A Tall Tale Still Repeated by Everyone from Creationists (like Kent Hovind) to Velikovsky-ists

A tall tale I ran across over the years concerns the alleged discovery of a Ninety-foot tall plum tree found frozen in place above the Arctic Circle with green leaves and plums still on the branches, that everyone from creationists to Velikovsky-ists claim was discovered by Baron von Toll, and which proves every hypothesis from The Genesis Flood story, or a 9,600 BC Earth Crustal Displacement, to catastrophic tilts of the earthʼs axis, that caused “instantaneous freezing” in parts of the world.

Today I discovered that someone built on my investigation, taking it to new depths!

He ended his article with…

“Even though Babinski wrote his debunking almost twenty years ago, the myth of the ninety-foot fruit tree is still alive and well. As a plum tree, Tollʼs tree continues to appear in creationist literature usually as evidence of the Noachian Deluge. Among secular catastrophists, the tree usually appears among supporters of Hapgoodʼs crustal displacement, such as Graham Hancock and Rand Flem-Ath (yes, thatʼs his real name). Babinskiʼs debunking gets linked to and copy/pasted into online fora again and again to no avail. Cut the tree down in one place and it pops up in another. Recycling is an essential part of fringe writing. The writers comb through each otherʼs works for anecdotes to use as evidence for their pet theories. Many writers never leave the echo chamber nor look for any new information that might challenge their anecdotes or even add a couple of interesting new details. Leaving the echo chamber would expose them to actual authorities and those are to be avoided at all costs; theyʼre out to suppress the truth. For fringe writers, other fringe writers, even those with competing theories are better sources than actual experts. For that reason, we can expect to see Baron von Tollʼs giant fruit tree again and again into the future.”