The Kensington Runestone
In 1898 the Swedish farmer Olof Öhman was clearing an aspen on his land near Kensington, Minnesota, and found a slab in the roots with a runic inscription: a party of eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey west from Vinland, ten men killed, the year 1362. The stone became the proof of a Norse presence deep inside the continent. Runologists have pointed to the same thing from the beginning: the language is not medieval Swedish but a nineteenth-century Swedish dialect written in runes, with forms and loanwords that did not exist in 1362 and characters known only from the schoolbooks of the day. No specialist in runes has ever accepted it.
The Columbus Poltergeist
In March 1984, in Joan and John Resch's house in Columbus, telephones, lamps and glasses flew around their fourteen-year-old adopted daughter Tina. A Columbus Dispatch photographer caught a sequence of a handset in mid-air and the picture went round the country. A WTVN crew left a camera running while Tina believed she was not being filmed: the tape shows her reach out and pull a standard lamp over. James Randi, who came later, showed that every flight happened strictly outside an observer's line of sight, and the photographer admitted he had only pressed the shutter when the girl was looking away. The parapsychologist William Roll went on regarding the case as genuine.
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