By Count Friedrich von Olsen
Captain Kristen Griest and 1st Lieutenant Shaye Haver this week became the first women to graduate from the U.S. Army’s Ranger School. Both Captain Griest and Lieutenant Haver are West Point graduates…
Apparently, they are in pretty good shape and have strong legs. One of the feats required of Ranger School graduates was carrying a fifty pound backpack over a twelve mile course. It was reported that they covered the distance faster than some of their male counterparts…
Lieutenant Haver is an Apache helicopter pilot…
Captain Griest is an Airborne-qualified military police officer…
I have just received a report that a train operated by the Germans in Poland during World War II has been found by two men and that on board is 300 tons of gold, precious stones and weapons…
I am skeptical, too…
I have a few questions. How does a train get lost for 70 years, even in a place like southwest Poland? Is that 300 tons of gold? Isn’t that more gold than exists in the entire world?
Or does the 300 tons apply to the gold and the jewels? Or does it apply to the gold, jewels and the weapons?
Supposedly, the two men who came across this train have had written communication through a lawyer with the governmental district council in Walbrzych and have offered some tantalizing evidence that this cache exists, but are holding off on spilling the beans on exactly where it is until they are provided with a guarantee by the Polish government that they will be provided with a ten percent finder’s fee from the proceeds of their discovery…
I’ve been to Walbrzych and I don’t remember seeing any neglected trains scattered about. That doesn’t mean much, since it is being suggested the train is inside some secret tunnel once used by the Nazis. Indeed the Nazis did use trains to transport loot taken from Eastern Europe back to Berlin. The train in question is rumored to be somewhere in the vicinity of Ksiaz castle, which is roughly 46 miles southeast of the Polish village of Wroclaw…
My guess is that the Polish government has a pretty good idea of where the railroad tunnels in that country are located. For that reason, the ploy of using a lawyer to make a ten percent claim on the find might not work out the way these two fellows, one of whom is a Pole and the other a German, are hoping…
Trophies and being put on a pedestal are honorifics some, maybe even many, people aspire to, but it turns out there are some trophies you might rather not be a part of and some pedestals you really wouldn’t want to be mounted on…
Since 1914, archaeologists have been digging through the ruins of the Mayor Aztec Temple in Mexico City. For more than a hundred years, archaeologists have been making comparisons of the physical evidence found at, beneath and around the temple to accounts given by the Spanish conquistadors of what they observed at the temple complex almost five centuries ago…
Something that is both gruesome and riveting are paintings and written descriptions from the early Spanish colonial era of what are known as “tzompantli.” These were racks of human skulls that had been joined together with a type of mortar. No such artifacts had in fact been previously found. But in February, archeologists in Mexico City came upon something on the western side of the temple that verified the actual existence of tzompantli, shedding yet further light on the concept. What was discovered is what is now believed to be the main trophy rack of sacrificed human skulls at Templo Mayor…
The Aztecs used the tzompantli to display the severed heads on wooden poles pushed through the sides of the skull. The poles were then suspended horizontally on vertical posts.
Eduardo Matos, a leading archaeologist at the National Institute of Anthropology and History, says the Aztecs displayed the tzompantli to send a message to foe and friend alike. The message? Something on the order of this: Don’t mess with the Aztecs…
The skulls are recurrent at the temple. One of the temple’s platforms that was uncovered between February and May featured heads mortared together in a circle, looking inward. It is not clear what was at the center of this circle. This is just the topmost, now visible layer. There are likely more skulls in the layers below and it is not yet known how those skulls are arranged. Archaeologists must proceed slowly, so as not to damage what they are uncovering. It appears likely that the skulls were used as a type of building material for a portion of the temple…
Some archaeologists believe that the skulls were utilized while they still had upholstery, i.e., flesh and scalp and hair, attached. Thus the term “head rack” is more appropriate than skull rack, those archaeologists suggest. One wonders about the curator at this temple. Did he have a certain standard for the heads he wanted to, er, uh, mount? If you were really ugly, do you think he might have elected to not have you beheaded?