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July 5, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:37
Edition 116 - Illinois Cave Mystery

This edition features Harry Hubbard who has researched a cave in the US claimed to have beencrammed with “Egypt-style” artefacts.

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thanks again for keeping the faith with the show.
Thank you for your messages and for your good feedback on recent editions of the show.
I'm always looking for your suggestions for guests on the show.
And you might remember that at the back end of the last edition of the show, I floated an idea.
And it was an idea based on something that I did on the radio when I was doing the radio show.
On a few of the editions, we just opened the lines and asked for your paranormal stories, ghost stories, UFO stories, whatever.
And those shows absolutely rocked.
We did really well with them.
I was very scared of doing that kind of thing, but I just went with it.
And I was glad that I did.
So I want to try and do something here similar.
Now, of course, it's not a live show, and that has advantages as well as disadvantages.
This is a recorded show, but it means that you can email me with your details about your story.
Perhaps you had a close encounter.
Maybe you've been abducted.
Maybe you had a horrendous ghost experience that you could tell me about.
I think most people in most families have come across these things, and they're the tales that you tell privately amongst the family, maybe at Christmas time or other times when everybody gets together, but you don't tell anybody else.
Now is your chance to tell the world on the unexplained.
It is an opportunity, and I would love to hear from you.
And before I even punted and floated that idea, I had an email from Stephen, and I'll tell you his story, and this is the kind of thing we're looking for, okay?
Stephen says, myself and a friend were playing football, we were kids, on a field opposite the house that we lived in a part of Stockport, which is Cheshire, South Manchester, really, in the UK.
For some reason, I looked up and spotted two white objects very high at aeroplane altitude.
They appeared to have come from behind a white cloud, and a few seconds later, two more appeared, and then another two, and then another two until there were eight flying in formation going in and out of the clouds.
Eventually, they disappeared, but it was an amazing experience.
We can't ever be sure what they were.
And the two of us kids ran back and tried to tell my mum, that's Stephen's mum.
And of course, Stephen's mum was very busy and shrugged the whole thing off.
But Stephen, and presumably the guy that he was playing football with at the time, have never forgotten that experience and can't explain it.
And that's a fact.
When you're a kid, things do happen.
But quite often, adults don't have the time to listen.
Maybe we've all had that experience.
So that's just one small example.
My dear dad, who of course died a few months ago, but he had many experiences of ghosts and paranormal activity when he was working funny shifts as a policeman in Liverpool.
And I think most families have these stories.
Even my grandmother, and I swear this is true, saw a UFO and later drew a picture of it.
And it was the classic sort of pancake-shaped UFO with a dome on the top.
And it was silver, and she saw it at about four o'clock in the morning on a summer morning when it was already daylight, maybe half past four or so, because, you know, in the summertime in the northern hemisphere here, it gets light early.
And she swears that this is what she saw appear from behind a cloud, hover, and then disappear.
And let me tell you, my grandmother was a wonderful, loving, and formidable lady, and she didn't make stuff up.
So that was the idea of floating that suggestion that we put together a show or maybe a couple of shows of your stories.
And we'll do that in a couple of months from now when I've collated all of them, maybe put some of you on here.
So if you want to get involved in that, mark your email, my story, okay, my story.
Go to the website, triple w.theunexplained.tv and click on the link to send a message to the show.
Call it MyStory and we'll get onto it.
That, I think, is not a bad idea.
Let's see how it works out.
And the website, designed by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who continues to do top work for us here.
Now, this time round on the show, we have something unusual.
Very, very unusual.
It's one of those almost Indiana Jones type stories.
It's the story of a cave or a group of caves that were discovered containing what appeared to be Egyptian-style artifacts.
Now, the interesting thing about these caves, whether they were not in Indonesia or Mexico or somewhere in South America or in Egypt or somewhere in the near or far east, they were in Illinois and they have been debated over the years since they were discovered.
I'm going to talk to a man called Harry Hubbard in the US, has made this one of his various quests.
He's a bit of an Indiana Jones character himself from what I read.
So we'll get onto him very, very soon.
If you want to contact me with any thoughts, suggestions, feedback about the show, or make a donation to it, please please go to the website www.theunexplained.tv, and that's the place where you can do that.
And I would love to hear from you because this show, apart from being very small, is very democratic.
It runs on your suggestions, and I do the sorts of things that you want to hear.
And if I'm not doing the sorts of things that you want to hear, then tell me what you'd like, and then I can make that happen.
And it really is.
In an operation this small, there's just me and my webmaster Adam Cornwell and you listening.
It's easy to do that.
And a lot of big media organizations cannot say that for you.
They cannot operate in that way.
They operate an awful lot slower and things do get lost in the mix.
Right, let's cross to the United States.
Let's get on Harry Hubbard.
So it's Harry Hubbard meeting Howard Hughes on The Unexplained.
Harry Hubbard, nice to have you on.
Thank you.
Good to have you here, Harry.
Now, I've got to say, I know absolutely nothing about you.
I do know something about your story because I've done some reading up about it, but you seem to me to be a bit of an Indiana Jones type character.
So tell me a little bit about you and your background, and then we'll get into this amazing story of the cave in Illinois and what may or may not have been there.
Yeah?
Okay.
Well, it all started.
I was a book collector.
Well, still am, and I read a lot.
And reading books in order, I joined several, I guess you would say, off-the-beaten path book clubs back in the late 80s early 90s and eventually that led to more concerning my interest in North American antiquities I was always interested in mounds ancient civilizations here in North America I always figured they were too highly developed too disciplined to
create the earthworks and the buildings that they had, that there had to be some outside influence there.
Now, when you talk about buildings and earthworks in North America, a lot of us are going to be very surprised because here in Europe, okay, you know, some of us haven't been to North America.
We don't know that much.
I have been.
But we don't tend to think about artifacts.
We don't tend to think about mounds.
We tend to think about Stonehenge here in the UK and other places in Italy and places like North Africa, places like that.
We don't think about that kind of stuff being in the United States and in North America generally.
That's true.
However, I think it was up until the early 1930s, the largest masonry building in the world was over here in the American Southwest that had been recently discovered at that time.
And in the American Southwest, there are huge buildings, ancient buildings that cover many, many acres.
They call them great houses.
And I was always interested in those.
Of course, my father, he was from the American Southwest and he was interested in them and he had books on them and such that when I was a young child, I would look at his books with him and he would show me this and that.
And he was also interested in ancient civilizations here in North America, especially the mound builders and the mound cultures, sun worshipers along the river systems, et cetera, et cetera.
And are we talking about civilizations that would have well predated the North American Indians?
Quite possibly.
I don't.
That's somewhat ambiguous as far as when the North American Indians, when their bloodlines began to show up.
I am not of the opinion that the North American Indians were all one single race.
It appears to me that there were at least 12 different racial categories concerning the North American Indians.
They weren't all just one particular line.
They looked very much different.
And we don't know.
I don't know.
I never bought the Bering Strait theory that the Indians came from Asia down into Alaska because the way they codified that and proven or proved it to themselves is with the language family called Nadine.
The Nadine or Athapascan language family as it trickled down from northern Canada into northern Central America.
But then as I studied more and more concerning these Native American languages, which I have many, many dictionaries and have been for years clocking different Native American languages and linguistic families, I've even written one book on it, I began to determine that it was all just a bunch of rubbish because the words that we have for sun, rain, dirt, rock, mother, father, boy, girl, these words are all completely different.
And the only words that I can find between the Athapascan language family that has trickled down from northern Canada to northern Central America are words like whiskey, beer, cheeseburger, refrigerator, light bulb, switch, car, truck, rifle, gun, bullet, slug.
So it's all comparatively new stuff.
Gasoline, oil, lamp.
Yes, exactly.
And so they say that these languages were all members of the same family given certain what they call grammatical tricks.
Say, for instance, that this whole family of languages doesn't have an F or an N sound.
Well, that means they're all the same language family.
Or this language family doesn't have a G, R, L, or an M. Oh, they must all be from the same parent language, which is just absolutely a bunch of bunk.
But you were interested from the very beginning in civilizations that we didn't know anything about, that were literally emergent or new discoveries.
Well, possibly.
I enjoy reading American archaeology books and North American antiquities.
They say, we know so very little about this civilization.
There's a whole town there.
There's several burials.
We have their middens.
We have their trash.
We have what they ate, what they did, what they lived, all the diseases.
We know so much about them.
But they'll say, we know very little about these people.
When it comes down to it, we know a whole lot.
We just don't know who they were, where they went.
And, you know, which is another item of speculation.
Why do civilizations just disappear or vanish?
It could be so many things.
It could be a hard freeze.
It could be a drought.
It could be some kind of poison in their pottery, some type of food that they were eating.
Or, of course, it could be war, conflict.
It could be.
It could be.
All right.
Do you subscribe to the theory that a lot of people seem to be subscribing to, especially these days, that there may have been a civilization, a master civilization, that predated most stuff that we know, even the ancient Egyptians.
There was a bunch of people behind them in that area, south of Egypt, kind of, that connected to Mexico and places like that and had connections around the world that we cannot even begin to scratch the surface of.
Of course.
Of course.
I don't believe that the Earth has never not been populated.
I'm not an evolutionist.
I am a de-evolutionist.
I believe that we have gone down on the evolution scale, if such is a term.
There is a...
Anyone who wants to check it out, it's called...
Just type in or Google Calaveras County, California, or Calaveras skull.
Years ago, in the last century, there were a couple of miners that were digging in the into the side of a Mountain prospecting for gold, and they were about 500 feet below the surface and several hundred feet from their entrance.
And they found a whole civilization underneath basalt.
And these people had very strange skulls and just, I mean, not just a subtle flirtation, an entire race of people, 500 feet down in the ground.
And, okay, try explaining that.
Well, since it doesn't fit the Darwinian theory of evolution, the scholars here just throw it out.
And there have been many ancient civilizations found deep in the earth in California.
Massive, massive walls that stretch for, you know, a mile or so.
And the same thing is in southern New Mexico, all through this country.
There was a couple found, I think, like 30, 40 feet down underneath the soil in a state called Ohio here.
I know in Utah, underneath, I think it was 15 feet of limestone, they found a whole bed of petrified human teeth.
Not fossilized, petrified.
But since this doesn't fit the Darwinian theory of evolution, which nothing does, actually, if you start thinking about it, I really enjoy conversation with evolutionists who believe that.
Because I said, well, how do you explain this?
How do you explain this?
How do you explain that?
Let's get one thing clear now, because we've had this issue on this show before.
When you start talking about evolution, Darwin, and all the rest of it, you open up a whole big can of worms, both sides of the Atlantic, especially in the part of the United States where you are, where there will be people who will say, well, the answer to all of this, of course, is very, very simple.
It's God who put us there.
Now, I'm not going to get into any of that debate.
I'm just wondering where you're positioned on that scale.
Are you coming from the religious, Christian, fundamentalist position?
Where are you on that term?
Well, I'm Christian, but I believe that stuff was brought here as far as intelligent design, yes.
As far as, you know, there are too many things here that are unexplainable.
And I'm just not an evolutionist, okay?
I am creative in certain ways, but I also have to say that, hey, this had to have been brought here.
And when you say brought here, I don't want to put words into your mouth at all.
You've got to say them.
Are you talking about extraterrestrial fathers for our civilization or what?
Out of the three theories of the creation, be it the Bible, which is so misconstrued when you read it.
If you go back to the original Greek, it reads completely different.
There's, I guess, what you call creation, God creation, evolution, and that extraterrestrials brought stuff here.
Out of those, there's more evidence all over the place of number three.
I mean, I didn't invent it.
I just read and just study and just try to clock everything.
The fact that there are so many civilizations that are buried beneath the earth.
We have here in America fossils that come up from 2,800 feet, 3,000 feet down in the ground.
And they'll say, oh, well, that was what these fish, these fish fossils, that was when these fish were on the surface and there was a big ocean right above us here.
Okay, now they're 3,000 feet in the ground.
Well, my question is, is what was 3,000 feet in the ground when those fish were on the surface being fossilized?
In other words, it's got to start somewhere.
There has to be a starting point.
Yes, I'm a cataclysmist.
I believe that the earth just folds over again and again and again and again.
Anytime the big guy upstairs doesn't like it, he just, and it's gone, and then something else happens.
It's just gone.
Everything just moves in a certain way that we don't understand.
I don't understand.
But I know what is not.
I don't know what is, but I know what is not.
All right.
So big interest in ancient civilizations, which brings us to the point of this discovery, so-called in Illinois, near the town of Olney.
Is that how it's pronounced in Illinois?
Well, that was where the man who got into it in 1982 was a very important thing.
Right, so this is all comparatively recently.
And from what I've read, let me just see if you tell me if I've got this right.
This is a guy who makes an apparent discovery of a cave in Illinois, of all places, that appears to contain artifacts that seem to have some kind of Egyptian-style look to them.
And that's where the story starts.
Yes, in 1982.
And the place had actually been documented since the early 60s in North American treasure books.
And it was first discovered in 1925, and that's all on record.
But nobody knew.
People didn't follow through with it.
Now, back in the 70s, there was a surge here in America with treasure hunters because metal detectors came out.
And people started buying these metal detectors.
And to enhance participation in purchasing these metal detectors, free treasure guides were given along with the purchase of them.
So these created more interest and many more things were discovered in time.
Folklore, local folklores, legends, et cetera, et cetera, began to get more popular.
Okay, but this place in particular that you say had been known about since 1925, this is along a branch of the Wabash River, right in this place called Oldney, Illinois.
And then comes along this guy in 1982 called Burroughs.
How does he get into it all?
How does he come to be part of this?
There is nothing in Alney, Illinois.
It is about 50 miles southeast.
It's in Marion County.
And there's a lot of confusion with that because in 1998, Burroughs took a bunch of money from these people that were treasure hunters and just took them into a place in Alney where he was from and just said, right, here it is.
And so they've been digging there for, what, 15 years and they never found anything.
But let's just, in case we lose the point, let's Describe what Mr. Burroughs says that he found in 1982.
It's 30 years ago.
What is it that he came out with?
He came out with just a myriad of artifacts, and it appears that many of the artifacts were 2,000 years old, 2,000 years ago.
And there are a couple that have date on them, and they're dated in AUC, or what we would call Roman time.
And then when you convert back, you can kind of get an idea of what happened.
And all of the dates of what we discovered and the inscriptions on the tablets, everything fits into a classical timeline that just seems to be lost.
For years, I thought that there was something, some little twist that had happened here in North America concerning the ancient Mediterranean.
I say Mediterraneans because when you say ancient Mediterranean, you're pushing several different tribes of people.
The Phoenicians, the Sicilians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Libyans, the Martanians.
There's several different peoples that populated the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea.
And so they knew each other.
They spoke their languages, and they had a lot of commerce and communication.
And from what I've read, it's quite an evolved civilization.
We're talking something like the Romans, really.
Yes, yes.
And a lot of Roman influence.
And there's a lot of Latin in this tomb.
See, for years, no one could break the script.
They didn't know what it was.
So all of these artifacts that Mr. Burroughs brought out in 1982 and that piqued your interest, they all had the same kind of script on them?
Well, there's like five scripts.
There's five different types of script.
You may have a Greek god written in Latin letters, except for one letter, just a Greek letter.
You may have an inscription of Greek that is Latin tense.
You may have Phoenician on one line and then a backward Latin word snuffed in there somewhere.
It's really all over the place.
And because the scholars here could not break the script, they automatically say it's fake.
They automatically say it's fake.
And a lot of the stones had animals that no longer existed, which is, I'm hoping to do some more, give out some more information on some of that at some point in the near future.
So anyway, Mr. Burroughs got in in 1982.
He was escorted down to the Target property, and he started to pull artifacts and gold and silver, ancient impure properties.
And he did this for, let's see, seven years, seven, eight years, up until 1989.
Right, so hold on.
He picked up on this story from the 1920s, was taken to this place, decided to tunnel into it, go into it, see what was there.
And you say that he spent about six or seven years coming out with stuff.
Yes.
Yes.
During the, it appears that from about middle spring to early fall every year, he would spend his evenings two or three times a week in this tomb taking artifacts out.
And what kind of media coverage did he get?
Because, you know, I was alive and around then.
I don't remember anything about that.
No, he got local newspaper interest.
Several local newspapers did stories on him.
He was a guest speaker at different clubs, different archaeology clubs.
But his evasiveness concerning his demeanor, he had been caught in several falsehoods that he had been talking about.
So people just flopped him off.
And any of the academics that you were saying were not keen on the story and were very keen to debunk it all.
That played into their hands, didn't it?
they just determined that everything was a hoax, which I can't blame them for that because he would say one thing one day, another thing the next.
He was scared to death that somebody else was going to find out where this tomb was and actually contact the...
If I was in that situation and I'd come out with these things and I'd found them, I'm not sure I'd want to give away entirely the full story of where these things were and where you could go and get some more.
That's true.
That's true.
Yeah.
And depending on how honest you were, you would have a glory hole for many years.
According to our paperwork that I was able to acquire years later, there was probably, it looks like seven, about seven and a half million dollars worth in gold taken out and sold to the United States Treasury Bureau of Printing and Engraving through Fort Knox.
So hold on, we're talking about artifacts that were debunked as being fakes, plus stuff that was made of gold and a huge quantity of gold that, you know, if you're an ordinary Joe, you cannot lay your hands on that amount of gold.
So you have to have a source for that.
And a very good source in history of gold is finding ancient things because that's what they were made of.
Yes.
And but at the time, during the late 80s and early 90s, no one knew that Burroughs had been dealing with gold.
And how do you know that he was dealing with gold?
Because we, back in 1996, one of Burroughs' previous associates, daughters, brought over to my office a bunch of pictures that showed gold artifacts.
And her story was quite amazing.
And so after that, then we started realizing, hey, this was a lot bigger than we ever thought.
Let's just clarify this.
I'm trying to just explain parts of the story as they come up.
Why would his daughter make contact with you?
Because, oh, very good.
You're sharp.
Because an article had come out in the local newspaper in Florida where I lived.
And she just happened to live in the same town.
And when she saw the article, she started contacting me.
And so...
Well, my dad's been finding these ancient things, and here are some pictures of some of them.
Isn't this amazing?
Well, I was totally familiar with her father's work.
And to show you what a small world it is, is I had known her husband for many years because he was a guard at a security outpost of a large silicon plant that I had serviced.
I do mechanical, hazardous waste, things like that.
And he was always very polite in searching our vehicles, checking our electronic gear, and such like that.
So when it came out in the newspaper, he told her, oh, I know him.
I've known him for years.
So it's a real life case of like six degrees of separation, isn't it?
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
But look, I could bring you photographs right now of chocolates made in London wrapped in gold foil, and I could show you a picture.
And if I dumbed down the resolution a bit, I could say, look, there's a gold rabbit.
I've just dug this up in a street in London.
That's an ancient artifact, isn't it?
Well, what you don't have is three shoeboxes with thousands of pictures of different artifacts that have ancient script on them in unknown dead languages like Numidian, Egyptian hieroglyph, Latin, Greek characters, lots and lots of Greek that explain that they have everybody that we know of, their names inscribed right on there.
Marcus Antonius III, Gaius Kaisar, Cleoptra.
But if I was a faker and a hoaxer, those are the obvious names I would put on there.
Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, who else can I think?
Who else have I seen in a movie with Richard Burton?
I just put those names on.
I'm the King of Lydia.
And the thing about it here in America, if something is written in an ancient language and it is in the original syntax that they don't understand, it's fake.
But if it's read from left to right, it has an English syntax and it's perfect English grammar, oh, that's for real.
It's exactly the opposite as it should be.
And I hate to go on and on about American scholarship, but I sometimes have to fight my tongue to call it American scholarship.
So by this stage, the 1990s, you'd met Burroughs' daughter.
You were well and truly hooked by the story.
What did you do then?
It was actually Jack Ward's daughter.
I had not met Burroughs' daughter.
Someone who hated Burroughs.
And she said that she would share with me her information, provided one and only stipulation that I had to promise her that I would go after Burroughs.
All right, well, and what did you do then to investigate the discovery at those caves, the one set of caves?
Well, what happened was it was I had all this information concerning ancient languages found in North America.
And I had met Paul Schafranca at a framing shop.
I was a collector of medieval maps, and they were in Latin.
And when I met Paul, he was framing my, I mean, these were, you know, $1,000, several thousand, several hundred dollar maps.
He was framing them for me.
And he said, man, these are very, very interesting.
And he said, I know Latin, and I can translate some of these for you.
So then he started to translate some of my maps, and they were just fascinating.
And we did that video that we ended up doing in 1994.
It's called the Lazeria Map Collection.
And it's online, YouTube.
It's on Vimeo.
Time in Lazaria.
Did you carry them maps of where?
Of that area?
Oh, no, of Europe, the northern hemisphere.
It's an extremely controversial video.
But how does that tie into the cave?
Well, after getting to know Paul and he and I becoming friends, he wanted to see all I had concerning languages in North America.
And so I started showing him my collection of data, and he just fell in love with it, and he started working with the scripts, and he made the first decipherment of these tablets that Burroughs had been pulling out of the tomb.
Got you.
So this indicates that a lot of people are saying that the stuff that Burroughs had been producing was fake, academics among them, and yet here's some evidence that suggests this stuff is not fake.
Going back a little bit to run down the same path, is at that point we wanted more script.
So we contacted Burroughs, summer of 1993.
And he said, no, he was not going to be helpful.
There were no more tablets because you'd ask, what did I do after that?
Well, so we wanted more information.
And so we tried to put together a logistical catalog of ideas to come up to Illinois and to try to find where this tomb was.
I had the books.
I had pictures of what he claimed were taken from near the cave entrance.
All right, so by this stage, even by that late stage, the location of this place was still quite secret.
Well, in his book, he said he'd pointed out that it was in Marion County, Illinois, and that it was near certain rivers or there was a general area that it was along the Skillet Fork River, which is a tributary to the Little Wabash River, that it was somewhere along the Skillet Fork River.
And there were pictures in the book printed.
Well, I was like, well, heck, all we got to do is just do some hiking, some legwork, and maybe we'll be able to determine where these pictures are taken from.
So in 1960.
Sounds easy.
Yeah, it sounds easy.
And so anyway, I had started, I said, well, if Burroughs has been untruthful with us, and he is, this is long before I met Jack Ward's daughter, I said, perhaps he's been Untruthful with others, and we can go back, we can backtrack and try to find some of the people he had previously been associated with, and they can give us some information.
And that's exactly what happened.
I tracked down a lady photographer out of New York City, her name was Virginia Horrigan, and this is all documented in book one.
And she was giving other, she had been to the site, and so had another photographer, a gentleman named Warren Dexter.
And their pictures were the same.
Burroughs had escorted them into a ravine system, and she had taken a myriad of pictures, and or several dozen pictures of this area.
So given that and what she had been talking about, I was able to pinpoint closer where in Marion County this might be.
And coincidentally, the main giveaway was a high-voltage power line that bisected the property.
So it was literally X marks the spot.
Right, or close to it.
That will get me close.
And so, and I said, well, if I can get to a mile there.
And then so when I first came up here in Illinois, I guess it was the second time, and I guess it was fall of 1994, I rented an airplane.
I had already made some local friends who knew the area very, very well.
And we went up in a plane and we started looking at different ravine systems of where could something like this exist in a ravine system from the air that intersects with the power line.
So we followed down through the power line and sure enough, the first place that we went to, it was a needle in the haystack, and I found the needle.
And didn't know it at the time.
I didn't know it till several weeks later.
But I had been on the right pathway or the right track from the very beginning.
Now this is, as I said at the top of this show, an Indiana Jones style exploration here.
How were you getting money to do this?
I had a prosperous business in Florida.
I had an electric machine shop, electric motor shop with machine lathes and milling machines.
We did electric motor rewinding, transformers, generators, and I also did hazardous waste.
As you said, disposal, yeah.
Not so much disposal, but decontamination.
I fixed pumps and motors and panels that were inside critically severe, hazardous environments.
So really specialist stuff that would make you enough money to be able to indulge your interest, your passion.
Correct.
So there you are.
You've seen it by XMAX the spot.
Bingo, you're there.
Boom.
What do you do after that?
Well, Burroughs found out about it and he came after us.
And what was he telling you?
Was he telling you that I own this, that I have title to this?
You know, what reason could you?
What the thing was, is you're in the wrong spot.
You're in the wrong spot.
What you're looking for is 10 miles away.
It's 2 miles away.
It's 3 miles away.
It's 4 miles away.
And he was very inconsistent.
And if I was in the wrong spot, why not just say, hey, yeah, you're right there, man.
Well, that's what I would have done.
Okay, so you had a certain amount of opposition.
How did you get to be able to explore it, if you were able to?
With using local help, local assistance.
But as I grew to learn more about the local population here, there were many local people, treasure hunters and people into amateur archaeology who had been following this Burroughs Cave thing for years before I ever knew about it.
And then I actually met people who had been down in the ravine back in the early 80s at the same time that Burroughs had been in there and who knew Russell Burroughs and knew of him.
And what stories did they tell of what was found there?
Their stories are quite elaborate and lengthy, and they're documented in book one.
I can't be too specifically detailed about them, but they had all known that this site was registered in treasure books and had been registered in treasure books for years.
And it had been checked out.
But they didn't find the glory hole.
Burroughs found the glory hole.
And there is some writing that I've seen about a sarcophagus, almost Tutankhamun style, isn't there?
Yes.
Solid gold.
And how do we know about that?
How do you know about that?
Well, what I know about it is that a guy from Aldi, Illinois is not going to make up a story so fantastic that there's a solid gold sarcophagus buried in Marion County, Illinois.
And it's just too fantastic.
It's too outlandish.
Why wouldn't you make it up?
It'd be very good for tourism.
I mean, there's a thing called the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland that people have been debating for years, and everybody says, well, even if it doesn't exist, it's great for tourism.
And nevertheless, though, if anybody does much research, there's not too many ancient kings that were buried in solid gold sarcophagus, sarcophagi.
And so.
So did you assess the detail?
This person told you the story.
Did you assess the detail?
And presumably, the detail fitted point to point what would be found in a situation like that at a sarcophagus of that kind?
Correct.
And the descriptions that he had written about in his books were that there were 13 crypts.
One of them had a woman in them.
And the main crypt at the back of the cavern, this is all man-made caverns, about 12 to 16 feet underneath the ground.
That it was a stone that was rolled over the entrance.
He pushed the stone away.
And there was a solid gold sarcophagus in there.
And a solid gold sarcophagus sitting on a golden buyer.
That all of the bodies had been mummified and were sitting on rock buyers.
Right, what we call over here a beer, yeah?
Yeah, beer.
Funeral beer, yeah, got it.
So you would presumably want direct proof of your own if it was me doing that exploration.
I would want to see something of my own.
Well, once the script had been broken, I met with Burroughs.
I showed him the decipherment video step by step, letter by letter, word for word.
And in his book, he had like this one little tablet that said, this came out of the main corridor outside the main crypt.
Okay, well, there's a little portrait of a guy there.
It's read from bottom up.
It's in Greek.
It has Latin characters and Greek characters.
And it says, Baz Alex Upelleo.
And Baz Alex Upellio, King Alexander of Pella.
It was a very low-brainer.
And it made sense.
What we have here is the entire Ptolemaic dynasty entombed about four miles from where I'm standing right now.
And no one in the last 20 years has been able to come up with anything.
Now, in that period of time, they have had so many news stories in Egypt and Sudan and other places, Ethiopia.
Oh, we found the Ptolemaic dynasty or we found Alexander the Great.
And there are so many people who are looking for the lost tomb of Alexander the Great.
And there are so many people looking for the lost tomb of Cleopatra or Cleopatra is what I've called them.
Queen of Queens, because there were seven of them.
Queen of Queens.
And what they fail to understand in reading their classical history is that all these bodies were buried together.
They were buried together.
If you're looking for Cleopatra or Alexander, you're looking for all the Ptolemies as well.
If you're looking for Ptolemy Arigates II, Fiscon, Potbelly, you're looking for everyone else.
If you're looking for the pipe player, you're looking for Cleopatra.
But wouldn't research as we know it up to now and a fair amount of common sense suggest that those bodies would be buried closer to where I am now rather than closer to where you are now?
Well, obviously they're not.
Everybody that's looking for them, they're looking for them on the wrong continent.
And it's only, what, 21 days, 22 days' sail from over there.
And Diodorus Siculus, writing in, what, 54 B.C., he talks about the happy land, way too many days' sail to the west, with many navigable rivers, fruit trees of every kind.
This happy land, or the land of many smiles, some people call it, was documented.
It wasn't a secret.
So you're saying for this ancient civilization, their Las Vegas really was over there.
It's just that the rest of us, in more modern times, weren't aware of that.
Correct.
And that's where the classical history kind of drops off and where people just figure, well, it's not written in English that I can understand it, so it must be fake, or it must not have happened.
It's where you get back to what we call American scholarship and the flaws contained within it.
Harry, you've been in this cave.
Yeah?
Is that right?
No.
You haven't?
No.
We just, I spent years just getting an accurate location of it.
Right now the land is for sale.
We've proven that there are underground caverns there, and the landowner wants a large chunk of change for someone to purchase it to open it up.
And that's pretty much where we're at.
So you're trying to get the money together to buy this site?
Yes, yes.
I spent probably about a little over $800,000 through the years to determine exactly where this thing is.
And what guarantees can you give to people that you are not just wanting to raise that money or you're not colluding with the owner of this land just to perpetuate one great big hoax?
Just look at my geological surveys.
We did Earth resistivity three times out there.
And you can have your own geologist examine my work.
My work is impeccable.
Everything is accurate.
The machines are all set perfect.
And the one flaw in your story is that you've heard a lot of detail from some people who live locally.
And of course, they would have been, a lot of them around there at that time when all this stuff was happening.
But you yourself have never been able to gain access to that place.
And that must be an enormous frustration for you.
It has been an enormous frustration for many, many people.
Not just myself.
I have several people who have been with me through this since day one.
And yes, but not only that, it's really hurt the state of Illinois.
It's hurt our country.
This would be a boom to the area.
It could actually probably try to save the state of Illinois.
And of course it would be a boon to the area.
And I don't want to keep harping on about this because I find the story fascinating.
Of course I do.
But it would be a boon to the area if the whole thing was a fake, wouldn't it?
You'd still get the tourists in, you'd still get visitors in, and you'd still get people writing conspiracy theory books and books debunking it and books supporting it.
It would still be good for business.
Well, you could actually set up a museum here, anywhere near here, and show just a few hundred of these artifacts and really make out well.
I mean, just I would pay to see them.
There's more artifacts here than there are in many, many museums, especially from here in North America.
Now, you can go to a museum and see artifacts from South America, Central America, all day long, just room after room after room.
And even Hopewell stuff, mound stuff.
But the most important point of this is, let's leave aside any fakery, jiggery, pokery that might have been going on.
The important fact for us in the rest of the world to know is that some of this stuff you believe is the real deal.
And then we have the question of how did this stuff...
Yeah?
But it is, I need to elaborate a little more.
Is any of the artifacts that people purchased after summer of 1995 are fake and tainted?
And what the ones before that were the real deal?
Are you saying the ones before 1995 were the real deal?
A lot of stories from the Old Testament depicted on the stones, a lot of what they call the Michigan tablet influences, the mystic symbol, a lot of stuff just all over the place.
And we can see them coming across the room.
Harriet, do you own, do you personally own any of the artifacts that are ones that you think are the real deal?
Have you bought any?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And many people around here own many more than I do.
I had 15 artifacts destroyed in a fire back in 2008.
And now I've got three or four.
And if I'm doing a lecture or anything, there's hundreds from around here that I can pick to choose from.
Okay, and of the artifacts that you personally own, that you currently have, which is the most convincing?
Oh, all three of them are.
You can see pictures of them.
I've got one that's an unknown type of marble.
This got an Egyptian priest sitting holding an Ankh.
And I've got also a very large piece of honey calcite.
It's the largest piece of calcite anyone in the museum has ever seen.
And it's inscribed, has like a woodland Native American on it.
And then I have the face.
Where would you get in this day and age?
If I was looking for a piece of honey calcite like that, where would I get it if I was where you are?
This is a stone that's indicative to southern Illinois and northern Kentucky.
It's a honey calcite.
That area south of us here, about 120 miles, is very famous for fluorospar and calcite.
So somebody in an ancient civilization, you're saying, inscribed this thing in situ in that area.
They didn't bring it from somewhere else.
No, both.
There are many native stones that we have from around this area.
Some sandstone.
There's like a wolverine and bears, three-dimensional pieces carved in sandstone.
And there's other types of stone that are native to here.
And then there are many stones that come from overseas.
The black stone, the Lavagna stone with the indicative fossils embedded inside it and the pyrite embedded inside it all come from Italy, Lavagna.
We call it Lavagna because that's close to the town where it's found.
And there are geologists that say, oh, no, this came from over here, this came from over here.
But when I look at their work and I examine their papers and what they're saying, it doesn't stack up.
I'm sorry.
You know, there we go back to American scholarship.
And I suppose the biggest bit of information, the biggest bit of evidence that you have on your side, Harry, is that if you were a faker and if you wanted to fake the entire story and every single artifact, it would take you more time than most of us have got alive.
Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, most definitely.
It take a lot of people, a lot of time.
Yes, correct.
I have seen probably about 4,000 or so artifacts that are for real.
And I would say that now there are at least 400 to 500 fakeries.
I mean, that are obvious fakes that Burroughs and some of him with his consortium have just manufactured in modern day times that will not hold up in forensic labs.
And people need to be aware of that.
Well, can I just ask you, if you made this great big discovery, why would you want to go faking stuff?
Because that discovery is so huge, there would be no point in doing it.
To keep everyone off balance, to continue to make money, and to there were many situations where an artifact collector, someone who has a lot of money, will want a certain type of stone or a certain type of caricature on that stone.
Well, I just go home, I carve you one, I put that insignia on it that you want with a motif, the Egyptian motif, or however you want it, cartouche, and I sell it to you.
And I get more money.
Okay.
And that's how it all happened.
Harry Hubbard, here's an important question.
What is in this for you?
Books, movies, stuff like that.
Lecture, explanation of artifacts.
My fate's sealed.
I certainly am not going to be getting any gold and melting it down I will be able to I started book number three, and there would possibly be number four, number five.
And once somebody does purchase the property, which I believe we get closer to on a day-to-day basis, that I suspect that that person would probably hire Paul and I to put together volumes and volumes and volumes of data and information.
Okay, so you yourself are not in the bidding to buy this piece of land.
It's too rich for you.
I'm a researcher investigator, correct.
So you're waiting for somebody.
I'm just amazed that if this story is as genuine as you think it is, why some huge American university, backed perhaps by some multinational corporation, doesn't say, doesn't matter how many million dollars this takes, here's the money.
Because American collegiate institutions tow a very, very fine line.
Columbus first.
Nobody before Columbus.
No European influence at all.
Even though we've got Phoenician script and ancient coins, Roman coins, ancient Greek coins.
Could that be because the academics over here in London and in various other places are still skeptical about this and still think the whole thing is hogwash?
Well, it all depends on where you go in London.
Certainly if we had L.A. Waddell, it wouldn't be that way.
But there are— I mean, look at economics.
You get a room full of economists, and you'll never get two of them to agree.
Academics don't agree.
So I'm surprised that some academics have not come to you and said, we don't care what those guys over there say.
We believe you.
We will back you.
Academics and scholarship here, you're not going to get it.
It would have to take somebody, probably an amateur archaeologist, someone who is interested in ancient civilizations here, to do something like that.
And I mean, if I had, I'm hoping that there's someone out there who has just like incredible financial resources that just wants to shut Harry Hubbard up.
Okay, Harry Hubbard, we're going to prove you wrong.
We're going to shut you up.
We're going to make you look like a fool.
Come on.
I would love that because so far we've stood the test of time for 20 years running and nobody has come up with anything different.
But Harry, you know, there are still people who think that Michael Jackson is not dead and that Kennedy wasn't assassinated really and that we didn't land on the moon.
So you know that you will always benefit from the fact that you will always get the benefit of the doubt.
And Hitler was in Argentina, that Elvis is alive, that it goes on, and that Lotten Lottenes Nessie.
So, what I'm saying to you is that you know that you will always get the benefit of the doubt from people, even if some academics say you're a complete charlatan and you're completely wrong.
You know that some people will always say, well, there must be a grain of truth in what this guy has to say.
I would possibly hope that.
There have been people, many, countless articles written concerning me that are just absolutely false.
Secondhand information, here, say, here, say, here, say.
Well, we don't want to go naming names, but I've seen stuff on the net.
I've done exactly that.
And there is stuff on the internet that is quite dismissive of you.
Now, I don't want to name any names.
People have been saying this stuff because I don't want to get involved in any of that.
But you know that you have your critics.
Yes.
Oh, yes.
And when it comes down to it, they don't know anything of the story.
They have never seen an artifact that was, you know, possibly.
But again, you've never been in the cave.
Right, right.
And there are people that have deduced that the artifacts are fake.
Well, the dozen or so artifacts that they have actually seen in hell, they were fake.
So, you know, it's kind of convoluted.
And what about the artifacts that you own, Harry?
Have you had any of those analyzed by academic research institutes?
I have them analyzed forensically at a lab in Santa Fe who is on retainer by the Chicago Field Museum, the Belgian Museum of Natural History.
And they've all come up okay.
Yes.
Yes.
All right.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
They fly through forensics as 1,600 years before present, 1,800 years before present, because all you have to do here in America is get over that 500, 600-year hump, and boom, you're there.
So, and that's what we've done.
Of course, it helps when you've got an artifact that's inscribed and actually has a Roman date on it.
And Roman towns, there's some stones that actually have actual places, real places with the old Latin names on them.
But we can go into the script.
This is very similar to the Verilanda texts, some of that, which is heavily abbreviated.
You know, the American scholars won't accept anything that's abbreviated.
We're out there, you know.
But when you read the ancient classics or any form of ancient tablets, they're heavily abbreviated.
Are you happy that in your lifetime, Harry, you will see yourself as you would see it vindicated?
I don't know.
I don't know.
What's most important is for me to leave and to provide researchers, investigators with accurate information that they can take over where I left off.
But at the moment, is anybody following you, any academic following you in that way?
There's a few investigators that are picking up on, that have picked up through the years.
And we are on Facebook, the Illinois Caves.
My books are available at www.alxanderhelios.com.
And we have a massive webpage at the IllinoisCaves.com.
All right.
Can I just, I know I'm probably being really dim.
Why Alexander Helios?
I know it's...
Because that's the guy that brought it all over here.
That's the guy that brought it all over here.
And ask me, who is he?
Who is he?
He is Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, Queen of Queens, Cleopatra, son, oldest son, missing from history after about age 10.
And so if he was missing from history, he was missing in action in the U.S. What is now the U.S.?
U.S. Yes, and there are many tablets that show him growing up and in different priestly garb as a warrior in different helmet designs.
So he was living there.
As king.
He was living there.
He was king here.
Okay.
This is, I mean, it's a huge and fascinating story.
His name is written in Greek characters in a cartouche, and the rest of the tablet is in Egyptian glyph.
And a lot of this is on our webpage, illinoisaves.com.
And you can see a lot more stuff on, well, just dozens and dozens and dozens more pictures of artifacts on Facebook, the Illinois Caves.
And you can order, there's even some free articles, no charge articles on the alexanderhelios.com.
And you can also access our management from zttconsulting.com.
So there's a lot of information there.
My books are available as e-books.
They're very well priced because years and years ago, when I was making them by hand and self-publishing them, they were very expensive to do because there's so many color pictures and you have to have the ancient font in there to understand what happened and how the script was broken.
And my next book will have no pictures, color illustrations in it.
They're just all going to be pretty much straightforward.
Okay.
And can you do something?
And, you know, we Brits have a reputation for being quite polite.
And I think by and large we are.
I think you guys in the States are more direct, and I love you for it.
But we are a little reticent and somewhat polite at times.
Not always, but sometimes.
So I'm going to be a little impolite now.
And at the end of this conversation, I want to ask you this.
Can you swear to me now, because I'm going to get a torrent of email about you, that you are not part of a grand hoax and a big fake?
Oh, correct.
Yeah, no doubt.
No doubt.
People, like I was going to say, people have accused me and Paul of being in cahoots with Burroughs.
And that was years ago.
Oh, you're just working with Burroughs.
No, we're not.
And this is not, I don't like eat or steal and I don't pull legs.
And we have been saying the very same thing.
Now, there are dozens and dozens of interviews of mine that I have done through the years available on YouTube.
And every time we are saying the same thing, Paul's got interviews on there too.
My associate, Paul Shafranka.
We say the same thing each and every time.
There is no, oh, one time, Harry, you said this, one time you said that.
Well, what's the truth?
There's no confusion in How we come across and what we say.
And even in our videos, that we, even if it's fun videos that go way out in left field, all we're doing is showing you what, like the map video.
We're showing you what the maps say.
We're not telling you to go there.
We're just showing you what they say.
You make up your mind of where you want to take it.
And the same thing with our decipherment videos.
It's all letter by letter, word for word.
And none of the tablets have been made by us.
All the tablets that we show are for real.
And how much have you spent on this over the years then, Harry?
What, money or time?
Well, I'm just trying to get out of you if you've spent in exploration and research more than you've made by selling books.
Oh, yeah, oh, most definitely.
I'll probably never, ever compensate for what I've spent.
Like I said, I've spent probably over $800,000 through the year since 1993, 94 to locate where this thing was and plus all the time involved with it.
And when the new owner of that land in Illinois, when the new owner gets it and hopefully gives you access to it, do you want to be first through the, not the door, but the portal of that cave?
You want to be first in there?
Not necessarily.
I would, first of all, want that tested for spores that make you go nuts.
I would rather, we believe, well, we don't believe.
We speculate.
The reason that Burroughs could be so evasive concerning it is that perhaps maybe there's hydrogen sulfide in there.
It could be radon, gas.
There could be something turned septic in there.
Or if you want to go right out there, it may be cursed.
Well, I wouldn't.
The cursing wouldn't bother me as much as sewage or diphtheria, dysentery, or some kind of ancient funk that you can't wash off in the shower.
Harry Hubbard, we've got to leave it there.
But listen, thank you very much for telling me that story.
Just give me the main website again, the Alexander Helios one.
Yeah, www.alxanderhelios.com.
And from there, you can get to Facebook.
Our main webpage concerning this is attitudated is illinoiscaves.com.
And my email is available there, too.
Okay, all right.
Well, let me know what feedback you get.
And if I get feedback on you, which I will, I will let you know about this.
Thank you very much.
Harry Hubbard there with an amazing Indiana Jones.
I told you it was an Indiana Jones style story here at The Unexplained.
Harry, thank you very much.
My name is Howard Hughes.
We're out of time.
This show is got out to you by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who designed the website.
If you want to give me feedback or send me your stories, as we talked about at the top of the show, your paranormal or unusual stories, one place to do that, www.theunexplained.tv.
And as I say, Adam Cornwell designed that website.
If you want to send me feedback donation to the show, that is the one-stop shop to do that.
We're totally out of time.
My name is Howard Hughes.
Hope you enjoyed this show.
More good stuff to come here at The Unexplained.
Take care.
Look after yourself.
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