>> PAYTON: Today on the show, we're talking about sports.

Just kidding.

Not really.

Could you imagine?

Ugh!

♪ Welcome to "Flyover Culture."

I'm Payton Knobeloch.

Today, we're doing something a bit different.

We've already covered some topics in fandom and geek culture, but a big part of culture is the stories we tell each other.

And sometimes those stories happen to be a big honking lie.

Maybe.

So today, I want to dip into some local history with a big asterisk, of course, which brings me to...

The Minnesota Vikings.

Well, actually, they weren't really in Minnesota.

The Vikings apparently get their name from the area's rich Scandinavian heritage, but as far as we know, the actual Vikings in history didn't make it that far inland to North America.

As far as we know.

The generally accepted bit of history is that Viking voyages in the late 10th century mostly took them to the northeastern tip of North America, to Greenland, and Newfoundland.

They, like many a "Bachelor" contestant, weren't there to make friends.

They consistently butted heads with Native Americans, whom they called "skraelings," or "wretched people."

Relations weren't good.

They came.

They saw.

And they mostly stuck to Greenland, and only dipped their toes into Canada.

But in the late 19th Century, a humble farmer would come across an artifact that changes our whole perspective of these North American voyages if, you know, it turns out to not be a fake.

In 1898, 44-year-old Olaf Ohman was clearing land on his farm, when he found a stone slab wedged between tree roots.

He got it out and tossed it aside, until his son picked it up and said-- >> What does a pregnancy test look like?

>> It's like a thin piece of plastic with a thing on the end of it.

>> Okay.

So this is definitely a-- >> North runestone.

>> Yeah.

Put that away.

>> PAYTON: On this 200-pound, 6-inch thick stone was a collection of Norse runes that read: By some accounts, those 10 dead men were killed by Native Americans.

By others, it was bubonic plague.

But either way, this was a huge find.

As Paul Nelson wrote for MinnPost: That story also raises some red flags.

There's the big question of how they got there.

The most likely route being south from Hudson Bay, which is 800 miles directly, and much longer by river.

And for the times period, no one's quite sure what they mean by "Vinland" or where that is.

And in 1899, a banker in Kensington sent a copy of the text to a Scandinavian linguist at the University of Minnesota.

He determined the runes weren't written in old Norse.

People on both sides of the debate agreed with his statement, and it was the last nail in the coffin for a while.

The line of questioning was rough for Ohman, who just wanted to get some work done, and now had people breathing down his neck, asking when in his fourth grade level education he learned how to carve Norse runes.

Ohman did his best to try and forget about the whole affair, until he got a visitor in 1907.

Hjalmar Holand was a Norwegian historian who was 34 at the time.

Author and academic B.J.

Hollars describes him as, quote, part showman, part scholar.

And Holand was among those still determined to prove the stone's authenticity and get the conversation going again.

With Ohman's blessing, Holand displayed the runestone around the world, where he encountered others also on team real, like the then Director of the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology.

With high-profile believers in his corner, Holand shifted the conversation, although, not quite proving the stone's authenticity outright.

But he also became one of Olaf Ohman's most staunch defenders, saying people were quick to blame Ohman because they didn't have anyone else better to accuse.

He wrote in an undated letter.

At this point, the Kensington runestone's authenticity is still way up in the air.

But if it is a forgery, and Ohman didn't have the ability or the brazenness to forge it, who did?

That brings us to the last set of players in this grand saga.

In the early 20th century, a Scandinavian languages professor at the University of Wisconsin, named Dr. Julius Olson came to a certain conclusion about the runestone.

That the info needed to write the inscription came from an obscure, 1643 book called, "Fasti Danici" that he came across in his studies.

Who in the area had also checked out that book and had the fluency of the language to turn it into that convincing of a forgery?

Dr. Olson had his answer.

Fellow professor and classmate of his at the University of Wisconsin, Ole E. Hagen.

Olson argued that while much of Hagen's studies in America were accounted for, his time spent in the months before the fall of 1891 were iffy.

If he did end up in Kensington to forge a runestone, the timeline matched up.

At one point, Olson tried to have a land agent talk to Hagen and get him to admit that he was familiar with the Kensington area, but for some reason or another, that meeting didn't happen.

If you're thinking, jeez, why is Olson so obsessed with him?

The two had significant beef while in school together.

Actually, less beef, more that Olson really couldn't stand the guy because he dressed and acted differently.

Olson's allegations were never made public, but the suspicion weighed on Hagen.

After a feud with a colleague in South Dakota lost him a teaching position, he left academia to farm with his family in Wisconsin.

And don't worry, it gets more depressing.

Hagen spent the last few years of his life studying the Kensington runestone, maybe to clear his name, maybe out of curiosity.

But a fire burned down his home and took his life's work with it.

Without any evidence, Hagen provided one last statement to the press.

He couldn't prove the stone was a hoax, but he wasn't able to say definitively either way.

Hagen died shortly after in 1927.

So why go through all this, other than to bum you out?

Well, one, it's because I enjoy it, but, personally, I find the story around the stone so much more interesting than what the actual stone says.

At the end of all this, we're no closer to proving it's a hoax.

And if it is, why?

What does someone have to gain from learning Norse runes, carving a message into a stone slab, and then yeeting it into the woods in Minnesota?

If you can pull that kind of a fast one on so many people, wouldn't you want to take credit for it?

But that's the fascinating thing about these local tall tales, isn't it?

How they start, how they spread, all the messy in-between bits, that's what keeps them going.

Today, the runestone sits on display at the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota.

You're more than welcome to make the trip and decide for yourself.

And if you personally did the hoax, I guess put it in the comments.

This video is based on the case file in B.J.

Hollars' "Midwestern Strange."

It's a great read, super thoroughly researched, and it even has a chapter all about a certain turtle in Northern Indiana that I'm sure you're familiar with if you watched [Indi] Android.

I'll have a link to where you can find the book and my other sources down in the description.

If you have any strange tales from your hometown, drop them in the comments or tweet them at us.

And as always, be sure to like, subscribe, and click that bell.

We'll see you next time for something a bit more provable.

Thanks for watching.