The Jacobsons eventually divorced and left Imperial. Scholarly history is arrayed against him. Yet there are believers who insist that, using recent advances in archaeology, the ship can be found. The last leap has to be into something beyond fact. If not, they may end up in a mass grave in Holtville, where many undocumented immigrants who've died during the border crossing are buried. It may be a story about some masterpiece you've been nurturing for years, of selling a tech startup to Google, of raising a family in rural Vermont. "You will say I am crazy, that I lose my water and get thirsty and see dreams, but it is the truth." A team that was shooting for the History Channel program came out to scan the property with ground-penetrating radar a few months ago. "The usual theory advanced is that it is a mirage," Bailey said of the desert ship. Those "round metal disks"—the superior comals Santiago promised his wife—suggest a Viking ship that would have sailed through the Northwest Passage, down the coast of Canada, around Baja California and up the Colorado River, which before a modern-day diversion flowed into the Gulf of California. But when he tried to lift the chest out it fell completely apart." "This guy from Skeptoid is grossly misinformed," Grasson says. In the rugged Colorado Desert of California, there lies buried a treasure ship sailed there hundreds of years ago by either Viking or Spanish explorers. Follow Question; 3 Great Question; Asked by ScottyMcGeester (1897) July 2nd, 2013 I wanted to know more about this story, as much as I can. The Desert Magazine covered the mystery of the desert ship for the first time in 1939, when writer Charles C. Niehuis described a strange encounter he'd had with Jim Tucker in Prescott, Arizona. Unfortunately, that very day, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck Southern California. Born in Cleveland in 1957, Grasson enlisted in the U.S. Army after high school and worked as a cook. It is enough for Grasson to live inside the legend, the way a believer lives inside a religion, never questioning its outer bounds. But the meeting never took place, and Grasson came to doubt the armor was from the ship. The Content was loaded with 4 million dollars in stolen gold but it is believed that the ship ended up in the desert never … But these are not the things Grasson has chosen to do. There were also impressions on its flanks where shields had been attached—all the hallmarks of a Viking craft. He prefers to be called an "explorer of legends and lore," not a treasure hunter. He wears a black Dezert Magazine cap, which obscures what's left of the graying hair at his temples. The nearby U.S. border is a popular crossing for undocumented immigrants. When we'd spoken on the phone, I'd gotten the impression he thought the ship was of Spanish origin, which made more sense, as there were Spanish conquistadors in Mexico in the early 1500s, whereas there is no solid evidence of Viking settlement on the West Coast. This would explain why sightings of the desert ship began in the 1870s, by which time the abandoned boat, exposed to the elements, would have come to look like an ancient vessel. Searching for a Lost Viking Ship in California Back in the days when much of the map was still blank, explorers would follow any waterway in the hopes of finding the next great passage. (Alex Berger / CC BY-NC 2.0) Grasson does not think the desert ship is in Canebrake Canyon, where Myrtle Botts claimed to have seen it in 1933. The Canyon collapsed and the ship was buried in the rubble. It is fed entirely by agricultural run-off that will soon cease to flow, for an insanely complex set of reasons having to do with California's insanely complex water-rights statutes. John F. Kennedy will stay a paragon of 20th century liberalism, no matter how much we learn about his philandering, drug use and mafia associations. In addition, he'd recently been studying a 1632 book, Hydrographic and Geographic Descriptions of Many Northern and Southern Lands and Seas in the Indies, Specifically of the Discovery of the Kingdom of California, by a Spanish explorer of California named Nicolás de Cardona. The explorers may have thought the lake was a strait, since California was believed to be an island into the 18th century. Sailing up the Colorado River back then would have brought this ship into Lake Cahuilla, an enormous body of water that once occupied much of what is today California's Coachella Valley. Sufferers of arthritis and rheumatism park their mobile homes here for up to six months at a time, to enjoy the springs' soothing waters. Searching for a Lost Viking Ship in California Viking ship from the Ship Museum in Oslo. They point, for example, to a wooden sloop from the 1770s unearthed during excavations at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, or the more than 40 ships, dating back perhaps 800 years, discovered in the Black Sea earlier this year. This is the presentation I did at the Mousley Museum of Natural History in Yucaipa Ca. His point was that knowledge can only take you so far. Viking ships were marine vessels of unique structure, built by the Vikings during the Viking Age.The boat-types were quite varied, depending on what the ship was intended for, but they were generally characterized as being slender and flexible boats, with symmetrical ends with true keel.They were clinker built, which is the overlapping of planks riveted together. Grasson, who has a cheerful manner, walked me past winter bird tourists to the parking lot, where his 15-year-old Jeep Wrangler awaited. There are reports of sightings around the Salton Sea and Imperial Valley, extending as far south as Mexico’s Baja peninsula, though firsthand accounts are rare. Even Grasson concedes that a part of it should have remained above ground. About 10 years ago, one of his co-workers told Grasson he was too intense and needed a hobby. The furthest documented voyage by a Spanish ship throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries happened in 1540, says Don Laylander, a senior archaeologist with the cultural resources firm ASM Affiliates, who has published numerous studies on the region. Again, no desert ship. "I don't question the existence of the Lost Ship of the Desert," he wrote to me in an email. More likely, Grasson has concluded, the ship is closer to the Mexican border, where the land is dusty and flat, where the dry riverbeds have names like Coyote Wash and the irrigation canals have names like Wistaria Lateral Eight. The Los Angeles Times concluded there are plenty of craft at the bottom of the Salton Sea, but it reported that they were all attached to the nearby U.S. Navy test base. The land is featureless except for the brown jags of mountains that squat on the horizon. She bought a tiny 8-room farmhouse and began a little refurbishment which would take $5.5 million and … According to Grasson's most recent research, the desert ship is here. It is today believed by many to be under the Salton Sea in California. Two factors drove Grasson into the realm of obsession. And if there was a ship on the desert floor, where did it go? He also argues that fieldwork is everything—you can't find a desert ship in an academic journal. That wasn't to be, because, several hours later, there was a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in the waters off Huntington Beach, in Southern California. Grasson hasn't been there, but won't discount the possibility. It was a hint, though also a taunt. "Could a ship pass through here? There are date groves everywhere, disconcerting green rectangles carved out the desert, tattoos of our weird civilization. Like many others who lived in or near Los Angeles, Grasson found real-estate prices pushing him East, into Riverside County and beyond, ever deeper into the desert, until he ended up in Banning, where he has lived for the last 11 years. A few have even claimed to have seen the ship, its wooden remains poking through the sand like the skeleton of a prehistoric beast. It is said that after a very successful pearling trip along the coastal waters of Baja California, he sailed up the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) to explore its northern end, which is the Colorado River delta. The State of California has vowed to invest $80.5 million to make sure the Salton Sea doesn't dry out, mostly because of toxic sediment that could blow all the way to Los Angeles. Botts claimed it dislodged rocks that buried her Viking ship, which she never saw again. Viking Sunstone Josh travels to England and Norway to unlock the secrets of the Viking sunstone, a mystic crystal the Vikings used to conquer the seas. ", Grasson also had Golden Mirages, the book that first inspired him a decade ago. Lost Viking ‘highway’ revealed by melting ice 1,000-year-old horseshoes, sleds, and tools are emerging from a shrinking ice patch in Norway, telling the story of the rise and fall of a mountain pass and the people who travelled along it. Pearce Paul Creasman, an associate professor in the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, says wood can survive for an "amazingly" long time in certain parts of the desert, depending on environmental conditions. This is what Grasson believes. Others have also seen this vessel, but much farther south, in Baja California, Mexico. Surrounding place names reflected the strangeness and severity of the land: Moonlight Canyon, Hellhole Canyon, Indian Gorge. Let us only believe that which is shared with us on Facebook. Grasson thinks that was because only a small segment of the Jacobsen property was searched. "He's got some facts, but the dates are all wrong, the places are wrong.". Audiences appeared to agree. Today, the Salton Sea is the largest body of water in California. There are reasons to doubt her story, yet it is only one of many about sightings of the desert ship. He knows they look down on him, but he also thinks he knows more than they do. The Vikings presumably abandoned ship, giving themselves over to the harsh elements, but their ship remained—and perhaps remains still. If they are lucky, their "treasure" might be steady work in the shadows. "The beauty with legend," he says, "is that you're never wrong.". The story begins in the year 1587. Newsweek is drawing attention to a search for California’s lost Viking treasure ship Breaking News tags: California, Spain, Viking, Archeology. His quote, stripped of context, is frequently found on college-dorm posters, because it seems to say that the pleasurable work of dreaming is more important than than the grinding work of accumulating and mastering fact. The Viking Sky lost power on Saturday and sent out a distress signal after it began drifting towards land. In 1870, for example, explorer Albert S. Evans was traveling to San Bernardino, Calif., when he claimed to have stumbled on its remains. John Grasson picked me up at the Palm Springs International Airport in mid-November. Subscribe today. Confronted with facts that pummel his theories—or the lack of facts to back up his beliefs—Grasson retreats into an uncertainty he thinks benefits his cause. The editor of Desert Magazine during the 1960's, one Choral Pepper (2002), in her book Desert Lore of Southern California (1994), Chapter 3: Anza-Borrego Desert in a section called "Legend of the Lost Viking Ship" writes about a reported find of a single shield-like artifact somewhere close to or in Deep Canyon, near Palm Springs. That's not what Einstein meant, however. History. Theories range from a Spanish galleon to a Viking knarr — and everything in between. In the rugged Colorado Desert of California, there lies buried a treasure ship sailed there hundreds of years ago by either Viking or Spanish explorers. The legend does seem, prima facie, bonkers: a craft loaded with untold riches, sailed by early-European explorers into a vast lake that once stretched over much of inland Southern California, then run aground, abandoned by its crew and covered over by centuries of sand and rock and creosote bush as that lake dried out…and now it lies a few feet below the surface, in sight of the chicken-wire fence at the back of the Desert Dunes motel, $58 a night and HBO in most rooms. In the rugged Colorado Desert of California, there lies buried a treasure ship sailed there hundreds of years ago by either Viking or Spanish explorers. Jacobsen used a sifter to retrieve the spilled jewels. Unfortunately, that very day, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck Southern California. But included in California State Parks' files is an old, black-and-white photo of Justus, wearing dark sunglasses, from an unidentified publication. "I was hooked full-bore," Grasson recalled. What was a ship doing out here, of all places? But others must be allowed to live, because without such nourishing nuggets of wonder, life can shrivel up into an endless series of tasks, captured and measured, posted on social media, forgotten. "The moon threw a track of shimmering light," he wrote, directly upon "the wreck of a gallant ship, which may have gone down there centuries ago.". Hell, yes.". Like Bailey many years before, he refuses to consign the desert ship entirely to the realm of fiction. Given the podcast's name, and the pleasure its host takes in debunking popular legends (Hitler escaped the fall of Berlin, the moon landing was faked), it is not surprising Dunning took apart the desert ship plank by plank. Imperial is a sad, low town eternally under a hot, low sun. A map showing California as an island, an common misconception even into the early 18th Century. So they left and decided to come back in a few days. "I know this is kind of weird, and a lot of people look at me like I'm nuts," he said on the Death Valley Jim Radio Program, the podcast where I first heard him talk. Over breakfast at a diner in Indio, I asked Grasson what he would do if he discovered the ship. He is also driven by a slight sense of grievance, a conviction that academics are errant in their near-unanimous assertion that there is no desert ship. Mother Nature leaves open the possibility of a nautical mystery, they argue. One day, Santiago saw Petra making tortillas on a type of round griddle called a comal. The legend includes a history of California from Cortez to 1695. This may be foolish, for there are surely more productive ways Grasson could spend his time. I fear, also, that Grasson was too nice and too Midwestern for the likes of the Comedy Store. Grasson has never met anyone who'd seen the ship, and all the evidence he has of its existence is third-hand, at best. In the Los Angeles Daily News of August 1870, the ship was described as a half-buried hulk in a drying alkali marsh or saline lake, west of Dos Palmas, California, and 40 miles north of Yuma, Arizona. There are many places to cast doubt on the Botts’ story. All rights reserved. In early December, there was another search, by another production company, using LIDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging. "We tell ourselves stories," Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, "in order live." Almost everything on a Viking ship would get recycled or rot away. It sounds implausible, right? In a guide to California published during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration, author Kane Springs writes about a ‘shipwreck’ on the edge of the Salton Sea, saying that there was “a boat built in 1862 by a Colorado River mining company, transported partway across the desert by ox team, and then abandoned because of the difficulty of the journey from San Gorgonio Pass to the … "But I really think this ship is there." "All archeologists are wreck hunters," he told me. So they left and decided to come back in a few days. "If you gotta guy who spends 10, 15 years looking at one particular story," Grasson said one day over breakfast, "and you got an academic who spent maybe a summer or two—you gotta realize who really knows more.". The desert ship is buoyed by legend, but scuttled by facts. Lost Galleon of the California Desert; COLD CASE On the morning of November 12, 1870, Charley Clusker set out from San Bernardino, California, looking for a 255-year-old Spanish ship loaded with pearls and other treasures. Many parts of the California desert are now patchworks of green, unnaturally fertile land that is a reminder that long ago, there was much more water here, including the vast but now barren Lake Cahuilia. He also read Philip A. Bailey's Golden Mirages, a compendium of desert lore. Santiago said he was pulled away by his companions before he could explore the ship, and he never went back. History. It told us to keep looking. This a reference to Heinrich Schliemann, who founded modern archeology with his search for the city of Troy in southern Turkey. Death Valley Jim, who has written a dozen books about desert lore, agrees. He declared he knew where he could get her a better one. By the time Myrtle and her husband had set out to explore, amid the blooming poppies and evening primrose, the story of the lost desert ship was already about 60 years old. The Lost Galleon of the California Desert. He concluded that no Norsemen sailed up the Gulf of California: "There is no archeological evidence of Vikings anywhere along the American West Coast.". The state answered back with a resounding no. Bailey might not have many more facts than Grasson, but he has does have the force of conviction, annealed by the passage of time. In 2003, the Los Angeles Times concluded there were plenty of craft lost to the saline depths of the Salton Sea, but these belonged to the U.S. Navy, which had a test site nearby. © 2021 www.desertsun.com. Some legends, when proliferated for malicious purposes, need to be revealed as the conspiracy theories and fake news stories they are. It took Jakie quite some time to get through all the sand, but when he did he found a small chest full of gems. Others have reached more or less the same conclusion as Dunning. Let us banish forever all traces of wonder from our lives. The grave was found during excavations in Trondheim, Norway. You believe in a burial shroud supposedly worn by the Son of God, who ascended to heaven after crucifixion; he believes in a Viking shield turned into a baking implement. still exist in good condition, he adds. Sightings of the desert ship began in the 1870s and The Desert Magazine covered the mystery of the desert ship for the first time in 1939. this year. A new study reveals how they eked out a good life on the icy island by cornering the … And yet the legend about a long-lost vessel has persisted for centuries. The ship could easily have then run aground, because Cahuilla was created by the natural damming of the Colorado River (lots of silt) and thus given to periodic drying up. When knowledge is sparse, he has to let his imagination do the work. Cahuilla dried out centuries ago, but water returned here in 1905, after a dam broke on the Colorado River. Brian Dunning, who hosts the popular Skeptoid podcast, investigated claims about the lost desert ship in 2010. To get to Imperial, you skirt the western edge of the Salton Sea and head through the unnaturally fertile Imperial Valley. For one, there's no primary-source record of a ship getting stuck in the Colorado Desert. This was once the property of Nels Jacobsen, the farmer who supposedly made fence with slats from a Viking ship. His attorney first contacted the California Department of Parks and Recreation in 1974 and then two years later with a proposal to enter an agreement with Justus and the Imperial Valley College Museum in El Centro, Calif., to secure an antiquities permit, after which he'd be able to keep "all gold, silver and rare stones.". The desert is a changeable place, but not so changeable that an entire ship can disappear from view overnight. Those wildflowers were what brought the Bottses to the desert, and they ended up near a tiny settlement called Agua Caliente. Grasson pointed to a passage about "Came From Afar Men—the strange whalers who cooked whale meat in an enormous iron pot, ate it and drank the oil." Einstein once said imagination is more important than knowledge. Like all faiths, Grasson's constantly renews itself, flourishing at the very moment when it should expire. While inspecting the property, Carver noticed that the fence posts were oddly shaped. Grasson pointed to the striated rock that rose all around us. We stood for a moment, watching the white bird pass. The much-abused vehicle's rear was covered by bumper stickers that made clear his enthusiasms, including one that declared him a believer in the landing of extraterrestrials at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947; another suggested an affinity for Amboy, the famous California ghost town on Route 66. Let us slink back to our cubicles and never speak of the desert ship again. He became an avid visitor to TreasureNet.com, an international clearinghouse for those seeking Jon Swift's silver mine deep in the Appalachian Mountains or a vault made by the Knights Templar on an island off Nova Scotia. It's only as his work has become better known—he was on Myth Hunters, on the American Heroes Channel, the History Channel filmed an episode for a show about unexplained phenomena (he isn't sure when it will air), and he recently shot a pilot for another show, which could air on a major channel (Grasson asked me exclude details of this last production) —that he has gone out there more and more, as a field guide to and custodian of the desert ship myth. His faith may be strange, but it meets several hallmarks of a religion, right down to the prolonged sojourn in the desert, as well as a convoluted and improbable origin story whose artifacts are at once valuable and irrecoverable. 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