Other video:
Butterflies for Cash
Swim to Freedom
A night in solitary
Building an escape raft

Read on for some context to the investigation… Who was Papillion? And was his story accurate?

Dispatch from Devil’s Island
The most famous person to escape from Devil’s Island was Papillion – made into an awesome film staring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. How much of it was actually true? The film was shot largely in Jamaica but in its design and narrative cuts closer to the reality than most Hollywood films. The book Papillion, on which the film was based on, was written by Henri Charriere and even by the author’s own admission was not entirely accurate: “let’s say I lived through 75% of what I wrote. So help me, the rest is purely questions of errors and memory”.

Charriere was born Nov 16th 1906, was imprisoned in the penal colony of French Guinea and escaped to Venezuela to write his book and die a millionaire. The records of his internment have been lost, so often it’s his words against another. One thing we do know – he did have the Papillion (butterfly) tattooed on his chest (as did McQueen in the film) as a symbol of freedom. Historians point to inaccuracies in his story including claiming to have escaped 9 times and murdered a fellow prisoner Bebert Collier for which he was given 8 years in solitary, whilst the maximum was only five. Splitting hairs perhaps, but Alexander Miles, author of Devil’s Island: Colony of the Damned and the historian featured in our film, believes that the events and adventures described in Charriere’s book were probably performed by others and compiled and claimed by Charriere himself. But to Charriere’s credit, he did say he only ‘lived through them’, so you can interpret that, as you like. Convicts that knew him described him an ‘unknown’, ‘a completely insignificant prisoner’, and ‘a mild non-rebellious type’. And the big question from the film? Did he escape on a bag of coconuts? Well, I put it to the test to see whether it was possible, but one thing I can say, is that there was no need to count the waves before jumping in.

Devil’s Island is two things – in general it’s the name that has become synonymous with the entire penal colony of French Guiana which included prisons and work camps on the mainland and the 3 Salvation Islands; but it’s also the name of the smallest of the Salvation Island – the others being Royale and St. Joseph. The name ‘Salvation’ is a touch misrepresentative of their penal history (the convicts called them the ‘Islands of Death’) and refers to the name the islands were given by the first French colonial settlers who arrived in 1763. 10,000 of the first 14,000 died of disease and starvation in the first two years, the survivors held out on the islands where typhus and malaria were less frequent. The French claimed this to be ‘a humanitarian triumph’ describing French Guiana as ‘one of the most generous ideas of the century, one that would allow convicts to release their chains… no longer would they rot in French dungeons but the eternal springtime of a lush and wholesome land’.

For the convicts it was hell on earth, an experience clarified when we visited the solitary confinement cells and where I spent one of the worst nights of my life. Men were sentenced to between 6months to 5 years for a variety of crimes including trying to escape. The ‘tiger cages’ were 5ft by 7ft, walls that broke men’s wills, a wooden plank for a bed, shackles, a bucket for the toilet, no windows, and the ceiling was iron bars where guards walked on a catwalk above. Noise was forbidden, occasionally broken by the screams of the men who cracked, often going insane, and usually described like the sound of men slowly becoming ‘howler monkeys’. The undisputed King of the Dark Cells was Paul Rossenq who spent a total of 3,779 days in the cells including for the following crimes:

• Tearing and destroying prison uniform: (30 days)
• Calling out to other prisoners in solitary (30 days)
• Refusing to put irons on at night (30 days)
• Refusing to be let out of irons in the morning (30 days)
• Accusing guards of stealing 2 Francs from him (60 days)
• Putting head between the bars and screaming (“Another punishment if you please” (30 days)

Rossenq wrote a 300 verse poem called Hell and immortalised the dehumanising process in the lines: “I am no longer a man, for prison has entered into me and I am the prison”. I spent a night in the cells to try and understand a little bit of what they experienced. The physical discomfort of the pressure-cooker unabating equatorial heat, the endless stream of cockroaches running over my sweating body could be over-come but it was the mental side that broke me. The rot set in whilst trying to communicate the experience to a night-vision camera, Iand recalling the stories of men like Rossenq and Belbenoit, the latter who wrote, “He lives in dim light, from dark to dawn – blackness and silence. He is alive in a tomb”.

The silence was overwhelming, the silence of ghosts… there was an awful presence that seemed to perspire from the walls, of the 100s, if not 1000s of souls that were extinguished en masse, imprisoned to a living death. After a while I stopped talking to the camera, as it’s just seemed to take my mind into a darkness I did not want it go. But once that bit of the brain had been opened, it couldn’t be shut – memories that I’d buried away deep in the dusty recesses hoping never to be recalled, seemed to emerge like ghosts crawling back along the synapses to commune with the other dark horrors that inhabited those cells. Psychiatrists believe that just 2 hours in solitary confinement is enough to generate significant psychological change in a patient (some still use it), and within a few hours I was a broken man. Despite the reassuring knowledge that come morning I would see the sun and sky, I thought I would have had the strength to deal with it, but I didn’t. The experience did help my understanding of prison life but there is obviously no way I could extrapolate upon my superficial experience to truly understand what those men went through.

Nobody denies that crimes should be punished but the extent of that punishment should be relative to the crime and according to judicial and human standards. The numbers speak for themselves – less than 10% of convicts survived and with them the painful double paradox of one of the most sophisticated nations on earth, maintaining for nearly 100 years, one of the most brutal penal systems in the world whilst the forsaken men took up the challenge to try to beat the system and survive at almost incalculable odds. For the men that did survive and the few that did escape, they remain a beacon of almost unimaginable strength and bravery that can exist in the depths of human spirit.

Some Questions answered:

A dark investigation into the nightmare of Hitler’s Aryan worldview, Nazi racial policies, how ‘bog-bodies’ were used by Himmler as justification for murder, SS expeditions to Tibet, (Hitler thought Buddha was the last great Aryan leader), gun-wielding modern-day neo-Nazis, the complicity of the scientific community to provide the SS with the pseudo-legitimacy to justify industrial mass-murder. Horrific.

More Video
Master Race HQ
Bog Bodies
Aryan Purity Myth
Armed white activist
Elusive Aryan Genes

If possible I would advise reading my Dispatch before hand as I hope it helps provide important context for the investigation… Read it here….

DISPATCH
Having watched and studied the Indiana Jones films in some depth, I never thought the Nazi connection to the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail or even secret SS expeditions to the Himalayas was even remotely plausible or what they actually represented. Like many times before, I was of course wrong. And alarmingly so. I have not felt so shocked and embarrassed about how little I knew about a period of history of such unspeakable horror.

It’s no secret that Hitler and Himmler had a twisted historical worldview where three groups existed: Founders of Culture (Aryans), Bearers of culture and Destroyers of culture (vermin). They believed there was once a mighty tribe of original Atlanteans, a master race of Aryans that once ruled the world. Often they had Nordic traits including a long head, narrow face, flat forehead, narrow nose, angular chin, thin lips, tall slender body, blue eyes and blond hair. Probably at their great embarrassment, neither Hitler nor Himmler fitted this prescription. Himmler was once appropriately described as looking like a half-starved shrew and when challenged on this point his defence was pathetic at best: “I may not look Nordic, but I possess a Nordic brain” and in defence, Hitler was known to quote scientist Herman Gauch who in 1933 cleared up any confusion with the cryptic but immortal lines: “The reason why birds can be taught better than other animals is explained by the fact that their mouths are Nordic in structure”.

In the minds of Hitler and Himmler this was just the beginning of their insanity and the destruction they would wreak in their evil, twisted perspective. Hitler believed his nation and race had become weak, corrupted by an infusion of degenerate elements into the bloodstream. In his mind, society had to be cleansed, to be built on strong, racially pure blood-stock – an idea he made repeatedly clear, not least in 1942: “I shall have no peace of mind until I have planted a seed of Nordic blood wherever the population stand in need of regeneration”. But to enact his horrific vision upon his world, first he and Himmler needed to prove the existence of an Aryan race, and provide racial profiling of Aryans to support their racial policies.

Himmler took the lead and set up the official, scholarly sounding Das Ahnenerbe, the Ancestral Heritage Society. Their formal role was to promote ‘the science of ancient intellectual history… unearth new accomplishments and deeds of Germany’s ancestors… and communicate the findings to the public”. They possessed a public veneer of being an elite think tank of 137 German scholars, brilliant thinkers, representing all academia including history, biology, linguistics, geology, geneticists, archaeology, anthropology etc etc. They cultivated an air of solid professional integrity, disguising all their ideas as science and fact when in reality they were devoted to myth-making, distorting the truth and churning out tailored evidence to support Hitler and Himmler’s insane historical, and completely unsubstantiated, world view.

Das Ahnenerbe was run under the banner of the Himmler’s SS, academics became senior officers, and the SS provided logistical and military support for some of their expeditions. In order to provide pseudo-legitimacy to their ideas of Aryan supremacy or appear to retrieve some sort of ancient Aryan knowledge, expeditions were sent out to the four corners of the world: to Iceland to search for the Holy Grail (I kid you not you!), to Iran searching for evidence of ancient kings of pure Aryan blood, to Finland to record and film ancient magical rites (sounds recorded by a man called BOSE – any connection?), to Croatia, Serbia and Iraq to study the role of the Aryans in the Roman Empire and even to Tibet to measure the skulls of the Tibetans who they believed were the ancient immigrants and survivors from Atlantis. Wurst, the unfortunately named expedition leader, wrote in his report that “there is great similarity between the words of the Fuhrer and those of that other great Aryan personality, Buddha”. There you have it! That’s what we’re dealing with here – people who believed Buddha was an Aryan.

As we explore in this film, there was far greater depth to their delusion and I wish I could laugh at just how insane they were, but of course there is nothing remotely funny about the impact of their delusion and their subsequent industrialised mass murder. With the fabricated legitimacy constructed by the academic community, the Nazis established racial policies long before World War Two even started that included:
• July 1933: The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring – led to Compulsory sterilization of 400,000 people including those suffering from schizophrenia, deafness, hereditary blindness, epilepsy and severe alcoholism (this was the precursor to Action T4)
• 1935: Nuremberg Laws – pseudo-scientific basis presented for racial discrimination of Jews
• 1935: The laws of the Protection of German Blood and German Honour
• Lebensraum: As detailed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf – the German people needed increased “living space” (land and raw materials) for the expansion of the Aryan race – mixed Lebensraum with racism to provide the blueprint for aggression and invasion, occupation of Poland, Operation Barbarossa etc.
• Action T4: During the Nuremberg trials, it was estimated that 275,000 people had been killed under Hitler’s Secret memo of September 1st 1939 to kill those ‘unworthy of life’ to ‘improve racial hygiene’
• ‘Final Solution’: the industrialised mass murder of millions classified under Nazi racial policies of being ‘unworthy of life’: including Jews and Untermenschen (“under-human”) – gypsies, homosexuals, disabled, Slavic and non-Slavic Russians.

The Ahnenerbe were more than just a cult of crazy scientists – they provided the scientific justification for racial policies to promote racial purity that the Nazis presented as legitimacy for their aggression and the slaughter of millions. Some of the files of the Ahnenerbe were presented during the Nuremberg trials and a few were charged with war crimes varying from the plundering of museums and private art collections, to the cold brutality of human experimentation including exploring new ways to freeze, poison, and sterilize people and even creating a human skeleton collection.

Here we have a precedent of unspeakable horror, but this type of inhumanity, could and has happened again – in East Timor, Kosovo, Iraq, West Papua, Rwanda, Darfur to name but a few. In ‘Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity’ Goldhagen examine why people commit acts of mass murder and whether they were coerced into it. His research reveals that during the Holocaust, “no German perpetrator was ever killed, sent to a concentration camp, imprisoned, or punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews”. They, like others who carry out such atrocities, are motivated by politics and their ideology, believing what they are doing is right and necessary and there is little, sometimes, no coercion involved. “Mass elimination”, Goldhagen explains, “is always preventable and always results from conscious political choice…mass murder is a political act… it is not an expression of human nature and it’s not inevitable.”

I cant phantom how these lessons could ever be forgotten, and how this horror and cruelty has ever been allowed to happen again. But as history repeats itself, this will probably happen again. What can we do? I do not know. But we can start with burdening our consciences, take responsibility, look hard and not look away, speak up, question, and don’t claim we know nothing, or we too become complicity in these tragedies.

Questions and Discussions – read here

Wealth From Murder and Theft
The Nazis had a sick penchant for plundering every nation they invaded, most famously for their gold reserves and art. Germany began the war with reserves in the Reichsbank of around $208 million, of which some $97million represented gold already stolen from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Danzig. The total amount of gold looted by the Nazis during the war itself, not only from the defeated nations, such as Belgium, Holland and Hungary, but from Jewish and other victims, is now estimated at $580 million. The gold came from governments and civilians, including Jews murdered in concentration camps, from whom everything was taken down to the gold fillings of their teeth. Of this about $400 million (worth $4 billion today,) went to Switzerland either to the Swiss National Bank’s own account or through their banks to other nations. I’m ashamed to say, that I didn’t know that much about the Swiss connection during the war so I’ve been doing a bit of digging.

Nazi Gold Trading
The Swiss accepted some $280m ($2.8 billion today) on their own account and the rest went directly to the accounts of other countries (Portugal, Spain and Sweden, Turkey, Argentina) in payment for goods and raw materials. Most of it has never been recovered. The Bergier commission (an investigation set up by the Swiss Government) says 76% of Nazi gold transactions went through Switzerland and the volume of trade between Swiss private banks and war-time Germany was at least three times higher than earlier estimates indicated. The Swiss returned only $58 million in gold, keeping gold valued by a Swiss historian at $350 million ($3.5 billion at today’s prices!).

Sinister Swiss Accountants
They also kept most of an estimated $250 million to $500 million in liquidated German assets — even some from German Jews. Half of this was supposed to go to stateless victims, who finally got about $28 million. In 1962, Swiss banks began “finding” “lost” bank accounts, finally returning $9.5 million to rightful owners in the early 1970s. Pressed again in 1996, they suddenly “found” another $32 million in 1996. In the past few years, they have now apparently located $46.8 million in 5,600 “dormant” accounts opened by “foreigners” before May 1945. They are still a long way short of “finding” all the missing accounts.

Aiding the Enemy
The Swiss National Bank, as well as the Bank for International Settlements (based in Switzerland) openly carried out gold transactions between neutral central banks and the Reichsbank during the war, thus facilitating the Nazi war effort. The US War Department, Treasury Department, Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Justice Department all accused the Swiss of also engaging in direct production for Nazi Germany and providing protection for their investments. Swiss shipping lines furnished Germany with a large number of boats for the transport of goods. Switzerland also allowed an unprecedented use of its railways to link Germany and Italy for the transport of coal and other goods. Switzerland provided Germany with arms, ammunition, aluminum, machinery and precision tools, as well as agricultural products. Swiss convoys carried products from Spain across France through Switzerland to Germany. This collaboration continued even as the Germans retreated and the threat of invasion evaporated. As late as early 1945, Switzerland gutted an agreement it had just reached with the United States to freeze German assets and to restrict purchases of gold from Germany.

An Amber Room Connection?
In the making of this film, we focused mainly on investigating the Amber Room, but the research in Nazi looting and especially the little known complicity of Switzerland, has truly helped to inform our wider understanding of these events. I’m obviously not saying that the Amber room in held in Swiss bank vaults (although anything is possible – and it seems very possible that the Amber Room could be hidden with numbers to Swiss bank accounts), but there is still a huge amount we don’t know about what happened during the war. The Nazi legacy, including the complicity of others and the location of some of their plunder, still remains unsolved.

A few more video links: (From the Discovery US Site for Solving History)
Mysterious nazi cargo:
Exploring Nazi Tunnels
Nazi Gold Hoard

Some Questions answered and previous discussions on my blog: Read here

Exploring the mystery of El Dorado — its very name has has become synonymous with a legend of a mythical city of gold lost in the wilds of South America. For hundreds of years explorers have mounted expeditions to find it… and as strange as it seems, I am a strong believer that there is lots still to be found… large chunks of unmapped, unexplored regions of the Amazon and the Andes, makes it technically possible.. and we actually find something new to add to the debate… From the golden churches of the Incan capital Cusco, we follow the trail of El Dorado (aka Paititi) along a road of ruins deep into the remote Andes Mountains….

More Video links:
Inca Bridges
Lost Inca Road
Conquisador Gold Theft
Inca Master Builders
Coca Leaf Pit stop

Dispatch: Could a lost city still be out there waiting to be found? Read why I think so….

Could a lost city still be out there waiting to be found?

The Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532, lead by Francisco Pizarro – 182 men, mainly independent freeloaders and mercenaries, motivated by the greed for gold and carrying out their invasion in the name of God and the Crown. They set about ripping out the golden heart of the Inca monuments described in part by Ciezo de Leon:
“In of the one of the houses, which was the richest, there was the figure of the sun, very large and made of gold, very expensively worked and enriched with many precious stones. They also had a garden, the clods of which were made of pieces of fine gold, and it was artificially sown with golden maize, the stalks as well as the leaves and cobs, being of that metal…”

The Spanish famously kidnapped the Inca Atahualpa and ransomed him, unsurprisingly for gold – the Inca bought gold from across the empire, including Prince Choqe Auki. En route, he heard that Pizarro hadn’t kept to his end of the bargain and had strangled Atahualpa. Legend has it, he hotfooted it through Calca, Lores, Choque, and Kancho Lago with 200,000 llamas with gold and Inca treasures. The Spanish went after him but never found him, nor his gold. Whether this is true or based on legend, we don’t know; but it is just part of the origin of the mystery of a lost city of gold. What we do know is that the Spanish stole so much gold that it altered the whole European economic system.

A Peruvian economist Virgilio Rool tallied up the value of the gold and silver they stole (what the Inca called the ‘Sweat of the Sun’ and ‘The tears of the moon’), estimated the destruction and damage they inflicted, and reckoned it to be around $600billion. He lodged a demand for compensation with the Spanish government who instead replied with an offering to upkeep the Spanish churches – a deliberately tactless move I imagine, as in the eyes of some locals and others, the churches are seen as monuments to the genocide the Spanish carried out in the name of God. Whilst this figure of $600billion may seem high at first, it cannot of course come close to compensating for the cultural and moral damage inflicted upon the Andean people and the effect that this has even today. Whilst it’s true the Conquistadors did not intend to kill so many people (two thirds were unintentionally killed by smallpox brought in by the Spanish that the Andean people had no immunity to), and I’m not one to be an apologist for the Inca (who were not the most savoury crowd in history), what occurred was simply genocide motivated by the greed of gold. Sadly it seems we have not learned these lessons of history as the idea of raping a country of its wealth, often killing its inhabitants for the benefits of others, continues.

Gold was not in short supply and even to this day, the Andes and the Amazon are mined for gold. During our expedition up in the high Andes, we saw countless streams of white quartz, one of the key indicators of gold. Since the initial invasion, The Spanish, British and others have mounted expeditions in search of into the unmapped regions of South America usually motivated by one of a number of factors: 1) searching for routes to the south seas; 2) Hope of finding hidden kingdoms of fabulous wealth (El Dorado, Patiti, City of Z (the latter made famous by British Explorer Percy Fawcett of which a film is scheduled for release this year starring Brad Pitt); 3) Hope of discovering mineral deposits or fertile land for settlement. For centuries explorers have believed there could be a lost city of the Inca, El Dorado, Patiti, City of Z or whatever else you may call it, but is it is nothing more than a metaphor for hidden wealth rather than a real place?

There are still large chunks of the Amazon and high Andes that remain unmapped and largely unexplored by the outside world, so is it not possible that within these unchartered areas, there could still be something waiting to be found? Machu Pichu is still the most famous lost city to be found recently, and that was only discovered (or revealed to the outside world, as presumably the locals always new it was there) in 1911 by Hiram Bingham. The amusing, and oft-neglected part of this tale, is that he only spent a few hours at the site when he discovered it, took some pictures, made a rough sketch map, jotted down a few laconic lines in his journal, only afforded the site 7lines in his expedition report (whilst writing 2 pages on some old bones he found in a glacier) and took a year to return to it. Bingham was actually looking for Hatun Villacamba, the lost city of the Inca and he was initially convinced Machu Pichu wasn’t it. But Machu Pichu is not alone and the great Inca sites of Gran Pajaten and Espiritu Pampa (Vilacamba – rediscovered in 1964) should be considered among the pantheon of important archaeological discoveries in the 20th Century. But history continues to be revealing itself.

In the last few months, explorers using satellite technology have detected giant mounds over 155 miles, that seem to point to a sophisticated pre-Columbian culture near Brazil’s border with Bolivia (read more). These rediscoveries at the very least should stimulate the possibility that more sites, and possibly cities remain hidden.

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Read here for a discussion on this dispatch and questions raised and answered

Further Research on previous expeditions in search of El Dorado and Paititi (and some more questions previously posed and answered)

More Video links:
Inca Bridges
Lost Inca Road
Conquisador Gold Theft
Inca Master Builders
Coca Leaf Pit stop

Carved into the Peruvian desert thousands of years ago, the Nazca Lines have puzzled archaeologists and historians ever since their discovery 100 years ago. Stretching over hundreds of square miles, thousands of geometric shapes and animal figures mark the desert landscape – some as big as football fields, but all flat as the land itself, making them virtually invisible from the ground. Theories to explain the lines range from giant maps of the stars to alien runways to places for elaborate and bizarre rituals. Why would a people who couldn’t fly have built images that could only be seen from the air? Highlights include confronting grave robbers who try to sell me mummified heads, journeying to the real Temple of Doom, ingesting large quantities of san pedro in a shamanic ceremony in an effort to venture into the spirit world myself to unravel the mystery of the Nazca Lines… (watch out for the shaman spraying me with damp geraniums ;-) we do draw some compelling conclusions though ;-) hope you can tune in… (read on for my Dispatch: “Nazca: a tale of water?”

Dispatch: Nazca Lines: A tale of Water?

“Thousands have lived without love – not one without water”
W.H. AUDEN

I like water. Seas, lakes, rain, cloud, ice, in a bottle. It’s used and enjoyed by humans in all three states of matter. What more could you ask for from a fundamental component required for the existence of all life forms. With 97% of our biosphere made up of water, it’s no surprise that from space, we look like a blue planet. Those seeking life elsewhere in universe start with looking for water. Scientists think that much of the water in the universe is created as a by-product of star births. You can’t say that about many things. But what’s water got to do with the Nazcans? Well a lot I think.

Call me simple, but to understand the Lines, we need to understand the people who were inspired enough to create their timeless Guggenheim on Mother Nature’s gift of a massive natural canvass. They must have had something they wanted to get off their chest to go to such creative and inspired lengths. So who were these ancient artists?

The Nazcans were essentially farmers, and some of the more unfortunate agriculturalists, dealt the ancestral 13 in a game of cultivation pontoon – farming in the desert. Although 2000-plus years ago, things were as bad as they are now. But to their credit, they realized they needed to look after their most precious resource – water from the rivers that only flowed during certain times of the year.

The calendar, (the ability to predict the arrival of water so you can plan your planting and harvesting times) is the key component to successful agriculture. Take the Ancient Egyptians for example – they had to deal with periodic flooding of the Nile, so went to great lengths to create a precise calendar based on the appearance of the constellation Canis Major including one of my favorite stars, Sirius.

Maria Reiche knew this and wrote: “where time is not marked by natural cycles of growth and decay, man has to raise his eyes to the starry heavens, whose ever changing aspect records the passage of months and years with exactness and regularity.”

She concluded that the Nazca lines must have been a giant star chart calendar. Turns out she was wrong, but much of her thinking and analysis still appears to be right.

Recent archeological research has shown that the soil within the lines is far more heavily compacted than elsewhere, strongly suggesting that the compression was the result of huge numbers of people walking on the lines. But why? It appears to be far from the random act of geographically confused farmers, but rather something more purposeful, possibly, if not probably, some sort of ceremonial procession.

Water was in such short supply to the Nazcans, that it must have informed there physical relationship with their world, and then by implication, their spiritual relationship both to their gods and to one another. As Reiche said: “they appealed to the Gods when nature appeared to be out of time.” With such a critical and survival-dependent relationship to water, no effort would have been too great to try to win favor with their Gods, and what better way than taking large quantities of the psycho-active San Pedro, and marching out some kind of spiritual procession, a kind of ancient pilgrimage, an act of worship, a physical prayer to the Gods, the turners of the taps, to bring forth a deluge.

But I may be wrong. Perhaps future archeological findings will draw different conclusions. Which is what is so magical and quixotic about the lines. In this age of space exploration and high-speed communication, we still can’t be sure about the meaning of the biggest billboard in the world – the largest act of creative expression in the history of mankind. But these ancient artists died out, because their water did not come. All that is left today of the Nazcans are their lines and their graves, both warnings we would be foolish to ignore.

Some questions answered: Read here

Taking on the Alien Theorists:

Some Questions answered about aliens and more

Here’s an extract from my journals whilst investigating the Ark of the Covenant… exploring the role of belief and how it influences our understanding of history…

Field Dispatch: Ark of the Covenant: Believe it or not?
Historical documents record the existence of the Ark of the Covenant as a chest that housed the 10 commandments, given by God to Moses. Fortunately there were only 10 commandments, otherwise Moses would have needed a bigger box. That aside, did it really exist and did it really house the power of God inside? Of course, I have absolutely no idea. The historic and archeological records are wholly inconclusive, but is that the point?

If you believe in the Ark of the Covenant, then the Ark exists and vice versa. If you believe the Ark is missing, then you probably believe that when it’s found, it will bring strength to the weak and the oppressed will be free. And in my book, that conclusion is pretty good thing to believe in. Amen to that. I like happy endings. But isn’t that really a bit of a cop-out?

Belief remains at the core of so many great historical mysteries, but it may also supply an all too easy “get-out-jail-free” or “one-size fits all” generic super-conclusion to many of the historical riddles we question in this series. Yes, we can look at the historical, geological and archeological records to inform our opinion, but at some point, we’re still left projecting into the unknown – often based on belief, or even faith.

But what role does belief play in influencing our understanding of history? Well obviously a lot, but it’s one of those questions that I’ve never thought to ask until starting to make this series. So what is belief and where did it come from? Well it’s clearly way above my pay-grade and brain-station to have anything meaningful to contribute on the subject, but I like the question and hopefully hopefully someone reading this will have some intelligent thoughts to contribute and challenge.

Recent archeological discoveries gives credible evidence that religious practices have occurred for the last 300,000 to 500,000 years. Today, the vast majority of the world believes in something (less than 0.005% are atheists, I think) while religious subscription is declining in Europe, it is rising in America, Africa and Asia. As we continue to push out the frontiers of our knowledge to the point when we’re even trying to replicate the conditions of the Big Bang, why do the majority continue to want and need to believe in something mysterious?
Strip back the layers and complexity of modern religious thought, structure and practice and maybe there are clues to be found in the building blocks of belief. Prayer, ritual, meditation, music, art, history (oral and written) and ancestral and cultural traditions all help us understand the origins, evolution, the role and importance of belief systems in identity and society. Belief systems have traditionally helped us explain our existence and form the basis of how we see the world around us, often providing a guide to how we relate to our world. Time and again it is a leap of faith to explain the inexplicable and at times of fear, the belief structure can provides protection, consolation and even understanding. But with the benefits of modern science, is all religion and belief as Richard Dawkins claims, delusional? If so, is there a place for delusion? And how does that understanding, help us deal with religious extremism?

Is human morality defined by our modern religions or did it grow out of primate sociality, and evolved through our tribal ancestry? These are questions that I do not know the answers to, but they are questions I feel I should ask if I want to learn about our past, and leave my minds open to enjoy the magical possibility that we might just not have all the answers.

Links to some questions and answers:
some answers
some more answers

Sunday Times Choice of the Day:
“In the first of a series of appealing gung-ho historical investigations, the adventurer and journalist Olly Steeds explores the notion that it is fact rather than merely folklore that underpins the tale of Robin Hood. Trudging around Sherwood Forest, the presenter proves rigorous, probing academics, historians and a medieval survival enthusiast in an effort to separate reality from whimsy and gain a handle on Hood’s popularity”.

Read my Episode Dispatch: Who was Robin Hood & do we really need another Robin Hood film!?

“Give ear and listen, Gentlemen,
Who are of Freeborn Blood.
I shall tell you of a good yeoman,
His name was Robin Hood”
The Gest of Robyn Hood

Another Robin Hood? Really? Robin’s been given the Gladiator makeover, directed by Ridley Scott and with Russell Crowe tighting up in the Lincoln Greens. You’ve got to be kidding, right? We’ve already had Clark Gable, Disney, Sean Connery, Kevin Costner, and even the Oscar-overlooked, most natural of them all, Kermit. Surely Miss Piggy (Maid Marion) saving Kermit Hood from the evil Sheriff Gonzo with the help of some angry chickens should complete the Pantheon? In the latest incarnation, Mr. Crowe has dropped the frog-talk and the Costner twang in favour of a Rutland accent. Who knew Robin was from Rutland?

Rutland is somewhere around Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, is the smallest English county with a lovely Latin motto “Multum In Parvo”, “much in little” and it’s wetlands are a popular breeding ground for ospreys. Amongst the Nurdling community, Rutland, well the Jackson Stops Inn at Stretton is their Mecca, their Vatican, their Jerusalem. Every Late May Bank Holiday, men can be found tossing old pennies into a hole drilled into the seat of an oaken settle. These are the Nurdlers. Welcome to Rutland.

But was Robin a Nurdler? Possibly, although there’s no evidence either way, but the facts have never got in the way of the legend. Mainly because there are no ‘facts’ and Robin is an invention of the scribes of the day, changing through the times to appear relevant to every generation. Historians have trawled the archives searching for a real Robin, sadly without much luck. By 1300, at least 8 people had assumed the name Robin Hood (or Robehod etc), but it seems likely it was just a nickname given to outlaws and fugitives, who’s real names was unknown to the authorities. In Ye Olde English, the origin of the name is perhaps clearer – ‘Robin’ being used as a shortened version of Robber and the Hood referring to the common attire of Medieval England, an era defined with the fashion sensibility of the hoodie.

Robin really entered the public space through the ballads of the 14 and 15th Centuries – Robin Hood and the Monk, Robin Hood and the Potter, and A Gest of Robyn Hood. In these early stories, there was no love interest from Maid Marion, no link to Richard I, no mention of the resistance versus the Norman Conquest; he was a yeoman, not a peasant, knight or disposed Nobleman, and he wasn’t even a social rebel.

But the identity of the man matters less than the persistence of the legend. Through 700 years of ballad, book, poem, play, radio and film, Robin has stood the test of time, foreshadowing the superheroes, whilst constantly being reinvented to meet the changing social and political landscape of his changing audience.

Robin has travelled beyond literature into culture, politics and economics to become an attitude, and a social philosophy. Chancellor Darling’s last stab at house taxation was labelled a Robin Hood Tax, there’s even a Robin Hood Tax Campaign in the UK. Robin even exists beyond the English shores in Switzerland and Latvia where hackers and thieves are claiming the Robin Hood defence for stealing and leaking data about corrupt banks and tax-evaders. Even on the Arab street, some young men refer to Osama Bin Laden as Robin Hood – a man who gave up great family wealth, became an outlaw to fight in the trenches against what he believes is evil and defend what he believes is right, surrounded by the kinship of his rebel army and offering to some, a principled resistance to wrongful authority.

Mr. Hood still means many different things to many different people. But so long as there is injustice, tyranny, oppression and inequality, there will always be a place for the beloved outlaw hero, even if he was a Nurdler.

Long before Alcatraz, there was Devil’s Island – the most notorious and vicious prison complex ever constructed. Over a century of operation, 70,000 men were incarcerated there, less than 10% survived. Built in the tropics of French Guiana, it was called the perfect prison – penned in by the jungle on one side and the sea on the other. Escape was said to be impossible. But was it? I explore the horrors of prison life and test out whether tales of great escapes could be true. Devil’s Island airs on Discovery US at 7pm EST tonight (23rd March)… Read my blog here –

The most famous person to escape from Devil’s Island was Papillion – made into an awesome film staring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. How much of it was actually true? The film was shot largely in Jamaica but in its design and narrative cuts closer to the reality than most Hollywood films. The book Papillion, on which the film was based on, was written by Henri Charriere and even by the author’s own admission was not entirely accurate: “let’s say I lived through 75% of what I wrote. So help me, the rest is purely questions of errors and memory”.

Charriere was born Nov 16th 1906, was imprisoned in the penal colony of French Guinea and escaped to Venezuela to write his book and die a millionaire. The records of his internment have been lost, so often it’s his words against another. One thing we do know – he did have the Papillion (butterfly) tattooed on his chest (as did McQueen in the film) as a symbol of freedom. Historians point to inaccuracies in his story including claiming to have escaped 9 times and murdered a fellow prisoner Bebert Collier for which he was given 8 years in solitary, whilst the maximum was only five. Splitting hairs perhaps, but Alexander Miles, author of Devil’s Island: Colony of the Damned and the historian featured in our film, believes that the events and adventures described in Charriere’s book were probably performed by others and compiled and claimed by Charriere himself. But to Charriere’s credit, he did say he only ‘lived through them’, so you can interpret that, as you like. Convicts that knew him described him an ‘unknown’, ‘a completely insignificant prisoner’, and ‘a mild non-rebellious type’. And the big question from the film? Did he escape on a bag of coconuts? Well, I put it to the test to see whether it was possible, but one thing I can say, is that there was no need to count the waves before jumping in.

Devil’s Island is two things – in general it’s the name that has become synonymous with the entire penal colony of French Guiana which included prisons and work camps on the mainland and the 3 Salvation Islands; but it’s also the name of the smallest of the Salvation Island – the others being Royale and St. Joseph. The name ‘Salvation’ is a touch misrepresentative of their penal history (the convicts called them the ‘Islands of Death’) and refers to the name the islands were given by the first French colonial settlers who arrived in 1763. 10,000 of the first 14,000 died of disease and starvation in the first two years, the survivors held out on the islands where typhus and malaria were less frequent. The French claimed this to be ‘a humanitarian triumph’ describing French Guiana as ‘one of the most generous ideas of the century, one that would allow convicts to release their chains… no longer would they rot in French dungeons but the eternal springtime of a lush and wholesome land’.

For the convicts it was hell on earth, an experience clarified when we visited the solitary confinement cells and where I spent one of the worst nights of my life. Men were sentenced to between 6months to 5 years for a variety of crimes including trying to escape. The ‘tiger cages’ were 5ft by 7ft, walls that broke men’s wills, a wooden plank for a bed, shackles, a bucket for the toilet, no windows, and the ceiling was iron bars where guards walked on a catwalk above. Noise was forbidden, occasionally broken by the screams of the men who cracked, often going insane, and usually described like the sound of men slowly becoming ‘howler monkeys’. The undisputed King of the Dark Cells was Paul Rossenq who spent a total of 3,779 days in the cells including for the following crimes:

• Tearing and destroying prison uniform: (30 days)
• Calling out to other prisoners in solitary (30 days)
• Refusing to put irons on at night (30 days)
• Refusing to be let out of irons in the morning (30 days)
• Accusing guards of stealing 2 Francs from him (60 days)
• Putting head between the bars and screaming (“Another punishment if you please” (30 days)

Rossenq wrote a 300 verse poem called Hell and immortalised the dehumanising process in the lines: “I am no longer a man, for prison has entered into me and I am the prison”. I spent a night in the cells to try and understand a little bit of what they experienced. The physical discomfort of the pressure-cooker unabating equatorial heat, the endless stream of cockroaches running over my sweating body could be over-come but it was the mental side that broke me. The rot set in whilst trying to communicate the experience to a night-vision camera, Iand recalling the stories of men like Rossenq and Belbenoit, the latter who wrote, “He lives in dim light, from dark to dawn – blackness and silence. He is alive in a tomb”.

The silence was overwhelming, the silence of ghosts… there was an awful presence that seemed to perspire from the walls, of the 100s, if not 1000s of souls that were extinguished en masse, imprisoned to a living death. After a while I stopped talking to the camera, as it’s just seemed to take my mind into a darkness I did not want it go. But once that bit of the brain had been opened, it couldn’t be shut – memories that I’d buried away deep in the dusty recesses hoping never to be recalled, seemed to emerge like ghosts crawling back along the synapses to commune with the other dark horrors that inhabited those cells. Psychiatrists believe that just 2 hours in solitary confinement is enough to generate significant psychological change in a patient (some still use it), and within a few hours I was a broken man. Despite the reassuring knowledge that come morning I would see the sun and sky, I thought I would have had the strength to deal with it, but I didn’t. The experience did help my understanding of prison life but there is obviously no way I could extrapolate upon my superficial experience to truly understand what those men went through.

Nobody denies that crimes should be punished but the extent of that punishment should be relative to the crime and according to judicial and human standards. The numbers speak for themselves – less than 10% of convicts survived and with them the painful double paradox of one of the most sophisticated nations on earth, maintaining for nearly 100 years, one of the most brutal penal systems in the world whilst the forsaken men took up the challenge to try to beat the system and survive at almost incalculable odds. For the men that did survive and the few that did escape, they remain a beacon of almost unimaginable strength and bravery that can exist in the depths of human spirit.

A dark investigation into the nightmare of Hitler’s Aryan worldview, Nazi racial policies, how ‘bog-bodies’ were used by Himmler as justification for murder, SS expeditions to Tibet, (Hitler thought Buddha was the last great Aryan leader), gun-wielding modern-day neo-Nazis, the complicity of the scientific community to provide the SS with the pseudo-legitimacy to justify industrial mass-murder and more – I think it’s one of the strongest films in the series. There are more videos on the Solving History site… If possible I would advise reading my blog before hand as I hope it helps before important context for the investigation… Read it here….

Having watched and studied the Indiana Jones films in some depth, I never thought the Nazi connection to the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail or even secret SS expeditions to the Himalayas was even remotely plausible or what they actually represented. Like many times before, I was of course wrong. And alarmingly so. I have not felt so shocked and embarrassed about how little I knew about a period of history of such unspeakable horror.

It’s no secret that Hitler and Himmler had a twisted historical worldview where three groups existed: Founders of Culture (Aryans), Bearers of culture and Destroyers of culture (vermin). They believed there was once a mighty tribe of original Atlanteans, a master race of Aryans that once ruled the world. Often they had Nordic traits including a long head, narrow face, flat forehead, narrow nose, angular chin, thin lips, tall slender body, blue eyes and blond hair. Probably at their great embarrassment, neither Hitler nor Himmler fitted this prescription. Himmler was once appropriately described as looking like a half-starved shrew and when challenged on this point his defence was pathetic at best: “I may not look Nordic, but I possess a Nordic brain” and in defence, Hitler was known to quote scientist Herman Gauch who in 1933 cleared up any confusion with the cryptic but immortal lines: “The reason why birds can be taught better than other animals is explained by the fact that their mouths are Nordic in structure”.

In the minds of Hitler and Himmler this was just the beginning of their insanity and the destruction they would wreak in their evil, twisted perspective. Hitler believed his nation and race had become weak, corrupted by an infusion of degenerate elements into the bloodstream. In his mind, society had to be cleansed, to be built on strong, racially pure blood-stock – an idea he made repeatedly clear, not least in 1942: “I shall have no peace of mind until I have planted a seed of Nordic blood wherever the population stand in need of regeneration”. But to enact his horrific vision upon his world, first he and Himmler needed to prove the existence of an Aryan race, and provide racial profiling of Aryans to support their racial policies.

Himmler took the lead and set up the official, scholarly sounding Das Ahnenerbe, the Ancestral Heritage Society. Their formal role was to promote ‘the science of ancient intellectual history… unearth new accomplishments and deeds of Germany’s ancestors… and communicate the findings to the public”. They possessed a public veneer of being an elite think tank of 137 German scholars, brilliant thinkers, representing all academia including history, biology, linguistics, geology, geneticists, archaeology, anthropology etc etc. They cultivated an air of solid professional integrity, disguising all their ideas as science and fact when in reality they were devoted to myth-making, distorting the truth and churning out tailored evidence to support Hitler and Himmler’s insane historical, and completely unsubstantiated, world view.

Das Ahnenerbe was run under the banner of the Himmler’s SS, academics became senior officers, and the SS provided logistical and military support for some of their expeditions. In order to provide pseudo-legitimacy to their ideas of Aryan supremacy or appear to retrieve some sort of ancient Aryan knowledge, expeditions were sent out to the four corners of the world: to Iceland to search for the Holy Grail (I kid you not you!), to Iran searching for evidence of ancient kings of pure Aryan blood, to Finland to record and film ancient magical rites (sounds recorded by a man called BOSE – any connection?), to Croatia, Serbia and Iraq to study the role of the Aryans in the Roman Empire and even to Tibet to measure the skulls of the Tibetans who they believed were the ancient immigrants and survivors from Atlantis. Wurst, the unfortunately named expedition leader, wrote in his report that “there is great similarity between the words of the Fuhrer and those of that other great Aryan personality, Buddha”. There you have it! That’s what we’re dealing with here – people who believed Buddha was an Aryan.

As we explore in this film, there was far greater depth to their delusion and I wish I could laugh at just how insane they were, but of course there is nothing remotely funny about the impact of their delusion and their subsequent industrialised mass murder. With the fabricated legitimacy constructed by the academic community, the Nazis established racial policies long before World War Two even started that included:
• July 1933: The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring – led to Compulsory sterilization of 400,000 people including those suffering from schizophrenia, deafness, hereditary blindness, epilepsy and severe alcoholism (this was the precursor to Action T4)
• 1935: Nuremberg Laws – pseudo-scientific basis presented for racial discrimination of Jews
• 1935: The laws of the Protection of German Blood and German Honour
• Lebensraum: As detailed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf – the German people needed increased “living space” (land and raw materials) for the expansion of the Aryan race – mixed Lebensraum with racism to provide the blueprint for aggression and invasion, occupation of Poland, Operation Barbarossa etc.
• Action T4: During the Nuremberg trials, it was estimated that 275,000 people had been killed under Hitler’s Secret memo of September 1st 1939 to kill those ‘unworthy of life’ to ‘improve racial hygiene’
• ‘Final Solution’: the industrialised mass murder of millions classified under Nazi racial policies of being ‘unworthy of life’: including Jews and Untermenschen (“under-human”) – gypsies, homosexuals, disabled, Slavic and non-Slavic Russians.

The Ahnenerbe were more than just a cult of crazy scientists – they provided the scientific justification for racial policies to promote racial purity that the Nazis presented as legitimacy for their aggression and the slaughter of millions. Some of the files of the Ahnenerbe were presented during the Nuremberg trials and a few were charged with war crimes varying from the plundering of museums and private art collections, to the cold brutality of human experimentation including exploring new ways to freeze, poison, and sterilize people and even creating a human skeleton collection.

Here we have a precedent of unspeakable horror, but this type of inhumanity, could and has happened again – in East Timor, Kosovo, Iraq, West Papua, Rwanda, Darfur to name but a few. In ‘Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity’ Goldhagen examine why people commit acts of mass murder and whether they were coerced into it. His research reveals that during the Holocaust, “no German perpetrator was ever killed, sent to a concentration camp, imprisoned, or punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews”. They, like others who carry out such atrocities, are motivated by politics and their ideology, believing what they are doing is right and necessary and there is little, sometimes, no coercion involved. “Mass elimination”, Goldhagen explains, “is always preventable and always results from conscious political choice…mass murder is a political act… it is not an expression of human nature and it’s not inevitable.”

I cant phantom how these lessons could ever be forgotten, and how this horror and cruelty has ever been allowed to happen again. But as history repeats itself, this will probably happen again. What can we do? I do not know. But we can start with burdening our consciences, take responsibility, look hard and not look away, speak up, question, and don’t claim we know nothing, or we too become complicity in these tragedies.

Wealth From Murder and Theft
The Nazis had a sick penchant for plundering every nation they invaded, most famously for their gold reserves and art. Germany began the war with reserves in the Reichsbank of around $208 million, of which some $97million represented gold already stolen from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Danzig. The total amount of gold looted by the Nazis during the war itself, not only from the defeated nations, such as Belgium, Holland and Hungary, but from Jewish and other victims, is now estimated at $580 million. The gold came from governments and civilians, including Jews murdered in concentration camps, from whom everything was taken down to the gold fillings of their teeth. Of this about $400 million (worth $4 billion today,) went to Switzerland either to the Swiss National Bank’s own account or through their banks to other nations. I’m ashamed to say, that I didn’t know that much about the Swiss connection during the war so I’ve been doing a bit of digging.

Nazi Gold Trading
The Swiss accepted some $280m ($2.8 billion today) on their own account and the rest went directly to the accounts of other countries (Portugal, Spain and Sweden, Turkey, Argentina) in payment for goods and raw materials. Most of it has never been recovered. The Bergier commission (an investigation set up by the Swiss Government) says 76% of Nazi gold transactions went through Switzerland and the volume of trade between Swiss private banks and war-time Germany was at least three times higher than earlier estimates indicated. The Swiss returned only $58 million in gold, keeping gold valued by a Swiss historian at $350 million ($3.5 billion at today’s prices!).

Sinister Swiss Accountants
They also kept most of an estimated $250 million to $500 million in liquidated German assets — even some from German Jews. Half of this was supposed to go to stateless victims, who finally got about $28 million. In 1962, Swiss banks began “finding” “lost” bank accounts, finally returning $9.5 million to rightful owners in the early 1970s. Pressed again in 1996, they suddenly “found” another $32 million in 1996. In the past few years, they have now apparently located $46.8 million in 5,600 “dormant” accounts opened by “foreigners” before May 1945. They are still a long way short of “finding” all the missing accounts.

Aiding the Enemy
The Swiss National Bank, as well as the Bank for International Settlements (based in Switzerland) openly carried out gold transactions between neutral central banks and the Reichsbank during the war, thus facilitating the Nazi war effort. The US War Department, Treasury Department, Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Justice Department all accused the Swiss of also engaging in direct production for Nazi Germany and providing protection for their investments. Swiss shipping lines furnished Germany with a large number of boats for the transport of goods. Switzerland also allowed an unprecedented use of its railways to link Germany and Italy for the transport of coal and other goods. Switzerland provided Germany with arms, ammunition, aluminum, machinery and precision tools, as well as agricultural products. Swiss convoys carried products from Spain across France through Switzerland to Germany. This collaboration continued even as the Germans retreated and the threat of invasion evaporated. As late as early 1945, Switzerland gutted an agreement it had just reached with the United States to freeze German assets and to restrict purchases of gold from Germany.

An Amber Room Connection?
In the making of this film, we focused mainly on investigating the Amber Room, but the research in Nazi looting and especially the little known complicity of Switzerland, has truly helped to inform our wider understanding of these events. I’m obviously not saying that the Amber room in held in Swiss bank vaults (although anything is possible – and it seems very possible that the Amber Room could be hidden with numbers to Swiss bank accounts), but there is still a huge amount we don’t know about what happened during the war. The Nazi legacy, including the complicity of others and the location of some of their plunder, still remains unsolved.