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: Skeptical Inquirer magazine
: September/October 1999 : Buy this back issue
Profits and Prophecy
Hayseed Stevens and Oil in Israel
A fundamentalist oil entrepreneur mixes creation science, Biblical
prophecy, and revivalist techniques for a program of oil exploration in
Israel.
Donald U. Wise
When the local Pennsylvania newspaper announced that the Prophecy Club would be
holding a three-hour seminar conducted by "Hayseed" Stevens concerning prophecy
and oil in Israel, curiosity overwhelmed me. After a forty-year career of
research and geology teaching, I had a fair idea of Israel's geology and the
origin of its tiny oil production. Such a case for personal "enlightenment" was
not to be missed. The following report on that January 8, 1998, seminar is a
small window on the fundamentalist movement in America and its application of
creation science.
The Prophecy Club has a network of local chapters, with its headquarters in
Topeka, Kansas. It is a fundamentalist Christian organization with television
programs scheduled on eight stations. It also has radio programs on fifty-eight
AM and FM stations and six shortwave stations as well as on six satellite
channels. Its January/February 1998 newsletter, distributed at the seminar,
lists a total of "765 new conversions" and "2,441 rededications" during the
last year as "determined by show of hands and public confessions at its
sessions." This particular presentation was one of twelve being made from
Boston to Spokane by "Hayseed" Stevens in January and February 1998. The
newsletter lists fifty additional seminars to be taught across the nation by
four other speakers during this same time period, each charging $7 per person
admission. Advertised seminar subjects include how America is being taken over
as part of a "New World Order," prophecies of financial crisis, secret codes
embedded in the Bible, and prophecy warnings about governmental plans
concerning the use of UFOs to "destroy the religions of the world and switch
them to the religion of the Antichrist."
Joining approximately 150 other people, I paid at the door and entered the
rented lecture room at a local convention center. At the back of the room were
five sales tables laden with video tapes, recordings, and a variety of
pamphlets of prophecy and doom. Following an opening prayer, the head of the
local chapter introduced Harold "Hayseed" Stevens, who responded with another
prayer ended by a lackluster chorus of "Amens." Intent upon engaging his
audience, Hayseed requested a lustier "Amen." Eagerly embracing his role as
cheerleader, he cried, "If I told you that the Philadelphia Eagles had just won
the Super Bowl, what would you say?" "Amen!" "Even better. Now what if I told
you that Jesus Christ was coming tomorrow?" A thunderous "Amen!"
followed. After finally warming up his audience, Stevens directed the group to
repeat after him, "The greatest oil field on Earth is under the southwest
corner of the Dead Sea." Throughout the rest of the talk, at about ten minute
intervals, he led his audience in this same rousing cheer.
Now, with an involved and receptive audience, Stevens proceeded to describe his
early fundamentalist religious life growing up on a sharecrop farm in Texas,
his sinful life as a professional football player, and his final conversion to
Christian evangelism. According to his tale, one day God told him to go into
the oil business. With God's direction he developed Hayseed Stevens Oil, Inc.,
as well as an international oil company called Ness Energy International.
After a few years, God told him to go drill for oil in Israel and He would
reveal the oil's location.
Stevens described going to Israel in 1980 with eleven other Christian
businessmen to meet with Menachem Begin. When Begin told them that he knew
nothing about oil, Hayseed whipped off his Texas-style ten gallon hat and gave
it to Begin announcing that the gift would help him understand the oil
business. At once, the miracle occurred! The hat fit and Begin said to him,
"Maybe you should be the one to come and find oil for us in Israel." As proof
that such an event took place, Stevens showed a photo of the group with a big
white Texas hat in front of Begin and concluded that, "miraculously, within two
hours God showed me the location of the world's greatest oil field. . . . Now
repeat after me . . ." And the crowd thundered, "The greatest oil field on
Earth is under the southwest corner of the Dead Sea."
Stevens described the origin of this Israeli oil bonanza by using a version of
geology straight out of creation science. A large 1992 poster from the Creation
Evidence Museum was displayed with the title "Creation in Symphony" as Stevens
gave glowing attribution of the work to his friend, the "brilliant" creationist
writer Carl Baugh. The proposed model involved a 6,000-year-old Earth with a
molten interior at 10,000 degrees. Floating above the molten interior and
keeping the surface "insulated" was a huge layer of hydrocarbons, the mother
lode of Earth's petroleum resources. Above this and just below the crust was a
layer of water in some strange kind of density inversion. Slow seepage of the
water layer produced the humid jungle-like conditions of the Garden of Eden
with its great vapor canopy. To create Noah's flood, God used an earthquake to
rupture the crust and allow the trapped water layer to pour forth as the
Biblical "fountains of the deep."
According to Stevens, that Dead Sea fault zone marks the boundary of Earth's
greatest tectonic plates. (In reality the fault is only a medium-scale plate
boundary separating the African plate from the Arabian plate.) After the escape
of the waters, this deep fracture tapped the mother lode layer of petroleum
which bled upwards to form the asphalt and tar seeps in the region of Sodom and
Gomorrah. According to Stevens's interpretation of prophecy, God originally
intended all this oil to be the basis of Israel's future riches and
greatness. But unfortunately, the people became evil and undeserving so God
caused the fault to move. The resulting friction ignited the oil and it
exploded under Sodom and Gomorrah. Somehow the heat was so intense that it
created an "entirely new form of sulfur which melted at 10,000 degrees and
rained down on those evil people as fire and brimstone." The intensity of the
heat converted the rock to salt (a chemical process that would certainly have
delighted the alchemists of the Middle Ages). As evidence of this, Hayseed
showed satellite photos and crude versions of Geological Survey of Israel
seismic cross sections with a big salt plug at the southwest corner of the Dead
Sea basin in the vicinity of Sodom and Gomorrah. Encouraged, the audience
enthusiastically joined him in his incantation, "The greatest oil field on
Earth is under the southwest corner of the Dead Sea!"
Returning to his satellite photos, Stevens explained that the new salt plug
blocked the upward flow of the huge petroleum layer destined for Israel. Thus
diverted, the oil flowed eastward into the great reservoirs of the Middle
East. Even though a geologic plumbing system that would allow this flow is
almost impossible to imagine, problems such as that were never discussed.
Instead, Stevens changed direction to focus on the fact that 85 percent of the
world's known oil resources are presently under Islamic control. He assured his
audience that with his drill hole through the salt plug to tap the mother lode
of petroleum, he would change that imbalance by making Israel the greatest oil
producing nation on Earth. Quoting Isaiah 60:5 he declared, "Then you shall see
and be radiant, your hearts shall thrill at the glorious deliverance; because
the abundant wealth of the Dead Sea shall be turned to you. Unto you shall the
nations come with their treasures."
Stevens pointed out that this drill site along the Dead Sea is at the lowest
point on Earth and as everyone knows, fluids flow downhill. Thus, the well will
not only tap the mother lode but will eventually drain the Arabian oil fields
(by some unstated but geologically unthinkable mechanism). In accord with
prophecy, the enraged Arabs will attack Israel at the final battle of
Armageddon. The plains near Mt. Carmel, according to Stevens, cover a vast
reservoir of oil, and it is across these plains that the Arabs will attack. God
will ignite the underlying oil to incinerate the Arabs and ensure the victory
of the righteous, at least according to Stevens's reading of the book of
Revelations.
My strongest impression of the evening was of the interplay of prophecy,
prophets, and profits. The entire talk was sprinkled with overhead projections
and handouts of about twenty verses of Biblical prophecy. Most prophecies were
supplemented by Stevens's interpretation inserted in parentheses. Considerable
strain seemed to be required of the English language to make Biblical
statements conform to oil exploration and the present world of
geopolitics. However, once these prophecies were accepted there could be no
doubt that, "Repeat after me . . . !"
In 1985 Stevens organized a consortium to drill at the Dead Sea site, but the
drill string sheared off at about one mile depth. He is now planning to drill a
19,000-foot, $25 million well through the salt plug, and his company is about
to offer public stock sales for this venture. If the evening's talk was a
promotion, it was done as a soft sell but the phone number listed on the
handouts to reach his company was clear, as was the possibility of merging
prophecy with profits. Stevens pointed out that God's plans even include the
former Shah of Iran's financing of a 42-inch oil pipeline that was completed
across Israel from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, but never used because of
the Shah's fall. This pipeline passes within a few miles of the drill site and
is now standing there empty, waiting to take the supposed 200,000-barrel-a-day
production that will result just as soon as the well is completed.
The more immediate financial aspects of the evening were well covered starting
with the $7 admission charge ($7 3 150 = $1,050) to cover rental of the room,
etc. The plethora of video tapes for sale, mostly at $20 to $40, certainly met
their production cost as did several thin pamphlets selling at $5 to $10
each. Considering the admission cost it was surprising to see an additional
offering with helpers passing collection plates through the audience. The
number of $10 and $20 bills and personal checks in those plates was
impressive. Following the mid-evening break Stevens proceeded to extol the
great works done by the Prophecy Club and to propose that this warranted an
unheard-of second special collection. He noted that no one should feel any
pressure to contribute and that this offering should be from the heart. He made
a show of announcing his personal check for $1,000. As the plate was passed
this second time, he kept rephrasing the theme that this offering should be
voluntary, that there was no peer pressure to do God's work, and so on. I
watched in amazement as people around me wrote additional checks and put more
$10 and $20 bills into the plate.
The evening concluded with a revival-style prayer session complete with
exhortations to anyone who had sinned and wanted redemption to raise their
hands while everyone, with one exception, bowed their heads. Stevens
acknowledged these secret hands and counted them as part of the increasing list
of recipients needing prayer. With an "Amen," Stevens invited everyone who felt
the evening had been a success to stand and let it be known. In response, 149
people stood, waved their hands in the air and shouted "Hallelujah" and "Amen."
Hayseed Stevens folded his oil operations into and took over the Kit Karson
Corporation, a 19-year-old oil company listed as KTKC on the NASDAQ. In 1996
KTKC reported its total assets as $1,604 with a net loss of $1,179. After the
takeover, the July 23, 1998, SEC annual report for KTKC lists Stevens as
president, holding 56.5 percent of the common stock, which has "no par
value."
The latest Church of the Mail Newsletter from Hayseed Stevens announced that on
October 13, 1998, the Israel Oil Company had granted him drilling rights for
32,000 acres at the southwest end of the Dead Sea. The first was well slated
for April 2000 at a cost of $30 million and an expected depth of 19,000
feet. To judge the effect of this news on the market, the December 8 share
price of KTKC was $0.24, nearly its lowest point in a 52-week trading range of
$0.21 to $13.75. In early summer 1999 KTKC changed its name on the NASDAQ to
NESS, one of Hayseed's early names for his company. On July 2, 1999, NESS
traded at $0.48 per share.
Whatever happens with his oil explorations, I'll always find that January
evening one to be remembered and certainly one not easily confused with any
other lecture on oil resources. "Right now we are only one well short of
finding (repeat after me) the greatest oil field on Earth . . ."
About the Author
Donald U. Wise is a research associate at Franklin and
Marshall College, in Lancaster, PA 17604-3003 and professor emeritus of
geology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. E-mail: d_wise@acad.fandm.edu.
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