Insect Blue Enigma

A chronicle of the rancorous archaeological speculations that follow the discovery of an old blue automobile sometime in the remote future.

Rumours of the discovery began to circulate only slowly for there were many scholars who at first passed it off as a trifle; some thought the story was just too good to be true. A young boy, Billy Thorwent, is said to have been taking his dog Rex for a run among the old shafts and broken tails of the ancient drainage pipes. Picking up a stick, and throwing it some distance, Billy heard the unmistakeable sound of smashing glass as Rex gave a bark and a wag and scuttled off to fetch. On taking a closer look, Billy uncovered the archeological find of an era, a collection of otherwise unknown twentieth century texts, with authentic twentieth century artifacts, preserved in an elaborately crafted protective shell, hidden from the world for all these hundreds of years. Crawling inside, Billy helped himself to whatever his eyes beheld, and carried it to his Uncle Ted's, a junk dealer, a man with an eye for a bargain. How the first artifacts reached the University is a mystery, but that summer, as word got around, a team of excited egg-heads dug their way in, confirmed the find, and at length Professor Gordon Frostbite, director of the Institute, made a great announcement. "We will now know more about the twentieth century than we ever dreamed possible before," he declared. "Claims of a hoax cannot be sustained. We've struck the motherload!" A team of experts were dispatched and slowly the first hypotheses emerged. This, though, is when the trouble all began. The evidence neither confirmed nor refuted former understandings. Opinions oscillated in a spectacular manner. Suddenly, the whole field was in a ferment; the career-conscious raced to be among those in print.

The first and greatest mystery was without question the shell. The documents inside were mysterious enough, but the shell was a well-preserved, insect-shaped conundrum. Blue, sleek, curved and metallic, it was obviously, said the experts, some manner of preservation capsule with a cultic and arcane significance. But who had hidden the books in this way, and from whom? There were silver handles on the side and the perforated rubber rims around the glass still adhered. There were cogs and pipes and a space up front for sacrifices. There was some sort of strange grilling at the front too, and inside seats and cultic devices used, it seems, by the priests. A vessel for water was found at the rear, and stains of oil, presumably indicating some manner of ritual annointing. The wheels, however, counted against a permanent abode. 

"It was like a portable altar," said Dr Sue Kenneck from overseas, taking a look inside. 

"Or like a totem," added her rival, Dr Gob. 

Others thought it may have been a type of military device; others that it was a confession box where the ancient Covenanters could say their prayers and calculate the trundling stars. The remaining wires and frames, with scraps of leather, and hard brown baker-lite, had faded with age but were remarkably intact. Mere scraps were all we had known, but now we had possession of the total thing, disturbed but not undone by time. The superstitious were concerned it might contain malignant psychic residues. More sober analysts began the tedious task of identifying the writing on the front and sides. 

"Curiously," Professor Wombelt - another expert - explained, "these inscriptions are constructed of a weak, pressed metal, in a clear but self-conscious cursive scrawl." 

But there was no immediate agreement on what it all meant. The visible lettering - VOLKSWAGA - had the high-brows baffled. It might be the name of the Sect, or of their Teacher, or their High Priest, or, as Roland and Crosby, a team of talented amateurs speculated, a war cry that would strike fear into the hearts of their enemies. Others, more logically perhaps, just took it to be the title of the vessel. 

"There were many such vessels," speculated Professor Snowy Dupont, a radical with a reputation. He pointed out that another vessel, or its rusty red remains, discovered only thirty miles away, further up the coast, was, according to the best reconstructions, titled "Austin Healy Sprite". "Such cult objects were addressed like you and I," he wrote. "Typically, they would be imbued with animus." There might have been other vessels named "John" or "Russell" or "Sylvia", he explained, controversially, just to make his point.

Not unnaturally, disputation such as this, and a find worth a fortune, soon attracted lawyers. An enterprising firm of up-and-comings convinced Gob and Kenneck of mutual bouts of slander, and Billy Thorwent's Uncle Ted counter-sued claiming he had been aggrieved. Snowy Dupont soon sued Wombelt, Wombelt sued Frostbite, and they all sued Marcos Fandozzi, another member of the team, when he published a book claiming that the vessel wasn't used by priests at all, but by ancient teenagers for music, bourbon and uncomfortable copulation. This, as it happened, ruined his career. The book sold well, but few with a learned knowledge of the past could ever take him seriously again. Then, Dirk Iceland, a scholar with a following, weighed into the debate and accused the others of conspiracy when he was again and again denied. A new wave of copyright lawyers sniffed the air. Somehow Dirk had won possession of facsimile editions, and pointed out mistakes. 

"We have the sect's Temple, and their books, and even their Mars Bar wrappers," he said. "What are the authorities trying to hide?" 

Using advanced linguistic analysis he put up a popular alternative, tracing the sect to Germany. Using carbon dating and spectacular guess-work he traced the origins to the party he called the "Brown Shirts". "There is, at least, some connection," he said. "This proves that they were widespread. They had a Leader whom they trusted to the bitter end." It had always been assumed that the so-called "Allies" had been the popular party. "But history," said Dirk, omninously, "is written by the winners...."

There was no mention of this among the internal evidence, though. Instead, there were the tatty remains of the sect's holy writ, a diverse grab-bag of utterly cryptic writings, unique and hithertofore unsuspected. One work, the so-called 'Battle Plan' seemed to be a bound collection of maps. Though terribly faded, scholars, employing the latest infared techniques, could make out marginalia and a distinct set of lines as if indicating routes between locations. 

"A very curious business," admitted K.L. Pimpweed, the curator of the museum to which this text had been removed. "Don't ask me to speculate. It could be one of a number of things." Even more curious were the surviving leaves of text from some hallowed work called (they thought) "Even Cowgirls Get the [Blues]." "It was obviously a very sacred work," says Pimpweed, "For the pages are worn and folded. The Sectarians have made extensive use of it." 

Others pointed out that the text had been recovered from the mysterious compartment for holy objects in the front of the chamber, not from the back floor like the others. Did this mean it was too sacred to be touched? Or did it mean it was rarely used, perhaps only on sacred occasions? The concensus view was that, from time to time, Sectarians would sit in the vessel and incant the tome in solemn ways. Authorship was a puzzle, since the covers had not survived, but it seemed likely that it was a work by some noted authority, perhaps the Leader himself. Equally strange was the so-called "Manual of Volkswaga", a rough spring-bound codex edition inscribed both recto and verso that, in one extant fragment, appeared to address itself to "idiots" in the legible phrase "An Idiot's Gu[ide] to....". 

"This was the sect's self-irony," said Wombelt. 

Others suspected it was some covert work of propaganda. The dissenting Australian scholar, Dr Belladonna Keyring, argued that it was a hidden code. She wanted to date the work, on stylistic grounds, to the decade after Ronald Reagan. She pointed out that other sources from the period, not related to this find at all, commonly used "idiot" as a synonymn for Reagan himself. "This is a clear historical allusion," she declared. "The traditional theories have to be turned on their head." She explained further that the text would only yield its extraordinary revision of all historical norms if read backwards, substituting every third letter for every fourteenth letter and reading the whole thing in the light of her reconstructed twentieth century calendar of eight months of forty-five days.

The thing that really set the cat among the pigeons, however, was the belated release of missing fragments. Some were recovered from a box in Uncle Ted's beer cellar, torn and worse for wear, and he'd scribbled lottery numbers on the back of others. These had at first gone to Wombelt and his colleagues, and they guarded their content with an inpenetrable wall of wildcat litigation. Speculation grew rife. In the mind of the general public there had been a cover up. Specifically, the labels of the audio-cassettes found below the seat had not been recorded in the inventory made by the appointed teams. Strange chants and squalid warbles had the experts scratching their heads again. Scholars laboured for years to decipher the faded voices and unaccountable rhythms. Then, Iceland again hit the headlines, publishing photographs with commentary. It was too technical for the layman, but in interviews he made the situation clear. "One label," he said, "has a very plain inscription marked "The Beatles". Scholars have known this for decades, but have never said so. I call that reprehensible!" Others agreed: the experts had been sitting on the juicey bits. 

"Surely," said Dirk, "surely there is some connection between this title and the very shape of the vessel in which they were found." 

A newcomer in the field, Barry Shiftlink - with a background in twentieth century schisms - disagreed. "Its an initiation rite," he claimed confidently. "We can clearly hear the words, "I want to hold your hand..." - words of the neophyte as he approached the altar, no doubt." With hefty financial backing, Shiftlink hit the lecture tours to convince the public of his case. The conservatives regrouped. Iceland was passed over in the research grants.

Meanwhile, Billy Thorwent disappeared. His father would only say the whole ordeal had placed a stress upon their lives. When the first translated edition was prepared by, of all people, John "Greasy" Vermeer, he cast doubts on the Thorwent boy and spun his own tale of espionage and intrigue. In subsequent editions he modified his views but gave credence to the hard-liners who placed it in an early time-frame. "In the considered opinion of the present writer," he wrote, " we are looking at a date of about 1939, and those who disagree are manifestly scumbags." 

This is the sort of argument that won the day. The normally serene world of twentieth century archaeology had its wrankles roused. Enormous interest among the laymen was in direct conflict with the highly technical nature of the data. What would your average Joe know about four-wheeled twentieth century sacred time capsules? Yet people everywhere had an opinion. Soon there were tee-shirts and icecreams and movie spin-offs. In the pulpits preachers who would normally avoid all controversial topics railed for or against either this theory or that and members of the congregation - bus-drivers and plumbers who had dabbled in paleography - stood up and disagreed. Some fifty years after the initial discovery there was still a passionate divide. Were the so-called "finger sockets" found beneath the back seat cultic artifacts, medical artifacts or were they left there by "visitors" from another sect? Or were they some form of ancient prophylactics confirming the old Fandozzi theory? Then there were the cigarette butts in the ashtray at the rear. Might these yield clues to dating? The experts pointed out that tobacco was discovered to be noxious in about the 1960s; the butts could therefore not be later than that. This was an argument proponents of a later dating found difficult to counter. Fandozzi, who insisted on recreational use, had once pointed out that not a single surviving, authentic twentieth century source ever once spoke of tobacco as a "sacred herb" and there were no extant tracts linking it to contemporary religious rites. In response, a chorus echoed through the hallways of Academia: "Argument from Silence!"

Perhaps the most cogent account of the whole affair, and the last word on the subject in many respects, was written somewhat late, but full of wise reflection, by Harvey Grosshammer, a popularist with a PhD and a talk-back program in Baltimore. He explained in his much-lauded The Volkswago Enigma that rumours of a primitive internal combustion engine and "irresponsible" stories of a factory for their production near Munich - the German connection again - were simply fantasies, the dribblings of conspiracy theorists and "history haters". "You might as well claim that dinosaurs developed the FAX machine," he said. Attempts to refute the mainstreamers had come to nothing, in any case. Dissenting voices were thankfully growing thinner on the ground. "Are we to rewrite our whole history," he asked, "on the speculative interpretations of a few loose cannons?" There was, he explained, a whole array of points of evidence, but many of these seemed mutually contradictory. In such circumstances there are no grounds for a revisionist reading of the data. "Its an enigma," he said at the end. "When Billy Thorwent and Rex first opened the Temple and the first rays of weak, watery September light trickled in like glistening diamonds among the dust and fragile cobwebs for the first time in millenia, they unwittingly surrendered to us an enigmatic paragon. Only the puny of spirit ache for answers. The mature minded will celebrate the mystery for what it is." 

At various conferences held to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the find it was generally agreed that this was a sagacious approach. "Too many scholars," said Grosshammer, paraphrasing, "walk through the valley of wild assumptions, fearing no evil..." He explained that we should always opt for the simplest explanations. The dials and knobs in the front compartment were most easily explained as astrological devices, for example; theories to the contrary merely serve to muddy the water. Similarly, the vinyl clad hole in the roof was most easily explained as an "appature for stellar observation" by the priests or more likely just the High Priest or Leader, since it seems it could only support one observer at a time "At every turn," Grosshammer explained to a confused public, "we should opt for the most plausible account." This might mean, though, that the full story of the Sectarians and their strange blue insect-like Temple might never be known. The texts might never be unravelled. The meaning of the lettering and inscriptions might never be deciphered. The purpose of the vessel and its ultimate origins might never be revealed. The past, Grosshammer explained, is an inherently mysterious thing. We can be sure of what we can be sure, but of the rest, we should not let it make us feel uncomfortable or diminished. It's okay to say "We don't know." This came as a relief. In the end, the public and all the parties involved, were happy to see the problem put in the hands of capable men with a firm grasp of historical principles, with no axe to grind, no barrow to push.