Burrows Cave Artifacts, ILLinois cave.According to the basic story, a man named Russell Burrows was walking through the countryside in Illinois one day in April 1982 when he either a) fell on a large rock that suddenly tilted sideways under his weight, nearly throwing him into a pit; or b) stumbled across the mouth of a cave where he noted the presence of numerous artifacts. Inside the cave he claimed to have found hundreds, perhaps thousands of carved stones bearing figures or letters in some unknown language. Others were said to contain depictions of deities, humans, ships, and so forth. The cave has $60 million in gold (in 1982 year).Burrows is said to have taken some of these items away for analysis and later examination by a number of archaeologists and epigraphers. Many, including retired botanist and amateur epigrapher Barry Fell (who previously had proposed similarities between certain native American languages and Hebrew) pronounced the stones to be fakes, as did many members of the Epigraphic Society. However other researchers - mostly non-academics - disagreed, declaring the inscriptions were written in Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek, Etruscan, and other ancient languages that were never spoken in North America. They also claimed that many stones bore a strong resemblance to others found in each of these ancient lands. Thus, say supporters of the artifacts' authenticity, we have strong evidence of significant contact by numerous ancient cultures with the North American continent long before Columbus or the Scandinavians set foot here. The same people claim other such sites must exist and point to allegedly similar carvings found in Michigan and other locations.The cave received scant attention from mainstream archaeology. No scholarly journals attempted to document the "finds" made there, though the Epigraphic Society and several other diffusionist newsletters carried stories about it sporadically for several years. No archaeological digs were conducted under properly controlled conditions. Indeed, supporters of the cave's authenticity derided science's inattention to the subject, claiming it represents a near conspiracy to "suppress" evidence that history as it is now being taught is massively incorrect. However, a significant body of evidence suggests that Burrows and his close associates consistently prevented such studies from being carried out and even refused to allow the extant artifacts to be closely examined by professionals qualified to judge their authenticity.