Speaker 1: You're listening to an airwave media podcast.
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Speaker 4: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 3: A giant airy creature, part ape part Matt in Luckness,
Speaker 3: a twenty four mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands
Speaker 3: of Scotland.
Speaker 5: It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 2: Monster tal.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 3: Blake Smith and.
Speaker 4: I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 3: Ah the good old days. We first talked with Ken
Speaker 3: Fader back in twenty ten on episode ten, which was
Speaker 3: titled Fee five foux fum. It was all about giants,
Speaker 3: from Biblical giants to the Cardiff Giant and well our
Speaker 3: giants if you think about it anyway. Since then, he's
Speaker 3: been back several times and always retreat and I was
Speaker 3: greatly surprised to see that he'd recorded and released an
Speaker 3: entire web series about archaeological frauds and hoaxes, which I
Speaker 3: know many of you are going to want to go
Speaker 3: Ben Jon, so not only do you get his terrific
Speaker 3: teaching style, but in like this humble podcast, you can
Speaker 3: actually see his passionate delivery and watch his face light
Speaker 3: up as he talks about these fascinating mysteries and how
Speaker 3: we know which hypotheses are likely to be true and
Speaker 3: which can be discarded despite how popular they may be
Speaker 3: on the History Channel. Now, some of you may be
Speaker 3: disappointed that Ken doesn't talk like a sailor on this episode.
Speaker 3: I haven't asked him why, but in the intervening gap
Speaker 3: between his last visits and this one, he's sort of
Speaker 3: filled his house up with a delightful bunch of little
Speaker 3: people that might very well have impacted the frequency of
Speaker 3: his foul mouthedness.
Speaker 2: That's just my own hypothesis.
Speaker 3: Who knows? Could it have been aliens? I mean, who
Speaker 3: finally knows? Anyway, without further ado, let's go talk to
Speaker 3: Ken Fader more obstrutal. So we're here to talk about
Speaker 3: your new YouTube series. And I was really surprised, like
Speaker 3: to see this like it's already there, It's ready to go.
Speaker 3: People can hop in and catch all the episodes. I
Speaker 3: don't know if you'll be doing more, but right now
Speaker 3: you've got a complete series out there ready to go.
Speaker 3: This is a ten episode ten episodes exposing hoaxes, blesting myths,
Speaker 3: and solving mysteries from history Colorado.
Speaker 2: That's really cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now you're not from Colorado, So I guess did.
Speaker 4: You come out here to film it or you just
Speaker 4: know I did this.
Speaker 2: I did this from my office at home. There's a
Speaker 2: story about this. This was all the sort of you
Speaker 2: know we seen in our pants. Let's see how we
Speaker 2: can do this, Let's see how many we could do,
Speaker 2: Let's see how long they could be. Let's get some folks,
Speaker 2: professionals to actually record it. And we just went along
Speaker 2: and I'm really pleased with how it ended up.
Speaker 3: It looks great, plastic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've watched a little bit. I can't wait to
Speaker 4: watch some more. It's really fun.
Speaker 2: Well do you want my long winded background for how
Speaker 2: this all came about.
Speaker 3: I think that's what people are paying us work in,
Speaker 3: all right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: So it all starts in nineteen seventy eight. Actually, when
Speaker 2: I was the first year instructor university, first time I
Speaker 2: had courses that were given to me. Ken you designed
Speaker 2: the courses, you teach, the courses you grade the kids.
Speaker 2: And I was fresh out of grad school. And one
Speaker 2: of the things that I think people find surprising is that,
Speaker 2: at least in my day, there were no courses in
Speaker 2: grad school about how to teach, and most of us
Speaker 2: were going to go into teaching along with research, and
Speaker 2: so it was just sort of seeing your pants, man,
Speaker 2: they throw you in the deep end, and as the
Speaker 2: cliche goes, okay, teach a class.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know what the hell I was doing.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure I know what I'm doing now, but
Speaker 2: I certainly didn't know what I was doing back in
Speaker 2: the day.
Speaker 1: And I didn't There were no I had no role models.
Speaker 2: In fact, the run role model I had was kind
Speaker 2: of the opposite role model. I was just looking at
Speaker 2: other people. Before I actually started teaching at the at
Speaker 2: the university, I looked in on other classes, you know,
Speaker 2: I walked my classrooms and see how profts were doing
Speaker 2: their thing.
Speaker 1: And there was this one guy and I'm not going.
Speaker 2: To mention names, he's long dead, but it's you know,
Speaker 2: he was not He was not the most enthusiastic or
Speaker 2: entertaining professor. He was. He was a really weird dude.
Speaker 2: He used to dress in like nineteen forties gray suits
Speaker 2: and gray overcoats and like little pork pie hats, and
Speaker 2: he just we started calling him by his name, his
Speaker 2: first name, Kama the Undead is a vampire.
Speaker 4: Sure enough.
Speaker 1: When I would walk.
Speaker 2: By one of his classes that first the first semester,
Speaker 2: and I would see I'd make eye contact with the
Speaker 2: students in the class, and the look of quiet desperation
Speaker 2: in the eyes of those students was chilling. Because this
Speaker 2: guy would walk into a class, I don't think he
Speaker 2: would even acknowledge the fact that there were people there.
Speaker 2: He would sit down, put his hand on the desk,
Speaker 2: and open a three ring binder and then never look
Speaker 2: up from that binder and simply read his class notes.
Speaker 1: Oh, it was like it was a script, and it.
Speaker 3: Was tales from the script.
Speaker 1: Here's the deal.
Speaker 2: Here's my fantasy, Blake and Karen, was that one day
Speaker 2: I would walk by that room and look in and
Speaker 2: see these students, and the students would have this blak
Speaker 2: expression and they would, as if by some silent command
Speaker 2: while their professor is speaking, they would all rise up
Speaker 2: out of their chairs. And you know that that horror
Speaker 2: movie trope where like demons and ghosts don't actually walk
Speaker 2: like a person, but they glide. Yes, they film, they
Speaker 2: must put them on like a skateboarder or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really creepy.
Speaker 2: So in my in my fantasy I'm watching is these students.
Speaker 2: I'm amazed. They just kind of glide towards the desk
Speaker 2: where he's sitting, and they surround him. And meanwhile, his
Speaker 2: voice never is muffled, but he never stops because he
Speaker 2: has no idea what's going on, because he's not looking
Speaker 2: up from his notes. And then I hear this hub
Speaker 2: and eventually he stops lecturing and there's a buffle scream,
Speaker 2: and then the students all look up. The hub stops
Speaker 2: and they become humans again, and they walk out of
Speaker 2: the room. And I look over to the desk and
Speaker 2: he's not there. And I walk in and I see
Speaker 2: there's the three ring binder and on the chair is
Speaker 2: just a little ashy residue. Yeah, you know, I thought
Speaker 2: to myself, with that fantasy, I never want to be
Speaker 2: that guy.
Speaker 1: An example of what not to do exactly. It was
Speaker 1: kind of opposite.
Speaker 2: It was the opposite lesson, and it was kind of
Speaker 2: in that moment that I thought, you know what, the
Speaker 2: best bottle I have for how to keep twenty five
Speaker 2: or thirty five or forty or one hundred people entertained
Speaker 2: is stand up comedy. You know, those guys and those
Speaker 2: men and women are able to capture an audience con
Speaker 2: they some information to them, right unless it's pure slapstick,
Speaker 2: and have them really think about it and be entertained
Speaker 2: by it, and there's and there's recognition. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's Oh. I did never do that, and that became
Speaker 2: my model I was. I was stand up comic. And
Speaker 2: here's the here's the thing I used to tell people,
Speaker 2: there's a there's an old expression called that that goes
Speaker 2: a false modesty is no modesty at all. And it
Speaker 2: turns out that's not an old expression. I guess I
Speaker 2: made it up or I heard it somewhere. What I'm
Speaker 2: gonna tell you now sounds like I'm a pompous ass.
Speaker 2: Now I am a puppa's ass. But that's that's irrelevant.
Speaker 2: I I got really, really good as a lecturer and
Speaker 2: as a public speaker. I'm more out of fear than
Speaker 2: anything else, because I did not want my students to
Speaker 2: evaporate me. And be an ashy residue at the front
Speaker 2: of an auditorium. That scared the hell out of me.
Speaker 2: So I didn't want that to happen. So I thought, listen,
Speaker 2: you know, I can that, And then every lecture became
Speaker 2: like a state end up where I understood I had
Speaker 2: to engauge the audience's reaction, what was working on, what
Speaker 2: wasn't working. I had to add lib a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff as new as as people ask questions that as
Speaker 2: people reacted, and I got really good, you know, like
Speaker 2: I want to teaching award, hooray for me. But the
Speaker 2: point here is that I got I know that I
Speaker 2: got really good at that, and I liked it a lot,
Speaker 2: and I miss it. I actually miss not going into
Speaker 2: a classroom and teaching.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing.
Speaker 2: Here's here's the I think one of the saddest parts
Speaker 2: for me about teaching was that I would do a
Speaker 2: lecture I'm be and you know, they weren't all great,
Speaker 2: but I would be really pleased at the end of
Speaker 2: a lecture and then recognized it has it's gone, it's evanescent,
Speaker 2: that it's it will never be I'll never give that
Speaker 2: lecture again. In the same way I'll never have the
Speaker 2: same reaction in the same way.
Speaker 1: It's like, how do you preserve that? How do you
Speaker 1: save that? And I remember frequently thinking, well, day.
Speaker 2: I'm going to get our communications department or our av
Speaker 2: people to record my lectures because you know, no Blake
Speaker 2: and Canon, I don't want to shock you. But it
Speaker 2: turns out I am not immortal come day. I used
Speaker 2: to tell my students what I would in my intro
Speaker 2: archaeologic class. I would talk about dating methods in archaeology. Obviously,
Speaker 2: first of.
Speaker 3: All, don't lead with you're an archaeologist, because you're not
Speaker 3: going to get a date that way.
Speaker 2: That's uh, you know, I'm not speaking. The voice in
Speaker 2: the back of my head said, don't give. Don't give Blake,
Speaker 2: that take it away from it. And one of the
Speaker 2: things I would tell the kids is that that very
Speaker 2: often down when you open an archaeology text or a
Speaker 2: history text or or a prehistory text, that people instead
Speaker 2: of using B C or a D, which of course
Speaker 2: are based on the birth of Christ, who is not
Speaker 2: everybody's son of God, who is not everybody's God, incardate
Speaker 2: and that's sort of weird. So so people use BP
Speaker 2: for before present or or b C e is before
Speaker 2: the common era, and a bunch of ways of doing that.
Speaker 2: And then I tell them that I have my own
Speaker 2: method of of of of conveying dates. I have b F,
Speaker 2: which is before Fader. But we are now living by
Speaker 2: the way in the d F times, Durrek Fader, and
Speaker 2: you'll be able to tell your grandchildren back back in
Speaker 2: the Golden age DF I live through that. And then
Speaker 2: but that's sadly, there will come a time where there
Speaker 2: will be an af after Fader and and and it's true.
Speaker 1: And so this was always sort of this thing in
Speaker 1: the back of my.
Speaker 2: Mind that oh shit, you know, these lectures are great,
Speaker 2: but but nobody's gonna remember them, or by students who
Speaker 2: remember them, well.
Speaker 1: They're all gonna die.
Speaker 2: And so it's just this this moment in time when
Speaker 2: I was able to do that, and that's where and
Speaker 2: so that's just in the back of my mind. And
Speaker 2: so it was a year ago. Holly Norton, doctor Holly Norton,
Speaker 2: who is an archaeologist in Colorado State archaeologist in the
Speaker 2: Department of Department Office of State Archaeology and Historic Preservation,
Speaker 2: and we're Facebook friends. You know, I've never met her,
Speaker 2: but we taught, you know, I would come in on
Speaker 2: something she would say, and she would come out on
Speaker 2: something I would say. And at some point she wrote
Speaker 2: me an email or maybe it was a you know,
Speaker 2: a eye measseger, whatever hell it was saying again, would
Speaker 2: you ever be interested in doing a series of lectures.
Speaker 2: We have a little bit of funding on your you know,
Speaker 2: Fraud's Myths and Mysteries and Archaeology.
Speaker 1: And I thought, wow, that sounds really cool.
Speaker 2: Back and forth. I've had a life now where I
Speaker 2: can't let go out to Colorado for above the tape
Speaker 2: a bunch of lectures. But I told her, you know, look,
Speaker 2: to make this super simple, I can effectively give ten
Speaker 2: of the lectures that I get would give in my
Speaker 2: uh my class, which I use my book Fraudsmits and
Speaker 2: Mysteries Scientists sudo Science and Archaeology.
Speaker 1: That's Oxford University Press.
Speaker 2: Go and buy a copy going into it's goddp eleventh edition.
Speaker 1: So it's like, first of all, nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3: I don't want to interrupt your flow, but I will
Speaker 3: say that I know you have your favorite review of
Speaker 3: your book, but I tell people that there's more good
Speaker 3: scientific content on the cover of that book than an
Speaker 3: entire season of anything on the History Channel. And you know,
Speaker 3: I don't know if that's still being printed the same way.
Speaker 3: But the addition I have has all these facts and
Speaker 3: information on the cover. It's like it's not a joke, it's.
Speaker 1: Like for real.
Speaker 2: The inside Yeah, the inside cover is that it's kind
Speaker 2: of a list of dudes and dotes in science all together,
Speaker 2: but archaeology especially, you know, fa My favorite review was Faders.
Speaker 2: Book is filled with humor. It's like giving a dog
Speaker 2: a pill reffed in cheese. Yep, you're never gonna get
Speaker 2: it better.
Speaker 1: I love it, especially if you like cheese. And I
Speaker 1: like cheese.
Speaker 5: So so the series then, that that you've done is
Speaker 5: a great chance for those who've.
Speaker 4: Never been a student of yours to see you in action.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's and that's Look, it's a real ego stroke,
Speaker 2: it is. I mean, I'll probably get, you know, all
Speaker 2: kinds of things. People say horrible things about me, and
Speaker 2: that's fine whatever.
Speaker 1: You know, you're not gonna bother me.
Speaker 2: But but the response, the feedback I'm getting so far
Speaker 2: are probably from people who are fans anyway, who have
Speaker 2: read my book, or nob or no by work, and
Speaker 2: so that's been barely positive and I fully expect to get,
Speaker 2: you know, really bad blowback to and.
Speaker 1: It's it is what it is.
Speaker 2: If you know, if you've got to, if you have better,
Speaker 2: better stuff to say about this, make your own YouTube
Speaker 2: show or Netflix show that happens and.
Speaker 1: So, and we're fine with it.
Speaker 2: So so so when I took that opportunity to said, Holly,
Speaker 2: this is a great idea. But what we're gonna have
Speaker 2: to do is if I can do it from my
Speaker 2: home office and effectively do my you know, ten of
Speaker 2: my lectures, however, many from by course, which represents chapters
Speaker 2: in the Frauds Book.
Speaker 1: That would be great. Now.
Speaker 2: Coincidentally, I have done two of these two lectures, one
Speaker 2: based on the Cardiff Giant and one note one actually
Speaker 2: based on the archaeology of Sherlock Holmes and the archaeology
Speaker 2: in the Arthur Conan Doyle fifty six short stories and
Speaker 2: four novels, and I had.
Speaker 1: Done those already for Kathy Barr.
Speaker 2: Kathy's this wonderful colleague, brilliant woman, and she's the director
Speaker 2: of the P. T. Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Nice and
Speaker 2: she has I would say, single handedly because she will
Speaker 2: yell at me if I say single handedly. But she
Speaker 2: has preserved the integrity of that museum after it was
Speaker 2: by a tornado, a tornado in Bridgeport, Connecticut. This is
Speaker 2: like ten years ago, and they've been able to maintain
Speaker 2: a presence in like the near adjacent building while they're
Speaker 2: getting all this money together to finally make the original
Speaker 2: building that was that was ordered by Pt. Barnum for
Speaker 2: his own stuff, and this is beautiful late nineteenth century
Speaker 2: building with a dome. The tornado actually turned the dome,
Speaker 2: which means that which is not safe. So it's not
Speaker 2: safe for people now.
Speaker 1: But so Cathy and.
Speaker 2: I've worked with her on a number of projects, and
Speaker 2: I've done book signings for her at the museum. And
Speaker 2: so she contacted me to say, Ken, we have this
Speaker 2: like continuing education series. We'd love for you to do
Speaker 2: one on things related to Barnum. And I said, well,
Speaker 2: the Cardiff Giant story is the perfect example of that.
Speaker 2: That's this fake giant fossilized man found the New York
Speaker 2: State in eighteen sixty nine and along the way, Barnum
Speaker 2: had nothing to do with it originally, but once he
Speaker 2: he sees that there's a lot of money being made.
Speaker 2: He actually offers the people who were who owned it
Speaker 2: at the time, he offered them like thirty thousand bucks
Speaker 2: to buy it so he could put it in his
Speaker 2: side show. And when they turned him down, the son
Speaker 2: of a bitch had a copy made of it, like
Speaker 2: clandestinely was able to make a bold of the original,
Speaker 2: and he starts he actually starts advertising it as the
Speaker 2: real card of Giant, and then they sue him, which
Speaker 2: is great because you know, that's great publicity. And somewhere
Speaker 2: in my in a file, I have copies of the
Speaker 2: announcements in the New York Times for the fact that
Speaker 2: that that that in the side show of the circus
Speaker 2: at Madison Square Garden is the card of Giant.
Speaker 1: And then the actual owners of the Giant.
Speaker 2: The Giants at this point is like a being displayed
Speaker 2: at all, but the real one. They they write a
Speaker 2: letter to the Time say, Gevitt, that's not the we
Speaker 2: have the real one.
Speaker 1: It's coming to New York.
Speaker 2: They actually if you look at a Google Maps, you
Speaker 2: look at the addresses of where they were being displayed.
Speaker 2: They were being displayed simultaneously about a block and a
Speaker 2: half away from each other in Manhattan, the real Card
Speaker 2: of Giant and the Giant that Barnab was saying was
Speaker 2: the real Giant, but it was not. The real Giant
Speaker 2: was a fake Giant, and by all accounts, Barnum out
Speaker 2: drew Barnum's fake out drew the real Card of Giant.
Speaker 3: I mean, given the nature of how they were created,
Speaker 3: I guess they're both blockbusters.
Speaker 1: Somebody go ahead.
Speaker 4: This is one of the topics that you treat yes.
Speaker 1: Chapter of the book.
Speaker 2: It's it's one of their lectures I give in the
Speaker 2: ten part series. And it all started with this thing
Speaker 2: that I did for the for the for the pt
Speaker 2: Bart Museum, and I did one on on Sherlock Hobs. Anyway,
Speaker 2: when Holly contacted me, I said, well, you, Kenny, do
Speaker 2: you know anybody there who does recordings? And well, I say, yeah,
Speaker 2: these two guys who recorded me for and again those
Speaker 2: were cases in which I did them at home and
Speaker 2: those guys and I sent those guys to power points
Speaker 2: and they recorded the power points and then they edited
Speaker 2: them into a really nice couple of videos. So I
Speaker 2: contacted Kathy. Kathy gave me their contact information. I contacted
Speaker 2: them and they said, oh, we love to be able
Speaker 2: to do this, and so they came down to the
Speaker 2: house and we did two or two at a time
Speaker 2: was doable. One time we did three of these hours.
Speaker 2: But you know what it's like for me, it was
Speaker 2: just like in the old days when I would teach
Speaker 2: a couple of courses, have lunch, and then teach another
Speaker 2: course in the afternoon.
Speaker 1: So it was it was great fun.
Speaker 2: They did a great job, lots of cool sound effects
Speaker 2: and whatever else. And and I really feel I mean,
Speaker 2: I know this is kind of sappy. I was joking
Speaker 2: of before, but it really means a lot to me
Speaker 2: that at least these in these ten instances, those lectures
Speaker 2: will you know, knock knock on something, whatever the hell
Speaker 2: it is, knock on what uh will outlive me, and
Speaker 2: that maybe who knows me, the books and the lectures
Speaker 2: give me a level of more immortality than I would
Speaker 2: not otherwise have, you know.
Speaker 1: And I don't know.
Speaker 2: People are not supposed to talk about what he yellen anymore,
Speaker 2: but it's a great line when he says, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: some people want to achieve immortality through their works. I
Speaker 2: want to achieve immortality by not dying.
Speaker 1: But that's it's really not.
Speaker 2: An option so so so these are things that it
Speaker 2: makes me feel really good that there is this concrete,
Speaker 2: solid thing that people not only are am I not
Speaker 2: restricted geographically once the kids in my class get to
Speaker 2: hear me, but that anybody who wants to watch them
Speaker 2: on YouTube, uh, can watch them wherever the hell they are,
Speaker 2: and and and these things will again, if I hope
Speaker 2: they remain fresh and fun and interesting for people well
Speaker 2: into the twenty fifth century.
Speaker 4: I'm loving the sound of this. Can you tell us
Speaker 4: a little bit more about some of the other topics
Speaker 4: that you treat?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you bet you. And I always have to look
Speaker 2: at my list anyway. So the way we did them
Speaker 2: in no particular order, and I think that that's probably best.
Speaker 2: In other words, it doesn't make any goddamn difference. If
Speaker 2: you watch do the well, I'll watch Pilltown and then
Speaker 2: I'll go to Atlantis and then I'll look at rock Art.
Speaker 1: It doesn't make any difference.
Speaker 2: However, there is a first or introductory introductory lecture which
Speaker 2: is sort of my chapter two in the Fraud's book,
Speaker 2: my epistemology chapter which I have gotten feedback on that chapter.
Speaker 1: How you do.
Speaker 2: Science archaeology is the example that it actually heard from
Speaker 2: people who have taken you know, they apply to the
Speaker 2: publisher and make photocopies.
Speaker 1: Of just that chapter.
Speaker 2: And it's taught in like philosophy classes and engineering classes
Speaker 2: because it's a it's a cool topic. Archaeology is really cool.
Speaker 2: But it also is a reflection. It's a model of
Speaker 2: how science proceeds all together. So so so the if
Speaker 2: there's a first episode, that first episode is all about, hey, look,
Speaker 2: how do you how do you know what you know?
Speaker 2: And I use because I'm the Sherlock Charlockian, right, I
Speaker 2: use Sherlock Holmes as an example of here's a detective.
Speaker 1: He investigates the scene of a crime.
Speaker 2: How does he do that? Archaeologists investigate the scene of
Speaker 2: a life, and we use a lot of the.
Speaker 1: Same techniques and procedures.
Speaker 2: Effect In one of the stories, uh the inventor of
Speaker 2: silver Blaze, a horse goes a race, horse value of valuables.
Speaker 2: Horse goes missing, and the trainer of the horse, his
Speaker 2: body is had. He's found dead, and they call in
Speaker 2: Holmes and there's a the crime scene, the ostensible crime
Speaker 2: scene where the body of the trader was found. And
Speaker 2: the constable tells Holmes, yeah, we've gone over this area
Speaker 2: very very carefully, and Holmes says, it's fine, let me
Speaker 2: take a look, and he gets down on his hands
Speaker 2: and knees and he literally excavates through the soil and
Speaker 2: he finds a bird. He calls it a wax vesta,
Speaker 2: which is just a nineteenth century version of a match
Speaker 2: a matchhead, and he hands it to the constable. The
Speaker 2: constable is really annoyed. We were just over this. How
Speaker 2: did you find it? And Holmes said, well, it's very easy.
Speaker 2: I found it because I was looking for it. That
Speaker 2: just absolutely blows me away, because I think, you know what,
Speaker 2: that's why archaeologists and folks who have no training in archaeology,
Speaker 2: that's the place we have to meet where you understand
Speaker 2: with a butt with just like Charlotte Holmes, trading and
Speaker 2: a well of experience, we know what we have to
Speaker 2: find in order to support a hypothesis that what ancient
Speaker 2: Celts were sacrificing people in New Hampshire, or Atlanteans were
Speaker 2: traveling across the ocean and giving people technology and teaching
Speaker 2: them how to make calendars and how to make great monuments,
Speaker 2: or the ancient Jews were in New Mexico and left
Speaker 2: a copy of the Ten Commandments. We know what must
Speaker 2: be there in order to support that hypothesis. And when
Speaker 2: Holmes found the wax vesta, he already had a notion
Speaker 2: of what had gone on. He knew that that area
Speaker 2: where the body was found must have been illuminated, that
Speaker 2: something was going on there, and he had an idea,
Speaker 2: and so he knew that to support that hypothesis, you
Speaker 2: have to find something that indicated that the area had
Speaker 2: had been illuminated. And so he was looking for that
Speaker 2: specific evidence. And sometimes if you're not looking for the evidence,
Speaker 2: you're not going to find it. And so what I
Speaker 2: do is I go through.
Speaker 1: A whole bunch of.
Speaker 2: Ways in which archaeologists know how we know what we know.
Speaker 2: And it's it is the kind of stuff that is
Speaker 2: not necessarily intuitively obvious. But if you take a course
Speaker 2: in archaeology, you go, oh, okay, I get it. That's
Speaker 2: how you know what you know. It's not it's not
Speaker 2: about it. Really, Archaeology is really not about just making
Speaker 2: it up, which you hear online all of the time. No. No,
Speaker 2: what we do is we, like as all scientists, we
Speaker 2: have an idea. We hypothesize something and we say this
Speaker 2: is this is the kind of stuff that we have
Speaker 2: to find if that hypothesis is to be upheld, and
Speaker 2: if we don't find it, we put that hypothesis on
Speaker 2: the shelf. We say, that's a cool story, but we
Speaker 2: don't have any support for it. And so that's that's
Speaker 2: the first one is that. Then I go on to
Speaker 2: something the fun stuff, the Cardiff Giant lecture, which is
Speaker 2: a ton of fun about how you scientists look at
Speaker 2: this giant. They say, oh, come on, come on, this
Speaker 2: is a statue in a gypsum, hasn't been in the
Speaker 2: ground for more than a year, and that didn't That's
Speaker 2: a great object lesson in credulity and gullibility because even
Speaker 2: though scientists O. C.
Speaker 1: Marsh O'THEO. C.
Speaker 2: Marsh really famous paleontologist in the late nineteenth century Yale University.
Speaker 2: If you go to museums, especially throughout the Northeast, and
Speaker 2: you go see dinosaur exhibits, there usually is a plaque saying, okay,
Speaker 2: this was excavated by O. C. Marsh. He was that
Speaker 2: big of a deal.
Speaker 1: And O. C.
Speaker 2: Marsh was called in to look at the Cardiff Giant
Speaker 2: and he said, no, no, this is a statue but
Speaker 2: nobody cared. Very few people cared. It did not cut
Speaker 2: back on people's interest in going and seeing the giant.
Speaker 2: And it was only really six months after the thing
Speaker 2: was discovered that the guy who pulled it off, this
Speaker 2: George Hall, he confessed to were newspaper reporters. Yeah. I
Speaker 2: had a block of gypsum, purchased it in Iowa, sent
Speaker 2: it to some Chicago stonecutters.
Speaker 1: They made the giant. They shipped it east Me and my.
Speaker 2: Cousin Stub Newell Stub is that a great name for
Speaker 2: a farmer in the eighteen sixties in New York, Stub
Speaker 2: And I always tell I tell students this because I
Speaker 2: read it someplace that some people claimed it was a
Speaker 2: result of one of stub Nowle's anatomical deficiencies.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that anything.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's the case, but uh, and
Speaker 2: so you know, he confessed the thing is to day
Speaker 2: they brought it on the road. Listen.
Speaker 1: I don't know how how long we want to go.
Speaker 2: With this, but when I was this is in the eighties,
Speaker 2: sometimes I did. At some point I did an interview
Speaker 2: for a Histori's Mysteries, which was back with the history
Speaker 2: channel wasn't focused on the stuff it's focused on today.
Speaker 2: They did a week of famous historical hoaxes. They did
Speaker 2: one on the pilt Down. They then went on the
Speaker 2: protocols of the elders Zion. At the end went on
Speaker 2: on on the Cardiff Giant. This is the one where
Speaker 2: they were asking me to to they want a sound check,
Speaker 2: and instead of be going you know, testing one, two three,
Speaker 2: I said, well, if you want to define this Cardiff Giant,
Speaker 2: the sentence, he was a.
Speaker 1: Giant naked guy.
Speaker 2: The thing is I told all my friends, all my relatives,
Speaker 2: you gotta watch the histories and mysteries.
Speaker 1: And they watched it. God damn it.
Speaker 2: After every commercial when they would come back, if you
Speaker 2: listen carefully, you could hear me saying in the background,
Speaker 2: giant naked guy.
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 2: I did a lecture. I did a lecture for a
Speaker 2: local skeptics group and they didn't pay me, but I
Speaker 2: got like a rubber chicken for dinner, and they gave
Speaker 2: me a T shirt that said ask me about the
Speaker 2: giant naked guy. I don't wear that in public because
Speaker 2: I you know, personally, I don't want anybody coming up to, yeah,
Speaker 2: tell me about the giant naked guy.
Speaker 1: So that's that's just real, that's fun.
Speaker 2: And I wanted, you know, people to have at least
Speaker 2: one example of something that was just just silly. There's
Speaker 2: another one on Pilton, which is a hell of a
Speaker 2: lot more serious, because that's an example where scientists too.
Speaker 2: Scientists are people, and yeah, we we screw up, and
Speaker 2: some of us are dicks, and some of us are
Speaker 2: inflexible and some of us are are easily fooled when
Speaker 2: we see something that we want to be previously uh
Speaker 2: desired outcome. And the whole thing about Piltdown was number one,
Speaker 2: England had no ancestor. There were no there were no
Speaker 2: The fossil evidence of human evolution was from Germany, it
Speaker 2: was in Spain, it was in France. Uh, it was
Speaker 2: even in the island of Java, and literally the British
Speaker 2: War effectively evolutionary, you called evolutionary bastards they had They
Speaker 2: had no ancestors, there were no In fact, a French
Speaker 2: palaeontologist described English human palaeontology as mere pebble collecting because.
Speaker 1: That's all they got. They got rocks, they don't have bones.
Speaker 2: And so when when you know the Charles Dawson and
Speaker 2: Arthur Smith Woodward, who was Dawson, was just this guy.
Speaker 2: He was a a collector, an amateur collector, and but
Speaker 2: he was really good at finding stuff, which turns out
Speaker 2: a lot of it he found because he planted it.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: But he got a scientist, Arthur Smith Woodward, an ichthyologist
Speaker 2: at the British Museum, to come and take a look,
Speaker 2: and they excavated the site. They found all kinds of
Speaker 2: evidence of this this fossil that was very human like skull,
Speaker 2: human like creatium, but a very apel like jaw, and
Speaker 2: that this was ultimately the the the human ancestor that
Speaker 2: everything else came from. That, that Neanderthals were never lutionary
Speaker 2: offshoot and all these other java man again that was
Speaker 2: that was something that died off. But the real ancestor,
Speaker 2: the root of the human evolutionary tree, was right here
Speaker 2: in England. So people accepted that, they embraced it because
Speaker 2: it was what they wanted to believe. And it wasn't
Speaker 2: until I got that was the nineteen tens, And then
Speaker 2: it wasn't till nineteen fifties that technology had developed enough
Speaker 2: that people could actually assess and say, you know what,
Speaker 2: the skull is moderned five hundred years old, and the
Speaker 2: jaw is of an Orangutad for God's sake. Cool thing
Speaker 2: about that is that even very recently, with the last
Speaker 2: ten years, they were able to extract DNA from the
Speaker 2: mandible the lower jaw, and in fact have proven that
Speaker 2: it's an Orangatad jaw that was doctor to make it
Speaker 2: look like it belonged to the very modern looking cranium.
Speaker 3: The cool thing is in our archives if you want
Speaker 3: to hear more. Obviously, first of all, go to the
Speaker 3: news stuff, go to YouTube and check out his series.
Speaker 3: But also we did a deep dive on the Cardiff
Speaker 3: Giant and we didn't know we touched on pilt Down.
Speaker 3: I don't remember if it was the whole episode. We
Speaker 3: definitely talked about that a good bit and what we
Speaker 3: haven't talked about but you've mentioned here, I think briefly
Speaker 3: talk about epistemology just a little bit because I think
Speaker 3: it's fascinating, uh and super important because I think a
Speaker 3: lot of arguments come down to you're not really discussing
Speaker 3: the points. What you're really getting at is you guys
Speaker 3: have different basis for how you know things.
Speaker 2: In the episode, I go through all of the things
Speaker 2: that are that's this is not how this is not
Speaker 2: how science works. So it's a lot of it is
Speaker 2: look these these these steps that people are taking, understand
Speaker 2: that's not the way science works, or is it the
Speaker 2: way that science can work? And I think the biggest,
Speaker 2: the biggest problem I see in epistemology for all sciences
Speaker 2: is this. And I wonder if it steps from the
Speaker 2: American tradition of a jurisprudence in which a person is
Speaker 2: innocent and your job is to prove them guilty. But
Speaker 2: that otherwise the assumption is they're innocent. And I think
Speaker 2: people think, well, new ideas, new claims, new speculations, it's
Speaker 2: it's your job. If you're a scientist and you're skeptical,
Speaker 2: it's your job to disprove them because we are We're
Speaker 2: going to accept them because you know, because somebody, somebody
Speaker 2: said it out loud and we like it, and you know,
Speaker 2: you guys, you prove the negative.
Speaker 1: And that's that's not the way science can work.
Speaker 2: Nobody. If somebody were to say, hey, look if you
Speaker 2: you know, if you gargle apricot, ground up apricot pits,
Speaker 2: it will cure your cancer, Well, nobody's gonna say, Okay, well,
Speaker 2: all guys do that because you have to prove me wrong.
Speaker 2: I think most people and that kind of existential moment,
Speaker 2: would say, well, is there any evidence that this thing works?
Speaker 2: And that's the that's the smart thing to do, is
Speaker 2: to ask for the evidence that it actually has.
Speaker 1: An impact, actually works, and.
Speaker 2: Not just say well, I'm gonna blinthely go around doing
Speaker 2: this and and forget what forget chemo and forget radiation,
Speaker 2: and forget all those other modalities of treatment. But I'm
Speaker 2: gonna gargle apricot pits because somebody said it works. That's
Speaker 2: not the way science can work. So if you say, well,
Speaker 2: look there was there was an ancient civilization twelve thousand
Speaker 2: years ago that bequeathed its knowledge to all of the
Speaker 2: known civilizations from thousands of years later, we don't just
Speaker 2: say okay, cool, Okay, that's it, and now we're going
Speaker 2: to try to disprove it.
Speaker 1: It's the job of the claimant.
Speaker 2: The burden of proof is always on the person suggesting
Speaker 2: the hypothesis. And and folks, I think folks don't understand that.
Speaker 2: I think folks also don't understand that the uh A lot,
Speaker 2: a lot of of the pseudoscience that I see has
Speaker 2: an overabundance of question marks in there. In there, there
Speaker 2: are very few definitive statements. It's all question marks. You
Speaker 2: read any of Eric mcdonekan's books, even the title of
Speaker 2: Chariots of the Gods as a question mark at the
Speaker 2: end of it, and there's an old there's an old
Speaker 2: saying in uh a journal is that any statement in
Speaker 2: a newspaper article that ends in the question mark the
Speaker 2: answer that means that it's bullshit? You know that The
Speaker 2: answer is no, this is bullshit, we don't have any
Speaker 2: evidence for it. And they get away with it by saying, well,
Speaker 2: I never said it. I just wondered about it.
Speaker 3: Just asking questions. The j a Q, which I love.
Speaker 3: Someone came up with jacking off j a qing off,
Speaker 3: which I freaking cannot get out of my head. I
Speaker 3: just think it's so funny.
Speaker 2: So but but again, that's that's I see that very
Speaker 2: often as a defense.
Speaker 1: What are you guys? What do you guys care?
Speaker 2: He's just asking questions. But that's like, you know again,
Speaker 2: if you if you, if you take the model of
Speaker 2: a court case, a prosecuted attorney can't say to a
Speaker 2: guy who's, you know, been been accused of the bezzelment.
Speaker 1: So do you enjoy beating your children? You can't say question.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Obviously that's that would be inadmissible in
Speaker 2: a court. Yeah, in the courts of science as well.
Speaker 2: But the other thing is I get this a lot
Speaker 2: from folks, and I understand it. I empathize with this.
Speaker 2: You're not foolish to say this, which is but isn't
Speaker 2: it possible?
Speaker 1: This is what?
Speaker 2: What a complete dick? I am?
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 2: So, a bunch of years ago I did a talking
Speaker 2: head piece for an independent film called The Dragons of
Speaker 2: Jim Greed. It is a it's a lovely little film.
Speaker 2: This guy, Randy Sallow, who was the director, the producer,
Speaker 2: the recordist, he wrote the music for it.
Speaker 1: He good guy.
Speaker 2: And Randy called me up and said, look, I've got
Speaker 2: this guy, Jim Greed, and I think it was North
Speaker 2: or South Carolina, and he believes he's an older man
Speaker 2: and he believes that he has found evidence of a
Speaker 2: thirty million year old civilization on his property of intelligent
Speaker 2: he called him reptiloids.
Speaker 1: So you know what cool?
Speaker 2: And he asked, He said, look, Vader, I got your book.
Speaker 2: I know you're a skeptic. I would like to interview you,
Speaker 2: I says, Suah, he came over to the house. Now
Speaker 2: here's I buried the lead Here, Andy Snello.
Speaker 1: Jim Green was his grandfather.
Speaker 2: Oh basically grew up of the old dude's property and
Speaker 2: he was like a father to him. And I never
Speaker 2: got to meet Jim Green and he's passed away since.
Speaker 2: But in the video he seems like an incredibly sweet
Speaker 2: and sincere.
Speaker 1: Guy, nice fella. But he's wrong.
Speaker 2: He's just you know, he's just wrong. So at one
Speaker 2: point Randy literally sits me down and says, yeah, but
Speaker 2: Ken Kenny, isn't it at least possible? And my response was,
Speaker 2: I said, look, I don't like your question because if
Speaker 2: I say no, categorically it's not impossible, I come off,
Speaker 2: as you know, a hard nose skeptic. I have a
Speaker 2: closed mind. But if I say it's possible, and you
Speaker 2: just cut it there, because really, Randy, it's possible in
Speaker 2: the same sense that it's possible that as I'm sitting
Speaker 2: here a pig will fly out of my asshole. And
Speaker 2: those are about the possibility that there were reptiloids thirty
Speaker 2: million years ago. Visiting houses of prostitution in South Carolina
Speaker 2: is about the same likelihood as a pig flying out
Speaker 2: of my asshole. Now, to Randy's credit, Randy didn't get
Speaker 2: mad at me.
Speaker 1: In fact, in.
Speaker 2: One of the the ads for that video, you could
Speaker 2: find just that sex of it, Rader talk about pig's
Speaker 2: flag out of his asshole.
Speaker 1: It's available online.
Speaker 2: So anyway I talk about that, I talk about Atlantis.
Speaker 2: There's an Ancient Aliens episode. There's an episode about dative
Speaker 2: American rock art that's been misused and abused. There's an
Speaker 2: episode about epigraphy, but written messages in North America, especially
Speaker 2: that where the claim is, well, these are ancient ancient Israelites,
Speaker 2: or ancient Celts, or ancient Phoenicians, or ancient Egyptians who
Speaker 2: visit in America, and Karen, you do know, of course
Speaker 2: that they're somewhere in Australia. There's a fake Egyptian writing,
Speaker 2: fake hieroglyphs in some state park that to this day.
Speaker 1: There are people claiming, you know, the Egyptians.
Speaker 2: Got to Australia even though the oh.
Speaker 4: I'm not aware of that. I'm gonna have to go
Speaker 4: and check.
Speaker 2: That out, the Gosford Glyphs or something like that.
Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, that's not too I mean that is a
Speaker 5: bit of a distance from from where I'm going to,
Speaker 5: but you might be possible.
Speaker 4: I have to check that.
Speaker 5: Unfortunately, we're gonna have to wrap things up, and I
Speaker 5: think our listeners are going to have to go.
Speaker 4: And check out this series. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, fantastic. But
Speaker 4: we just had one last question. We wanted to ask
Speaker 4: you what you're working on next. You're always working on
Speaker 4: something fascinating.
Speaker 2: Well, the thing I'm working on right now, well, we've
Speaker 2: got the eleventh edition of Frauds is in the hopper,
Speaker 2: but my big new project for Princeton University Press, and
Speaker 2: there's no working title yet, although the thing is basically
Speaker 2: written is a popularly oriented book about the archaeology of
Speaker 2: North America, prehistoric archaeology, so those down builders and the
Speaker 2: cliff dwellers and rock art and the Paleo the original
Speaker 2: settlement of the New World.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of.
Speaker 2: Sort of geographical and temporal, but it's kind of the
Speaker 2: the History of the World part one. It's the history
Speaker 2: of North America, the native people, and it's been a
Speaker 2: ton of fun working on that thing, and right now
Speaker 2: I'm waiting for some feedback from the press, and then
Speaker 2: we're gonna get going on that probably in September. Everybody
Speaker 2: should look for that subtype at twenty twenty five, I.
Speaker 3: Guess excellent, assuming we're all still here.
Speaker 4: Yes, I think it is crossed. Oh, thank you so
Speaker 4: much for joining us today.
Speaker 5: They are really excited about this new series, and you
Speaker 5: really sprung it on us.
Speaker 1: Think about it.
Speaker 2: I didn't know if I was supposted like tell people
Speaker 2: about it beforehand, so I kind of waited until it
Speaker 2: was ready to go. Monster.
Speaker 3: You've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
Speaker 3: I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stoltner. You just heard
Speaker 3: an interview with doctor Ken Fader about his new web
Speaker 3: series on archaeological frauds and hoaxes. Check out the show
Speaker 3: notes for links, or go to YouTube and search for
Speaker 3: Fader Exposing Hoaxes and it'll take you right to them.
Speaker 3: And be sure and check out Ken's books, the latest
Speaker 3: of which is about forty alleged archaeological mysteries and oddities,
Speaker 3: which make a great companion to his previous book of
Speaker 3: fifty archaeological sites you should see before you exit this place.
Speaker 3: Karen and her family are back in Australia for a
Speaker 3: few weeks and as a reminder, we'll be bringing our
Speaker 3: partnership with Airwave Media to a very amicable end shortly,
Speaker 3: so your feed might see some changes, but remember you
Speaker 3: can always find the latest episodes in the correct podcast
Speaker 3: feed information over at monster talk dot org, so if
Speaker 3: anything hiccups or you don't see episodes when you expect,
Speaker 3: to check there for guidance on how to get it fixed.
Speaker 3: Monster Talks theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys and
Speaker 3: we appreciate your taking the time to download and listen,
Speaker 3: and we hope that you enjoyed your visit with us.
Speaker 3: If you did, why not share it with a friend,
Speaker 3: And if you don't have any friends, you still guide us.
Speaker 2: This has been a Monster House presentation.