Bluff Creek and Wallace's Wooden Feet
In August 1958 the bulldozer operator Jerry Crew brought a plaster cast of a sixteen-inch footprint into the office of the Humboldt Times, taken from a logging road at Bluff Creek in northern California. The headline coined the word Bigfoot and the story went national — this is where the creature got its name. The contractor on that road was Ray Wallace. After he died in 2002 his family showed reporters a pair of feet carved from alder that he had used to make the prints, and said he had been doing it from the start. His son put it plainly: the reality is, there is no Bigfoot.
The Vinland Map
A parchment that surfaced with a European dealer in 1957 and was bought for Yale: a fifteenth-century world map with an island of Vinland drawn west of Greenland — America, decades before Columbus. Yale announced it in 1965, on the eve of Columbus Day, and the argument ran for half a century. In 1974 Walter McCrone found anatase in the ink, a form of titanium dioxide first manufactured in the 1920s. Yale gave the final answer in September 2021: X-ray fluorescence mapping showed titanium ink along every line of the map, and beneath it an erased medieval inscription. The parchment is genuine; the map on it is not.
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