Do We Know What We Think We Know About ... - TheUFOStore.com

68 ATLANTIS ATLANTIS RISING RISING • Number 95
NORSEMEN
Continued from Page 40
sota throughout the summer of 1938. That August,
Elmer Roen, a mechanic from nearby
Brooten, was fishing beside an algae-coated
boulder to which he tied his rowboat near the
middle of the lake. Making his way from one
end of the boat to the other, he tried to steady
himself against the large stone with his right
foot, when he slipped, pushing off a swath of
slime. To his surprise, the exposed area revealed
several inscribed letters in an unknown written
language. The stone was flat on its side, emblazoned
with the inscription, and weighed an estimated
300 pounds. Washing away the rest of
the stone face, he was amazed to see
that the inscription completely covered
the four-foot high, five-foot
long, gray granite rock. The letters
ran along the stone from
top to bottom, going down
beneath the surface of the
lake. Roen probed along
the stone under the cold,
turbid water with his fingertips,
feeling, not
seeing, more incised
characters. But he was
not the first man to
find them.
About fifty years earlier,
another drought revealed
the same stone to
Henry Moen, a Sunburg grocery
store owner. Since he found it
a few years before the more famous
Kensington Rune Stone came to light, the
latter’s well-publicized discovery in 1898 could
not have inspired Moen to commit a hoax.
Moreover, he had a reputation among his
fellow townsmen for credibility but with no interest
in history. As an educated man, he nonetheless
immediately recognized the inscription
as runic, because he had been shown many
Norse runes during a previous visit to his native
Norway.
Minnesota’s Norway Lake stone was next
glimpsed in 1934 by one “Foxy” Anderson,
who hid behind it to ogle the local Qualm sisters
exposing themselves to the afternoon sun.
He took his eyes off the bathing beauties long
enough to notice that the engraved monolith
was “tombstone-like.”
Two years later, a Colonel Anderson (no relation
to the voyeuristic Foxy) was using the
boulder as a duck blind, when he observed that
flaking-away algae covered what appeared to be
“Indian writing.”
Elmer Roen alone took any real interest in
the Norway Lake stone during the late 1930s.
Over the next two decades, he sought out one
ancient writing system after another—Hebrew,
Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Latin, and many
more. But none of them matched his eyewitness
description of the Norway Lake inscription.
Although not university trained, he was
widely known for his inflexible honesty and
photographic memory. Finally, by chance, he
was shown the contents of a book by a wellknown
historian of the Norse, A Holy Mission to
Minnesota Six Hundred Years Ago (MN: Rune
Stone Museum Foundation, 1959). In it, author
Professor Hjalmar R. Holand --- earlier awarded
a Guggenheim Fellowship in Anthropology and
Cultural Studies—reproduced a photograph of
the Kensington Rune Stone. Roen recognized
the glyphs at once as stylistically identical to
those covering the boulder in Norway Lake.
He contacted Marion Dahm, head of the
Minnesota Viking Society, in Chokio, and told
him about the obvious comparison. In 1959,
Dahm arranged for them to visit the Kensington
Rune Stone preserved in Alexandria,
Minnesota. Roen was struck by its resemblance
to the Norway Lake script and instantly
picked out eight, different runes he remembered
from the half-sunken boulder. He
returned to Alexandria two weeks
later, when Dahm asked him to
select the same, eight
runes from among the
several dozens engraved
The Norway
on the Kensington slab.
Lake Axe
Roen correctly picked
them out again without a
moment’s hesitation.
On July 9, 1972, Dahm led a dozen other
scuba divers into Norway Lake’s first underwater
expedition. But their all-day efforts
were frustrated by the
murky waters, with subsurface
visibility from two feet to six
inches. Several other attempts
failed to locate the missing rune stone. It was
mostly championed by Dahm, a true believer,
until his death two years ago. Since then, the inscribed
boulder has not been forgotten, and
preparations are under way to overcome the
poor water clarity that has so far frustrated all
efforts to pinpoint its location. The boulder’s
re-emergence would be a major find, more significant
perhaps than that of the Kensington
Rune Stone, just 45 miles to the north. Connection
between both sites is easily accessible via a
water route down the Chippewa to Shakopee
Rivers, which were even more navigable six centuries
ago than they are today.
The sunken rune stone’s existence was underscored
by complimentary evidence that surfaced
in summer 1908, when a local fisherman
found a peculiar axe on a peninsula projecting
into the northern section of Norway Lake. “I
picked it up and thought it must have been
part of a seeding machine, or some other machinery,”
recalled Ole Skaalerud. Instead, the
axe “was immediately recognized by the staff at
several museums in Norway” as a twelfth Cen-
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