All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Jan. 31, 2017 - Skeptoid
17:03
Skeptoid #556: Exploring Kincaid's Cave

Some say a marvelous cave of Egyptian wonders is hidden in the Grand Canyon. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Golden Cave Tall Tales 00:07:16
A place of wonders like the Grand Canyon comes with its share of wonderful stories and tall tales.
One of these, which persists today, is that in the early 20th century, explorers found a marvelous cave of golden wonders.
And to top it all off, it was filled with Egyptian artifacts.
Ancient Egyptians in the Colorado River basin?
Well, that's what the story says.
Now let's see if we can find its origins.
And we're looking at the true history of Kinkade's cave right now on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and replace them with more Skeptoid.
The Extended Premium Show available now.
Come to Skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Exploring Kinkade's Cave.
The year was 1909, and the finer folk were settling into their comfy chairs for the morning newspaper and coffee.
But today's report told about something completely new.
It was the discovery of a magnificent cave in the Grand Canyon, but quite unlike any of the Native American domiciles already discovered.
This one was vast, but vast on a scale that can scarcely be imagined.
In the several hundred interconnected chambers discovered so far, scientists estimated 50,000 people could have lived.
Its discoverer was explorer G.E. Kinkade, a scout for the Smithsonian for the past 30 years.
Today we're going to check in on this cave a century later and see how the exploration is going.
According to the Arizona Gazette newspaper article that broke the story, the work was under the direction of Professor S.A. Jordan of the Smithsonian and was being expanded to a team of some 30 to 40 archaeologists.
The cavern was Nearly a mile underground, about 1,480 feet below the surface, the long main passage has been delved into to find another mammoth chamber from which radiates scores of passageways like the spokes of a wheel.
Several hundred rooms have been discovered reached by passageways running from the main passage.
One of them having been explored for 854 feet and another 634 feet.
The recent finds include articles which have never been known as native to this country and doubtless they had their origin in the Orient.
War weapons, copper instruments, sharp-edged and hard as steel, indicate the high state of civilization reached by these strange people.
The riches found within were fabulous.
The idol or image of the people's god sitting cross-legged with a lotus flower or lily in each hand.
The cast of the face is Oriental.
The idol almost resembles Buddha, though the scientists are not certain as to what religious worship it represents.
It is possible that this worship most resembles the ancient people of Tibet.
Among the other finds are vases or urns and cups of copper and gold, made very artistic in design.
And also dangers reminiscent of the day's best pulp fiction.
There is one chamber of the passageway which is not ventilated, and when we approached it, a deadly, snakey smell struck us.
Our light would not penetrate the gloom, and until stronger ones are available, we will not know what the chamber contains.
Some say snakes, but other boo-hoo this idea and think it may contain a deadly gas or chemicals used by the ancients.
Should we go try and find this cave?
Don't bother, Kincaid advised.
It is located on government land, and no visitor will be allowed there under penalty of trespass.
The scientists wish to work unmolested.
A trip there would be fruitless, and the visitor would be sent on his way.
Based on the hieroglyphics found throughout the caverns and many of its relics, Jordan's team concluded the residents were Egyptian.
Egyptians in the southwestern United States The explanation of this story can at first glance seem like a tremendous disappointment.
There was no G.E. Kincaid.
There was no Professor S.A. Jordan.
There was no marvelous cave.
Not a shred of evidence has ever supported the existence of any person or thing in the article.
The tale was a purely fictional invention of the anonymous writer who concocted it to gild his pages of the Arizona Gazette.
In response to an inquiry, the Smithsonian wrote to one researcher, The Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology has searched its files without finding any mention of a Professor Jordan, Kincaid, or a lost Egyptian civilization in Arizona.
Nevertheless, the story continues to be repeated in books and articles.
For those needing a bit of extra confirmation that the newspaper story is likely untrue, I point to two examples.
First, if the apocryphal Kinkade had actually been in the employ of the Smithsonian for 30 years, he would likely have known that its correct name is Smithsonian Institution, not Smithsonian Institute, as given in the article.
Second, he described the cave entrance as, The entrance is 1,486 feet down the sheer canyon wall, some 42 miles up the river from the El Tovar Crystal Canyon, about 2,000 feet above the riverbed.
The mouth of the cave was, at the time the cavern was inhabited, the level of the river.
Though no canyons bear such a name, El Tovar is the name of the popular South Rim Lodge that opened shortly before the article was published.
And 42 miles upriver from there, 1486 plus 2000 is indeed a reasonable approximation of the canyon's depth.
Most of that was carved in the past 1.2 million years.
As brief as that sounds geologically, it's six times older than the first anatomically modern humans in Africa.
That people skilled in metallurgy, using modern Asian imagery, and capable of excavating millions of tons of rock, lived there at river level at the time, seems improbable by any number of measures.
Context Over Simple Facts 00:07:24
But I would argue that this is neither a disappointment nor is it the end of the story.
It could only be seen as such by those who insist that it must simply be a literal historical account.
I argue that as a piece of American folklore, it is a work of exquisite elegance, dovetailing into the popular fiction of its day with a craftsman's precision and composing a marvelous puzzle box of historical documentary research.
In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact.
Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking.
And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media.
It's an easy ask.
Just send a quick message to your station's programming director.
By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction.
Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address.
You can even use the telephone.
I know that might sound crazy.
It's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication.
I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option.
The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless.
When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction.
And that's how we shape a better future.
In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless.
Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding together.
Get them to air the Skeptoid files from Skeptoid Media, available on the PRX Exchange, and they'll know what that is.
The era has been called the Golden Age of Pulp Fiction.
Popular magazines such as Argosy published westerns, romances, science fiction, and high adventure by authors such as H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs in the model of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Google for an old issue and enjoy the tales of lost treasures, archaeological mysteries, and adventurous explorers, just like our Kincaid.
As an illustration of the popularity of bizarre archaeological wonders in popular fiction, we can see the example written by Mark Twain for the newspaper The Territorial Enterprise in 1862.
He wrote the entirely fictional account of a petrified man found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford.
To hint that his account was satirical, he had the stone man thumbing his nose and noted that, quote, everybody goes to see the stone man, as many as 300 having visited the hardened creature during the past five or six weeks.
13 years later, he published an account of the hoax in his book, Sketches New and Old, in which he expressed his frustration at being unable to write a satirical account of an archaeological wonder because the general public believed every word of all such stories.
Published anywhere.
One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one or two glorified discoveries of this kind.
The mania was becoming a little ridiculous.
As a satire on the petrifaction mania or anything else, my petrified man was a disheartening failure, for everybody received him in innocent good faith, and I was stunned to see the creature calmly exalted to the grand chief place in the list of genuine marvels our Nevada had produced.
This was not just enthusiasm on the part of the public.
In 1869, businessman George Hull created the Cardiff Giant hoax, a three-meter stone man that he had carved, but claimed to have unearthed.
He created it in part to appeal to biblical literalists who cited Genesis 6.4, the Nephilim were on earth in those days, referring to a race of giants.
Some Christians, even after having been told the Cardiff Giant was a hoax, continued to promote its authenticity as an act of evangelism.
Even more than 60 years after the Cardiff Giant, the public remained rabid for lost underground civilizations.
In episode 46, we talked about the labyrinthine city of the lizard people claimed to be underneath Los Angeles.
And during those intervening years, at least two books were published revealing the subterranean city of a mythical race called the Lemurians inside California's Mount Shasta.
And these are only a few examples among many, so we can scarcely act surprised to learn of yet another iteration of the same basic story in 1909, the remains of an ancient civilization living in tunnels beneath some famous American landmark.
It could be argued that it would be more surprising if someone hadn't invented this tale.
Now that we're in the 21st century, we can look back on this period of American history and see it in its full context.
These stories were not just isolated pranks or whimsies in regional newspapers, not even fads or trends, but were emblematic of much broader cultural currents.
The American Romanticism and Transcendentalism movements were at full bore, rejecting the corruption of modern society and yearning for the perceived purity of ancient Eastern cultures, of which Egyptian and Tibetan were among the most revered.
Howard Carter would not discover Tutankhamun's tomb for another 13 years, but at the time of the Arizona Gazette article, there were already celebrity Egyptologists trumpeting news of the Valley of the Kings to the West.
Besides Carter, Theodore Davis and Edward Ayrton were household names, delighting American audiences with traveling exhibitions of marvels from the enlightened ancient East.
This syncretism of petrified ancient Americans, primeval natural wonders, and the romanticized view of Eastern mysticism was very much influenced by the neo-pagan and new thought manias that were sweeping America at the turn of the 20th century.
It was no less expected for a newspaper to report an Egyptian find in Arizona then as it is for one of today's Hollywood celebrities to tout the benefits of an organic detox today.
When viewed within its proper historical context, the inevitability of a claimed Egyptian tomb underneath a popular American landmark like the Grand Canyon cannot be overstated.
So when we proceed to investigate the historicity of Kinkade's cave, it is not with a misguided expectation of simple fact versus fiction, but with a zeal for context.
What treasure might be found is not golden urns in a cave, but insight into why and how Americans were so eager for such a story and eager to please one another by concocting it.
Listener Support and Canadian Coffee 00:02:18
Today, a few online communities persist at belief in the cave's literal reality, generally echoing the same overtones of conspiracy-mongering that we've grown accustomed to hearing from alternative historians.
In their view, official channels have covered up the existence of Kincaid's cave to protect some orthodox view of human history.
In fact, this would be a bizarre thing for archaeologists to do, as any actual such discovery would make a scientist's entire career.
So enjoy your pulp fiction and its cultural context, and don't get too caught up in any need you may feel to regard it as factual.
Considering the trends of the day, my suspicion is that the Arizona Gazette's unknown weaver of high adventure tales would be far happier if you enjoyed his story for what it is than if you instead dismissed his creativity and mistook it for bookkeeping.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrienne Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double-doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection