Description: PART ONE Body Parts File No. 003 Interview with Dr. Rose Franklin, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Enrico Fermi Institute Location: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL --How big was the hand? --6.9 meters, about twenty-three feet; though it seemed much larger for an eleven-year-old. --What did you do after the incident? --Nothing. We didn''t talk about it much after that. I went to school every day like any kid my age. No one in my family had ever been to college, so they insisted I keep going to school. I majored in physics. I know what you''re going to say. I wish I could tell you I went into science because of the hand, but I was always good at it. My parents figured out I had a knack for it early on. I must have been four years old when I got my first science kit for Christmas. One of those electronics kits. You could make a telegraph, or things like that, by squeezing wires into little metal springs. I don''t think I would have done anything different had I listened to my father and stayed home that day. Anyway, I graduated from college and I kept doing the only thing I knew how to do. I went to school. You should have seen my dad when we learned I was accepted at the University of Chicago. I''ve never seen anyone so proud in my life. He wouldn''t have been any happier had he won a million dollars. They hired me at the U of C after I finished my Ph.D. --When did you find the hand again? --I didn''t. I wasn''t looking for it. It took seventeen years, but I guess you could say it found me. --What happened? --To the hand? The military took over the site when it was discovered. --When was that? --When I fell in. It took about eight hours before the military stepped in. Colonel Hudson--I think that was his name--was put in charge of the project. He was from the area so he knew pretty much everyone. I don''t remember ever meeting him, but those who did had only good things to say about the man. I read what little was left of his notes--most of it was redacted by the military. In the three years he spent in charge, his main focus had always been figuring out what those carvings meant. The hand itself, which is mostly referred to as "the artifact," is mentioned in passing only a few times, evidence that whoever built that room must have had a complex enough religious system. I think he had a fairly precise notion of what he wanted this to be. --What do you think that was? --I have no idea. Hudson was career military. He wasn''t a physicist. He wasn''t an archaeologist. He had never studied anything resembling anthropology, linguistics, anything that would be remotely useful in this situation. Whatever preconceived notion he had, it must have come from popular culture, watching Indiana Jones or something. Fortunately for him, he had competent people surrounding him. Still, it must have been awkward, being in charge and having no idea what''s going on most of the time. What''s fascinating is how much effort they put into disproving their own findings. Their first analysis indicated the room was built about three thousand years ago. That made little sense to them, so they tried carbon-dating organic material found on the hand. The tests showed it to be much older, somewhere between five thousand and six thousand years old. --That was unexpected? --You could say that. You have to understand that this flies in the face of everything we know about American civilizations. The oldest civilization we''re aware of was located in the Norte Chico region of Peru, and the hand appeared to be about a thousand years older. Even if it weren''t, it''s fairly obvious that no one carried a giant hand from South America all the way to South Dakota, and there were no civilizations as advanced in North America until much, much later. In the end, Hudson''s team blamed the carbon dating on contamination from surrounding material. After a few years of sporadic research, the site was determined to be twelve hundred years old and classified as a worship temple for some offshoot of Mississippian civilization. I went through the files a dozen times. There is absolutely nothing, no evidence whatsoever to support that theory, other than the fact that it makes more sense than anything the data would suggest. If I had to guess, I would say that Hudson saw no military interest whatsoever in all this. He probably resented seeing his career slowly wither in an underground research lab and was eager to come up with anything, however preposterous, just to get out of there. --Did he? --Get out? Yes. It took a little more than three years, but he finally got his wish. He had a stroke while walking his dog and slipped into a coma. He died a few weeks later. --What happened to the project after he died? --Nothing. Nothing happened. The hand and panels collected dust in a warehouse for fourteen years until the project was demilitarized. Then the University of Chicago took over the research with NSA funding and somehow I was put in charge of studying the hand I fell in when I was a child. I don''t really believe in fate, but somehow "small world" doesn''t begin to do this justice. --Why would the NSA get involved in an archaeological project? --I asked myself the same question. They fund all kinds of research, but this seems to fall outside their usual fields of interest. Maybe they were interested in the language for cryptology; maybe they had an interest in the material the hand is made of. In any case, they gave us a pretty big budget so I didn''t ask too many questions. I was given a small team to handle the hard science before we handed everything over to the anthropology department. The project was still classified as top secret and, just like my predecessor, I was moved into an underground lab. I believe you''ve read my report, so you know the rest. --Yes, I have read it. You sent your report after only four months. Some might think it was a little hasty. --It was a preliminary report, but yes. I don''t think it was premature. OK, maybe a little, but I had made significant discoveries and I didn''t think I could go much further with the data that I had, so why wait? There is enough in that underground room to keep us guessing for several lifetimes. I just don''t think we have the knowledge to get much more out of this without getting more data. --Who is we? --Us. Me. You. Mankind. Whatever. There are things in that lab that are just beyond our reach right now. --Ok, so tell me about what you do understand. Tell me about the panels. --It''s all in my report. There are sixteen of them, approximately ten feet by thirty-two feet each, less than an inch thick. All sixteen panels were made around the same period, approximately three thousand years ago. We ... --If I may. I take it you do not subscribe to the cross-contamination theory? --As far as I''m concerned, there''s no real reason not to trust the carbon dating. And to be honest, how old these things are is the least of our problems. Did I mention the symbols have been glowing for the last seventeen years, with no apparent power source? Each wall is made of four panels and has a dozen rows of eighteen to twenty symbols carved into it. Rows are divided into sequences of six or seven symbols. We counted fifteen distinct symbols in total. Most are used several times, some appear only once. Seven of them are curvy, with a dot in the center, seven are made of straight lines, and one is just a dot. They are simple in design but very elegant. --Had the previous team been able to interpret any of the markings? --Actually, one of the few sections of Hudson''s report left intact by the military was the linguistic analysis. They had compared the symbols to every known writing system, past or present, but found no interesting correlation. They assumed each sequence of symbols represented a proposition, like an English sentence, but with no frame of reference, they couldn''t even speculate as to their interpretation. Their work was thorough enough and documented at every step. I saw no reason to do the same thing twice and I declined the offer to add a linguist to the team. With nothing to compare this to, there was logically no way to arrive at any sort of meaning. Perhaps I was biased--because I stumbled onto it--but I felt drawn to the hand. I couldn''t explain it, but every fiber of my being was telling me the hand was the important piece. --Quite a contrast from your predecessor. So what can you tell me about it? --Well, it''s absolutely stunning, but I assume you''re not that interested in aesthetics. It measures 22.6 feet in length from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger. It seems to be solid, made of the same metallic material as the wall panels, but it''s at least two thousand years older. It is dark gray, with some bronze overtones, and it has subtle iridescent properties.

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