Tag: oklahoma

The mysterious Viking runes found in a landlocked US state

Did Vikings find their way to a remote part of Oklahoma? Some in a small community believe so, thanks to controversial runic carvings found in the area.

“[Farley] spent the majority of her adult life researching the stone,” said Amanda Garcia, Heavener Runestone Park manager. “She travelled all around the US, went to Egypt and went to different places looking at different markings.”

Faith Rogers, an environmental-science intern and volunteer at the Heavener Runestone Park, led me down a cobblestone path toward one of the 55-acre woodland’s biggest attractions – which is also one of the US’ biggest historical mysteries. We were deep in the rolling, scrub-forest foothills of the Ouachita Mountains in far eastern Oklahoma, and we were on our way to view a slab of ancient sandstone that still has experts scratching their heads and debating about the eight symbols engraved on its face. 

Some believe that these cryptic inscriptions are runes (ancient alphabetical characters) carved into the towering stone circa 1000 CE by Norse explorers who travelled up the Arkansas River to this remote part of landlocked America.

“Do I think the Vikings carved this? I do,” said Rogers, as we stood in the protective wood-and-glass “house” built around the 3m-by-3.6m slab. “[Local historian] Gloria Farley spent her whole life researching this, and she has a lot of evidence to back it up.”

Farley – who grew up in the town of Heavener where the runestone was found and who passed away in 2006 – is a legend in these parts. She first saw the relic while hiking as a young girl in 1928 and was fascinated by it. Two decades later, she returned to study it, as an amateur runologist and self-taught epigraphist. 

The first modern knowledge of the runestone dates to the 1830s, when it was found by a Choctaw hunting party. For years, white Oklahomans called it Indian Rock, mistakenly thinking that the carvings were Native American.

“[Farley] spent the majority of her adult life researching the stone,” said Amanda Garcia, Heavener Runestone Park manager. “She travelled all around the US, went to Egypt and went to different places looking at different markings.”

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‘Multiple Human Remains’ Discovered During Search for Four Missing Oklahoma Cyclists: Police

Police in an Oklahoma city with fewer than 12,000 residents Friday reported finding four unidentified human bodies in Deep Fork River.

Okmulgee Police Chief Joe Prentice said in a post to the department’s Facebook page that a passerby informed them of suspicious items in the river near Sharp Road around 2 p.m. Friday

“Four male bodies were recovered from the river,” Prentice said in a statement. “No identifications have been made at the scene and the Medical Examiner will have to make the official identifications.”

The bodies have been sent to the medical examiner’s office in Tulsa for autopsies, the chief added.

Four local friends were reported missing in the area Sunday, but police declined to link the bodies to the missing men. The missing men’s families were notified of the discovery, police said.

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Senator in 2010 deposition: 13-year-olds can consent to sex

Before he became a leading voice for conservative causes on Capitol Hill, U.S. Senator James Lankford spent more than a decade as the director of youth programming at the Falls Creek Baptist Conference Center, a sprawling campground about 80 miles south of Oklahoma City that attracts more than 50,000 campers in grades six through 12 each year.

The Republican lawmaker’s tenure at the camp is a prominent feature of his political profile, noted in the first paragraph of his official Senate biography. That experience is also coming under renewed scrutiny as the Southern Baptist Convention, which is affiliated with the group that owns the camp, faces a reckoning over its handling of sexual abuse cases.

In 2009, while Lankford worked at the camp, the family of a 13-year-old girl sued a 15-year-old boy who was alleged to have had sex with her at the camp. Lankford, who was not in Congress at the time, is not alleged to have had any direct knowledge of the alleged assault, has not been accused of any wrongdoing and was not a defendant in the lawsuit, which was settled for an undisclosed amount before it was scheduled to go to trial.

But in a 2010 deposition in the case, given a week after he was elected to his first term in the U.S. House, Lankford testified that he believed a 13-year-old could consent to sex.

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New Video Shows University Of Oklahoma Faculty Teaching How To Silence And Punish ‘Problematic’ Conservatives

According to newly released video footage, University of Oklahoma instructors want to punish students who defy campus orthodoxy. Their plan is to “avoid ‘a rhetoric of dysfunctional silence’ that closes ears to marginalized voices,” by — you guessed it — silencing marginalized voices. 

On Tuesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit focused on protecting campus free speech, publicized video footage of an April 14 workshop on “Anti-Racist Rhetoric & Pedagogies” at the University of Oklahoma (OU). The workshop’s leaders presented slides about “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “subverting white institutional defensiveness.” In an attempt to teach so-called antiracism, the workshop’s leaders also promoted censorship and indoctrination.

The event was “one of nine professional development workshops for instructors and grad students” at OU. During the workshop, three faculty members taught their colleagues “how to foster an anti-racist environment in their classrooms,” brainstorming tactics for dissuading, censoring, and penalizing “problematic” speech. 

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100 Years Ago Today, Cops Helped Terrorists Kill 300 of the Most Successful Blacks in America

On June 1, 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a horrific act of racial terrorism took place, and the perpetrators were actually assisted by the local police and the national guard. The site of the attack was a region of Tulsa known as “Black Wall Street” in a neighborhood called “Greenwood,” which was a thriving center of culture and commerce for African Americans.

At the time, the community was a symbol of black success in America, which unfortunately made it the target of constant hostility from media, politicians and local racists who saw it as an economic threat. The attacks on the community were sparked by an accusation that a black man attempted to rape a white woman. Although the man accused of the crime was arrested and awaiting judgment, a mob of angry racists did not want to wait for the suspect to see a fair trial, and instead wanted the whole black community to pay for the alleged crimes of this one man.

At the courthouse, innocent black bystanders were attacked by a mob and forced to retreat back to Greenwood. The mob then descended on “Black Wall Street,” setting fires to buildings and shooting people indiscriminately, creating a night of terror throughout the city. Airplanes circled the sky dropping kerosene and nitroglycerin on the buildings and people below, according to survivors of the attack.

Authorities did nothing to stop the violence, and in fact, they actually assisted the mob by only arresting blacks, and some reports have even indicated that they also engaged in violence, possibly even flying some of the planes that were responsible for the bombings. These events came to be known as the “Tulsa Race Riots,” but as many survivors have pointed out, calling them “riots” just serves to take responsibility from the mob and the police that protected them.

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Oklahoma Bigfoot Bounty Balloons to $3 Million for First to Capture Sasquatch

The Oklahoma lawmaker who created a controversial cash prize for the first person to capture a living Sasquatch in the state announced that the proverbial Bigfoot bounty has been increased to a staggering $3 million. State Representative J.J. Humphrey made the declaration during a session of the Oklahoma legislature on Wednesday as he was providing his colleagues with an update on the audacious idea which he first suggested as a Bigfoot hunting season back in January. “Who knew that that would go international and that we would gain so much attention,” he marveled at the worldwide headlines that followed his initial proposal.

Since that time, the concept has transformed into a plan wherein applicants could get ‘tracking licenses’ from the state’s tourism department with the express knowledge that they are not to kill Bigfoot, but can capture it alive and, if they do, they win the enormous cash prize. “We have started what may be the biggest promotion in the state of Oklahoma ever,” Humphrey proclaimed to the legislature, “this is turning out to be huge.” The lawmaker also noted that the attention surrounding the state’s strange embrace of Bigfoot has already brought dividends as a documentary crew had journeyed to Oklahoma to film a series on the famed cryptid.

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