Racism In Cryptozoology
Posted by: Loren Coleman on February 24th, 2009
I get all kinds of emails.
The messages received are usually reasonable. Once in a blue moon, I get one that makes no sense or is downright scary.
The following email arrived yesterday. It was horrible to read, as it was sent in all seriousness, with an invitation to receive other supporting “documents.” The basic nature of the communication shows an underside of our culture that many of us hoped was long gone.
Such thoughts still live in our midst, and do exist in the research on hidden animals.
Here is the email:
The film that Roger Patterson made in 1967 in California of Bigfoot is real. Here is what Bigfoot is. Long before Jesus was born there were thousands of slaves who ran off around the world and started their own countries. When they left there was a large group of men and boys who took off and ended up in Africa. When they got to Africa some of these men and boys caught female Orangutans and took them over to South America and had sex with them and created the American Indian. The men and boys who stayed in Africa caught female Gorillas and had sex with them and created the Black man. When scientists found the bones they thought we evolved from a female Chimpanzee. But it wasn’t a natural evolution it was a man made evolution. That’s where Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Orangutan man and the Skunk Ape comes from. They are half man and half Gorilla and half man and half Orangutan. They use to call the American Indian the red man. The Orangutan has redish or orange hair. When those men bred out the hair the Indian’s skin remained red. The Gorilla has black hair and skin. When those men bred out the hair the Black man’s skin remained black. They are not prehistoric creatures from millions of years ago but they are man made creatures from several thousand years ago. The creature that Roger Patterson filmed in 1967 was half man and half Gorilla. There is no such thing as a natural evolution.
Yes, there are people out there that believe this.
There’s no place in cryptozoology, hominology, and Bigfoot studies for racism, the same kind of scientifically-enveloped racism that jumped from eugenics in the general society to racial hygiene in Nazi concentration camps.
The email above is a form of racism that was used in early California to call First Nations people there by the demeaning label of “digger Indians.” We have seen in recent years how this has been carried forth in “massacre theories” about the Patterson-Gimlin footage.
It is the same kind of dehumanizing racism that equated apes with African slaves in the American South. And, yes, it allows a climate of rationalization to exist in modern times about cartoons in newspapers involving chimps and African-Americans.
Early ologenetic theory lead to eugenics, which was used to justify a lot of ugly things in the first half of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, eugenic thinking slipped into the popular discourse regarding the discovery of new animals, in the early 1900s. French cryptozoologist Michel Raynal and I discussed this in The Anomalist 4, Autumn 1996 article, “De Loys’s Photograph: A Short Tale of Apes in Green Hell, Spider Monkeys, and Ameranthropoides loysi as Tools of Racism” and in a followup article.
I’ve continued adding pieces to the evidence for this racism that influenced the hoax of Ameranthropoides loysi, here, here, and here.
I’m shocked that anyone would write me this kind of email.
The photograph (above) of an alleged “Ameranthropoid ape” supposedly was taken in South America by François de Loys. It was used for proto-Nazi racist promotion in the late 1920s and early 1930s, despite the fact it is most certainly a white-bellied or long-haired spider monkey, Ateles belzebuth. George Montandon’s promotion and François de Loys’s interest in supporting a racist theory for the origins of the Indians of the Americans is today more deeply understood.
George Montandon, who was the first initial force behind de Loys’ ape, was actually a racist and anti-semetic, who also thought that “Whites” derived from Cro-Magnon man, “Blacks” from gorillas, and “Orientals” from orangs and gibbons. Sound familiar? This week’s email tells me, in this first term of President Barack Obama, we live in a time when racism based on ignorance and intolerance of the worst kind is still considered to have intellectual merit by a few.
Montandon’s hatred of Jewish people, by the way, was graphically shown during the 1930s-1940s when he tried to devise ways to stop the Jewish population from reproducing (one “solution” of his was to cut off the noses of Jewish women). The de Loys “ape” was the final piece in the Montandon-de Loys racist theory that their proposed new Ameranthropoid was the ancestor of the American Indians (or in one version, “the Jews”).
What is difficult to realize is that Montandon-type theories can still exist, as shown in the email that I shared with you above.
After the Nazi killings of Jews and other “racial” abuses, eugenics seemingly disappeared. After WWII, however, a new movement began, so-called “crypto-eugenics,” in which eugenic beliefs were taken “underground” by respected anthropologists, biologists and geneticists in the postwar world (including Robert Yerkes in the U.S. and Otmar von Verschuer in Germany). Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of UNESCO and a founder of the World Wildlife Fund was also a Eugenics Society president and a strong supporter of eugenics.
Let us look closely at what we do in cryptozoology, and be careful, whether it develops in the talk of Bigfoot being “primitive Indians” or the supposed origin theories regarding Yetis. Let us look deeply at the biases influencing such thoughts and conjectures.
Eugenics chart, early 20th century, USA.
References:
CENLIVRES, Pierre, and Isabelle GIROD
1998 George Montandon and the large American monkey. The invention of Ameranthropoides loysi. Gradhiva, n° 24: 33-43.
COLEMAN, Loren, and Michel RAYNAL
1996 De Loys’ photograph: shorts have bruises of apes in Green Hell, spider monkeys, and Ameranthropoides loysi have the tools of racism. The Anomalist 4, n° 4: 84-93 (Autumn).
1997 One of Loys’s photograph. The Anomalist, n° 5: 143-153 (Summer).
MONTANDON, George
1929 Discovered of a monkey of appearance anthropoïde in South America. Newspaper of the Company of the Americanists of Paris, 21 [n° 6]: 183-195.
OLIVIERI, Guido
1999 the mysterious monkey of Of Vaud of Loys. 24 Hours (October 15).
VILORIA, Angel L., Free URBANI, y Bernardo URBANI
1998 François de Loys (1892-1935) there a hallazgo desdeñado: the historia of una controversia antropológica. Interciencia, 23 [n° 2]: 94-100 (marzo-abril).
VILORIA, Angel L., Free URBANI, Stuart McCOOK and Bernardo URBANI
1999 Of Lausanne to the forests vénézuéliennes. Geological mission of François de Loys (1892-1935) and origins of an anthropological controversy. Bulletin of the Company Of Vaud of the Natural Science, 86 [n° 3]: 157-174 (September).
Eugenics poster, c. 1935, from Germany: “The relationship between the Jews and Freemasonry.”
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Either that or it just smacks of plain old fashioned, unadulterated ignorance…sheesh.
What do you say to something like that, other than shake your head and move on…
I don’t know how you even begin to deal with that on a rational and intelligent level…of course it begs the question of how you can be supporting evolution and creationism at the same time (I know…he tried to qualify it by saying natural evolution, but if he’s sticking by his idea that it could happen, then you have to extrapolate that evolution could happen even accidentally over the course of millenia…thereby supporting the theory of darwin evolution anyway…I know I’m dangling from a limb, but then so is the dude who is the cause of this thread, and I think he’s dangling by a pre-hensile tail…)
Great post on a disturbing subject.
This email is sickening on many levels.
In addition to the main ludicrous and hateful hypothesis, the knucklehead who wrote it doesn’t even get his most basic of facts straight, unless there are orangutans living in Africa that I’m unaware of. And since when did we evolve from a female chimpanzee? That made me scratch my head. No scientist has ever even remotely suggested anything of the sort. I could go on and on about this incoherent mess, but the bottom line is that the “information” written in this email is complete and utter hogwash.
All this leads me to believe that this was just an ignorant, quite probably uneducated person who is either completely detached from reality, or is deliberately trying to get a rise out of Loren for whatever reason.
Thanks for this, Loren.
Shocking. And a real shame.
The thing that bugger me most with those kind of people is that humanity supposedly started in south Africa then spread worldwide. So white men, red men, and yellow men all come from the same race; the race that became the black men we know.
Just to not have comments that i’m black so I support black people let me say that I’m mostly white and a little Amerindian. So I’m just realist.
I’m not sure if the email is from a racist POV. It seems more like old-fashioned whacked-out-of-your-mind derangement. Whoever wrote this was clearly mentally ill as well as ignorant (orangutans from Africa?). Of course, racism is alive and well in this world, but I believe that this idiot qualifies for the tinfoil hat society.
Loren, I only wish I could be truly shocked at this, but there is so much shocking stupidity in the world, and so much shocking evil, that it’s no great surprise to find a perfect merger of the two.
That email was disgusting—total filth. I’d feel that way even if my wife weren’t Native American (Cherokee). The fact that the morons who believe this sort of thing have gigantic inferiority complexes and try to compensate by dragging others down to and below their own level doesn’t make it any less ugly.
As comedian Ron White says, “You can’t fix stupid.” This sort of thing is proof positive.
I have to agree with the comment that it sounds like someone who has a mental illness, someone who is delusional.
Sadly, there are many people who actually believe these things. My own father, rest his soul, was a very racist person. I realize that he was a product of his times and his upbringing, which he never overcame. He did not even realize a need to overcome anything. There are a still a lot of people where he lived, in north-central Florida, who have the same attitude toward race. Th N word is used freely and they don’t even see why it’s wrong. There is animosity, mistrust, and fear on both sides.
Not to say that that area has a monopoly on prejudice. Where I live, many, many people still harbor racism toward African Americans. The same person who is proud of having a Cherokee grandmother is horrified to think that their daughter might marry an African American. It’s really frustrating because most of these people don’t consider themselves “prejudiced”.
Things are changing – but slowly. The root of the problem is, I believe, fear. Fear of the unfamiliar. As the world becomes more integrated, that fear is slowly dissipating. I think that there is hope that someday – maybe not within my lifetime, but possibly within the lifetime of my grandchildren – that fear will be overcome and racism will be no more.
This is either the absurd rambling of a delusional individual, or his idea of a bad joke. Don’t take it too seriously. Unfortunately though, this kind of thing does hamstring anthropology and interfere with the serious scientific study of our species.
I have to add to my comment:
Near the end of his life, my father was watching Barack Obama during a campaign speech on television. I was expecting him to berate Obama and go into a tirade, but instead he said “You know, he is a really smart man. I think he might make a pretty good President”.
So maybe Dad was coming around, after all. He had friends, good friends, who were African American. But he still, to the end of his days, thought that African American people were the result of white people mating with gorillas. There was no convincing him otherwise. I hate to even write those words, because I always wished that my dad would come around to a more enlightened point of view.
I remember those “black = ape” flyers being left outside my junior high school in Vero Beach, FL, which would have been about 1973/4. I also remember friends I thought of as smart and certainly modern, in a successfully integrated high school, casually dividing all African Americans into “blacks and N—-” There were no political lines – I heard the same thing from members of the Teenage Republicans and the Teenage Democrats.
There will always be sick, deranged individuals. Whether they are more racist or more crazy I’ll leave to the psychologists.
Cryptozoology is like any other branch of science. It can be warped, misused, slanted, etc. in the service of bizarre or hateful ideologies. Racism and eugenics are ancient and didn’t die out in the age of science. (Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist – try finding that painful little nugget in a modern P.C. textbook. The 20th century syphilis study was an example of horrific racism by alleged men of science in a supposedly modern nation.)
Anyway, Loren is right here. All kinds of discoveries can be warped beyond recognition. The potential will always be there. All we can do is be vigilant and protest vociferiously when we see it.
Several possibilities emerge:
1) The emailer was simply trying to get a rise out of Loren via a really bad joke for its “shock value.”
2) The emailer is white supremacist.
3) The emailer is mentally unhinged and off his meds.
4) The emailer belongs to a fringe religious cult that teaches “Amalgamation” with other species results in certain races of humanity.
5) All of the above.
Regardless, this person is totally ignorant and fortunately for us represents a marginalized minority of the country. In the future, I wouldn’t give him or any such emailer anymore notoriety. He may be logging on just to see if his message got through. Send their vile emails straight to the trash where they belong.
Shocking is the first word that springs to mind. I was raised and live in Southeast Missouri. Racism is still here. My parents were racist. They used the N word all the time. They didn’t see anything wrong with it. I remember when Jessie Jackson ran for president my parents swore they would move to Canada if he won. My best friend also has a habit of saying it still. I’m slowly breaking him of that habit. With to swift smacks to the back of the head. =o)
I wonder the age of the person that sent this email. Were they raised during the early part of 20th Century when this was commonly thought? When a 3rd or 4th grade education was normal for an adult. My father only went through the 4th grade. His father only went to 2nd Grade. They had to work instead of going to school. It was the only way the family could eat. There is clearly a breakdown in the person’s logic due to not even knowing 1st were Orangutans are from and 2nd when the New World was colonized. I think a lack of education led to that. I also have to wonder at the person’s state of mind. Could there be mental health issues involved? We’ll never know for sure. Yet we have to wonder.
Science is not only observed it’s also interpreted. So any findings can be warped, by the person’s religious beliefs, education level, and personal prejudices.
Loren don’t let the email bother you too much. Look at it as a warning to not let us warp our own observations.
What an idiot, but this is still how the world remains, even after all of the steps people have taken to be more tolerant and open. Besides, this person doesn’t even know that orangs are not native to Africa!
Thanks for posting this and taking on an important topic. Even in this day and age, ignorance remains pervasive.
You guys are missing something….
Not only is this some biggot or mental case, they are also some kind of religious zealot.
After reading the e-mail and all the very good responses to I am left with a question. Were do I put the thoughts of a person like this. He has bad information provided by zelots of bad science or no science and is a racist to boot. Don’t let this stuff get you down! Read it publish it until these people get there information correct or learn to keep the trash mouths stuff buttoned up.
Chris, I don’t see anything there marking the poster as religious. He makes a passing reference to Jesus (concerning timeline, not theology) and later inveighs against “natural evolution” (which statement actually doesn’t even fit with his own racist antilogic), again without mentioning theology or any deistic creationism.
To bring it back to cryptozoology, we are all, ideally, scientists. We go where the evidence leads. Natural selection is an important part of all biological sciences, including this one, because that’s where the evidence leads us. What exactly happened billions of years ago (that is, whether one thinks the universe erupted in a random spacetime flux or was “spoken” into being with a purpose) doesn’t really enter into it. (What kind of natural selection produced the deluded racist who wrote the original email is open to question, I suppose.) But as long as cryptozoology includes the study of primates, which it very often does, we are going to run into a few outliers – whatever their thought processes.
I have to agree with Alligator:
“In the future, I wouldn’t give him or any such emailer anymore notoriety. He may be logging on just to see if his message got through. Send their vile emails straight to the trash where they belong.”
This person wants the notoriety and the attention that posting his/her message brings him/her.
The best way to deal with such types is to ignore them.
Writing a piece about racism and mentioning it’s existence and hatred and the need to disabuse ourselves of it is one thing. Actually posting this person’s email only provides him/her with pleasure.
The only remedy against the cancer of ignorance is the vaccine of knowledge.
Loren, you should gather all your info regarding this subject and write a book about it.
PS: Racism is a beast that resides in each and everyone of us, it starts as a little creature that feeds on the most trivial and puerile of things, and lest we stop feeding it with our bias it can grow to become a true monster. So we all must fight with our inner beast every day of our lives; because even if we don’t succeed in killing it completely, the struggle yields its own rewards.
To ignore the ugly odor of racism that has tended to infrequently raise its stench within hominology and Bigfoot studies in the last five years is to condone it. No lessons will be learned from spraying the perfume of rationalization over it.
This emailer remains an unnamed individual, please note, who has not received any celebrity from my posting this email, nor has his or her obtained an increase in their google hits.
“Lukewarm acceptance is more bewildering than outright rejection.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
I hope this person is only sending this out as a (stupid) joke email. It sounds like it, something stupid done to mess with Mr. Coleman and people associated with cryptomundo or the study in general. However if its not, this sort of thing totally doesnt fly at all, its gross and crass. I find it very difficult to surmise this is a serious email, of even the most racist or small minded individuals Ive ever met this sort of letter would be absurd for that sort of individual to send. This sort of person (if the email is serious) I would think would to be a follower, doing things he was told to do for some sort of self satisfying egotism, not taking inituative themselves. Honestly this sort of behaviour is to be noted and guarded against, but I think its should be discarded as it is a wasteof lucid and rational peoples time.
Loren, just keep in mind that famous Harlan Ellison quote: “After hydrogen, stupidity is the most common element in the Universe.”
Well I don’t know where to find a ORANGUTAN in Africa. Maybe in a zoo. Orangutans are not from Africa. This was the racists first stupid mistake….
Stupid people say stupid things.
This should serve to remind us of one unrefutable fact: Darwinism/evolutionary thinking is behind the most oppressive governments and some of the greatest atrocities in recent history. The USSR, and all the other communist nations, as well as Nazi Germany, all were only able to defend their positions by evolutionary thinking. Margaret Sanger, the founder of NARAL and Planned parenthood, was an evolutionist/atheist and these organizations were founded upon eugenicist prinicples, and by such they still stand. 6 million Jews were killed by Hitler because they were considered less evolved than the “Arayan” races.
Has religion done great harm as well? certainly, but that is twisted religion, false religions, who must used coercion and death as a means of prostelytizing, because they have no power of the Spirit of God behind them-thus you have the Catholics and their ‘holy’ wars and Inquisition, and the Muslims and their jihads, and the Hindus out killing those they don’t agree with. even buddhists have been guilty of this coercion, of late.
all of it, false religious coercion and evolution, are ultimately about power, about pressing your will upon others.
Ukelele,
I’m a Christian who does not find that “irrefutable.”
I know we are getting off the cryptozoological topic here, and I’ll not protest if Loren cuts off this thread. But I felt compelled to respond.
There are bigoted, murderous, and/or racist people who think their religion justifies their views (whether they claim that religion to be Christian, Islamic, Buddist, pagan, or whatever) and similarly warped/sad/dangerous people who are agnostics or atheists. The Sermon on the Mount changed countless lives for the better throughout the last two thousand years, but it didn’t stop people (Protestant as well as Catholic) from committing all kinds of repression and atrocities in Jesus’ name.
Personally, I believe what C.S. Lewis called “Mere Christianity” is the closest thing to the ultimate spiritual truth we humans can understand. Some friends of mine agree: others follow other paths. I debate, but I do not condemn.
Certainly people have cited Darwinian thought as a justification for all sorts of evil, but people who reject Darwin completely have also cited the Koran, the Old Testament, etc. as reason to do terrible things.
To bring us back to science, natural selection is important because it’s where the evidence leads: if you disagree, fine, then have a rational debate about that evidence.
I am a dualist who believes there is, in fact, a “ghost in the machine” and a spiritual value and purpose to each of us, but I can’t prove that by science (and am unpersuaded by the efforts of Dawkins et. al. to disprove it). It’s folly to try.
Let’s press on with our efforts to learn about the material universe through science. Theology and philosophy are outside the topics we are here to explore.
That was a rough read, it’s amazing someone that inbred has enough digits to compose an email to you Loren.
ow! omg.. i think i can FEEL my brain cells dying as I read that email.
Im half Cherokee,.. so does that make me a quarter Orang? OW! there goes another brain cell!
I hope no one confuses the ravings of this disturbed mind with those of us who believe in creationism. If anything, I would say this person’s mind has devolved!
MattBille
Here, Here! As a fellow Christian I agree. Well said.
It is unfortunate that ignorance can be so damaging and dangerous.
I feel sorry for them.
This is a pathetic commentary to say the least on this kind of misguided, callous and unconscienable thinking that continues to be a festering wound on the face of humanity.There is absolutely no place in society anywhere for this kind of blatantly assinine way of thinking. To the emailer who sent Loren this”trash” your total stupidity and ignorance precedes your faceless cowardness. Your kind of thinking will not prevail here or anyplace else as long as there are good and decent people like Loren and fellow bloggers who continue to maintain a respectful and intelligent dialogue inspite of those who stay the course of racial ignorance, bigotry and hatred.
“A fool’s mouth is his destruction” (18:7 KJV)
Apparently America does not have a monopoly on racism. Here’s a link to a story from Australia.
This is a quote from the story, which is attributed to Michael Cohen of allnewsweb.com (whom, it must be noted was behind the original Siberian Yeti story):
I’ve always thought of Australians as being very much like Americans. Maybe they are even more so than I imagined.
I know that it’s a minority of people who do these sorts of things, but when are people going to realize that freedom has to mean “freedom from prejudice” if it’s going to mean “freedom for all” ?
The sad part is this misguided soul will probably run for president and get some support from the public.
Sad to believe educated people still take such non sense as fact
I guess that makes me a descendant of an Orangutan than. sheesh
Unfortunately, this is NOT the first time I have heard this theory, and I almost question if I may personally know the person who sent you that email!
My grandfather (who died at age 100 years old about 10 years ago) used to say this, along with countless other similar racial things. His first wife, my grandmother, was a Kickapoo Indian. She also had Autism, so didn’t always respond to things in a normal way. Before they divorced, they had 12 children. After they divorced, the family was split in half, with some of the children going to Utah with their father and others staying in Maine with their mother.
Today, more than 50 years later and with both parents dead, the family still remains firmly divided, and I’ll tell you why.
The children that stayed with their mother, though she was strange and Autistic, were raised, more or less normally and became more or less, you average ordinary adults. My mother was among the children raise by my grandmother.
Throughout my childhood I heard “rumors” about my grandfather, and my uncles that were raised by him, but I had never the chance to meet them, so I had no idea, just how utterly insane these men really were, until I was 14 years old, and all 264 children, grandchildren, and great grand children (taking into account there was 2 polygamists in the group) showed up at my beach-front home for an unannounced “family reunion”.
Like I said, I had heard rumors about my grandfather and the now adult sons he had raised, but even with that there was nothing that could have prepaid me for actually meeting these otherworldly outlandish men and there poor submissive terrified wives and children.
My first introduction to my grandfather was to hear him tell that exact same story as you got in your email. Only difference was, he was telling it as an explanation to why his former first wife, my Autistic Native American Grandmother, acted the way she did! He than went on to say that the children that had stayed with him, where the ones that were more Human like him, and that the ones that stayed with her, had stayed with her because they were “stupid apes” like she was.
It got worse. I myself have Autism and I respond to things not too unsimilar to the way my grandmother did. His story continued, to tell that the grandchildren (with myself being his “prime example”) where demons and to be shunned by the “more superior” members of the family!
But than, it got even better when he continued on, saying that God himself had come to earth and talked to him, and told him this information. He continued on, saying that God than sent and angel to take my grandfather on “a trip to Hell”, where he was allowed to see my grandmother, “her” children (as opposed to “his” children), and “her” grandchildren (as opposed to “his” grandchildren) all being torment for time and eternity in hell, because we were all cast into a lake of fire and were demons.
He farther claimed that it was after God “revealed” all this too him, that that was the reason why he divorced my grandmother all those years ago, because God was going to punish him for his abomination if he did not get rid of her and marry some one else.
Oh my gosh!
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was even more stunned, however, by the unending harsh, cruel words and accusations my uncles started spouting out at the rest of us, because they were acting on their father’s words, and treated every word he said as though it had just come straight from the mouth of Jesus himself! One uncle was abusive and violent and saw nothing wrong with beaten any of the rest of us, because we were “inferior animals anyways”. They stayed camped out on our land like a band of gypsies, in trailers and tents, and campers for the entire summer, saying that we had no choice but to let them stay because they were “superior” and we “had no right to make them leave”!
My grandfather spent most of the summer writing letters to church leaders, telling them of the various “revelations” that God was coming down and giving him on an almost daily basis. Much of the complaint letters he sent out to these church leaders, were racial and complained that the church should not be allowing “demon possessed races” in their congregations. His list of “demon possessed races” included Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, “Blacks”, “Japs”, “Jews”, and “Savages”.
All I can say it was one hell of an eye-opening summer! By the end of that summer I was thourally convinced that my grandfather was a raving lunatic and that he had brainwashed his sons into acting just like him. Needless to say, I have in the years since avoided contact with these wild, religion crazed, ignorant, and verbally and physically abusive relatives of mine, and am almost ashamed to have to admit that I have any relation to them at all. 🙁