The meat of Swordgate unwrapped itself from December of 2015 (when the claim was originally published) through the spring of 2016.  Since that time, many of the original blog posts, videos, and sound files used to attempt to support the claim have become unavailable. Even the link to the original story in The Boston Standard is now inactive.

I can only speculate as to why all of these original sources have apparently disappeared. I can say, however, that removing those sources has not removed the claim from the internet.  A Google search on "Roman sword Nova Scotia" still returns over 700,000 results; "Roman sword Oak Island" returns over 4 million. Although some of the highest ranked hits are skeptical blog posts by me, Carl Feagans, and Jason Colavito, the sources reporting the claim as a credible one predominate.

Clearly, the claim lives on. Someone searching for information about the purported "Roman sword" online will be shown numerous articles that breathlessly and uncritically report the central components of Hutton Pulitzer's claim: the shipwreck origins story, the nonspecific XRF results, the verification of the sword by a "Roman antiquities authority," the other evidence of a Roman occupation of Oak Island, etc. In this January 2016 Ancient Origins article we even get a part of Pulitzer's rebuttal to the growing number of swords that were being documented :

"The Roman sword found off Oak Island is believed to be part of a rare set of votive swords. Four similar swords having been recovered and verified, now in private collections and museums, including the Museum of Naples, Italy, which issued cast iron replicas of the sword. Many replicas of these rare swords can now be found on websites such as eBay and Amazon."

For the record, no-one has ever produced an image or a record of the supposed "Naples Museum" sword that is key to the argument for the sword's authenticity. The statements that such an item exists have remained simple assertions for years now, with zero evidence provided to back them up.

You will notice that the Ancient Origins article is completely unbalanced: it does not challenge the key elements in any real way, and it does not cite or quote any part of the contemporary evidence and analysis that suggested the sword claim was incorrect. Many many sources questioning the sword claim were available when the article was written, and yet none is included. This article is one of the top search results. 

The claim remains in other places as well. If you have the time, I recommend you listen to the entirely of this February 2016 interview of Hutton Pulitzer on Earth Ancients. In addition to a full-throated defense of the sword, Pulitzer describes his other evidence for the ancient Roman occupation of Oak Island, communicates his expansive, world-wide research agenda, and teases the publication of the elusive "white paper" and multiple books that will explode all of our outdated ideas about history. He concludes with these remarks:

"I'll take the heat. They can call me names. I will not back down. And we'll all do this together. . . . This is a war for truth, folks, and we need warriors for truth. You have to fight this battle and not let the system suppress it."

I suppose the subsequent disappearance of many of the videos, blog posts, and sound files arguing the case for the authenticity of the sword and an ancient Roman occupation of Nova Scotia could make one question the outcome of the "battle for truth." To the best of my knowledge, the vaunted "white paper" was never released and the books that were being produced were never distributed.

But, nevertheless, the claims about the "Roman sword from Nova Scotia" remain extant and active as long as the original articles and interview videos continue to be available. And as long as the claim is active, our engagement with that claim must also remain available.

If you're so inclined, I invite you to donate some material support to the effort to keep the counter-claim alive and accessible.

The Curse of Oak Island has started another season with a few episodes of the obligatory 1/3 recap of the previous episode, 1/3 recap of the recap, 1/6 new material, and 1/6 recap of the new material, per episode. The show airs Tuesday nights in the United States and Sunday night in Canada. To avoid any spoiler issues, this blog is being done on a Monday after the Canadian crowd has had a chance to catch up on the most recent episode.

Welcome to Pilumgate. Don't worry, it won't last long. You might be able to hold your breath until it's over.   
 
You have to wonder if Kevin Burns (Executive Producer & Writer, Prometheus Entertainment) is watching the reactions to his Oak Island cash cow as they happen after each show and season. You have to then wonder if he literally does everything for a reaction. Throw out the red herrings and the scraps of . . . well, scrap, basically . . . as it gets pulled from yet another borehole, or caisson grab, or backhoe pit, or this beach, or that piece of forest, or a full swamp, or a drained swamp . . . you get the idea. As the show keeps trying to be about something, it keeps delivering essentially nothing. Scraps of minor finds are inevitable with the amount of digging and metal detecting going on. Give any historic location in Nova Scotia the same level of effort and you wouldn’t find much of anything different. It’s all stuff from the last couple centuries, but on Oak Island there is also stuff from all the past dead end searches.

Ignoring all these scraps from the last few years, and since this blog is about fake Roman stuff, we leapfrog forward from Fake Roman Swords to the most recent fake Roman find. Kevin Burns has thrown a pilum at us.
 
First let’s build up the context. The supposed non-actors who don’t star in a scripted show have become actors portraying non-actors who do star in a scripted show. They know what they are expected to say, when to say it, and thus they know what exactly has the best chance of making the final edit back in the Los Angeles studio. As a result, when swinging a metal detector turns up a pointed piece of iron, it’s best to start with a conclusion and worry about details later. Fist pumping yelps of TEMPLAR are now mandatory. The obligatory cell phone speaker call to bring over the always conveniently close by fellowship members has to happen next. The bros then high five all around and Prometheus immediately cuts to a leap of faith confirmation fantasy historical re-enactment scene, with universally condemned narration from the “Could it be?” guy. In other words they found this iron spike thing and immediately gave it a bromance declaration as a Templar crossbow bolt.

Based on what I saw, the program is pretty much right where it has been for years: long on holes, dramatic music, speculation, and imagination; short on results.

I'm not a fan of the show and the short time I spent watching it last night reminded me why. If learning nothing is the goal, I can think of a hundred other ways I'd rather spend my time.

The program is still on the air, however, because a lot of people are watching it. I know from groups on Facebook that some people watch it religiously. Despite years of baloney, misdirection, and nonsense, they still watch: the program is one of the top-rated cable shows on its Tuesday time slot, successfully competing with professional wrestling. 

Why?

The first chapter of the book Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (by Kevin Young, 2017) provides a possible answer. Young draws a comparison between the rise of reality TV and P.T. Barnum's 19th century success with "humbug," noting Barnum's own distinction between "humbug" and other brands of fakery (swindle, forgery, hoaxing, etc.).  Young (page 9) quotes Barnum:

in other words, the most important component of successful "humbug" is actually giving the people something for their money. People walk away satisfied, even if they know they didn't see exactly what they were told they were going to see.

It is Young's comparison to reality TV (page 10) that resonates in my mind with the loyalty I see among Oak Island fans:

There's no question in my mind that a good portion of the success of Oak Island can be traced to exactly that dynamic, where viewers can participate in endless debate about who buried what on Oak Island and what all the clues mean. It doesn't matter if nothing is ever found: the product that is being sold is the fishing, not the catching. The show is successful because it gives the viewers what they really want (a sense of participation) not what they say they want (an answer).

Here is my falsifiable hypothesis about Oak Island: there is nothing "special" buried on Oak Island.

Nothing.

Zip.

I have seen no evidence that convinces me that anything special happened on Oak Island: no buried treasure, no wondrous underground constructions, no Phoenicians, no Ark of the Covenant, no Knights Templar, no Roman armies, no bones of Jesus, no Shakespeare manuscripts, nothing. Before you start giving me the "what abouts," have a look at this critical source on Oak Island.

I am a professional archaeologist. I have been doing research in the field and lab for over two decades now. Nothing that I've seen on Oak Island since the first season resembles in any way how I would go about trying to answer a question about what happened there in the past and when it happened. Random metal detecting, drilling blind holes, entertaining a string of kooks to spout off about this or that "theory" . . . these things are fuel for the humbug, not steps taken to address a question. 

Don't get me wrong: I understand the appeal of humbug. I paid to take my daughter to the Mystery Spot in St. Ignace, Michigan. I probably would have paid to see Barnum's Feejee Mermaid and the Cardiff Giant. ​

But as far as Oak Island and "rewriting history," I checked out long ago and won't be back unless there's a real reason. FYI: "real reason" does not include another beach artifact found while metal detecting, another piece of wood retrieved from a hole drilled into an area that has been previously excavated, or another "artifact" handed to the film crew with a shaggy dog story attached.

During Swordgate, I made some internet friends that are connected in one way or another to the story of Oak Island. My goal in writing this isn't to make anyone mad, but to call it like I see it: when you strip away the show business from the show, what's left? Not much, in my opinion. That doesn't stop a lot of people from enjoying the ride, obviously. But I'm not among them.

Last weekend I wrote this post about a planned excavation by Heartland Mormons to search for the temple of Zarahemla in Iowa. That excavation was justified by a map produced via a ground-penetrating radar survey. Today, thanks to a comment on a recent blog post by Jason Colavito's blog post, I learned of another example of ground-penetrating radar data being used to propel the excavation of what is almost certainly a fantasy, this time in association with Oak Island.

First, an update on the Zarahemla excavation.

The webpage for the project proclaimed that a professional ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey had identified the location of a rectangular wooden "temple structure" with walls extending 5-22' below the ground surface. I pointed out that that level of specificity was impossible using GPR and questioned (among other things) how those outlines were determined and how they could possible serve as the basis for an actual archaeological excavation. Coincidentally or not, that webpage (dated January 2015) is not currently available, and the entire Book of Mormon Evidence site is currently "under maintenance."

I couldn't find any details about the excavation, but I suspect it has already taken place. Blog reader and friend of archaeological reality Mike Morgan located a report of the record of purchase, showing that the 13.8 acre "temple of Zarahemla" parcel was sold to Zarahemla Holdings, LLC, on January 20, 2015. Another of my online friends told me that he recalls seeing images posted on Facebook showing an excavation in progress some time ago, but those images were later removed. That an excavation was planned for the spring of 2015 is also supported by comments on message boards like this one, posted the day before the sale of the parcel closed.

A comparison of aerial photographs of the parcel from June 2014 (before the sale; image from Google Earth) and summer of 2015 (image from the Iowa Geographic Map Server) suggests that excavations were, indeed, undertaken in the area identified as the "temple" in the first half of 2015. The light-colored areas marked with arrows appear to show the areas of backdirt piles and newly-filled excavation areas. Those areas correspond to the location of the eastern wall of the "temple" (unfortunately, since the webpage is gone, I can't reproduce their aerial with the "temple" superimposed [Update: you can see the figure on this website]).

[Update: I found this image from June 2015 that reportedly shows Wayne May, apparently dowsing, in an excavation at the "temple" site.]

A machine excavation into the "temple" area would have quickly revealed that there was no buried, 15-foot-tall wooden wall. Without seeing the raw GPR data and details of how it was processed, there's really no telling what kinds of anomalies, if any, the survey actually detected. But I presume that if the Temple of Zarahemla had been found we would have heard something about it by now. So my money is on nothing. I just hope that no real cultural deposits have been damaged so far in this pursuit.

And now for the new example.

This webpage, dated the 28th of October, 2016, makes a bold proclamation:

"OAK ISLAND RELATED UNDERGROUND FACILITY FOUND ON MAINLAND LUNENBURG COUNTY, NOVA SCOTIA!"

Here we go again.

You can read all the Shakespeare stuff and then get down to the brass tacks of the "proof" that (1) there's an underground facility and (2) it's related the mystery of Oak Island.  That "proof," apparently comes down to GPR data. Here's what the site says:

"In March 2015, I conducted GPR scanning around the X marked boulder and have had the files analyzed by very skilled GPR analysis experts. Disturbances in subsurface features can be seen in the data. The experts say such disturbed structures should not be present in normal ground conditions.

In the summer of 2016, a professional GPR firm conducted a second, more extensive scan of the site. The result and report from this scan is still pending. The analysis is complicated due to a number of factors that has to do with GPR settings for best possible data collection. I also have instructions from the Nova Scotia Communities, Culture and Heritage to keep results confidential until a decision has been taken on how the province will react on a report showing interesting results. The 2016 scan was financed by Paul Lappin and Knut Skofteland. I’m very grateful for their contribution to this project."

So, somehow, from these incomplete GPR results, the authors have "proved" that there's an "intact underground facility" or "vault' that contains important things.  Let's get the backhoe!

Anyone who understands GPR is shaking his or her head. As I said in the previous post, GPR data are complicated. The equipment works by pulsing radar waves into the ground and detecting the reflections that occur when the waves encounter a material with different electromagnetic properties. Depth can be estimated based on analyzing the two-way travel times of the reflected waves. That's it. Anomalies in GPR data can be caused by any contrast in the electromagnetic properties of the materials that the waves are passing through: open spaces (such as rooms or caves) can cause anomalies, as can buried rocks, changes in sediment, the water table, and numerous other things. Often in a natural setting (i.e., when you're not looking for something really obvious like buried storage tanks) you can't really tell what's "anomalous" until you get data from a large enough area to understand something about what you're looking at.  

So . . . yeah, like the Zarahemla example, I'll go on record with the position that what you think the GPR is telling you is not what it's actually telling you. 

I think these two examples are part of a trend of the fringe embracing new technologies that they think will provide "out-of-the-box" credibility to their ideas and conclusions. In some cases, the abilities of these technologies are probably being intentionally misrepresented to wishful thinkers. In others, it's apparent that the people using these gee whiz technologies don't really understand them. The screen on a GPR doesn't beep at you and say "alert! buried vault!" The XRF meter doesn't have a "detect Roman brass" setting. And tiny flashlights don't have "old" and "not old" icons to discriminate ancient from modern stone inscriptions.  You might as well be using dowsing rods and flipping coins. 

Try learning something about the tools you're using and then collecting and presenting data in a way that they can be evaluated. Then maybe someone would take you seriously.