The Anomaly(5)

Gemma blinked. Feather smiled sweetly.

I decided that I could come to like Feather.





From the files of Nolan Moore:





THE PHOENIX GAZETTE—APRIL 5, 1909





Chapter

3



Up in the room I drank several glasses of water, tried unsuccessfully to wrestle the air conditioner up from its subarctic setting, and sat at the desk. I had most of the blog post drafted already but I like to finesse them at the last minute. People would see the piece, no question—the newsletter has over thirty thousand subscribers, and the show has slowly clawed its way up to 93,211 Twitter followers (not that I obsessively check). Hardly stellar, but these were numbers I hoped would increase exponentially once we started going out on cable. You can bullshit all you like about how YouTube is the medium of choice for the young and smartphoned, but even a professionally produced webcast gets no respect compared to an actual network.

Ken was right. This was a big deal, and not to be screwed up. But did people care that the time and date at the top of the blog post were real? I told myself it gave the material a here-and-now veracity. And maybe it did. Or perhaps it was a question of kidding myself that I was a real investigative journalist. Either way, it needed to be done.

I rolled up my sleeves and started typing my last blog post from the world as we knew it.





DAY 1: THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM


I’m sitting in a hotel room twenty miles from the Grand Canyon. From my window I can see the lamps of the parking lot, and beyond it, darkness shrouds mile upon mile of the great desert: a forbidding environment that deflects mankind’s gaze—and, I believe, cradles secrets waiting to be told.

It’s been a long day getting here. And now, as always at the start of an expedition, I’m filled with both excitement and a sense of responsibility. I know how many of you share my conviction that the world is a far larger place than we’re allowed to believe—and that access to the facts will open our eyes to the wonders of our land, our species, the entire planet…with its curious corners and extraordinary secrets.

So let’s look at some of those facts.

On April 5, 1909, the Phoenix Gazette—at the time, one of Arizona’s leading and most respected news sources—ran a front-page story under the headline EXPLORATIONS IN GRAND CANYON. The article details how a hunter and explorer named G. E. Kincaid came to the newspaper with a story. He told how a recent expedition—conducted under the auspices of the Smithsonian, and directed by one Professor S. A. Jordan—traveled to a spot Kincaid had previously come upon while cruising down the Colorado River (and that “down” is important, as you’ll see over the next two days), prospecting for minerals in the Grand Canyon.

There, halfway up the sheer 3,000-foot wall of the canyon, Kincaid had spotted an opening. He’d clambered up and discovered that a cave lay beyond, a passageway into the rock, nearly a half mile below the current desert level. He’d explored a little, finding a few relics. These he dispatched to Washington. His finds were enough to inspire the Smithsonian to fund the expedition led by Professor Jordan.

There are other crevices in the Grand Canyon. Stanton’s Cave, for example, is home not only to some striking big-eared bats but also to four-thousand-year-old twig figurines, shells, and beads, and ten-thousand-year-old remains of giant condors and mountain goats. Though inside this cave, the Kincaid Cavern, they didn’t find mere twigs and bones.

They found…wonders.

But…it’s getting late, and we’ve got an early start tomorrow. So for now I’ll just urge you to read the original article (linked here), and read for yourself what they discovered. What they claimed to discover, at any rate—claims that have been ignored or derided by the archeological establishment ever since.

Try to decide whether this article is a piece of idle make-believe, or if it’s possible these brave and inquiring men of yesteryear uncovered evidence that North America was visited in eldritch times by another culture. Consider the question of whether the idols, artifacts, and crypt that Kincaid and his colleagues claimed to have explored in 1909—which, admittedly, no one has ever been able to locate in the century since—are mere figments of imagination…or if there is a great truth here.

A truth we’re not being told.

I’ll admit it’s curious that the Smithsonian claims to have no record of Kincaid. No record, either, of this Professor Jordan. But as we’ve seen in previous episodes of The Anomaly Files, the Smithsonian has a long record of being tight-lipped—perhaps even of being prone to “counterfactual statements”—when it comes to any idea that contradicts the consensus the museum was established to maintain.

Questions. Doubts. A fog between us and the truth. I don’t want to live my life in a fog—and from what you tell me in the comments section, and via Twitter and our Instagram page (links at the bottom), you feel the same. And so tomorrow we’re going to once more cut through all this smoke and try to find evidence of the fire beneath.

We’re going looking for Kincaid’s cavern.

It won’t be easy. We will be breaking the law, entering the canyon via a route that’s closed to the public (and why, you might well ask, should that be?). I have spent many hours conducting my own analysis of the original account, and as a result I’ll be leading us toward a location that’s quite different from where others have tried before.