A Phoenician Fortress and Furnace?
by David Campbell
(article and images taken from www.viewzone.com)

The discovery of the hilltop fortress and furnace came about, it seemed, by casual chance. My wife publishes a little community newspaper distributed in the counties bordering the Red River around Lake Texoma, called TGIF The Weekend Bandit. It is a general interest paper focusing mainly on local events and history. I write a weekly column on history and sometimes feature articles. Since I grew up near Rockwall, Texas, it was of great interest to me to discover that in January 2000 excavation of the mysterious buried wall there had finally been undertaken. I had been obsessed by that wall since childhood.

Only a week or two earlier, I had done an article on Gloria Farley's work on the Heavener Runestone. The rock wall seemed a logical follow up, especially since "runes" had been unearthed there in 1949. In the article, I asked any readers who knew of similar writings or walls to contact me. Following that, I gave a synopsis of Viewzone's expedition to the Purgatory River canyon.

The following Friday, my wife and I returned from our weekly 600 mile distribution route to find a somewhat urgent message from a reader in Colbert, Oklahoma. When I returned his call, he told me of meeting a man while he was hunting arrowheads in the Kiamichi Mountains. This man had found stone tablets with some kind of writing on them and seemed eager to get back to the cave of the "little people" whose skulls and bones were found with the tablets. The caller gave me some extremely vague instructions on getting to the place and no names at all.

Sue and I were intrigued by the story and trusted the sincerety of our informant. However, the hills of Oklahoma are full of strange stories and not all of them are true. We figured the worst that could happen was that we'd have a nice Sunday in the mountains. After more than three hours of driving, we found a house that fit the Colbert man's description. We knocked on the door and were invited in by a 92 year old resident of the area. The hill folk of Oklahoma are a warm, hospitable people but the old gentleman could not recall hearing of any tablets, though he did know much of what had occurred locally for most of the 20th century. He told us of numerous places where rare flints were to be found and mentioned an "old furnace" that a big timber company had pushed down with bulldozers. His granddaughter graciously drove us up the mountain roads to places her grandfather mentioned and which she had explored as a girl. She pointed out the vicinity of two caves in the steep bluffs but warned of the swarms of rattlesnakes up there this time of year. We returned to our own vehicle and went back to see if we could find any traces of the "little people."

I went down into the dry river bed filled with massive boulders and managed to climb to what appeared to be a cave. It turned out to be only a deep overhang with no sign of human habitation. As I was climbing back, I ran across the first of the "cell" formations badly eroded. It looked odd but natural. Back on the road I discovered a collection of crudely worked flints which appeared to be "blanks" discarded by arrowhead hunters. It was as we turned the truck to go back down from the crest that Sue said, "Stop and take a look at that block formation." I climbed over charred pine logs to what appeared to be a section of massive wall. Not far from there I found the first section of clearly defined "cells" which seemed to be separating from the dense limestone. They seemed to have been "melted" on some way. They were so dense and black, I was almost sure they were iron. Later I tested a section at home with an industrial magnet but it did not react.

Sue began photographing the wall and cells while I climbed over two more "parapets" to the summit. What I saw there began to seep into my brain like ice water. Jumbled about in a haphazard fashion were acres of squared, dressed and notched stones. It was eerie standing on those shattered ramparts with all those tumbled stones like a desecrated cemetery. My mind suddenly flashed back to 1979 standing in the ruined streets of Copan in Honduras. The same massive blocks pushed apart by tropical fig trees. Instantly, the realization gripped me that I was standing atop an enormous ruin of cyclopean proportions. Sue struggled up the final wall to join me in the 100 degree evening. It was her turn to be numbed. "This thing is HUGE!" she kept mumbling. By that time we were shaking with heat and exhaustion. I remember asking her over and over, "Are we seeing things? Is this real?"

Darkness was descending quickly and those snaky places are not where one wants to grope around in the night. We drove away in a state of shock. We were beginning to convince ourselves that it was all a delusion when the film came back from the developer. Our jaws dropped and our minds returned to a proper state of awe and wonder. We showed the pictures and the "cell" sample to staff members and salespeople and asked, "What do you think this is?" The answer was always the same, "I dunno but it ain't natural."

We sent a few black and white jpgs to Frank Joseph at Ancient American for his opinion but as yet have not had a reply. Then we sent some color jpgs to Gary Vey, here at Viewzone. His reply was rapid and enthusiastic, to say the least. We returned for a second expedition and took many more pictures. We also learned that the "Aztecs" had smelted gold up there and that even in historic times, the Choctaws had known of the mine. They used it to trade for salt at Fort Towson up until the first quarter of the 20th century.

I came across an interesting website which detailed the prehistoric copper and iron furnaces in Ohio, Georgia, Virginia, New Mexico and Arizona. One in Ohio is almost identical to the site we found, even to the configuration of the hilltop and it's fortress walls. This ties into what Gene Matlock has said elsewhere in Viewzone about the origins of Coronado's "Gran Quivera." I had written of a renegade Spanish expedition which came as far as eastern Oklahoma before being driven back to die on the Purgatory River. They believed the Tanoan and Caddoan accounts of the seven cities of Cibola, though Coronado thought them a lie. I think the story of Gran Quivera is true but that it had been abandoned long before the 16th century. I am going out on a limb here, but I have no professional reputation to lose. I believe that Sue and I found an ancient Phoenician fortress and furnace and that it may be the remains of one of the "mythical" cities of Cibola. Meanwhile, our investigations are far from over.

Following our last report of an unusual stone structure found in the East Oklahoma area, several samples of the layered and mitred stones were analyzed. The striations appeared to be the result of extreme heat and rapid cooling over many -- perhaps several hundred -- years. This was expected since the structure appears to be a huge smelt for refining gold ore. Certainly this was not the work of the indiginous population in North America. Gold crystals and red mercury oxide were found in traces on the specimen that Viewzone examined.

We were just about to form an expedition to the site when another huge foundation was located nearby. Some symbols, possibly First Tongue, were described on one of the stones. But, sadly, the site was abruptly shut down and the excavations were bulldozed with earth by some arm of our own government. An informed source close to the family that owns the land reported that the family was threatened with harm if they allowed anyone to dig on their land in the future. They were told to forget what they saw. This type of threats remind one of the aftermath of Roswell in the late 40's.

The results of the burial are pictured above.

At Viewzone we receive many such reports from all over the globe. Ancient sites that appear to be very old are shut down or quickly buried by the host governments. Why?

We asked an individual from New Zealand to tell us why some of his country's ancient sites were being covered up. Here is his reply.

Hello Gary & team,
You ask why archaeological sites and significant information is being hidden by government officials...in the US and elsewhere around the world? I suppose one could write a whole book on the probable answers to that question, but in the end it would all boil down to "power & control". The eradication of archaeological sites & artifacts is most certainly going on in the Australia/ New Zealand region, where "concealment teams" are being employed to both destroy or seal away from sight any traces of anomalous discoveries. In the last few years the New Zealand teams have removed/ buried/ concealed: A trilithon/ obelisk arrangement, composed of about 5 component sets, from the Wairaki area of New Zealand's central North Island. The "Artiamuri Stones", registered by Captain Mair in the 1800's and described by him as the 2nd most significant site he'd seen in New Zealand...these were, seemingly, pushed into a river by a "Forestry Department" bulldozer. A number of burial caves containing large stature skeletons with red, brown & blond hair. These skeletal remains are a most unwelcome find, as the ancient individuals were very definitely of Indo-European ethnic origin. Platted samples of their red or brown hair used to be on display at the Auckland Museum...but have long since been removed from public scrutiny. An ancient stone jetty on a northern river estuary. A beautifully hollowed out and fashioned communal dwelling/ assembly area in a limestone cliff. This was at Castlehill in New Zealand's South Island. A friend who revisited it in recent weeks found that the entranceway had been collapsed...undoubtedly by explosives. These few examples represent some of the skullduggery going on, officially, to throw a spanner in the works of normal scholastic pursuit within the confines of New Zealand. A gentleman named Tristan Rankin, who runs the Australian web site: http://www.awarenessquest.com/ complains about similar clandestine, insidious "concealment team" interference in Australian archaeological endeavors. A friend of mine, in recent years, had a long talk with a New Zealand girl called Lisa Kerr. She'd done extensive traveling, like many young New Zealanders, who head out on their traditional OE (overseas excursion).

Lisa, amongst several jobs she got around the world, worked for a while with the New Mexico Park's Department. During her term of employment there was a big "washout" in one of the Park regions and I'm assuming it was up in Pueblo country around Taos. The flash flood scoured out embankments and in doing so a large number of anomalous skeletons were exposed. Lisa and her colleagues were assigned the task of gathering up the remains and placing them into crates. Also in attendance at the site were Smithsonian Institute officials and FBI agents.

Each day as Lisa and the other Park's Department employees went onto the site, they were searched for cameras. Similarly they were searched as they left the site each day to make sure they weren't removing artifacts. They were also obliged to sign "secrecy documents" ensuring that they would never divulge details of their participation in this undertaking. The reason for this degree of secrecy stems from the fact that the skeletons were of people who were about 8 feet tall. They had six fingers on each hand and six toes per foot. They also had a strange, double row arrangement of teeth.

The crates containing the recovered remains, at the termination of work, were taken away by the Smithsonian officials and, undoubtedly, will never be seen again. Strangely enough, there is a report of two similar skulls having been found in New Zealand's far north around the beginning of the 20th century. Lisa later had official "hassles" when trying to come home to New Zealand and was severely grilled by US government functionaries as she attempted to depart from the US.

The short answer as to why there is suppression of true archaeological and historical evidence in New Zealand appears to be due, in part, to the ambitions of big business and the multinationals. Using "indigenous rights" legislation as leverage, large parcels of New Zealand natural resources and wealth are wrested out of the hands of the New Zealand populace. They then fall into the hands of a small number of corrupt, so-called, "indigenous" leaders/ representatives, who turn around and sell "exploitation rights" to big business.

The vast majority of New Zealand's Maori people (Polynesian...officially designated indigenous) derive no benefit from these massive financial "payouts" or from the acquisition of "redistributed" resources.

Privately owned farms and large tracts of land are being gobbled up by the "Waitangi Tribunal" and big business is the final beneficiary. Our corrupt politicians are little more than an executive arm to the multinationals and take their orders from the World Bank.

That's the simple, superficial answer, but the tentacles of control go much deeper. One would have to probe age-old, long established, "control-freak" organizations to find out why they perceive "forbidden archaeology" to represent such an undermining danger. Maybe there's a large element of "religious" interference, wherein those large organizations, with influences reaching who knows where, see an inherent danger to the story they tell and product they promote. I can't fathom the fullness of this insanity, but realize we must all work quickly to photograph and record as much as possible of the ancient traces before "big brother" erases them forever.