The Salamander Letter and the Mark Hofmann forgeries Ep. 59

Guys fun fact: My mother has just informed me that my grandmother was Hofmann's personal nurse after he was injured by his own bomb. I need to ask that woman some questions!

When I was a boy, the police officer who arrested Hoffman gave a fireside chat in our home for our ward. It was interesting to hear the story from the law enforcement side. In addition to finding all sorts of forgery evidence in his personal study, they also found a book on how to make bombs. Hoffman was a really good liar and his closest friends and family had no idea what he was doing.

I had absolutely zero knowledge of this topic and what this video was claiming to be about before clicking on it. I learned something!

If Abraham teaches us anything it’s that prophets aren’t immune to being deceived.

This was great, thanks for all of the information about this David. What you're doing means a lot.

I've never heard of this, great video.

I never heard of this, but as an LDS member born in the 2000s, of course I didn't. It lines up with what I know about prophets. We are here on this earth to learn, prophets included. This was a learning opportunity for them and the rest of the church.

According to my dad, who was part of church history circles at byu in the 70s, said that he was suspicious of Hoffman. His "discoveries" were too convenient. For context, most of the Pratt archives are only there because my dad went to descendents asking if they had any letters or documents. After the deaths of the early apostles, many of their letters were divided out to the family. When you have plural wives they get around. It's a shame.

The fact that anyone can dupe the leaders of the church is enough for me to not believe of their authority. They are always telling us how they are unable to else is astray and it just happens so much.

This was by far my favorite Faith's and beliefs episode! Thanks for the Olan Roger's and Styx references.

I had a dream about this and I'm not a mormon or a critic of the mormon church. I came across this video by googling white salamander code based on I dream I had about falling into a cave, in this cave there was a pond of water and 4 white salamanders asking me to decipher a letter they had, they insisted that I could tell the world what the letter said. When I woke up I googled that and I came across this finding.

amazing video! Would be good if you would make a video of the netflix documentary as well

BIG difference between admitting that all men are imperfect, and the difference between a SEER and revelator not seeing this letter as a fake. Why wouldn’t God make that known?

Fascinating! Thank you for the video!

Dude is like the real life Riddler. The sense of needing to see people’s faces when he lies to them, counterfeiting, deception, a feeling of intellectual superiority, the fact that he doesn’t resort to Violence till he thinks he’s stuck. And even then the inadvertent violence using mail bombs. I will not glorify him but the way the documentary builds up his techniques is some meticulous work that I hope to see replicated in The Batman

Interesting fact that you left out of the story Jerald and Sandra Tanner, famous critics of the church. Publicly disavowed Mark Hoffman as a fake. However, Gods spokesman and prophet did not have the power of discernment to see what the Tanners could. This is why critical and rational thinking is important. It is interesting to hear Sandra Tanner interviews as she describes the clues they saw that caused them to question Hoffman's documents. This single event is not anything earth shattering as a whole for the church. But just another line of evidence that shows the LDS church is just like any other church, and making all the same mistakes.

This is actually one of your better & more accurate pieces. My slight issues with is: At 2:05 when you assign motive to Hoffman: I think it was more complex than this. I think that Hoffman's main intent may have been to help people understand that early church history was full of magic which included seer stones, etc.,. This was not well known outside of academic circles at that time. At 4:02 you state that the gig was up. Actually, it took months (or even years) for investigators to figure out what really happened and the extent of the forgeries. You also talk about the church "supposedly suppressing" these new documents and try to normalize this behavior. The church appears to have actually suppressed the information, and continued this trend when it excommunicated scholars for their writings in the 1990s. It continues to suppress information today by creating false narratives around the seer stones to make them seem more plausible. When was the last time you saw a picture of the white seer stone? But, on the whole I enjoyed this video.

Man, Mark Hofmann tried to trick Latter-day Saints and murdered two other members? Wow. Than this means Latter-day Saints are indeed the victims and always has been. Mark is not, he is the bad guy here and he broke the commandment of no false witnessing. He caused a whole charade of false witnessing. Yeah Mark Hofmann, I'll just meme quote Obi Wan from Star Wars in my own words(Latter-day Saint style), "YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE, YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BRING GREATNESS TO THE CHURCH, TO BE CHRIST LIKE NOT JOIN SATAN AND DESTROY THE CHURCH WITH LIES, GOING AGAINST JESUS, OUR LORD & SAVIOR!" Anyone else think that Mark Hofmann here is like Anakin and that Latter-day Saints to some extent when it comes to Holy Sacred Temples, are like the Jedi plus trials in life? (Except we can get married)

Well, I guess you all are not going to like that Netflix movie "Murder Among Mormons".

David, You're being too generous by saying that Hoffman "duped" the General Authorities. Oh sure, the Church ended up purchasing his forgeries but, there was plenty of doubts to their authenticity at the time. It just couldn't be PROVEN until several years down the line. I was a recent convert and serving a mission when several of these documents began surfacing. There were a number of photographs in the Church News and Ensign magazine at the time. I was immediately suspicious that Hoffman was pulling some kind of underhanded activity. I can tell you that I wasn't alone - I know that many others received the same prompting from the Spirit. However, PROVING that they were forgeries wasn't within human ability at the time.