The RIT-AUVAN Account
A previously untranslated Catawba ledger entry, dated 1843, describing an object that fell into the Mississippi near Keokuk and the men who retrieved it.
The text
The Catawba ledger was acquired in 1991 from a private collector in ███████, North Carolina. Its provenance is well-attested. The relevant entry, in the original Catawba syllabary, was translated by Dr. ██████████████ of the University of North Carolina and published (in part) in Ethnohistory in 1994.
The translation reads, in part:
“On the night of the █████, the sky opened above the river and a thing of polished metal descended, trailing a fire that did not burn. Four white men came in a boat from the north. They took the thing into their boat and spoke among themselves in a language the watchman did not know. They paid the watchman eleven dollars in silver, and a quantity of cloth, and instructed him to say nothing.”
Cross-references
The four men, per the entry, are not named. However, a separate entry six weeks later, in a different Catawba ledger held by the same collector, refers obliquely to “the white men of the tall house” and “the great bell that rings without sound.”
A grainy tintype, recovered from the same collection, shows four men in early-nineteenth-century dress standing on a riverboat at night. Three of the men are unidentified. The fourth is almost certainly Joseph Smith, based on dental records and a distinctive scar above the left eyebrow.
The committee has not, as of this writing, identified the object.