Articles tagged "hoaxes"
Bigfoot Hoax Results In Fatality
by Laurel Miller on Aug 28, 2012
Despite the fact that Bigfoot is a well-known pseudo-inhabitant of the Pacific Northwest, a Montana man died Sunday night attempting to create a hoax in Flathead County.
According to CNN, the incident occurred in Northwest Montana when Randy Lee Tenley, attired in a Ghillie suit, walked into "the driving lane" of Highway 93, and was hit by a teenage motorist. A second car managed to miss Tenley, but a third automobile ran over his body.
Tenley's companions confirm he was "attempting to incite a sighting of Bigfoot – to make people think they had seen a Sasquatch," said state trooper Jim Schneider. No news on whether or not Tenley was also trying to win a Darwin Award.
Are there lost pyramids in Bosnia? Probably not.
by Sean McLachlan on Jan 22, 2012
For several years now, European archaeologists have been in a furor over a supposed lost civilization in Bosnia that built the biggest pyramids in the world. Scholars have dismissed the claims, made by Bosnian-American businessman Semir Osmanagic, as pseudoscience, yet he's getting funding from the Bosnian government and was just granted permission to excavate over the objections of the country's archaeological establishment.
Osmanagic is convinced a large hill overlooking the town of Visoko near the Bosnian capital Sarajevo is a pyramid from an lost civilization dating to about 12,000 years ago, when the region was experiencing the Ice Age. The hill is indeed roughly pyramid-shaped, at least the half that faces the town. The other half is a bit lumpy. In fact, if you look at it with Google Earth, it doesn't look like a pyramid at all. Geologists say it's a natural formation and that there are several like it in the region; Osmanagic says many of those hills are pyramids too.
To prove his point Osmanagic set up the "Archaeological Park: Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun" and since 2005 has been fighting for permission to excavate. The permit was granted, but then it was revoked for fear the excavations could damage an existing archaeological site on the top of the hill. This is a medieval fort with Roman foundations built atop a Neolithic settlement. Now permission has been granted again and the work will continue.
A victory for independent science against the narrow vision of academia? Not necessarily.
Looking at the photos on Osmanagic's website on the pyramids in Bosnia, I don't see anything indicating there's a pyramid there. Most of the supposedly worked stone looks like other natural formations I've seen, the so-called "secret tunnels" could be from any era, and the few examples of obviously worked stone could just as easily be medieval. In fact, Byzantine records say there was a town here in the Middle Ages and it has not been found. The Bosnian pyramid team may be destroying a real archaeological site in order to create a fake one.Some of Osmanagic's actions seem a bit fishy too. He claimed to have assembled a team of experts to work on the site and give him advice, including famous Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass, but many of them said they had never agreed to work on the site. Some of them said Osmanagic never even contacted them.
In an angry letter to Archaeology Magazine, Dr. Hawass wrote, "The discoverer of the "pyramid" in Bosnia, Semir Osmanagic, who claims that a hill near the Bosnia River is a man-made structure built before the end of the last Ice Age, is not a specialist on pyramids. His previous claim that the Maya are from the Pleiades and Atlantis should be enough for any educated reader."
The claim has certainly created a tourist industry in the previously sleepy town, and it's sparking interest in Bosnia's past. So where's the harm?
In an article in Science, Bosnian archaeologists lamented that funding and attention were going to the fanciful pyramid theory while the nation's real heritage remains underfunded and underprotected. Some have even reported being threatened for speaking out against the project. The Bosnian Pyramids have become a matter of national pride for a nation still feeling the wounds of the bitter war of the 1990s. Osmanagic has made Bosnia the cradle of civilization, or as he terms it, "supercivilization".
This is the sort of nationalistic chest-thumping that got the Balkans into trouble in the first place. Osmanagic is playing with fire.
New photos released of remote Brazilian rainforest tribe
by Laurel Miller on Feb 1, 2011
Survival International, a UK-based rights group dedicated to protecting indigenous communities worldwide, has just released new photographs of an "uncontacted" group of indigenous people living on the Brazilian-Peruvian border. This is only the second time in two years photos of the isolated Indians have ever been released.
FoxNews reports the photos were taken by Brazil's Indian Affairs department, which monitors various indigenous tribes by aircraft. Uncontacted tribes are so described because they have limited interactions with the outside world. Survival International estimates that there are over a hundred uncontacted tribes left globally.
The organization came under fire for creating a hoax when the first photos were released in 2008; the president of Peru even hinted that such tribes were an invention of environmentalists opposing Amazonian oil exploration. The myth of "first-contact" tribes also prevails amongst unscrupulous companies catering to tourists. Survival International's website quotes Marcos Apurinã, Coordinator of Brazil's Amazon Indian organization COIAB as saying, "It is necessary to reaffirm that these peoples exist, so we support the use of images that prove these facts. These peoples have had their most fundamental rights, particularly their right to life, ignored … it is therefore crucial that we protect them."
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The Brazilian government is a believer, however, and has dedicated a division to helping protect uncontacted tribes. Many indigenous peoples of the Amazon have been the victims of disease or genocide (due to war or, uh, "eradication") or displacement by petroleum companies. The Brazilian government is concerned that an increase in illegal logging in Peru is forcing uncontacted tribes over the border into Brazil, which could result in conflict.
Survival International reports that the Brazilian Indians appear to be in good health, as evidenced by their appearance (FYI, their skin is dyed red from the extract of the annatto seed), as well as that of communal gardens and a plentiful supply of food including manioc and papaya. The tribe was also recently filmed (from the air) by the BBC for the television series, "Human Planet."
While there is admittedly a certain hypocrisy in buzzing uncontacted peoples with planes, the bigger picture is the necessity of proving their existence in order to save them, as Apurinã points out. Look for my forthcoming post on my stay with the remote Hauorani people of Ecuador, who had their first contact with the outside world in the late 1940's. Over the last twenty-plus years, they have waged legal land rights battles against various petroleum companies in order to preserve both their land and their existence.
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