast of Baartman’s body and preserved her brain, genitals, and skeleton, ensuring that even in death, she’d draw a crowd. While Benga was being exhibited in a monkey house cage, Baartman’s remains—her brain, genitals, and skeleton—were still on display in case number 33 at the Paris Musée de l’Homme.12While today most people of all races would find such behavior both racist and morally contemptible, in the era’s elite white circles Cuvier was generally considered an embodiment of scientific truth.
Long after Baartman’s death human zoos celebrating Europeans’ conquest of purportedly primitive people remained popular in Europe; these included zoos in Hamburg, Barcelona, and Milan. Carl Hagenbeck, a seller of wild animals, exhibited Samoan and Sami people to great success in 1874. So popular was his 1876 exhibit of Egyptian Nubians that it toured Berlin, Paris, and London.13 A year later Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, director of the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimation in Paris, organized exhibits of Nubians and Inuit seen by one million people; and in 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium exhibited several hundred of his newly conquered Congolese people in Brussels to appreciative crowds.14

Hornaday conceded that these had all been human zoos; none of the people had been exhibited in a monkey house cage. But he was an inveterate showman, and he saw the exhibition as in keeping with the mission of the zoological gardens. He hoped that he had not given his colored brethren reason to believe that Benga’s placement in a monkey house suggested any close analogy of the African “savage” with apes.

“Benga,” he wryly assured them, “is in the primate house because that’s the most comfortable place we could find for him.”15
**
Shortly before 2 P.M., Benga appeared in an arena-like cage, equipped with a bow and arrow, a new target made of clay, and a pet parrot. A short time later, he was joined in the cage by Dohong, an orangutan.

Three hundred to five hundred spectators at a time crowded around to gape at the pair. Those who had been present the day before noted that Benga’s feet, which had been bare, were now covered by canvas shoes. The two captives were sometimes locked in each other’s arms; at other times, Dohong was placidly perched on Benga’s slight shoulder, or the two frolicked with Benga flinging Dohong like a ball. The crowds reveled in these antics. For Benga, Dohong provided a needed distraction, and also companionship and affection, all of which he had been denied.

The Times reporter noted the similarities between Benga and Dohong, saying that Benga was not much taller than the orangutan, and their heads were alike. “Both grin in the same way when pleased,” he added, casually suggesting a closer kinship between Benga and the ape than other humans shared.7

A bewildered Benga occasionally sat silently on a stool, staring—at times glaring—through the bars as his tormentors hysterically howled their approval. Benga occasionally mimicked the menacing mob, as he did when a knicker-clad boy goaded him to shoot his bow and arrow, commanding, “Shoot, shoot.”

“Shoot, shoot,” Benga mocked back.8 The crowd roared. In fact, Benga found that, like the monkeys, he was a source of amusement whether he sat motionless, erupted in anger, or sought to allay his anxiety by playing with Dohong or shooting his bow and arrow.

But not everyone was amused by Benga’s misfortune. The Reverend Dr. Robert Stuart MacArthur, the influential pastor of Manhattan’s Calvary Baptist Church on West Fifty-Seventh Street, stood among the heckling, howling herd that Monday, and he was outraged.

“The person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African,” MacArthur said. “Instead of making a beast of this little fellow we should be putting him in school for the development of such powers as God gave him.”9 MacArthur said he would contact the city’s black clergy to organize a protest against the exhibit. “Our Christian missionary societies must take this matter up at once.” In MacArthur, Benga had found a formidable ally.
**
By Sunday, September 16, a week after his debut, Benga was no longer in the cage, but roamed the park under the watchful eye of park rangers. Still he was not free. That day a record forty thousand people visited the zoo, nearly all to see Ota Benga. Wherever Benga went, hordes followed in hot pursuit, “howling, jeering and yelling,” reported the Times.15 The rowdy crowd pursued Benga, and when he was cornered, some people poked him in the ribs or tripped him, while others merely laughed at the sight of a frightened “pygmy.” In self-defense, Benga struck several visitors, and it took three men to get him back to the monkey house.

Hornaday had long shared Osborn’s and Grant’s contempt for the lower-class zoo-goers, whom he privately described as “low-lived beasts who appreciate nothing and love filth and disorder.”16 Now, the unruly mobs overwhelmed the park rangers. Benga had excited their raw emotions and Hornaday had tired of the chaos. He wrote to Verner on Monday, September 17, to report that Benga had again resisted authority.

“I regret to say that Ota Benga has become quite unmanageable,” he wrote.17 “He has been so fully exploited in the newspapers, and so much in the public eye, it is quite inadvisable for us to punish him; for should we do so, we would immediately be accused of cruelty, coercion, etc., etc. I am sure you will appreciate this point.”

Immune from punishment, Hornaday complained, “the boy does quite as he pleases, and it is utterly impossible to control him.”18

Unable to fathom Benga’s resistance to his captivity with monkeys and apes, Hornaday expressed dismay that Benga threatened to bite the keepers whenever they tried to bring him back to the monkey house “and would undoubtedly do so if they should persist.”

Given the insurrection, Hornaday was prepared to relinquish the reins. “I see no way out of the dilemma but for him to be taken away.”19Meanwhile Benga’s daily adventures in the wilds of the New York Zoological Gardens had become a newspaper publisher’s dream. Neither journalists nor the public could get enough of Benga, whose adventures in the picturesque zoological park were a daily source of headlines. “Zoo Has a Pygmy Too Many,” reported Monday’s New York Sun. From the depths of his debasement, Benga was a star.
That day, a keeper managed to catch Benga after he was once again chased through the park by a jeering mob. He reportedly asked how Benga liked America. “Me no like America,” Benga forlornly replied.20
**
Finally on the afternoon of Friday, September 28, Benga, escorted by the long-overdue Verner, bade farewell to the zoo. Benga asked to say good-bye to the attendants, to whom he gave his arrows, reserving the bow for the chief keeper.

Hornaday breathed a sigh of relief as Verner quietly left the park with the person who had first been exhibited in a cage twenty days earlier. The exhibition had contributed to a doubling of park attendance compared with the preceding year. Some 220,800 people had visited the park in September and nearly all, if not all of them, had seen Benga.8

Benga’s departure would be as calm and contained as his debut was frenetic and flamboyant. Hornaday apparently did not wish to invite the fanfare that had accompanied the debut. No reporters were alerted to witness Benga’s farewell.
Benga, wearing the same khaki uniform with gold buttons as the attendants, would be quietly lifted from the bowels of debasement in the Bronx Zoo monkey house to the height of African American achievement in Brooklyn’s Weeksville section. There, he would enter the city’s largest and most affluent African American community, complete with schools, churches, businesses, doctors, lawyers, and teachers steeped in Victorian ideals, to live in a finely appointed orphanage. Gordon was ecstatic.

“He looks like a rather dwarfed colored boy of unusual amiability and curiosity,” Gordon said.9 “Now our plan is this: We are going to treat him as a visitor. We have given him a room to himself, where he can smoke if he chooses.”
Concerns had been raised by relatives about the welfare of the children residing at the orphanage once Benga—who had routinely been described in the press as a savage cannibal—arrived. “Why he’ll eat my Matilda alive,” one anguished mother told Gordon.10

Gordon assured anxious relatives that Benga would not board with the children, and that he would dine with the cooks in the kitchen. Gordon said Benga had already learned a surprising number of English words and would soon be able to express himself.

“This,” he asserted, “will be the beginning of his education.”11

**
From the moment Benga set foot on American soil he had been held up to public ridicule by those determined to prove he belonged to an inferior species. Now, at the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn’s Weeksville section, he would be surrounded by elite African Americans determined to show that blacks could be fully integrated into American life as respectable and self-sufficient citizens.
Named for James Weeks, a stevedore from Virginia who in 1838 bought a plot of land in the ninth ward of central Brooklyn, by the 1850s Weeksville had become one of the largest African American communities, a picturesque suburb bounded by present-day Fulton Street and East New York, Troy, and Ralph Avenues. Its population had swelled to nearly seven hundred after the 1863 draft riots made it a refuge for blacks fleeing Lower Manhattan.1

Hundreds sought safety in Weeksville and Flatbush, where, according to an account in the Christian Recorder, “the colored men who had manhood in them armed themselves and threw out their pickets every day and night, determined to die defending their homes.”2
***
At the end of 1909 Gordon wrote to Verner, who by then was working on the Panama Canal, to report that Benga was still working on the farm. “He has a bank account, and is saving his money to go back home or to do whatever is thought for him,” Gordon said.21

Gordon said the educational project had “proved to be a failure,” given Benga’s age. “It was simply impossible to put him in a class to receive instructions, from a literary point. . . . I have done the best I could in trying to develop him, from every standpoint, and I find that the only thing to do is to let him work.”22

Soon afterward, in January 1910, Benga made his second pilgrimage to Lynchburg, Virginia. That spring William Sheppard settled in Staunton, Virginia, seventy-four miles away. Sheppard would never return to Africa—a fate that Benga desperately hoped would not befall him.
**
So Benga, with his halting English and little more than a rudimentary education, found himself in an academically rigorous environment surrounded by black intellectuals who were dedicated to attaining racial equality in the United States and abroad. Accordingly, their students were held to the same high standards as white students at top colleges.
A survey of the required curriculum in 1917 found that it included three years of Latin and Greek and one year of German.13 Such an environment would be daunting, even overwhelming, for many American students. Now a person who had spent most of his life as a hunter was thrust into the vortex of a vigorous debate over the course of education most suitable for Africans and their descendants. While Benga might have found greater satisfaction in the woods or on a farm than he could find learning Latin, such thinking would be deemed heretical among the school’s academic elite.

Benga would, however, find a kindred spirit in one of his instructors. Annie Bethel Spencer was not quite twenty-six when Benga arrived at Virginia Seminary. She had been born on a farm in Henry County, Virginia, to mixed-race parents. Her father, of black, white, and Seminole Indian ancestry, had been born into slavery in 1862, and her mother was the biracial daughter of a wealthy Virginia aristocrat and his enslaved mistress. In America, where “one drop” of African American blood outweighed such nuances of ancestry, Annie Spencer was considered African American, a designation she proudly embraced.
**
Benga took elementary courses alongside children believed to be less than half his age, but outside the classroom he became a trusted teacher and companion to neighborhood boys. For Gregory, Hunter, and Wilelbert Hayes, who were born between 1903 and 1906 and lost their father before his memory could become indelible, Benga became a father figure and hero.

Often barefoot, though wearing western clothes, Benga would lead a band of boys—including the three Hayes boys and Annie Spencer’s son Chauncey—and teach them the secrets of the forest, including how to shave the tips of hickory wood to sharp points to make spears, or how to make bows from vines. With Benga the boys also learned how to gather blackberries and spear fish. The man they called Otto Bingo also taught them how to hunt wild turkeys and squirrels with a bow and arrow and how to trap small animals. They learned to forage for roots to make sassafras tea and marveled at his ability to collect honey from the bees without being stung.

Years later Hunter recalled with amusement how Benga rolled on the ground, overcome with laughter, after Gregory stuck his hand in a hive as he had watched Benga do. Unlike Benga, Gregory was stung, and ran home crying to his mother.

In his scrappy Congo-infused English, Benga regaled the boys with stories of his adventures hunting elephants, pantomiming how he stalked them—“Big, big,” he’d say with outstretched arms—and recounting how he would celebrate a kill with a triumphant hunting song.

In Benga they found an open and patient teacher, a beloved companion, and a remarkably agile athlete who sprinted and leaped over logs like a boy. And with his young companions Benga could uninhibitedly relive memories of a lost and longed-for life and retreat to woods that recalled home.
Benga also delighted in eating, and at the sound of the noon whistle at the cotton mill, he would drop what he was doing to race home and fix his lunch. “Gotta go cooka eat,” he’d say.7

He especially relished Mary’s cooking and she happily indulged him, often specially preparing for him the baked yams that he so enjoyed. He delighted in the hog-killing season, and enthusiastically joined the men in the time-honored communal ritual that took place throughout the South—and nowhere more than Lynchburg—and that had many of the characteristics of his own hunter culture.
The slaughtered hog would be placed in a barrel and then boiled over hot sandstones to soften the bristles. With the hog splayed on a long table, Benga would go to work, vigorously scraping it to remove the hair, which he then used for ticking. With the hog hung by its feet, and cut from bung to throat, he’d clean its insides with a sharpened broomstick.
The hog would then be divided into parts and products: bacon, belly, ham, shoulders, feet, ears, sausage, spareribs, neck bone, tail, brains. The fat would be used for soap and the small intestine for chitterlings. What wasn’t cooked for the day’s feast was salted, dried, and seasoned and days later hung in the smokehouse to be preserved for future meals. The ritual, for the hunter, surely evoked home.
In Lynchburg Benga had found a surrogate home and family and would learn their customs, and the contours and boundaries of their binding blackness. When he crossed into neighboring Cottonwood, a white working-class community, he was heckled and pelted with rocks. “He would come back and ask why they did that,” Chauncey recalled years later. “He didn’t understand.”8

However, long before he arrived in Lynchburg Benga had seen that scowl of scorn; he had seen it on the faces of the chicotte-wielding capitas; in the jeering crowds in St. Louis, and among the spectators outside the cage at the Monkey House.

The experience in Lynchburg probably triggered memories of earlier trauma.

A study on shame and post-victimization released in 2011 found that individuals who, like Benga, had experienced shame-related trauma risked developing severe psychological symptoms, and also that “shame is more likely to be evoked in these individuals, increasing the risk for re-traumatization.” New trauma, the athors of this study said, caused “a significant increase in the frequency of post-traumatic stress reactions to the original trauma.”9
Whether Benga internalized shame or blamed his oppressors, he would know that he was not free. He learned to live within the carefully drawn lines of Lynchburg’s black community and practice customs its people had crafted from memory and centuries-old oppression. In their sermons and spirituals he may have recognized a sorrow as familiar as the forest dew. They were the descendants of a people who knew the despair of displacement and the loss of language and of friendships, family, ritual, sights, scents, and sounds.

These people, cobbled together from a far-off continent and made anew, sang of being “r’buked and scorned,” and yet drew him to their bosom. Some had lost loved ones to slavery; some bore the children of their enslavers. Yet with all of their travails, they had made room for a homeless stranger.
Still, they did not know the piercing rupture; the vacuous eternity of alienation that many of their forebears had known—and that the man they called Bingo now knew. While they were burdened and disdained in America, it was the land they had tilled and spilled blood on, the land where they created life and buried their dead. For all the rejection and hardship, they were home.

Benga had only memories, and no one but he could know what form they took. Was his sleep troubled by nightmares of being stalked by howling mobs, or being caged with apes? Was he haunted by visions of murdered loved ones, or of starving, tortured, chained Congolese? Did he dreamily drift into joyful gatherings of kin and clan, only to awaken alone?
Some nights, beneath a star-speckled sky, the boys would watch Benga build a fire and dance and sing around it. Chauncey, Gregory, Wilelbert, and their friends were enraptured as he circled the flame, hopping and singing as if they weren’t there. They were no older than ten, too young to grasp the poignancy of the ancient ritual, or the urgency of Benga’s refrains.

**
Benga did odd jobs for Anderson and sometimes stayed in her hayloft, where he spent countless hours delighting children with enchanting tales of home, of hunting and singing in a mythical forest teeming with creatures reminiscent of Noah’s Ark. After a few years attending school he had taken a job at a tobacco factory.
But by 1916, something had changed. Benga was no longer the eager friend of the neighborhood children. He had lost interest in their excursions to the surrounding woods to hunt or to fish in nearby streams. Many had noticed his darkening disposition, his all-consuming longing to go home. For hours he would sit alone in silence under a tree. Some of his childhood companions would decades later recall a song he’d sing that he had learned at the Virginia Theological Seminary:
I believe I’ll go home,
Lordy, won’t you help me
It had been ten years since he left the Congo, and his tie to home was fraying. He would know nothing of his village, of the family and friends he left behind. The decade had been marked by his exhibition in a cage and by World War I. During that period the earth seemed to spin off its axis, increasingly consumed by a war that would, over the next four years, claim nine million lives. (...)

The man who had been referred to by so many names—including Mbye Otabenga, Ota Benga, Otto Bingo, Otto Binga, Bengal, Artiba, Autobank, and Ottobang—was in Lynchburg without any known intimate relationships. For all the many kindnesses he had been shown in Lynchburg, he was isolated—an ocean and a river away from the life he knew. In a city of thirty thousand people, he alone sang lustily to the forest and had roamed amid beasts, wild and free.

The music of home was getting fainter; the drumbeats, the rumbling elephants, a distant dream.

In the late afternoon on March 19, 1916, the boys watched as Benga gathered wood to build a fire in the field between Mary’s house and the seminary. As the fire rose to a brilliant flame, Benga danced around it while chanting and moaning. He danced faster and faster, twirling and moaning, as the boys watched in solemn silence. They had seen his ritual before, but this time they detected a profound and boundless sorrow. This time their beloved Benga seemed eerily distant, as vacant and frightening as a ghost.

That night, as they slept, Ota Benga entered the battered gray shed behind Mammy Joe’s store where a chorus of giggles had pierced the air. Sometime before daybreak he recovered a gun he had apparently hidden in the hayloft and fired a bullet through his broken heart.

And in the harrowing stillness, he was free.

SPECTACLE.
Pamela Newkirk

West reasons that the civilization responsible for the Sphinx and its neighbouring temples must have disappeared long before 7000-5000 bc

 Water erosion

The origins of this controversy go back to the late 1970s when John Anthony West, an independent American researcher, was studying the obscure and difficult writings of the brilliant French mathematician and symbolist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Schwaller is best known for his works on the Luxor Temple, but in his more general text, Sacred Science (first published in 1961), he commented on the archaeological implications of certain climatic conditions and floods that last afflicted Egypt more than 12,000 years ago:

A great civilization must have preceded the vast movements of water that passed over Egypt, which leads us to assume that the Sphinx already existed, sculptured in the rock of the west cliff at Giza that Sphinx whose leonine body, except for the head shows indisputable signs of aquatic erosion.[37]Schwaller’s simple observation, which nobody appeared to have taken any notice of before, obviously challenged the Egyptological consensus attributing the Sphinx to Khafre and to the epoch of 2500 bc. What West immediately realized on reading this passage, however, was that, through geology, Schwaller had also offered a way ‘virtually to prove the existence of another, and perhaps greater civilization antedating dynastic Egypt—and all other known civilizations—by millennia’: [38]If the single fact of the water erosion of the Sphinx could be confirmed, it would in itself overthrow all accepted chronologies of the history of civilization; it would force a drastic re-evaluation of the assumptions of ‘progress’—the assumption upon which the whole of modern education is based. It would be difficult to find a single, simple question with graver implications ... [39]Not floodwaters

West is right about the implications. If the weathering patterns on the Sphinx can be proved to have been caused by water—and not by wind or sand as Egyptologists maintain—then there is indeed a very serious problem with established chronologies. In order to understand why, we need only remind ourselves that Egypt’s climate has not always been as bone dry as it is today and that the erosion patterns to which West and Schwaller are drawing our attention are unique to the ‘architectural unit’ that Lehner and others define as the ‘context’ of the Sphinx. From their common weathering features—which are not shared by the other monuments of the Giza necropolis—it is obvious that the structures making up this unit were all built in the same epoch.

But when was that epoch?

West’s initial opinion was that:

There can be no objection in principle to the water-erosion of the Sphinx, since it is agreed that in the past, Egypt suffered radical climatic changes and periodic inundations—by the sea and (in the not so remote past) by tremendous Nile floods. The latter are thought to correspond to the melting of the ice from the last Ice Age. Current thinking puts this date at around 15,000 bc, but periodic great Nile floods are believed to have taken place subsequent to this date. The last of these floods is dated around 10,000 bc. It follows, therefore, that if the great Sphinx has been eroded by water, it must have been constructed prior to the flood or floods responsible for the erosion ...[40]The logic is indeed sound ‘in principle’. In practice, however, as West was later to admit, ‘flood or floods’ could not have been responsible for the peculiar kind of erosion seen on the Sphinx:

The problem is that the Sphinx is deeply weathered up to its neck. This necessitates 60-foot floods (at a minimum) over the whole of the Nile Valley. It was difficult to imagine floods of this magnitude. Worse, if the theory was correct, the inner limestone core-blocks of the so-called Mortuary Temple at the end of the causeway leading from the Sphinx had also been weathered by water, and this meant floods reaching to the base of the Pyramids—another hundred feet or so of flood waters ... [41]Floodwaters, then, could not have eroded the Sphinx. So what had?

Rainfall

In 1989 John West approached Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University. A highly respected geologist, stratigrapher and paleontologist, Schoch’s speciality is the weathering of soft rocks very much like the limestone of the Giza plateau. Clearly, says West, he was a man who ‘had exactly the kind of expertise needed to confirm or rebut the theory once and for all’.[42]Schoch was at first sceptical of the idea of a much older Sphinx but changed his mind after making an initial visit to the site in 1990. Although he was unable to gain access to the Sphinx enclosure he could see enough from the tourist viewing platform to confirm that the monument did indeed appear to have been weathered by water. It was also obvious to him that the agency of this weathering had not been floods but ‘precipitation’.

‘In other words’, West explains, ‘rainwater was responsible for weathering the Sphinx, not floods ... Precipitation-induced weathering took care of the problem in a single stroke. The sources I was using for reference talked about these floods in conjunction with long periods of rains, but it hadn’t occurred to me, as a non-geologist, that the rains, rather than the periodic floods, were the actual weathering agent ...’ [43]As we have noted, Schoch got no closer to the Sphinx on his 1990 visit than the tourist viewing platform. At this stage, therefore, his endorsement of West’s theory could only be provisional.

Why had the geologist from Boston not been allowed inside the Sphinx enclosure?

The reason was that since 1978 only a handful of Egyptologists had been granted that privilege, with all public access closed off by the Egyptian authorities and a high fence built around the site.

With the support of the Dean of Boston University, Schoch now submitted a formal proposal to the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, requesting permission to carry out a proper geological study of the erosion of the Sphinx.

A rude interruption

It took a long time, but because of his eminent institutional backing, Schoch’s proposal was eventually approved by the EAO, creating a brilliant opportunity to get to the bottom of the Sphinx controversy once and for all. John West immediately set about putting together a broadly based scientific team, including a professional geophysicist, Dr. Thomas L. Dobecki, from the highly respected Houston consulting firm of McBride-Ratcliff & Associates.[44] There were also to be others who joined ‘unofficially’: an architect and photographer; two further geologists; an oceanographer and a personal friend of John West’s, film-producer Boris Said. [45] Through Said, West had arranged to ‘record the ongoing work in a video documentary which would have wide public appeal’: [46]Since we could expect nothing but opposition from academic Egyptologists and archaeologists a way had to be found to get the theory to the public, if and when Schoch decided the evidence warranted full geological support. Otherwise it would simply be buried, possibly for good ... [47]As a way of getting the theory of an ancient rainfall-eroded Sphinx to the public, West’s film could hardly have been more successful. When it was first screened on NBC television in the United States in the autumn of 1993 it was watched by 33 million people.

But that is another story. Back in the Sphinx enclosure the first interesting result came from Dobecki, who had conducted seismographic tests around the Sphinx. The sophisticated equipment that he had brought with him picked up numerous indications of ‘anomalies and cavities in the bedrock between the paws and along the sides of the Sphinx’. [48] One of these cavities he described as:

a fairly large feature; it’s about nine metres by twelve metres in dimension, and buried less than five metres in depth. Now the regular shape of this—rectangular—is inconsistent with naturally occurring cavities ... So there’s some suggestion that this could be man-made. [49]With legal access to the enclosure, West recalls, Schoch, too:

was swiftly dropping conditionals ... The deeply weathered Sphinx and its ditch wall, and the relatively unweathered or clearly wind-weathered Old Kingdom tombs to the south (dating from around Khafre’s period) were cut from the same member of rock. In Schoch’s view it was therefore geologically impossible to ascribe these structures to the same time period. Our scientists were agreed. Only water, specifically precipitation, could produce the weathering we were observing ... [50]It was at this crucial moment, while the members of the team were putting together the first independent geological profile of the Sphinx, that Dr. Zahi Hawass; the Egyptian Antiquities Organization’s Director-General of the Giza Pyramids, fell upon them, suddenly and unexpectedly, like the proverbial ton of bricks.

The team had obtained their permission from Dr. Ibrahim Bakr, then the President of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization. What they had not known, however, was that relations between Bakr and Hawass were frosty. Neither had they reckoned with Hawass’s energy and ego. Fuming that he had been bypassed by his superior, he accused the Americans of tampering with the monuments:

I have found out that their work is carried out by installing endoscopes in the Sphinx’s body and shooting films for all phases of the work in a propaganda ... but not in a scientific manner. I therefore suspended the work of this unscientific mission and made a report which was presented to the permanent commission who rejected the mission’s work in future ... [51]This was putting it mildly. Far from ‘suspending’ their work, Hawass had virtually thrown the American team off the site. His intervention had come too late, however, to prevent them from gathering the essential geological data that they needed.

When did it rain?

Back in Boston, Schoch got down to work at his laboratory. The results were conclusive and a few months later he was ready to stick his neck out. Indeed to John West’s delight he was now prepared fully to endorse the notion of a rain-eroded Sphinx—with all its immense historical implications.

Schoch’s case, in brief—which has the full support of palaeo-climatologists—rests on the fact that heavy rainfall of the kind required to cause the characteristic erosion patterns on the Sphinx had stopped falling on Egypt thousands of years before the epoch of 2500 bc in which Egyptologists say that the Sphinx was built. The geological evidence therefore suggests that a very conservative estimate of the true construction date of the Sphinx would be somewhere between ‘7000 to 5000 bc minimum’.[52]In 7000 to 5000 bc—according to Egyptologists—the Nile valley was populated only by primitive neolithic hunter-gatherers whose ‘toolkits’ were limited to sharpened flintstones and pieces of stick. If Schoch is right, therefore, then it follows that the Sphinx and its neighbouring temples (which are built out of hundreds of 200-ton limestone blocks) must be the work of an as yet unidentified advanced civilization of antiquity.

The Egyptological reaction?

‘That’s ridiculous’, scoffed Peter Lecovara, assistant curator of the Egyptian Department in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. ‘Thousands of scholars working for hundreds of years have studied this problem and the chronology is pretty much worked out. There are no big surprises in store for us ...’ [53]Other ‘experts’ were equally dismissive. According to Carol Redmont, for example, an archaeologist at the University of California’s Berkeley campus: ‘There is no way this could be true. The people of that region would not have had the technology, the governing institutions or even the will to build such a structure thousands of years before Khafre’s reign.’ [54]And the redoubtable Zahi Hawass, who had tried to nip the geological research in the bud in the first place, had this to say about the Schoch-West team and their unorthodox conclusions concerning the antiquity of the Sphinx:

American hallucinations! West is an amateur. There is absolutely no scientific base for any of this. We have older monuments in the same area. They definitely weren’t built by men from space or Atlantis. It’s nonsense and we won’t allow our monuments to be exploited for personal enrichment. The Sphinx is the soul of Egypt’. [55]John West was not in the least bit surprised by the rhetoric. In his long and lonely quest to mount a proper investigation into the age of the anonymous Sphinx many such brickbats had been thrown at him before. This time, with Schoch’s heavyweight support—and the massive exposure of the whole matter on NBC television—he felt vindicated at last. Furthermore it was clear that the Egyptologists were rattled by the intrusion of an empirical science like geology into their normally cosy and exclusive academic territory.

West, however, wanted to take the matter a good deal further than Schoch was prepared to go and felt that the geologist had been too conservative and lenient in his ‘minimum’ estimate of 7000 to 5000 bc for the age of the Sphinx: ‘Here Schoch and I disagree, or rather interpret the same data somewhat differently. Schoch very deliberately takes the most conservative view allowed by the data ... However I remain convinced that the Sphinx must predate the break-up of the last Ice Age ...’ [56]In practice this means any time before 15,000 bc—a hunch that West says is based on the complete lack of evidence of a high culture in Egypt in 7000 to 5000 bc. ‘If the Sphinx was as recent as 7000-5000 bc,’ he argues, ‘I think we probably would have other Egyptian evidence of the civilization that carved it.’ [57] Since there is no such evidence, West reasons that the civilization responsible for the Sphinx and its neighbouring temples must have disappeared long before 7000-5000 bc: ‘The missing other evidence is, perhaps, buried deeper than anyone has looked and/or in places no one has yet explored—along the banks of the ancient Nile perhaps, which is miles from the present Nile, or even at the bottom of the Mediterranean, which was dry during the last Ice Age ...’ [58]Despite their ‘friendly disagreement’ as to whether the erosion of the Sphinx indicated a date of 7000 to 5000 bc, or a much more remote period, Schoch and West decided to present an abstract of their research at Giza to the Geological Society of America. They were encouraged by the response. Several hundred geologists agreed with the logic of their contentions and dozens offered practical help and advice to further the investigation. [59]Even more refreshing was the reaction from the international media. After the GSA meeting articles appeared in dozens of newspapers, and the issue of the Sphinx’s age was widely covered by television and radio. ‘We were over the fifty-yard line and heading downfield,’ recalls West. [60]As for the matter of his difference of opinion with Schoch about the dating of the monument, he honestly concedes that ‘only further research will resolve the question’. [61]

The Message of the Sphinx

A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind

Graham Hancock Robert Bauval

Before the first Apollo mission ever even cleared the launch pad, eleven NASA astronauts died in highly suspicious “accidents.”

 Bill Kaysing, another Moon hoax researcher, worked at Rocketdyne where NASA Saturn V rocket engines were built and became exposed to documents pertaining to the Mercury, Gemini, Atlas and Apollo NASA programs, which proved trickery was afoot.  Kaysing said of the documents that, “one does not need an engineering or science degree to determine that a hoax was being perpetrated.”  He wrote a book about his findings called “We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle.”  In it he exposes how NASA staged both the Apollo 1 fire and Challenger “accident” deliberately murdering the astronauts on board to silence them.

Before the first Apollo mission ever even cleared the launch pad, eleven NASA astronauts died in highly suspicious “accidents.”  Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White were all cremated together in an Apollo capsule fire during a completely unnecessary and dangerous test where they were strapped down and locked into a 100% oxygen chamber which incinerated the three of them to death in seconds.  Seven other astronauts, Ted Freemen, Charles Basset, Elliot See, Russell Rogers, Clifton Williams, Michael Adams and Robert Lawrence died in six separate airplane crashes, and Ed Givens in a car crash!  Eight of these deaths were in 1967 alone.  So many astronauts coincidentally dying under such circumstances is highly unlikely, and lends credence to the idea that these were intentional hits by the Masons trying to find the right people to sell their hoax.

One of the most outspoken of the fallen astronauts was Gus Grissom.   By 1967 Grissom had become increasingly irritated and vocally negative about NASA’s chances of ever landing man on the Moon.  He stated the odds were “pretty slim” and famously hung a lemon on the Apollo capsule after it repeatedly failed safety testing procedures.  Grissom threatened to go public with his complaints about the LEM, and even told his wife Betty, “If there ever is a serious accident in the space program, it’s likely to be me.”  Right after his murder, government agents raided Grissom’s house before anyone had been informed about the fire or his death.  They removed all his personal papers and his diary, never to be returned.

“In a prosecutorial mode, I accuse NASA, the CIA, and whatever super-secret group that controls the shadow government of these United States of fraud on the grandest scale imaginable, of murder by arson, and of larceny of over $40 billion in conjunction with the Apollo program that allegedly landed men on the Moon.  I also accuse them of violating a federal law against lobbying by government-funded entities and of serial murder of low-level NASA employees, witnesses, and other citizens who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Such accusations seem incredible because none of us ever want to believe our governmental father is deceiving us.  However, by the end of this book, even the most trusting reader will have no doubt that NASA MOONED AMERICA!”  -Ralph Rene, “NASA Mooned America!”

In 2001, investigative journalist and award-winning filmmaker Bart Sibrel produced the excellent documentary “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon.” When requesting footage for his movie, Sibrel was sent either by mistake or by a well-meaning whistle-blower, an official raw slated NASA clip from the Apollo 11 mission showing a young Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, for almost an hour, using transparencies and camera-tricks to fake shots of a round Earth!  They communicate over audio with control in Houston about how to accurately stage the shot, and someone keeps prompting them on how to effectively manipulate the camera to achieve the desired effect.  First, they blacked out all the windows except for a downward facing circular one, which they aimed the camera towards from several feet away.  This created the illusion of a ball-shaped Earth surrounded by the blackness of space, when in fact it was simply a round window in their dark cabin.  Neil Armstrong claimed at this point to be 130,000 miles from Earth, half-way to the Moon, but when camera-tricks were finished the viewer could see for themselves the astro-nots were not more than a hundred miles above the Earth’s surface, likely flying in a high-altitude plane!

“Many gullible people still accept NASA’s claim of sending men to the Moon, without bothering to carry out any research, or investigation, to see if NASA are indeed telling the truth.  There are some who will never accept the Moon missions were faked, regardless of how much factual evidence of a fake is put before them.”  -Sam Colby, “N.A.S.A. Numerous Anomalies and Scams Abound”

In 2004, Bart Sibrel completed a second documentary entitled “Astronauts Gone Wild” where he set out to film interviews with Apollo astronauts and ask them to swear on the Bible that they walked on the Moon.  In reaction to Sibrel’s accusations many of the astronauts indeed “went wild.”  John Young of Apollo 10 and 16 threatened to “knock him in the head,” then ran away into a nearby closing elevator.  Ed Mitchell of Apollo 14 literally kicked him out the door and threatened to shoot him!  Buzz Aldrin punched him square in the face!  The documentary is a fascinating psychological study, watching the astronauts repeatedly squirm and quickly escalate to threats and violence; they behave more like pathological liars than honorable cosmonauts.  Many of them have battled depression and alcoholism since “returning from the Moon” as well. 

Buzz Aldrin was once asked at a NASA banquet what it felt like to first step onto the lunar surface.  He staggered to his feet speechless then left crying uncontrollably.   On the 25th anniversary event for the Apollo 11 landing, one of the few interview appearances Armstrong ever made, he gave a cryptic speech basically telling the young people in attendance that there were many truths about Apollo they could uncover if they dug deep enough!  He said holding tears back, “Today we have with us a group of young students, America’s best.  To you we say we have only completed a beginning.  We leave you much that is undone.  There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth’s protective layers.”

Eric Dubay 

The Flat-Earth Conspiracy 

The Great Polar Fraud

 INTRODUCTION

January 1926, Leavenworth Prison, Kansas

The tall, handsome man walked into the warden’s office and sat on the long wooden bench. Though he was getting older and his blond hair was turning gray, he still carried himself well and retained the distinguished look of a prosperous country doctor. His eyes were as piercing as ever. But his face was pale and his body had lost the firmness of his glory days. The years in Leavenworth had done that.

Dr. Frederick Cook was nervous. He got few visitors, not because he was forgotten but because he discouraged them. He did not want people to see him like this. Even his ex-wife, whom he remained close to, was barred. Though he still loved her dearly and she was in his thoughts every day, she would no longer be in his life. Every request for an interview had been turned down. Journalists, old friends, people who had been part of his earlier life when he had been celebrated coast to coast, they were all on the no visit list. But for the man who was on his way to the prison, he had to make an exception. Their lives were entwined in so many ways.

Cook and his guards heard the sound of approaching footsteps, doors clanging open and banging shut, as the visitor made his way to the warden’s office. Then the door opened and a guard stepped in. Behind him was a big, ruddy-faced man, dressed well but looking slightly uncomfortable in his fashionable clothes: Roald Amundsen, the famous polar explorer, and the first man to the South Pole. Amundsen stepped around the guard and stood facing Cook, who had risen on his entrance. The two men stared at each other for a moment, then broad smiles broke out on their faces. As if of one mind, each man stepped forward and grasped the other firmly by the hand.

They sat on the wooden bench, side by side. Amundsen did not let go of Cook’s hand. He was European, and comfortable with the intimacy.  Cook was glad to feel the warmth of friendly companionship. After an exchange of pleasantries, under the watchful and curious eyes of the warden and a few prison guards, talk turned to the future—specifically to Amundsen’s plans to fly to the North Pole.

They avoided the past, as if by a mutual pact. The past was like a ghost in the room, brooding over them. It was one of two ghosts they were both acutely aware of. But they brushed them aside, as Amundsen spoke of the failure of his attempt to fly to the Pole in 1925. The next time, he planned to use an airship. He grew animated as he told Cook about the Norge, and his plans for a transpolar flight. He had seen so many features on the ice during the 1925 flight, features which confirmed sightings Cook had made nearly two decades previously. As he listened, Cook got excited. Although he would not say it to the younger man, he knew those sightings could back up his claim, the claim that had both crowned his life’s achievements and blighted them.

On April 15, 1909, Cook had arrived in Annoatok, northern Greenland, with a tale of unbelievable survival against the odds. He had disappeared fourteen months earlier with two Eskimo companions, last seen heading north across the frozen polar sea. When he reappeared—long after he was given up for dead—he told a delighted world that he had reached the Pole on April 22, 1908, but the drift of the polar sea had meant that it took him a full year to return to civilization.

Unluckily for Cook, another American explorer had also set his heart on achieving the Pole. Naval Commander Robert Peary had impressive backers; even President Roosevelt had been behind him. Peary set out a year later than Cook, but had not got lost on his return. He reached civilization within five days of Cook, and also claimed to have reached the Pole. He said he got there on April 6, 1909. Cook was happy to share the glory; Peary, less so. The naval commander immediately threw the weight of his considerable circle of friends into a frenzied effort to discredit Cook. The two men, once friends, ended up in an unseemly media war. Bit by bit, all of Cook’s previous achievements came under scrutiny. Peary even paid a massive bribe to one man to discredit Cook’s claim to have been the first to climb Mount  McKinley, the highest point in North America. It was a campaign of dirty tricks and intense bitterness, and it worked. Within a year, Cook was seen by everyone as a fraud.

The stigma followed him for the rest of his life. Now Peary was long dead, but as Cook languished in Leavenworth Prison, he knew that it was the ghost of Peary that put him there; the judge at his trial had been a personal friend of his rival, and had imposed a sentence far harsher than his offense warranted.

The other ghost that brooded over Cook and Amundsen in the dank visiting room was the elemental spirit of the Pole itself. It had shaped and dominated both their lives. Cook had known from his early twenties that he wanted to reach 90 degrees north; Amundsen had known from his teens, when he had started sleeping naked on top of his sheets, with his windows wide open. The frozen Norwegian air hardened his body for the adventures he dreamed of, and there had been many adventures. Amundsen had spent the first winter in Antarctica with Cook, and had been the first to navigate the Northwest Passage. In 1908 he was ready to make his own dash for the Pole. Then, within a week, he had heard that both his rivals, Cook and Peary, claimed to have snatched the prize.

Devastated, he altered his plans and secretly sailed south, becoming the first man to reach the South Pole, an accomplishment he considered a sort of consolation prize. As he sat with Cook that day in 1926, he must have wondered how things might have turned out if Cook and Peary had not both claimed the main prize. He knew that there were considerable doubts over Cook’s claim, and he suspected that there was doubt over Peary’s—the brash American had never had a high reputation in Europe. But history had decided, at least then, to accept Peary’s claim, and Amundsen had to go along with that verdict.

To Cook, Amundsen appeared pensive and almost depressed that afternoon.

“Our lot has been a hard one,” Amundsen said with a sigh. “From the depths of poverty to the heights of glory. From brief spells of hard earned success to the scourge of condemnation. I have wondered for  years how you stood it all. I have had the same, with perhaps not so much of the knife in it, but with quite as much of the pain of envy.”

After forty-five minutes the warden signaled the end of the visit. As Amundsen turned to go, he said, “I want you to know that even if all the world goes against you, I believe in you as a man.”

Amundsen left to continue his lecture tour, a fundraiser for the airship flight over the Pole. If he succeeded he would be the third man to reach the spot, and the first to fly there. But life is never that simple, and he was very aware that he had a rival, a young Navy aviator named Richard Byrd. Although he did not know it at the time, theirs would be a very closely contested race, a race he would lose by hours.

And he would die without ever knowing that Byrd’s claim to the Pole was as dubious as Cook’s. Eventually, Peary’s claim was also discredited. The three American heroes had knowingly and deliberately tried to pull a con on the entire world. Cook got away with it for a couple of months. It took decades before Peary and Bryd were found out. The spirit of the Pole was a dark one, inspiring greed, envy, deceit, and outright fraud. If the race to the South Pole was a tale of courage and self-sacrifice, the race to the North Pole was a sordid tale of great men with great flaws who allowed their soaring ambitions to overcome their ethics and honesty.

As Cook was escorted back to his cell, his step was lighter. The visit had done him a lot of good, and his jaunty air belied his sixty years. Some part of him hoped that Amundsen would find something in the bleak but beautiful polar landscape to back up his own claim to have been the first there. Despite his lengthy incarceration, he could still dream. . . .

***

EPILOGUE

ROBERT PEARY

All his life had been a buildup to the Pole. When he failed to reach it in 1909, he knew he was too old and too frail to mount another attempt. So exaggerating his distances on the final few days was his only option, particularly when it became obvious that Cook was claiming to have snatched the prize.

The following year he exercised all his ingenuity and cunning to shape the narrative in his own favor. He succeeded magnificently, breaking the reputation of his rival. In October 1910 he was promoted to the rank of captain in the Navy, a remarkable achievement for a man who spent so little of his career in the service.

But he knew he could not rest on his laurels. His own claims were as doubtful as Cook’s, and he could not afford to let them come under scrutiny. He headed off a move in Congress to have his claim to the Pole evaluated by an independent panel of explorers. He headed off many such moves, and consistently refused to make his papers available to researchers. His intransigence made no difference. He was given the Thanks of Congress for discovering the Pole by a special act in March  1911, and later the same month, Congress promoted him to the rank of Rear Admiral in the Navy Civil Engineer Corps. The promotion marked his retirement from the Navy.

Peary retired to a spacious home on Eagle Island, in Casco Bay, Maine, where he lived out his final decade. He received numerous foreign honors, and in 1916 became chairman of the National Aerial Coast Patrol Commission, a private organization which advocated the use of aircraft in detecting enemy warships and submarines. This led directly to the formation of the Naval Reserve aerial coastal patrol units—and paved the way for the later successes of Richard Byrd. He was also involved in the planning of a system of eight air mail routes, which became the basis of the US Postal Service air mail system.

Admiral Peary died in Washington on February 20, 1920. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His companion Matthew Henson returned from the polar expedition and spent the next thirty years working at the US Customs House in New York. He died in in 1955, and was reinterred in Arlington in 1988.

Peary’s personal papers, including his diaries and notes from the final polar expedition, were not made available to researchers until 1984. When they were finally analyzed, they revealed nothing to support Peary’s claim to have reached the Pole. The verdict of history is clear: he fell a hundred miles short.

ROALD AMUNDSEN

Umberto Nobile did his best to hijack the success of the Norge expedition, defying his contract by going on a lecture tour of America, and claiming all the glory for himself and Mussolini. But even a braggart can only go so far on old glory; eventually he decided to mount his own Arctic expedition. This would be an entirely Italian affair. During 1927–1928 he prepared an N-class airship, Italia, which was slightly bigger than the Norge and could travel at seventy miles per hour. He got it to Spitzbergen in May 1928, and on May 23 took off for the North Pole, repeating the first leg of the journey he had made with Amundsen. Nobile was both pilot and expedition leader.

 The following day they reached the Pole, then turned south, heading back to Spitzbergen. But a huge storm broke out. The airship weathered the storm as best it could, but on May 25, still well short of home, the Italia crashed onto the ice. They were just twenty miles short of Spitzbergen. Ten of the crew were thrown clear in the crash, while six remained attached to the dirigible, which took off into the air after the smash. Nobile watched helplessly as the six men disappeared into the sky. The dirigible and the six men were never found. One of the ten men thrown clear was killed instantly. That left nine injured men on the ice.

Nobile himself suffered a broken arm, broken leg, shattered rib, and a head injury. Others were equally battered. They managed to salvage some survival items, including the radio and a tent, and one of the six carried away to their deaths threw supplies of food from the air as he was swept up. The nine survivors set up camp on the ice, which was slowly drifting toward nearby islands. After a few days three made a dash across the ice. One, the meteorologist who had failed to see the storm coming, disappeared on that march. There were persistent rumours that he was killed and eaten by the other two.

The incident was an international disaster, and quickly many nations offered to help, including the Soviet Union and the Scandinavian countries close by. Amundsen despised Nobile, but he could not watch a fellow explorer die on the ice and do nothing. By now he was in semi-retirement, touring the world, lecturing, and enjoying being a public hero. He even did a lecture tour of Japan, a completely alien culture to Europeans of that era. But when he heard about Nobile’s disappearance, he knew where he had to be.

He did not have an aircraft of his own, but he volunteered to be part of a private French effort to save the missing airmen. On June 18, 1928, he boarded the Latham 47 Flying Boat at Tromsø for the flight toward Spitzbergen. On board were five French men, including two experienced pilots. The plane rose into the gray mist and turned toward the Barents Sea. It was beset by fog for most of the flight, with visibility very poor. At some point, the plane simply disappeared. Some wreckage, including  a wing-float and part of a gasoline tank, were eventually recovered. Of Amundsen there was no sign. He had simply vanished in the cold air.

It is believed that the plane crashed into the sea due to poor visibility, and all on board were killed on impact. Roald Amundsen, the last of the Vikings, was fifty-five years old. He had overcome his financial woes, and had established a reputation as the greatest of the modern explorers. He never got the chance to enjoy his golden years. Like his great rival Scott, he died in harness, actively exploring the frozen lands that had given his life meaning.

As the years have passed, Amundsen’s reputation has continued to grow. It is now widely accepted that he was the first man to reach both Poles, and his list of other achievements is staggering. He was the noblest of men, fearless and incorruptible.

His partner on the North Pole flight, Lincoln Ellsworth, remained interested in exploration, switching his attention to Antarctica, where he led four expeditions, all air based. He completed the first trans-Antarctic flight in 1935.

As for Umberto Nobile, he was rescued by a Russian ice-breaker after a month on the ice. Eight of the sixteen crew returned to safety. The Italian authorities blamed him for the loss of the Italia, and it took him several years to rehabilitate his reputation. He ended up an academic at the University of Naples, and he never returned to the Arctic. He died in 1978, still a legend in his own mind.

FREDERICK COOK

Cook lost his media war decisively, and with it his reputation. The whole of America—and most of the world—accepted Peary’s version that he was a knowing fraud. The attention on his polar con caused scrutiny of his earlier achievements, and his conquest of Mount McKinley was wiped off the record books.

This was followed by his imprisonment for mail fraud. He was a model prisoner. He worked as night warden of the prison hospital, as well as on a literacy program. He gave lectures to the other inmates, and wrote uplifting articles in the prison paper, The New Era, which were  widely reprinted. His behavior behind bars did much to rehabilitate him in the eyes of the American public. In 1926 Roald Amundsen took time out of his lecture tour to visit his old friend. The publicity from that meeting also helped rehabilitate Cook.

On his release in 1930, Cook chose not to go back to his beloved but estranged wife. He felt his disgrace too keenly, and felt his family were better off without him. Though they had been divorced before his imprisonment, they remained close for the rest of their lives, getting together several times a year. Cook found no market for his writings, and ended up moving to Chicago, where he helped out with a friend’s ophthalmology practice. His own medical qualification was long out of date.

The last few years of his life were spent shuttling from Chicago to New York and New Jersey, where he stayed with his daughters and a sister. Always a gentleman with a charismatic air, he did win back some support. But his stories of great discoveries in the Arctic and in Alaska were no longer believed by the public.

At the very end of his life, Cook received a Presidential pardon from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was delighted. It was some vindication, but not the vindication he wanted. He would have been happier if his claim for the Pole was accepted. A few months later, in early August 1940, Cook suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He died of complications a few days later, on August 5, and is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, New York.

He is now remembered as a talented ethnographer and anthropologist, and a gifted explorer, but also as a deeply flawed man with a penchant for exaggeration which led to claims everyone accepts were fraudulent.

RICHARD BYRD

Like Peary, Byrd knew that if he was to shine in the Navy and build up a career, exploration was his ticket. His 1926 flight close to the North Pole achieved that for him. He became a national hero, and was promoted to the rank of commander. He and Floyd Bennett were both presented with the Medal of Honor.

 In 1927 he took part in the race to be the first to do a non-stop transatlantic flight. But the plane he and Bennett were flying crashed, and Bennett was injured. Charles Lindbergh made the first successful crossing on May 21, 1927. With a new pilot (Bernt Balchen), Byrd became the second man to achieve a non-stop transatlantic flight, on June 29.

Bennett eventually recovered from his injuries, but they left him in a weakened state. A year later, on April 25, he was flying a rescue mission for the crew of the Bremen, which had crash landed on Greenly Island in the province of Quebec, Canada. He had pneumonia at the time of the flight, and succumbed to his fever in the air. There is a persistent rumour that he admitted to a friend shortly before his death that he and Byrd had not reached the North Pole during their historic flight, but turned back an hour short of their target due to engine problems. This is entirely consistent with what is known of the flight.

Byrd switched his attentions to Antarctica in 1928, leading an expedition with two ships and three planes. They established a base at Little America on the Ross Ice Shelf, and in the second summer, on November 28, 1929, Byrd flew to the South Pole and back again, becoming the first man to do this. His fame at an all-time high, he was promoted to the rank of rear admiral by a special act of Congress, becoming the youngest admiral in the history of the United States Navy. Not bad for a man whose career looked to have been cut short by a gymnastics injury.

Byrd led four more Antarctic expeditions (1933–’35, 1939–’40, 1946–’47, and 1955–’56). His adventures, recounted in his popular books, became the stuff of legend. He spent five months alone during the Antarctic winter, manning a meteorological station on his own, and nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning due to a poorly ventilated stove. In 1946 he led the largest ever Antarctic expedition, involving four thousand men, and in his last expedition he established a permanent base at McMurdo Sound, which is still in use, as well as bases at The Bay of Whales and at the South Pole itself.

He managed to take time out to serve during the Second World War, mostly as a consultant to the Navy top brass. From 1942 to 1945  he headed important missions in the Pacific, surveying remote island groups and setting up airfields, and he was present at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

Admiral Byrd passed away peacefully in his sleep at his home in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston on March 11, 1957, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

His later career established him as one of the true greats of Antarctic exploration. His reputation never suffered because of his deception on the North Pole flight of 1926. This is probably because, at the time, he was believed to have been the second or third man to have reached the spot, not the first. So his claim never came in for the intense scrutiny that could ruin reputations.

Anthony Galvin