Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [69]
The museum in lea is an amateur affair, run by a dentist. The fakes are rather amateurish, too. I say this because my experience in Peru has acquainted me with some of the finest phony pottery and grave articles that have ever been made. Artisans there use precisely the same methods employed by the ancients in making their pottery, and since most of their product is copied directly from the fine work produced by those little-recognized masters of long ago, it is almost impossible to detect the fakery unless you know a few tricks of the trade. But the Stones of lea have been the subject of several books, all printed in Peru and all of which take the rocks quite seriously. But those who deal in such things have known for a long time that they are utter fakes.
The "Nova" folks looked into the matter and were not long in discovering the truth. All they did was to visit the area, where they found the dentist, who was reluctant to discuss the matter when he discovered that they wanted to ask some penetrating questions rather than do the kind of careless and incomplete "investigation" von Daniken had done. Within an hour they had found out where the stones were really made and drove a few miles out of town to order a custom-made heart transplant item to be prepared while they waited and filmed the process.
The point is that von Daniken had this procedure available to him too. He was well equipped and financed and able to find out the truth about the stones; he simply did not want to.
Of course, merely finding a local artisan who said he was the maker of the stones, and who then made one to order that was indistinguishable from the "genuine" ones, proved only that he was a good artisan and could have made the whole lot. What was needed was some sort of evidence that the ones offered as genuine were actually fakes. And it was not hard to find. Great antiquity was claimed for the stones as finished items. This meant that the shallow carved grooves were bound to be weathered on the edges, a characteristic that could be seen with the use of a microscope. Careful examination by the "Nova" experts revealed that not only was there no such weathering but also that the stone custom-made on the spot was indistinguishable from the "genuine" ones.
I could have told them that there was a story going around Lima in the huaquero (grave-robber) hangouts that if you mentioned your profession to the doctor in lea, then excused him for fifteen minutes, you would hear dental drills whining away in a back room until he returned from the depths of his museum with a carved stone that, by a strange and somewhat contrived coincidence, bore a picture of someone from the distant past engaged in your very profession. Also well known to huaqueros is an aging process used to make fake artifacts look old. It is a treatment that involves donkey dung and is best left to the imagination.
There is at least one thing for which von Daniken must be given credit. He has improved upon the crude technique of the Big Lie used by others and given us, instead, the Provocative Fact. He bombards us with interesting and in some cases quite valid bits of information and allows us to assume that what he has presented is pertinent and laden with hidden meaning and proof. The same technique was used by the Gellerites when they assured us that at no time did Uri Geller use laser beams, magnets, or chemicals to bend spoons. This was quite true. It is also quite true that he had no eggbeaters, asbestos insulation, or powdered aspirin in his pockets either. So what? To quote at random from Chariots of the Gods?, von Daniken gives us—with no textual connection whatsoever and each in a separate paragraph—various statements that only seem to support his claims: