ROMAN RUINS FOUND IN FIVE ISLAND LAKE

Palo Alto: The University of Emmetsburg announced earlier this week that Roman ruins dating from the mid-1st Century AD were possibly found while dredging the northern end of Five Island Lake.

     Professor the Reverend Rabbi Bunny Shapiro, U of E Department of Classics, said in a press conference that workers uncovered the ruins while the lake was being dredged for the Lakefront Mall's U-3036 submarine amusement facility.

     The ruins, as described by Shapiro, consist of a limestone memorial tablet with a partial inscription, several columns and caps, and what appears to be a foundation and remains of walls.

     When asked if the ruins were genuine, Shapiro was optimistic.

     "I'm optimistic," Shapiro replied. "If they are, it will certainly make us rethink our timetable concerning European discovery of North America by one thousand years."

     Asked if there was any other evidence for a pre-Columbian discovery of America, Shapiro was also open-minded.

     "It's possible," he said. "Certainly not impossible. Given some tantalizing references in Pliny the Elder's Natural History , as well as in Apollodorus and Ptolemy, there does seem to be some evidence of trans-Atlantic contact as early as the mid-First century BC."

     Emmetsburg paranormal investigator Horst Wessel, however proclaims a more prosaic origin for the ruins.

     "They are the remains of an imense lithic computer facility, built by colonists from the moon Io over seven hundred years ago!"

     Mr. Wessel's opinion was imediately discounted by Classics Department Professor Emil Schnikenheim, who held a less sanguine view of Mr. Wessel and Rabbi Shapiro.

     "Wessel's a fruitloops," he said. "Everyone in town knows it. Shapiro? Who knows about him? I think he's putting the cart before the horse on this one. Everyone knows that Columbus was the first European in North America."

     When asked about the Norse discovery and settlement of the continent in the 10th century AD, Professor Schnikenheim was less certain.

     "Oh, that! Well, that Newfoundland and Greenland. That hardly counts."

     In resonse to the as of yet untranslated incription found with the ruins, and its possible corelation with the Kennsington Stone found in Minnesota in the last century, Schnikenheim shrugged.

     "This is all probably just debris from University remodeling in the last century. And the Kennsington Stone was proven to be a hoax; found by a Norwegian immigrant farmer---who just happened to be a Norse runic scholar? You want to hear another coincidence? Where these so-called Roman ruins were found was in an area that Kapitain Wassergott, of the U-3036 Amusement Park, wanted the lake dredged. Wassergott, I should point out, was a classics major at the University of Heidleberg before World War Two, and minored in Latin. You figure it out."

     As of yet, the ruins still have yet to be scientifically dated before their identity as Roman can be proven or disproven.