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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| Knights Templar, In Minnesota, In 1362? |
| 2007-08-25 |
| It's one of Minnesota's greatest mysteries. It's something that puts settlers in America well before Columbus. A Minnesota geologist thinks the controversial Kensington Runestone is the real thing and there is evidence that he says backs up the theory. The Kensington Runestone is a rock found near Alexandria a century ago. It's inscription speaking of Norwegians here in 1362. It begs the question. Were Vikings exploring our land more than 100 years before Columbus? Or is it just an elaborate hoax? New research shows that the stone is genuine and there's hidden code that may prove it. It contains carved words that have haunted these hills and the Ohman family for more than 100 years, yet their faith has never wavered. "I just never had any doubt. I mean I was very emphatic about it. Absolutely it's real. There's no doubt," said Darwin Ohman. His grandfather found the Runestone. Darwin's grandfather Olof Ohman has been considered the author of Minnesota's most famous fraud, the Runestone. He says he found it buried under a tree in 1898. Critics say the language on the stone is too modern to be from 1362, that some of the runes are made up. They say this simple farmer carved it himself to fool the learned. "You're calling him a liar. If this is a hoax he lied to his two sons, he lied to his family, lied to his neighbors and friends and lied to the world," said Scott Wolter a geologist and researcher of the Runestone. Wolter and Texas engineer Dick Nielsen are sharing for the first time new evidence about the hidden secrets they say are carved in this stone. "It changes history in a big way," Wolter said In 2000 he performed one of the very few geological studies on the stone. He says the breakdown of minerals in the inscription shows the carving is at least 200 years old, older than Olof Ohman. Those findings support the first geological study in 1910 that also found the stone to be genuine. "In my mind the geology settled it once and for all," he said. Linguistic experts are not convinced. They say runes like those on the stone are made up. But Nielsen has now found the same one here in an old Swedish rune document dating back to the 1300's. "It makes me ask the question if they were wrong about that what else were they wrong about?" Wolter said. For the first time Wolter has documented every individual rune on the stone with a microscope. He started finding things that he didn't expect. He was the first to discover dots inside four R shaped runes on the stone. He said they are intentional and they mean something. So Wolter and Nielsen scoured rune catalogs. "We found the dotted R's. It's an extremely rare rune that only appeared during medieval times. This absolutely fingerprints it to the 14th century. This is linguistic proof. This is medieval, period," Wolter said. They traced the dotted 'R' to rune covered graves inside ancient churches on the island of Gotland off the coast of Sweden. What they found on the grave slabs were very interesting crosses. They were Templar crosses, the symbol of a religious order of knights formed during the crusades and persecuted by the Catholic Church in the 1300's. "This was the genesis of their secret societies, secret codes, secret symbols, secret signs all this stuff. If they carved the rune stone why did they come here and why did they carve this thing?" Wolter asked. He has uncovered new evidence that has taken his research in a very different direction. Wolter now believes that the words on the stone may not be the record of the death of 10 men but instead, a secret code concealing the true purpose of the rune stone. Two runes in the form of an L and a U are two more reasons why linguists say Olof Ohman carved the stone. They are crossed and linguists say they should not be. A third rune has a punch at the end of one line. Each rune on the stone has a numerical value. Wolter and Nielsen took the three marked runes and plotted them on a medieval dating system called the Easter Table. "When we plotted these three things we got a year, 1362. It was like 'oh my god is this an accident? Is this a coincidence?' I don't think so," Wolter said. They wondered why Templars would come to North America, carve the stone and code the date. "If it's the Templars that were under religious persecution at the time, that would be a pretty good reason to come over here," Wolter figured. "I'm sure a lot of people are going to roll their eyes and say oh it's the Davinci Code and if they do they do. This is the evidence. This is who was there. This is what the grave slabs tell us. It is what it is," he said. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #12 Moose__ going back to the original story.... there has always been a lot of controversy about the Mandan indians in the upper midwest. Grey eyes, reddish hair, dwellings that look like Norse huts and an apparent shaman's lodge roughly shaped like a longship. Of course, they all died out in the early 1800's due to smallpox and you'd think anyone decended from Europeans would have retained a bit more resistance to the disease.... |
| Posted by: Prince Madoc 2007-08-25 23:54 |
| #11 twobyfour: People did get around. One Indian tribe in New Mexico, with a language and art very different from the typical in that region, was found to have some genetic traits common with ancient Japanese. Only after they found that out did they realize that their art looks a lot like primitive Japanese art. And down in South America, archaeologists were startled to find poured metal brackets between large construction stones, to hold them together. At first they realized that this meant the society was far more advanced then they thought, having to have had portable bellows furnaces. But then they tested the alloy used, and found that it was almost the same as one used by the Egyptians for that same purpose. And the odds of duplicate alloys independently achieved are minuscule. There are just too many variables, unless you are using the same recipe. To make matters even weirder, this same ancient city had a solar observatory that was wrong. Its solstice points were outside of where they were supposed to be. Then one of the archaeologists realized that the Earth's axis shifts have been slowly decreasing for eons. Calculating out when that solar observatory would have been accurate, they estimated that it had been so about 12,000 years ago. Finally, a couple of genetic discoveries, one in a small tribe in South Africa. That their ancestors had been from the Jewish Priestly tribe whose home was in Yemen. Their mythology even retained the approximate name of the city of their origin, which still exists in Yemen, and the name of the guy who led them out of there in the manner of Moses. The other is a village in China that looks somewhat Caucasian, and claim to be descended from some of Alexander the Great's army. They may actually be. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-08-25 23:40 |
| #10 Try to remember that the Vikings explored a huge swath of turf that stretched from Russia in the east—all the way down to the Black Sea—and extended into the Mediterranean and regions of North Africa, plus Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. It would have been no great shakes for them to transit the St. Lawrence and then gone across all the Great Lakes. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-08-25 23:01 |
| #9 Upper Minessota has copper all over it, in the form of nuggets, but there are also very old mines. Some of them were dated to 1400 BC, based on dating of remain of wooden supports. Now, the local natives did not use copper, they stuck to stone industry. I would understand if they picked up some nuggets and used them for trade with southern tribes some of which used copper. But mining? Not their cup of coffee it was. So the question is, who the hell mined copper there 1400BC? There were some inscriptions found in the vicinity of the mines that look Phoenician. These were considered hoaxes. But were they? |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2007-08-25 22:33 |
| #8 i did not use the "L" woid, and would beg off any Swede from doing so, thank youse. * Did yo'all ever hear the one about the Runestone Cowboy? |
| Posted by: Red Dawg 2007-08-25 21:10 |
| #7 5:1 they reference the molded jello with fruit cocktail. Although, the green bean and tuna casserole cannot be ruled out ... |
| Posted by: lotp 2007-08-25 20:56 |
| #6 Minnesota 2:1 the runes say "Try the green bean casserole." |
| Posted by: mrp 2007-08-25 20:30 |
| #5 But he would have been believed if it had used a Microsoft Word font right? |
| Posted by: Dan Rather 2007-08-25 20:28 |
| #4 Don't forget The Sons of Knute. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2007-08-25 20:03 |
| #3 They traced the dotted 'R' to rune covered graves inside ancient churches on the island of Gotland off the coast of Sweden. Didn't the Swedes settle in Minnesota? Is it not possible that someone brought it from Sweden later on? |
| Posted by: Unutle McGurque8861 2007-08-25 20:03 |
| #2 Agreed, but the 1523 Kiwanis vs Rotary vs Shriners war is also neglected and misunderstood /JM |
| Posted by: Frank G 2007-08-25 19:38 |
| #1 Maybe not as ridiculous as it sounds. Greenland was both occupied by Norway around that time, and had a Bishop located there. So if some Knights Templar were bugging out, it would not be a big stretch to imagine them sailing all the way to the South side of the Hudson bay. And it's a straight shot to Minnesota, between Lake Winnipeg and Lake Superior. If they brought horses with them, it would just be a matter of steering around the minefield of lakes from James Bay to Minnesota. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-08-25 19:07 |