Authenticity or Hoax: The Story Behind the Delk Footprint

SPEAKER 05 : 0:00

So when you step in the mud, it goes down and then it goes sideways and then it comes up.

SPEAKER 04 : 0:07

Yeah, feels really good too. I love that feeling.

SPEAKER 03 : 0:19

Scholars can’t explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune into Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin’ it real

SPEAKER 01 : 0:39

Today on Real Science Radio, we are excited to be joined by David Lines from the Creation Evidence Museum of Texas. David is here to talk about the fascinating Albus Delp track, a human footprint fossil found alongside a dinosaur track in the Plexi River region. This remarkable find has stirred both intrigue and controversy within the scientific and creationist communities. David, it’s great to have you on Real Science Radio. Thanks. All right. So, David, I want to jump right into this Albus Delk track. You’ve got some stuff to show us, to share with our audience, and we’re looking forward to it. So can you get us going?

SPEAKER 05 : 1:22

To begin with, I’ll say that the Bible teaches skepticism. One of the verses supporting that is go something like test everything and hold on to the good. So jumping into this, I got involved with the Creation Evidence Museum in the very early 90s, and it was sort of started as a skeptical investigation. And so I decided, OK, if I take really good, high quality pictures of everything, if I offer to do that and produce a really good report, if this thing is a fake, they’re not going to want me anywhere near this. But they threw the doors wide open and let me investigate the iron hammer artifact that they had. Now, fast forward to 2008, they called me and said they had a new artifact. And so I looked at it and I went, oh boy, that’s just all arranged way too conveniently. That has got to be a thing. I didn’t tell anybody this. But I was just afraid that maybe they were being suckered in. There were several things about it that made me doubt it. And so I set about… My thought process was, okay, if this is a fake, I should find certain things. And how would I go about making something like this?

SPEAKER 01 : 2:46

And this is the Dell print, right? This is the actual print. So that looks like a, I don’t know, a baby human footprint with a dinosaur. I’m trying to make heads and tails of this.

SPEAKER 05 : 2:57

That’s about a size 11. Oh. Smaller than my foot.

SPEAKER 01 : 3:02

Okay. That’s about my, a little bit smaller than my foot too. Yeah. You’re talking about the dinosaur is 11 feet? Dinosaur was the size 11?

SPEAKER 05 : 3:10

I don’t know what this dinosaur, I’ve forgotten the measurements now. I should have had that available, but it was just… You wear a size 20 shoe. The first thing that I wanted to investigate with this thing was I wanted to see if the tiny little fossils were in the rock. And I wanted to see the texture of the rock. I wanted to see if it had been altered. We had someone bring us a footprint. And it had a very glassy surface and you could almost see down into the rock and see all the tiny little fossils in it. But it was like it had obviously been altered. And so we told the guys, sorry, this may or may not be human, but we can’t. Dr. Baugh asked him some questions. And they had that actually, not knowing what they were doing, cleaned it with muriatic acid. Oh. Well, that stripped off a lot of the surface material, and it just kind of made it useless as far as a scientific investigation.

SPEAKER 04 : 4:15

Okay. All right. So a note to all you kids out there, if you find a fossil, don’t clean it.

SPEAKER 05 : 4:21

Correct.

SPEAKER 04 : 4:22

Bring it straight to the Creation Evidence Museum in Texas. Have them look at the raw material.

SPEAKER 05 : 4:29

Alice Delk found this and he cleaned it. But the way he cleaned it was he squirted it with a hose to get the infill out and the mud, caked mud off of it. And that’s when he, only then, it sat out behind his garage for eight years. And only then was he able to see the human print. Wow. Now, what are we looking at here? There’s an inset, and up here is a, if you look in the very center of the circle, there’s a little fossil of some sort. It looks like a tiny, tiny bone. And I mean, really tiny. This thing’s probably not an eighth of an inch, between an eighth and a quarter of an inch long. Down in the lower part, if you look really closely, you can see some tiny shells.

SPEAKER 01 : 5:16

Okay.

SPEAKER 05 : 5:18

And so that kind of verified, okay, this is the real thing. This is what you find in the Paluxy limestone layers. And it doesn’t look like it’s been hammered. You don’t see any little craters that chisel would have done. So I thought, okay, well, maybe this is okay. This kind of passed my…

SPEAKER 01 : 5:39

Your initial sniff test on it. Yeah, so right. Okay.

SPEAKER 05 : 5:43

This is when it was found. Like I said earlier, Alves Delca had a lot of experience in archaeology and was pretty well known. He has since donated his collection to a museum in Granbury, Texas. If you’re ever in Granbury, you can look up some of the museums there and see a lot of the 19th century and before archaeology. artifacts that he’s discovered.

SPEAKER 04 : 6:10

Oh, okay. When I was researching to do the show, one thing I noticed was almost every link that mentions Alvis Delk calls him an amateur archaeologist, which that sounds like it’s true, but it sounds a little bit misleading. I was under the impression that He just stumbled across this and it was his first rodeo, but apparently it wasn’t.

SPEAKER 05 : 6:35

No, archaeology is like creation science or paleontology. You almost have to have a side hustle full-time job in order to be able to participate in it. So, you know, that was his passion. And he did other things to make a living, but he, you know, his main love was archaeology. So he got pretty good and fairly accomplished. Yeah. okay yeah there’s there’s not a lot of grants uh being written for uh creation oriented archaeology i’m sure correct yeah now he was also take us to the discovery site we got permission to go on private land and and check this place out he said that he found the print in a pile of slabs up on the bank out of the white bluff creek and uh The discovery site is right at the junction of the creek and the river. And so next question, why would a pile of slabs be up on the bank without a backhoe? That’s what I was just thinking. So here’s the site. The creek flows from this direction, flows through this channel, and joins the Paluxy River. The pile of slabs was actually, it was better than just up on the bank. It was up in the mud where all these people are digging up under the trees where it’s not quite so hot. We dug out a few more very large, heavy slabs. One of them was like 300 pounds, and the water force had just tossed it up there. One other thing we found was that someone found a piece of iron. Well, Elvis Dill scampered over there, and so they all dug it out, and it turned out to be a 19th century wagon axle. That had gotten washed down the creek and thrown up onto the bank. Wow. And so that, you know, of course, went to the landowner as a very interesting artifact. But it was just interesting.

SPEAKER 01 : 8:37

Yeah. And so this Delk print, you guys are in possession of it, right? So at some point in the past, you must have purchased this from Albus Delk? Or how did you guys end up with it?

SPEAKER 05 : 8:47

The museum purchased it from Elvis Delk. Okay. And then we went on with further investigation. This is White Bluff Creek here and it runs under this bridge. That bridge is very significant and we’ll come back to that. It makes this curve and you see some houses and then you see green trees and then you see the creek. Those houses are actually 25 or 30 feet higher than the creek. And so this is sort of a bluff and the trees were covering up the actual discovery site. And then it goes on down through here and then joins the Paluxy River. This creek comes down from a high, much higher elevation. There are a lot of hills around here and this creek can get, the Paluxy River is, can get really mean. It’s one of the steepest rivers in Texas. It’s used by kayakers a lot for whitewater practice. If you see these lines on the topographic map, that indicates that you’ve got a really steep incline. So all this water rushes down into the river. And it tends to, you get this wall of water effect because it rains up in the hills. The drainage comes down to central points. They combine and combine and combine. And they finally get into one creek. The creeks get into the river and you really do get a wall of water effect. And people have died in the state parks from just such walls of water. This is what the water can do when it suddenly comes up over an incline and rushes down a slope. This particular picture is Lake Grapevine. You see people up here. There used to be a road right there. You used to be able to see people over there. The bedrock was no match for that rushing water. Water weighs 60 pounds per cubic foot. If you look over in the left column, you see that the Biloxi River was capable of getting 60,000 cubic feet per second. If you do the math, that’s 3.6 million pounds of water every second flowing by that gauge. If you had a sledgehammer that weighed 3.6 million pounds and you were able to swing it once every second, you could pulverize just about anything. An interesting thing, if you look, over the years… These peaks tended to go away. Is that because they didn’t have any more floods? No, it wasn’t. They still had normal rainfall. But the Corps of Engineers, back when the government spent money on good things, built stilling basins. They built these little lakes high up in the hills. then that violent water could collect in there, calm down a little bit, and then proceeded a little bit more leisurely rate down the creek. Still wasn’t slow by any means. Then it got to this bridge. The bridge is actually up here. This is one of the bridges where they have to build concrete slopes on either side to keep it from being washed out. Now, another thing those concrete slabs do is create sort of a fire nozzle effect. It focuses the water. It rushed out at very high velocity, hit this ledge in the river and just dug it up and it blasted big chunks of rock. At the bottom of the picture, you see some of the large rocks that we dug out. They’re still there. It’s still full of them. So, okay, that satisfied one of my objections is why are people bringing footprints to us that are just loose slabs? That’s, you know, did they take them out of the riverbed or did they take them off of private land or where did they come from? And so this one was blasted up out of the creek, but at least now we have a plausible mechanism for lifting such a heavy rock out and throwing it up into the mud bank.

SPEAKER 01 : 13:04

Yep. And you see them there now. I mean, there’s slabs now that are up there. Correct. You wouldn’t have planted them there.

SPEAKER 05 : 13:10

So this is the hole that it’s been digging. It’s almost like it’s got a cave in there. Yeah. So that might be an interesting scuba project if we could ever arrange to get somebody back in there. This is one of the slabs that we took out. This is the largest one. It didn’t have anything in it. We got rid of it. It was in the way. I’m building the wall of the building by now. Okay, what does mud do when you step on it? It squishes. And why does it squish? It gets displaced. Liquids don’t compress. So when you step in the mud, it goes down and then it goes sideways and then it comes up. Yeah, feels really good too. I love that feeling. Now when that happens… Some parts of the mud get more porous. Some get less porous. And so you’ve got a bunch of density variations. And it also slides. That’s the reason we have so many footprints and so many weird shapes and lengths. I did a test. I’ve got a size 13 foot, but I went out into the front yard and I left footprints from 16 to 22 inches just because of the sliding. It also sticks to things. You tend to, at a certain point, you tend to get taller as you walk along in the mud because it sticks to you when you are walking along if you’re trying to get somewhere your heel hits first this is a pressure diagram that they did to study how to make better shoes your heel exerts a lot of pressure because it’s it lands then your foot rolls over to the outer edge And then your little toe hits and the rest of your toes, and then your big toe digs in to launch you on your next stride. I thought that was weird, and I couldn’t imagine it. And then I saw an Olympic slow motion where they decided to get artsy and focus in on the feet of the runners. And they were doing exactly this. They hit on their heels, they rolled over to the outside, shifted to the inside, and pushed off with their toes.

SPEAKER 01 : 15:26

Okay. It sounds like this is going to be another way that this rock, the authenticity of it,

SPEAKER 05 : 15:32

is validated i think that’s where this is heading right well maybe okay okay i was present when the in fact i set i laid the slab on this on this gurney here or this is actually a table in a ct scanner the director at paris methodist hospital had just gotten this new installation He was an expert in radiology, had written widely about it, and I don’t have his name. I apologize for that. But he had the new machine, didn’t know what its capabilities were, so he was testing it to its limits. It’s like, you get a new car, how fast will this go? So a rock is not a good thing to put in the machine because you really have to crank the power. So they were very careful to get us out of the room before they unleashed the radiation. A CT scan is a bunch of x-rays in very thin slices. So what that does is it scans through a tiny thin slice and it shows you the density of what’s in there. An x-ray does the same. A simple x-ray does the same thing. If you land wrong on your arm and they take you to the hospital and they do a preliminary simple x-ray they can tell by the shadows if you have a crack in your bone so what you’re seeing here is the shadows and energy density now with the ct scan it’s better because you can see different places in it It gets a lot more precise. So you see all of this disruption where the fluid mud has been disrupted. It has been pushed and shoved. So what we’re looking at is we’re looking the direction of the guy’s foot. Here’s his big toe. The dinosaur impression isn’t there yet, but it’s coming. The dinosaur’s going toward the left, and so that shadow tends to extend further toward the left. They did some research on the sand, the compressed sand in White Sands, New Mexico. They found where Hewlin had walked alongside the trail of a giant sloth and they could tell which way they they were going even though the footprints were indistinct simply because of the density here’s the big toe impression here’s where his big toe dug in there is other toes when it gets out here beyond where his toe actually was you can still see the shadow here from the direction he was going So you’re going to have two shadows. You’re going to have one somewhat going forward from the impact and one going backwards from where the creature was pushing off. You can’t carve shadows into solid rock. This is one thing that sort of swung my opinion.

SPEAKER 01 : 18:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER 05 : 18:33

I had also seen other footprints with the same characteristics.

SPEAKER 01 : 18:38

So this isn’t something you can fake, right? No. Out of curiosity, what direction was the human running? They probably didn’t obviously happen at the same time, right? Otherwise, that dinosaur is about ready to step on that guy.

SPEAKER 04 : 18:54

Well, Fred, I think there was several million years in between, if I’m not mistaken.

SPEAKER 05 : 19:01

Yeah. The guy was running toward the top screen. The dinosaur was running toward the left. Gotcha. We showed this to the museum one time, and there was a preacher who had moved to the Dallas area to take a job as a pastor of a major church, and he thought it was fake. I said, how would you fake this? I went over this material with him. I said, how would you fake this? And he said, well, you just put something on it to soften up the rock and then make an impression of a dinosaur, mold that into it. And I said, if you know how to do that, you should be a multi-billionaire because you would have every highway repair contract on earth.

SPEAKER 04 : 19:50

Yeah, I was going to say that it’s easy to say soften up rock, but it’s not so easy to do.

SPEAKER 05 : 19:57

Part of how to recycle rock is to grind it up, put it through a kiln, break down the water bond molecules, and turn it back into Portland cement.

SPEAKER 04 : 20:09

So that brings a question to my mind. How do we know that this wasn’t just made in clay and then baked in a kiln and presented to everyone? How do we know that?

SPEAKER 05 : 20:22

The discovery site was one thing. We don’t know it 100%. Or at least I don’t, because I still have a little bit of skepticism, and I haven’t found a scripture in the Bible that says, look under this tree, and you’re going to find a rock with a human and a dinosaur footprint on it.

SPEAKER 04 : 20:41

Oh, I got you. So if it was in the Bible, you’d believe it. Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER 05 : 20:46

There you go. Back to the original languages. There you go. Yep.

SPEAKER 04 : 20:53

Okay, so since we don’t have chapter and verse, we have to, and obviously none of us were there. I like the fact that you do keep a bit of skepticism. That’s healthy, and it’s another flavor of, what did Bob used to say, Fred? It has the flavor of reality, or it has, you know, people say it has the ring of the truth. Yep.

SPEAKER 05 : 21:18

So moving along, we’re looking inside the rock. We’ve got an ability to do that now without destroying an artifact. Here’s a different view with slices going the other way. Now you would wonder, okay, so if I carve one, what’s it going to look like? Well, it looks different. And we’ll get a little bit further into that later. There’s a shadow under a carved one because of artifacts of the computer algorithm that puts the images together. But it’s nothing like this. Now, this actually is a fake. There was a newspaper article. A reporter called me. He got pretty nasty. And I sort of got nasty back. Because the guy was just not being logical. But he slandered Elvis Delk. He slandered the guy that was helping Elvis Delk. I don’t think probably could have successfully sued him. There was a lot of, he started up a lot of controversy, but I won’t get further into that. The worst thing he could say about me was that I was involved in running a Christian school. So that was a negative thing in his article to discredit me.

SPEAKER 04 : 22:35

So that, that tells you the flavor of the article right there. That’s what I was going to say in journalism schools, that’s considered a crime in some journalism schools.

SPEAKER 05 : 22:44

So he supposedly had found the granddaughter of George Adams. George Adams was a kind of a legendary figure in the very early 20th century. He was brilliant. He was incredibly strong. He had gotten a law degree. He never lost a case when he took one. But he decided during the Depression, some people were carving dinosaur prints and selling them just to survive. He decided he would copy one of the prints in the river. So he did this, but he was so successful, he did a couple of them. One of them was embedded in concrete. It’s now in somebody’s patio in Glen Rose here. And I’ve got another picture that I can show later. But this print was found by someone who’d gotten permission to go over his whole old home place and when they sold the land and they were going to pave it over with a parking lot. So he was working with his metal detector, but he was prowling around looking for metal and then found a big rock. He dug it out and it was this thing. This was the print that George Adams’ granddaughter claimed he had carved. And his granddaughter was convinced under questioning of the supposed journalist that that the delt print was actually the one that George Adams carved. This is the one he carved. Look at all these little pock marks. These are impact marks from his chisel. He did a very good job. He preserved the mud uphush. He got that detail right. He really got the toes very good, too. But it’s just not quite right. The heel is a little bit weird. It’s not totally out of the bounds of a real print, but all of these little carving marks is really what gives it away. This is the one we held, so I had C2 scanned. I don’t have the scans, but there was a slight shadow underneath it, but nothing like the displacement that we saw on the other, what we think are genuine prints.

SPEAKER 04 : 24:56

OK, it’s a shame that these fakes are out there because I remember. Well, you’re talking you were looking at this Dell print in the 2008 time frame. Because I remember it seems to me either in the in the early 80s. that claims were basically made that all these tracks were fake. And because there were some fakes, it was really easy for everyone to just dismiss them all as fake. And I was convinced they were fake when I was a little kid. Right.

SPEAKER 05 : 25:32

Another thing that we did was we went out to the infamous Taylor Trail, which is a whole other hour-long topic. I was looking at things in the river and thinking, well, I wonder if that’s a human print. And then when we got the water pumped out and I actually saw a decent human print, it was like, oh, okay, there’s no doubt what that is. and there are no little peck marks or anything else. It does not look card at all. It had a little bit of erosion, and you could see the erosion effects all over the riverbed. You can tell, and they are out there. They’re in the rock layers. Much lower quality prints are touted as 100% human or hominid if it fits the evolutionary paradigm.

SPEAKER 01 : 26:25

So the ones that you saw, did you get pictures of those?

SPEAKER 05 : 26:28

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER 01 : 26:29

Okay.

SPEAKER 05 : 26:30

Yeah, they were in a trail. Some of them are more distinct, some of them are less distinct, which it fits with reality. If you go out and go out and look at the sand in areas where kids run around barefooted and play, you can find all sorts of weird prints and you can’t tell that some of them are even human, but you know that They are because they’re in a trail and you see some very distinct prints. This is the fake print.

SPEAKER 01 : 26:56

That you’re showing now. Okay.

SPEAKER 05 : 26:57

Yep. You can see all of the pock marks and everything. You can see the rough chisel marks around here, which if someone had taken the print out, that’s a plausible thing. Now, what’s not plausible, if somebody had taken the print out, is look how close that big toe is. to the edge of the rock. If you had actually chopped a channel around that close, that detail would have crumbled. The reason I know this is because I’ve seen people take up dinosaur prints on their private land, and they have to go to great lengths to not let the thing break. So they have to take up a lot of rock around it to get an intact dinosaur print out.

SPEAKER 04 : 27:39

And so you’ve seen enough real ones that a fake kind of stands out to you.

SPEAKER 05 : 27:46

That’s right.

SPEAKER 04 : 27:47

I’ve heard that that’s how people who spot fake currency, that’s how they train themselves, is they look at the real thing so that when they look at a fake, almost immediately they know it’s fake, and then they have to dive in to kind of figure out the details, but they just kind of know it’s fake.

SPEAKER 05 : 28:04

That’s right. There’s a little thing that I did. I wanted to see if I could make a fake. So I had my grandson make a mud donut on a big rock that I drove home,

SPEAKER 06 : 28:17

Stop the tape, stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That’s Real Science Radio, rsr.org.

SPEAKER 02 : 28:31

Intelligent Design and DNA

SPEAKER 03 : 28:36

Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.

SPEAKER 1 : 28:45

Tune into Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.

SPEAKER 03 : 28:56

That’s what I’m talking about.