June Goodhue says she’s known about the rock since she and her late husband moved to North Kingstown’s Pojac Point in 1952.
Sitting in shallow water, the 8-foot-long boulder sported unusual markings that were typically visible only at extreme low tide. Goodhue said she heard people say the markings might be ancient runic characters left by Viking or Nordic explorers.
Even so, Goodhue, who is now 89, says she didn’t give much thought to the significance of what people call the Narragansett Rune Stone or Quidnessett Rock. That is, until a week or so before Christmas 2011 when her neighbor Paul Roberti, a commissioner with the Public Utilities Commission, asked her to host a neighborhood meeting to talk about the boulder with Scott Wolter, a forensic geologist from Minnesota.
Though Wolter has come under fire from critics who see his theories as over the edge, he is considered an expert by many on the subject of runestones, having produced documentaries for the History Channel and written two books. In “The Kensington Stone: Compelling New Evidence,” he writes about why he believes that a stone with runic lettering — found in 1899 by a farmer and his two sons on a hill in Minnesota — was not the hoax that critics claimed, but a real artifact made by visitors from Europe a century or two before Christopher Columbus set sail for the new world.
In his second book, “The Hooked X,” published in 2009, and in subsequent interviews, Wolter has gone further, suggesting that the presence of a mysterious “hooked X” character on the Kensington Stone in Minnesota as well as on the stone tower in Touro Park in Newport and the Narragansett Rune Stone off North Kingstown connects them all to the Military Order of the Knights Templar, a secretive medieval group that he says was suppressed by the Catholic Church because of its members’ unusual beliefs about the Holy Grail.
In the geologist’s view, the Narragansett Rune Stone was such an important piece of history — perhaps even more important than Plymouth Rock — that it was imperative that it be moved to a dry, safe place to protect it from erosion and vandals and to allow experts to examine it.
Read more at
http://www.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/content/20130706-as-theories-of-its-origin-abound-what-does-future-hold-for-narragansett-rune-stone.ece?ssimg=1091551#ssStory1091554
With thanks to Jacksaw1 for the link
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road