in Detroit, bought 40 of the objects. Savage believed them to be "remains relevant to the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel," and continued to believe in the relics until his death (in 1927). Debunking In 1891, Professor Albert Emerson came out to the sites to get a better look at the "artifacts" that he called "bad enough in the photograph... an examination proved them to be humbugs of the first water." In 1892, Professor Francis W. Kelsey, professor of Latin and Literature at the University of Michigan, along with Professor Morris Jastrow, Jr., librarian and professor of Semitic languages at the University of Pennsylvania, assessed the languages found on the objects. Kelsey and Jastrow deemed the Michigan Relics frauds containing a "horrible mixture" of jumbled ancient scripts. The consensus among most all early scholars who assessed the relics was that they were archaeological forgeries, based on the following evidence: The hieroglyphs were stamped cuneiform characters in random order. The figures on some of the discoveries included lions with no tails, an omission which would not have occurred by "primitive" artists. The clay items were dried on a machine-sawed board. The objects disintegrated in water, indicating that they could not have been buried in the ground for very long. Archaeologists and historians continually concluded that the objects were forgeries. On July 28, 1911, professor Frederick Starr of the University of Chicago declared in the Detroit News that the so-called relics were fakes. Mary Robson, who lived in a room next door to Scotford's sons Percy and Charles, stated that the boys manufactured more "relics" all the time. In 1911, Scotford's stepdaughter signed an affidavit in which she stated that she had seen him making the objects and when she denied their validity he threatened her life. While most scholars and academics have determined that Scotford was the craftsman and Soper was the salesman, and the men joined forces for personal financial gain, neither man ever confessed and remained active in the business until their respective deaths in the 1920s. The Relics and LDS The finds attracted the interest of some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). In 1909, Mormon scientist James E. Talmage participated in a "dig" and then thoroughly tested the artifacts in his lab back in Utah. His investigations led him to label the artifacts as frauds. In August 1911, he