1000 word Blurb



In all the time man has lived on this earth, the mystery of an unknown has always intrigued him most. From the origin of his being, to his beliefs and desire to know all. In using his senses in a methodical order, he sets out to prove what is fact from fiction. This is the story of one such event, that has occurred as a phenomenon in physical form, linking the past to our present.

The phenomenon may have been predestined to occur to me at the early age of eleven. It was 1967, and my interests in history of the American west was expanding. My days as a coin collector had just begun. The coin that most intrigued me was the buffalo nickel produced in the early twentieth century. There was an Indian bust on the obverse and a buffalo on the reverse. I had no money, and was only able to obtain some worn coins out of occasional change. I tried to imagine what those buffalo would have looked like when they were new.

Then I thought that someday in my future, a new coin would be made with a buffalo, and I would finally be able to obtain perfect ones. Even then, as a young boy, I knew what happened to the buffalo. I read countless books in which the factual accounts of the slaughter were written. It was then my mind began to open, and everything became clear. In a split instant, I saw the future. A new coin bearing a buffalo was minted, and displayed all the earmarks of the great slaughter. I thought this would be a punishment aimed at the American government for standing by idle, and allowing this to happen.

Thirty-eight years later in 2005, the phenomenon came true. But the phenomenon wasn’t the only discovery. It was the purpose for which it came. Unknown, until the book was being written, that the slaughters were still continuing. It was happening to the buffalo at Yellowstone National Park, and in Montana, for the very reasons it happened in the first place. The buffalo were being killed over a myth. And in senseless parallel, the death of many men and women was taking place in Iraq, over a myth of weapons of mass destruction.

In Native American legend, a basic understanding of life was given by the Spirit of the White buffalo. It explained that life is a circle, and whatever we do to anyone or anything in the circle we will do to ourselves, as we are all one.

The government kills buffalo with no documentation, only a myth that cattle could contract the disease brucellosis from infected buffalo. They disrespect the right of buffalo to live free. They kill young men and women with the myth of weapons that were proven not to exist, and as a parallel, they show no respect of their lives. Evidence of a phenomenon appearing on coins with a buffalo in a very troubled world comes with a message to all. Albert Einstein once referred the world’s greatest discoveries to come from one with an open mind and imagination. This book is the very footsteps of that thought.

It was February of 2005, when I began to look into a phenomenon appearing on the first buffalo nickels. At first, I purchased the nickels in two roll mint boxes as a need to have coins celebrating the Westward Journey’s 200th anniversary. Secondly, there was another buffalo placed on the 2005 nickel. “Wow,” I thought, appreciating the idea the mint had given in to a dream I had for a long time with a return of the buffalo to a coin.

I found out as I opened the very first boxes and then the rolls to examine, there were plenty of unusual physical defects. They were spread throughout the rolls uniformly on both the obverse side with Jefferson, and on the reverse side, with the buffalo. My first impression was a very good









feeling, one of excitement when finding error coins, thinking of the value in discovering an error coin that no one else had obtained. However, after going through many Westward Journey series nickels of 2005, the shock hit me. To my amazement, there were plenty of these so-called errors, and the more I looked, the greater the number and more vast the differences became. I was definitely on to something, so the next step was to go out and procure more.

This time, a more controlled experiment would be needed if my hunch was to be proved correct. I was about to conduct a tally of information through a predetermined search within the United States. Using different areas of the country, I wanted to see if this problem was concentrated in one area or spread all over the nation. Keeping careful records of the times purchased and the states involved, documentation had begun. I began checking the error types against the number of times they presented themselves at auctions. The method of using Internet auctions would provide me a second benefit— a mass of people searching millions of pieces rather than me financing the whole experiment. I’d be able to closely pinpoint the errors to precisely what I needed without getting myself into debt. On the 2005 nickels, I was finding a countless array of errors. However, what appeared to be mysterious and questionable was the way the errors were presenting themselves. I had trouble believing their existence in my mind. Were they really errors?

Then, after going through plenty of Philadelphia and Denver mint nickels, I was convinced what I originally had been calling errors were more than what they appeared to be.

I remembered my studies of nineteenth-century American history and what was said about the buffalo— and a light bulb came on above my head. I’d go back and check the coin errors against American history of the period, and see if there were any matches. Bingo!