Pseudoscience: Paul Chiasson and the Island of Seven Cities

I think the tragedy of this book is that honest well meaning people will read it and believe that this person, because he is educated and can write, has any notion of what he is talking about. It is the same thing that makes amateurs see a show from Von Daniken and mistakenly start to wonder if there actually were extra-terrestrails influencing ancient man. His prime evidence is the all too pervaisve 'it looks like this therefore it must be'. The reason no one has done any archaeological excavations is because any credible archaeologist takes one look at the location, or even the mapping, and sees clearly that it is not a site. This is of course leaving out the ludicrous notion that it was the Chinese. This is a lovely fantasy from a very imaginative but woefully misinformed and completely inexperienced amateur archaeological enthusiast. It is unfortuneate that a reputable publishing company would not have at least had this peer reviewed (and by peer i mean actual experts , not other people who realy just want it to be a site) before putting it in front of a public that all too often thinks that just becasue it is printed it may have some flimsy attachment to reality. It doesn't.

As someone who has seen the unreleased documentary I think that some claim (not all) resist the thought of history being changed. I myself think that there is not enough evidence to state the the Chinese were there before Christopher Columbus, but i do believe that the rocks and settlement do not look at all natural. In the documentary the pictures of the settlement shot bare space the forest all around. It look unnatural like human hands have some how touched it.

Just another side of the story.

Wow. What a revelation that would be if Chinese were the first to visit Cape Breton. But let's be realistic. Let's assume Paul is completely correct in his beliefs. I think that everyone who might help him will ultimately end of condemning him and discrediting him. Why? Answer is simple. Imagine the task involved in rewriting what believe is our true history accounts. Paul would definitely "upset the apple cart". Then it brings to question of how many other parts of our history, which we believe to be right, are actually wrong. I watched the documentary of members of several universities going to Cape Breton with Paul and made him to look like little more than a joke. The Professor from Acadia, in particular, seems to scoff at Paul when talking about him, as though he knows everything and his decision should be looked at as gospel. So the had a detector that would go down 72cm and detect annomalies in the earth. What if items are at 80cm. Paul needs to roll up his sleeves, get dirty, and find some Chinese artifacts in the area. He only needs to find one. I have been a prospector since 1999 and seen strange formations that have occurred naturally but why would anyone close their minds to other alternatives. An example would be the "rock rustles around Lake Rossignol in Nova Scotia. They are strings of large rocks located in a mining district but were actually caused by glacial movement. Anyway, I am very interested In Pauls theory.

There's a classic saying among skeptics. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Each of his claims has been debunked, and his thesis is silly on the face of it. Could the mediaeval Chinese have made it to Cape Breton? Of course they could have. Is there any proof that they did? Not at all. There's nothing here but wishful thinking. This is "Chariots of the Gods" thinking. Velikovsky logic. Indus Valley and Easter Island reasoning. Look them up.

Keep an open mind, by all means, but open like a filing cabinet, organized and sensible, not open like a garbage can, that takes anything that gets thrown into it.

Seriously, some of you need to be ashamed of yourselves for your gullibility.

This book was comical and its theories absurd.

If you all claim to be such devout researchers and you value the truth and you distrust ivory tower academia (and god forbid you believe in absurd government conspiracies) than you really need to do your own research. This entire claim, put forward in a horribly researched farce by Chaisson, was completely debunked in a 2010 publication entitled Underground Nova Scotia: Stories of Archaeology. Here author Rob Ferguson shows us why Chaisson was wrong and he actually provides his evidence so that you too can go find it and see for yourself.

And those of you who say professional archaeologists are covering something up and those stones don't look natural - shame on you, your gullibility, and your disrespect for the past. What a double standard you create when you claim that professional archaeologists don't know what they're talking about and then give your uneducated and uniformed opinion about some rocks. Are you a geologist? Have you excavated a Chinese site and have the expertise and experience to tell the difference? No you do not. And your gut feelings are not the things science, evidence, and truth are made up of. A series of racist, disrespectful, and misinformed coincidences do not create new histories or change our perceptions of the past. They make those of you who believe them racist, disrespectful, and misinformed.

I've excavated sites all over Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and Europe and I can tell you that this is not an archaeological site. The recent documentary proved that. Robs chapter proved that. I am a professional and I have researched this topic. I have read chaisson's book three times, the first time with an open mind, the second time to gather his "evidence" and a third time to refute his outrageous claims. You should become more interested in real history and archaeology than subscribing to this mans absurd claims made with no evidence at all. You'd be surprised how much you'd learn and how much more respect you'd have for the past and those people, long gone, who shaped the world we live in.

Volunteer on an archaeological site and don't be an armchair critic. The Nova Scotia Archaeology Society has free public digs and runs a lecture series and all are welcome. However if you're still not convinced and you'd rather agree with this nonsense then you are unfortunately contributing to a mutation of the truth that future generations will look back on and shake their heads over.

No one is realizing the internal political conflict in Nova Scotia that has existed since the 1850's when Cape Breton was illegally claimed by the territory of Nova Scotia.

If Paul's theory is true, the spin off would shift the political power in the province against the great bureaucracy of Halifax. Of course the employees of the great bureaucracy do not want this to happen and will do anything to debunk Paul's theory.

Cape Breton should be it's own territory, under which country or if it should be independent should be decided by a British Court as it never was and should have been.