http://www.newsday.com/features/printedition/longislandlife/ny-feat-lcov0331.story

Long Island's Tall Tales

Getting to the truth behind some of our grand delusions

By Jim Merritt

March 31, 2002

THE STONE MARKER with the small bronze plaque stood near Shelter Island's north ferry for decades. The inscription read:

On this spot July 11th, 1508

Fell Putikaos

Last of the Sihaqua Indians

Slain by the Norse Viking

Retawerif

Over the years, thousands of travelers stopped to reflect on the history of the place and silently pay their respects.

In the words of that great philosopher Bugs Bunny: Suckers!

"It was all a funny little hoax,” says Louise Green, the Shelter Island Town historian.

A little boy was the first to figure out that "Putikaos” spelled backward was "soak it up” and "Retawerif” was "firewater,” according to a 1942 Long Island Forum article "The Shelter Island Hoax” by then-Suffolk County historian Morton Pennypacker. Green believes the hoax originated in a temperance tantrum by a monied member of a local Methodist camp who placed the sign there in 1908 as a protest against drinking.

If the marker, with its unfortunate linkage between Indians and drinking, hasn't fooled anyone lately, that's because it disappeared after recent ferry construction.

Case closed. Or is it? Here on Long Island, proving something isn't so doesn't mean some people won't keep saying that it is, or keep other folks from believing them. After all, we live on such a long island that there's more than enough room here to stretch the truth (and as everyone knows, the big LIE runs right down the middle).

Long Islanders dive into lake legends. They engage in flights of fancy over flying saucers and spin myths about beasts out at Montauk. The reason we love, cherish and embellish tall tales boils down to three things, local history experts say: location, location, location.

Many Long Island myths and legends hark back to our seafaring past, says Philip Nicholson, professor of history at Nassau Community College in Garden City. Communities from Freeport to Sag Harbor welcomed "ships from faraway ports,” whose occupants "all had legends and stories to tell.” What's more, he says, our homegrown suburban legends may get some of their juice from urban-legend-rich New York City. (So why haven't we spawned any stories of giant crocodiles in the cesspools?)

Another wellspring of folklore: the Indians and their nemeses, those fork-tongued interlopers from across the Big Pond. "Most of what you read about are myths that are spun by the English,” says Brad Harris, the Smithtown Town historian.

One of Long Island's most enduring legends, he says, is the story of the lovesick Indian maiden who committed suicide by drowning herself in Lake Ronkonkoma and whose soul continues to take a male life every year. (In case you were wondering, that one has "no factual basis,” Harris says.)

Other stories are of more recent vintage. And with all the salons and saloons, gamerooms and chatrooms, coffee shops and country clubs contributing to the information stream, it's no wonder that places like Lake Ronkonkoma and Brookhaven National Laboratory are myth magnets.

UFO crashes. Stockpiles of alien DNA. Doomsday scenarios. It sounds like "The X-Files: The Long Island Project,” but it's really just a short list of the weird science fiction associated with the Upton lab.

BNL is better known for science than skulduggery. Researchers there have been awarded four Nobel Prizes since it was established in 1947 and are currently conducting 600 research projects for the U.S. government. The biggest project: the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (affectionately known as RHIC, or just "Rick”), a particle accelerator the folks in white coats hope is doing nothing less than re-creating the beginnings of the universe on a subatomic scale.

But some say there's a lot more to be found at the 5,300-acre campus than Big Bang, the sequel. Alien roadkill, for instance.

In 1989, a now-defunct group called the Long Island UFO Network claimed that a boomerang- shaped starship crashed into Moriches Bay, killing 17 aliens. The same group said that more errant E.T.s slammed into Southaven Park in Shirley in 1992. The villain, according to the network? You guessed it: BNL, which purportedly zapped the UFOs with a "Star Wars”-type particle beam, then spirited away the little green victims and their DNA in its fire trucks.

Holy "Independence Day”!

Lab spokeswoman Mona Rowe keeps her sense of humor even as she dismisses such charges as piffle. Rowe would certainly recognize an alien if she saw one: She's a big science fiction fan whose office is cluttered with UFO tchotchkes, including a 5-foot-tall figure of a little green man with big almond eyes.

She actually witnessed the 1989 "crash” while driving in Center Moriches -- the bright orange globes were distress flares from a boat, she believes. But whatever fell from the sky, it didn't hitch a ride to Upton. "We never sent our fire trucks off site, and we have the records to prove it,” Rowe says. For the record, "We have not shot down or studied UFOs.”

And although UFO hysteria has abated in recent years, BNL still gets a handful of E.T.-related phone calls every year.

There are a whole lot of little holes in another BNL story. In 1999, The Sunday Times of London reported fears that on the way to re.creating the Big Bang inside RHIC, the lab risked creating a black hole that would suck Long Island and the rest of the universe -- poof -- into oblivion.

The scientists, as usual, thought this hilarious.

"A bunch of us were sitting drinking beers one night, trying to figure out a good practical application for RHIC,” says BNL physicist Jeffery Mitchell, 37, of Rocky Point. Here's what they decided: "There are always an odd number of socks when they come out of the wash, so there's got to be some black hole that swallows up all the socks,” Mitchell says. "So we came up with a way to study this in the laboratory.”

But seriously, folks... BNL concluded back in the 1980s that RHIC was safe. "We weren't doing something that nature isn't doing already,” Mitchell says.

Nature is responsible for a whole other category of fabulous falsehood masquerading as fact. Let's start with a quick quiz given this winter at La Salle Center (formerly the military academy) in Oakdale.

Which of the following statements is true?

a) Long Island is sinking.

b) Lake Ronkonkoma and Lake Success are bottomless.

c) From those lakes, you could scuba-dive through underground springs all the way to Long Island Sound or the Connetquot River.

Answer? None of the above, says Gilbert Hanson, a professor of geology at SUNY Stony Brook. Skin divers in 1959 touched the muddy bottom of Lake Ronkonkoma, 70 feet down (that's still pretty darn deep for a Long Island lake). And as for any other body of water being bottomless, gravity wouldn't allow it. "The water would get stuck in the middle of the Earth,” Hanson says.

Meanwhile, you'd have to be smaller than a grain of sand to swim along the underground springs running through the Island's sedimentary layer, he says.

Finally, Long Island isn't sinking, Hanson says; the water's rising -- thanks to global warming -- but at a rate of about a foot a century, so don't go building any arks just yet.

(By the way, April Fool: La Salle closed last July.)

Nassau also has its share of truth-starved taradiddles. At least one prominent history book claims the Redcoats chained Revolutionary patriots to Execution Rocks, located just off Sands Point in Long Island Sound, leaving them to drown at high tide.

"Ninety percent hogwash,” says North Hempstead Town historian Joan Kent. The metal rings on the rocks were for tying up boats. Sailors probably named Execution Rocks for the shipwrecks they caused before the lighthouse there was built in 1850.

OK, but George Washington did visit his namesake Port Washington on his famous trip across Long Island in 1790, right? Wrong again. "Generations of Port Washington children were taught that,” says Kent, who grew up in the community. "But he went from Roslyn straight to Flushing.”

What about the story that Smithtown's boundaries were set around 1665 when the town's founder, Richard Smith, won from the Indians all the land he could circle in a single day on the back of his pet bull?

"A bull story,” Harris says, given the wilderness terrain at the time. "He did ride a bull, and he may actually have gone around, but if he did it in one day he was an amazing man, and he certainly was sore when he got off.”

And that puts the kibosh on this tasty morsel: that Bread and Cheese Hollow Road in Fort Salonga recalls Smith's ploughman's lunch that day, Harris adds.

"There's a sucker born every minute,” P.T. Barnum supposedly said, so it's fitting that some local humbug sucks Barnum in, too. The Village of Island Park lies on a beachhead known as Barnum Island. An official history of the village published in 1880 notes that the island was named after old P.T., who reportedly wanted to winter his circus elephants there, says Joann Krieg, a former Barnum Island resident and an English professor at Hofstra University.

Not so, Krieg says. If there ever were elephants in the neighborhood, they were Coney Island pachyderms used as a publicity stunt to draw attention to the Long Beach boardwalk when it was built around 1907, she says.

Barnum Island's true namesake: Sarah Ann Baldwin Barnum, also known as Mrs. P.C. Barnum (hence the confusion with P.T.), says Natalie Naylor, former director of the Long Island Studies Institute in Hempstead. Sarah Barnum was a 19th century preservationist from East Meadow who bought the island for use as a poorhouse, which was built in 1874.

Down the road a piece, Hofstra University in Hempstead got caught up in a cat's tale that has more than nine lives.

The university was founded in 1935 with a bequest from Kate Hofstra, who, legend has it, wanted her former estate preserved as a perpetual sanctuary for kitties. Alas, Kate Hofstra left no feline fund, says Geri Solomon, Hofstra University archivist. But to this day, cats still get left on campus, surviving on milk from students and pretty much fending for themselves when school's out.

And now for an even hairier fairy tale, this one about a raging beast, time travel and mind control.

During the early 1980s, as part of the so-called Montauk Project, the federal government conducted top-secret experiments at Camp Hero, the military base not far from the Montauk Point Lighthouse -- at least that's what conspiracy theorists say.

Preston Nichols, 55, of East Islip, co-authored a 1992 book with Peter Moon titled "The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time.” The book claims the project was the climax of a top-secret investigation into the paranormal that began in 1943 with the Philadelphia Experiment, when the government supposedly teleported the USS Eldridge back in time (the goal was actually to make the ship invisible).

The Montauk project didn't stop at disappearing destroyers; it was really about mind control, Nichols said in a recent interview, but as the experiment commenced, someone's mind wasn't totally on his work. A beast resembling Bigfoot was released from the mind of one of the Montauk Project radar operators. "I saw the creature,” Nichols says, when he was working there as a communications engineer.

New York State now owns the lion's share of Camp Hero and is planning to open a state park there to the general public this summer. State parks spokeswoman Wendy Gibson was loath to discourage tourist-drawing myths about the place, but she says workers haven't encountered anything "otherworldly,” even if Nichols maintains the beast is still roaming the grounds.

Things that go bump in the night bring us to "The Amityville Horror" -- subject of the popular book and movie -- which some think tops the list of all local hoaxes.

The Amityville house where Ronald Defeo Jr. murdered six members of his family in 1974 was just begging for a subsequent haunting, believers say. After all, it was built on an Indian burial ground.

But that one doesn't have a ghost of a chance, says Nicholson of NCC. "The whole island was an Indian burial ground because they were seminomadic,” he says. "They buried their dead where they lived. It's not as if they had a cemetery.”

Another successful -- if decidedly less gruesome -- literary hoax originated, we blush to admit, in the former Garden City offices of this very newspaper. In 1969, 25 Newsday reporters and editors penned an exercise in intentionally bad writing titillatingly titled "Naked Came the Stranger.”

A Long Island housewife posed as the author, Penelope Ashe, doing a number of television and radio interviews to promote the novel before the hoax was revealed, says senior editor Harvey Aronson, then a feature columnist and co-editor of the book. "Naked” made it to No. 3 on The New York Times' bestseller list, sold 60,000 hardcover copies and eventually earned about a quarter of a million dollars for its perpetrators, he says.

New technology opens new hoax horizons. In 1997, "Slaughterhouse-Five” author Kurt Vonnegut was caught up in a flap over a commencement speech he supposedly gave at MIT warning grads to "wear sunscreen,” "floss” and "dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.”

It was great Vonnegut-level advice for future grown-ups, and thanks to an anonymous e-mailer known as Culprit Zero it flew around the Internet. Vonnegut never wrote or said it, however, and the Sagaponack resident readily gave credit to the real author, Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich.

But literary license has a long history on Long Island.

"An American bard at last!” proclaimed an 1855 review of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass.” Too bad the comparison to Shakespeare was nothing but a ruse.

Today, Whitman, who was born in Huntington, is revered as our poet laureate. But back then, he was just another ink-stained newspaperman, trying to drum up publicity for a book that wasn't exactly flying off the shelves.

David Reynolds of Westbury, author of the 1995 book, "Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography,” explains: "When the first edition of ‘Leaves of Grass' came out in 1855, he wrote three laudatory reviews that he planted anonymously in friendly newspapers.” The editors of those now- .defunct papers were in on the scam, but not their readers.

"Basically, he pulled a fast one,” Reynolds says.

The excuse: Back then, lots of folks were doing it.

Dick Ryan, curator at the Walt Whitman Birthplace in West Hills, points out that with no Oprah-style talk shows to drive "Leaves of Grass” up the bestseller lists, planting complimentary reviews in newspapers was "the only way that was available to a person promoting himself.”

Whitman never prospered from his cheating; sales and some measure of success came only in 1881, after his book was tossed out of Beantown, inspiring the famous phrase "banned in Boston,” Reynolds says.

So, should the Good Gray Poet be dis-bard for his little ploy? No, say his fans, even if the two thumbs- up he received were his own.

Jim Merritt is a frequent contributor to Newsday.