United Kentucky Liberation Front?

According to Louisville.com, a man tried to rally attention for his "United Kentucky Liberation Front" group by sending pornography to Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, John Boehner, Ron Paul, Mitch McConnell and others.

I'm trying to think of another example that might knock this one out of the running for the most monumentally idiotic PR move in the last two hundred years.

I can't think of any. I think this guy's got it sewn up.

This incident apparently occurred last summer, but the man was only taken into custody on June 9. According to the Louisville.com article, "If convicted, Edwards faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison. He faces maximum potential penalties of 30 years in prison, a $500,000 fine and supervised release of at least five years and it could be any term of years including life."

What does porn have to do with liberating Kentucky? Well, this guy says he only added the porn images to his mass e-mail to "get noticed" to help promote his cause. Groan. And what cause, pray tell, is that? This "United Kentucky Liberation Front" advocates the secession of Kentucky from the United States. That in itself actually doesn't sound like such a bad idea to me sometimes, but how many brain cells does it take to understand that doing something like this is only going to turn the public against you and kill any chance your silly organization ever had of ever making any headway in the future?

I googled a bit and found this cut-and-pasted Topix post in which someone from this group laid out their thinking:

It is largly unknown that Kentucky is actually not legally part of the United States. The United Kentucky Liberation Front has recently done some research into the subject and has written this report on it. These are the laws keeping Kentucky an Indepedent nation.
1. Proclamation of 1763 reserved Kentucky for Native Americans, but was broken though it was supposed to stay in effect after the United States took over.(additionally there are no federally or state recognized tribes in this land).
2. In the Treaty of Paris (1783) the British delegation declared only the 13 colonies free states. It also said that loyalist land and property was to stay in their possession, this includes Native American land. This is supported by the fact that none of Florida or Canada became America.
3. In 1784 a constitutional convention was held in Danville in which General James Wilkinson proposed secession from the United States and in 1785 there was a petition to Virginia to become “free and independent”.
4. In 1850 Kentucky was declared a commonwealth, and is the only commonwealth outside the original 13 colonies. Since the original colonies banded together originally as a confederation, implying they were all republics. Therefore Kentucky is an independent republic not banded with the original 13 colonies.
5. Before the civil war, Kentucky was a slave state and declared itself neither Union nor Confederacy. During the war though, it had both a Union and Confederate government and was admitted to the Confederacy in 1861. It was also had the only Union Capital that the Confederacy captured. Additionally Kentucky is the birthplace of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Finally, when Lincoln asked the Governor of Kentucky for troops, Governor Magoffin replied “I will send not a man nor a dollar for the wicked purpose of subduing my sister southern states.” This all proves that Kentucky was technically a state of the Confederacy, but was never readmitted to the Union and was not occupied by the Army during the reconstruction.
6. In the Montevideo Convention (Article 1), which was signed by the United States, states that the state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a permanent population (over 4 million); a defined territory (the state of Kentucky); government (the legislative, executive, and judicial branch of the state of Kentucky); and capacity to enter into relations with the other states (Kentucky was de facto recognized by Spain in 1787, and the Kentucky Government has given awards to numerous foreign officials such as Winston Churchill or Yahya Jammeh).
7. Native American rights are broken by government. There are currently no recognized tribes in Kentucky, even though it was originally set aside for natives. Currently the Cherokee Tribe of kentucky, Kentucky Cherokee Heritage Group, the Ridgetop Shawnee, and the Southern Cherokee Nation of Kentucky are striving for recognition.

Alllllrighty then.

There are so many confused legal points in this diatribe (not to mention misspelling and incoherent grammar) that I'm not even going to bother picking it all apart here. The part about the Native Americans is right on, of course - and I do support the survival efforts of groups like Southern Cherokee Nation of Kentucky. But the Cherokee Nation doesn't need fools like this ruining their cause by mailing porno to Palin. With allies like that, who needs enemies?

Midway

At the halfway point between Frankfort and Lexington you'll find the spooky little town of Midway, so named for its equidistant position which was deliberately chosen by the Lexington-Ohio Railroad Company. Accidentally and coincidentally, it also happens to be equidistant between Versailles and Georgetown.

The site where Midway now stands was once a vast farm owned by a man named John Francisco. Each year, the Francisco's Farm Arts Festival is held in Midway at Equus Run Vineyards, and this year's is coming up soon - June 25 and 26.

The area was once heavily populated by native American mound builders, which no doubt lends to the spooky feeling in the air here.



Other interesting Midway factoids:

John Hunt Morgan stopped here on July 15, 1862, in an effort to trick the Union soldiers chasing him into thinking he was heading towards Frankfort. Morgan instead hid out briefly, then backtracked.

The Porterhouse steak supposedly originated here, at the still-standing Porter House. However, the Oxford English Dictionary credits its development to New York, circa early 19th century, before Midway even existed.

Zerelda Elizabeth Cole James Simms Samuel, mother of Jesse James and mentioned in the Tom Waits song "Diamond in Your Mind", was born here on January 29, 1825.

Indian Head Rock

For many years, a rock protruding from the middle of the Ohio River along Greenup County was a popular spot for swimmers and waders to venture out to and have their picture taken. The rock also became well-known for a petroglyph of an oddly simplistic face.

Not everyone agrees on the significance and origin of the face. According to Wikipedia:

It has been theorized that the face was carved by an Native American artist as a petroglyph, a boatman as a river gauge, or was carved by John Book from Portsmouth, Ohio who later fought in the Battle of Shiloh. Other theories include that a band of robbers used it to mark their nearby stash and that a quarry man carved the face with a metal device.

Seeking to preserve the rock from eventual destruction from erosion or defacement, Ohio historian Steve Shaffer took it upon himself to remove the rock from the river and haul it over to Ohio, where it was placed on display.

And then all hell broke loose.

The Greenup County Attorney declared that Shaffer's removal of the rock could be a violation of Kentucky’s Antiquity Act (a Class D felony) and the Army Corps of Engineers also opined that the rock was Kentucky property and its removal violated the Federal Rivers and Harborment Act of 1899. After three years of legal wrangling - which included having the Mayor of Portsmouth, OH dragged before the Grand Jury - the rock is finally being returned to Kentucky. Says the Courier-Journal:

Under an agreed order dismissing a suit filed in federal court, the city of Portsmouth, Ohio, will relinquish control of the rock and permit it to be returned to Kentucky.

The so-called Indian Head Rock will be taken to a Greenup County garage until a permanent home can be found and money can be identified to put it on display for public viewing, Greenup County Judge-Executive Robert Carpenter said in a release from the Kentucky Heritage Council.

Land of Tomorrow

It's often been repeated in years past - by me, even - that there's an old legend about Kentucky's name coming from a Native American word for "dark and bloody ground". The legend, of course, isn't true - but hey, it's always been a useful meme, because Native Americans did use that specific phrase to describe this area.

We still don't really know for certain where the word "Kentucky" comes from. George Rogers Clark said it came from a Native American word meaning "river of blood". That's pretty awesome, but really, there's no reason not to make the more logical assumption that it comes from the Mohawk word Kentah-Ke, meaning "meadow".

But that doesn't mean we have to abandon the "dark and bloody ground" concept, not by any stretch. The term really was applied by Native Americans to describe the territory that would become Transylvania, and then eventually our modern-day Commonwealth of Kentucky. In Steven A. Channing's Kentucky: A Bicentennial History:

When representatives of the Transylvania Land Company
signed the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals in 1775, Chief Dragging Canoe of the Cherokee said they had secured "a dark and bloody ground."

Why dark and bloody, exactly? Well, it's complicated. Northern and southern tribes, such as the Cherokee and Shawnee, had been fighting over the land for as long as either side could remember. But the curious thing is, they weren't fighting for it for the purpose of living there. They wanted the land strictly for its qualities as a superb hunting ground, but one that spooked all concerned (perhaps it was, even then, teeming with Devil Deer.) There was something about this land, even in ancient times, that early man seemed fearful of.

And it seems to go back to early, early man, ones that even predate our own Native Americans.

In his 1806 book Travels In America, Thomas Ashe writes of his experiences with a vast network of huge open-room caverns originally discovered in 1783 beneath the city of Lexington, containing exotic artifacts, a stone altar for sacrifices, human skulls and bones piled high, and mummified remains.

These mummies were very strange looking, of unusually tall stature, and had red hair. The local native Americans claimed that these were the remnants of an ancient race predating their own; one that died out long ago and about which they knew very little.

Respected historian George W. Ranck, writing in 1872, also discussed this "lost city" buried beneath Lexington, and Don Edwards, writing a century later in the Lexington Herald-Leader, noted that when construction workers were preparing to build one of the downtown hotels, they took many more core drillings of the ground than usual - just to be sure they weren't building atop one of the legendary giant caverns.

Lexington isn't the only place that strange Kentucky mummies have been found. Check your copy of Weird Kentucky for information on the mummies discovered in Mammoth Cave - mummies that continue to confound our current ethnological paradigm.


And in 1792, General John Payne made a strange discovery while building his house in the tiny town of Augusta, KY, 63 miles North of Lexington. Payne's firsthand account is related in Historical Sketches of Kentucky by Lewis Collins:

"The bottom on which Augusta is situated is a large burying ground of the ancients...They have been found in great numbers, and of all sizes, everywhere between the mouths of Bracken and Locust Creeks, a distance of about a mile and a half. From the cellar under my dwelling, 60 by 70 feet, over a hundred and ten skeletons were taken. I measured them by skulls, and there might have been more, whose skulls had crumbled into dust...The skeletons were of all sizes, from seven feet to infant.

David Kilgour (who was a tall and very large man) passed our village at the time I was excavating my cellar, and we took him down and applied a thigh bone to his. The man, if well-proportioned, must have been 10 to 12 inches taller than Kilgour, and the lower jaw bone would slip on over his, skin and all. Who were they? How came their bones here?

When I was in the army, I inquired of old Crane, a Wyandot and of Anglerson, a Delaware, both intelligent old chiefs, and they could give me no information in reference to these remains of antiquity. Some of the largest trees of the forest were growing over the remains when the land was cleared in 1792."

A few years later, on December 21, 1806, the town of Augusta, KY was visited by Harman Blennerhassett, lawyer, occultist, and member of the Illuminati. Was he aware of the ancient underground civilization in the region?

Blennerhassett was born on October 8, 1764 in Ireland and moved to the USA with his wife, where they settled on Blennerhassett Island on the Ohio River. Blennerhassett was a friend and colleague of Adam Weishaupt, and a member of his Order of the Illuminati, reaching the level of Illuminatus Magus. He was also a friend of Vice President Aaron Burr, with whom he, some allege, engaged in a conspiracy to, among other things, remove President Thomas Jefferson from power. The plot was discovered, and Blennerhassett's secret camp at Marietta was destroyed on December 19, 1806.

Blennerhassett fled with about 50 of his fellow initiates, leaving his wife, his sons and the rest of his guerrilla troops behind. But here's what has always puzzled me: instead of making a direct exit, Blennerhassett risked making a mysterious side trip to Augusta, KY, arriving on the day of the solstice. Given his penchant for mystical folderol, it seems clear to me that there must have been some occult significance to his visit to Augusta. But what? We may never know.

That Blennerhassett was interested in Kentucky's forgotten ancient civilization is a distinct possibility, however. And did the Marquis de Lafayette have similar thoughts in mind when he toured America with an eye for ancient burial mounds and significance found in calendar dates?

(By the way, I originally wrote an essay on these subjects on my old, now defunct, original version of the UnK site, and much of that material was cut and pasted with some unwelcome alterations and reprinted on other sites with credit given not to me but someone else. So here on this Halloween, I hereby declare the Curse of Grillo's Grandfather and will also mention that I have some excellent attorneys.)

And then there's The Kentucky Anomaly, which is something I ran across accidentally while combing through a mind-numbing quantity of old NASA technical reports. NASA subsequently pulled the report from the URL at which it had previously occupied, and replaced it with something else. But the original report had spoken of "a very prominent magnetic anomaly measured by MAGSAT over the eastern mid-continent of the United States was inferred to have a source region beneath Kentucky and Tennessee. Prominent aeromagnetic and gravity anomalies are also associated with the inferred source region."

Gravity anomalies. Caused by something beneath Kentucky. Seriously. Now that's news! Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out much else about this so-called "Kentucky Anomaly". What does it all mean? Dunno. I'm working on it. But if, as NASA says, this thing goes back to Pre-Cambrian times, consider that this could be the smoking gun as to why this territory has had a palpably weird vibe for as long as humans have dwelt on its soil.


On the other hand, the Ohio River along Kentucky's upper border also seems to be a source-point for spookiness, from the burial mounds of the Ashland area where Charles Manson grew up, to the aforementioned Augusta, to the anomalous Welsh-speaking people that implausibly turned up in the area that would later become Louisville (Again, consult your copy of Weird Kentucky.)

The mysterious and awe-inspiring Great Serpent Mound is just on the other side of the river in Ohio, but definitely related to all this other ancient activity in the Kentucky/Ohio Valley region. The tribes involved have been alternately theorized to be the Hopewell, the Fort Ancient, the Adena, and a prehistoric precursor of the Allegheny tribe known as the Tallagewi. Still others contend that it all goes back even further, to lost cultures about whom we know absolutely nothing.

Of the Great Serpent Mound, Wikipedia has this to say:

The mound is located on a plateau with a unique cryptoexplosion structure that contains faulted and folded bedrock, usually produced either by a meteorite or a volcanic explosion.

Determining exactly what formed the Serpent Mound Cryptoexplosion Structure is a problem that geologists continue to debate. Two main solutions have been offered. Some geologists think the structure is a meteorite or asteroid crater. Others suggest that the structure was caused by forces from inside the earth, probably an explosive eruption of gases derived from a deep magma source in the basement rocks.

A similar anomaly exists at Jeptha Knob in Clayvillage, KY (Shelby County). Jeptha Knob was originally thought to be a cryptovolcanic structure but now is considered to be the site where a massive asteroid struck the Earth 425 million years ago.

One could go quite mad studying all the puzzling evidence - and some have.

This Halloween, my fellow Kentuckians, count yourself lucky to be living in one of our country's most interesting states - but also consider that "may you live in an interesting state" could be an equally effective variant of the Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times."

There's yet another proposed meaning for the word Kentucky - some say it comes from a Wyandot word meaning "Land of Tomorrow". Though not as plausible as some of the ones we addressed at the outset, I just like the sound of it, and the implication it carries - that as interesting as Kentucky is now, it's going to get even more interesting in the future...

Floyd's Defeat Mass Grave

This marker in Eastwood Cemetery commemorates the Kentucky pioneers killed or captured by indians in the battle that came to be known as "Floyd's Defeat". This was part of the same incident as the Long Run Massacre, in which Huron and Miami indians killed 76 settlers and soldiers during a two-day period.

The marker, which is located beside the cemetery's fence, indicates that the men are actually buried in a mass grave on the other side (see image below).


Also in Eastwood, you'll find an obelisk marking the battle site and honoring Col. John Floyd and his men, who died, as the inscription states, "in a contest with the Indians in 1781".

The Legend of the Little People

Kyle Lovern's new book Appalachian Case Study: UFO Sightings, Alien Encounters & Unexplained Phenomena, Volume 2 is hot off the presses! While Volume 1 focused entirely on UFO incidents in Lovern's home state of West Virginia, Volume 2 goes outside that state's borders to examine cases related to the Appalachian region of bordering states, including Kentucky.

The Appalachian region was once the ancient homeland of the Cherokee civilization (as well as other tribes) for thousands of years before Scottish and Irish immigrants settled into its mountains in the 1700s.

The book's recounting of Kentucky UFO lore is well done, but what really piqued my curiosity was Lovern's analysis of the Yunwi Tsunsdi legends passed down in Cherokee culture since antiquity.

The Yunwi Tsunsdi are miniature beings described in ancient Cherokee lore as sometimes being spirits and sometimes being diminutive humanoids about two feet tall. According to the legends, Lovern says, these beings may have different types of appearances and may be of three or four different types. Descriptions of them range from kindly but mischievous to somewhat more malicious tricksters. They reportedly have the power to confuse humans' minds, and to turn invisible at will.


Lovern wonders aloud, "Were the "little people" known to the Cherokee related to UFOs, inter-dimensional mysteries or some other unusual phenomena?" and points out that many Indian tribes throughout North America have legends of beings from other planets or from other dimensions.

I also find it interesting that my own Irish ancestors who came to Kentucky had "little people" legends of their own - the Leprechaun, the Clurichaun, and the Faerie. Not to mention Sprites, Hobs, Korrigans, Pixies, Elves, Imps, Brownies, Goblins, Gremlins, Boggarts, and Lubber Fiends.

Kentucky Kokopelli?

Your parents might not have ever heard of Kokopelli, but there's a good chance that you have. In recent years, the ancient Southwestern Native American symbol of Kokopelli has become trendy and hip, leading to greater awareness of this mysterious trickster music/agriculture/fertility deity. The first known images of Kokopelli appear on Hohokam pottery circa 750 A.D. and reportedly, the tradition goes back even further to the Ancient Pueblos, circa 1200 years B.C.

Kokopelli petroglyphs (see image above) usually depict him as a slightly hunchbacked humanoid figure (though some theorize he's actually intended to be a cartoonishly anthropomorphized insect) holding a sticklike object up to his face. Because music is among Kokopelli's realms of overseeing, the object is generally regarded to be a flute. Some say it may have originally been a blowgun but gradually gave way to a more peaceful, musical symbol. Still others contend it's actually a pipe for ceremonial smoking of tobacco and herbs.


Kokopelli is also sometimes depicted with obvious male genitalia, and protrusions from the head that variously resemble antennae, hair, horns, or long floppy ears like Walt Disney's Goofy.

Images of Kokopelli are ubiquitously found in the Southwestern states, and I've always wondered why his influence never spread to other parts of North America to states like, well, you-know-where.

But it just may be that the power of the Kokopelli myth did indeed make it to Kentucky in antiquity. I submit to you pages 24-26 of Rock Art of Kentucky, the ultimate compendium of prehistoric petroglyphs of our commonwealth. There you'll find information about the Reedyville Petroglyph (see image below). Located in Butler County, southeast of Reedyville, near the old Honaker's Ferry, this set of petroglyphs reside on a slab of Pennsylvanian sandstone known as "the Caseyville Formation". They show what clearly seem, to me, to be a Kokopelli-ish figure, hunched forward with protrusions from his head and holding something up to his face. A more primitive one is just inches away, with a head of "hair" that even more resembles Kokopelli, but is limbless and tree-trunk-like. Most importantly, look at the legs and feet and how they relate to the torso.


The sketch in Rock Art of Kentucky is just one person's attempt to draw what he saw there, of course. Unfortunately the photo in the book is a terrible one and shows very little. These glyphs lay flat, open to the elements, and were almost certainly much more detailed when they were new. Many details that would aid in analysis may have been eroded away.

Me, I'm convinced this is a rendering of Kokopelli, deliberately done as such by an ancient hand for reasons unknown.