- [Dan Brekke] Up in the East Bay Hills,
there are a collection of
stone walls that people
have been discussing for
well over a hundred years.
Sort of debating and
guessing at who built them,
when they were built, why they were built.
There's no evidence that they're
interconnected in any way
but they're seen pretty far
north in the Berkeley Hills
all the way down to around San Jose.
So one thing that becomes
evident as soon as you start
looking into this is
they've been the source
of this sort of romantic speculation
for well over a hundred years.
This is something that's been going on
since the early 1900s.
The speculation seems almost comical.
There are all sorts of theories
ranging from the appearance
of Vikings to Lemurians.
Lemurians are beings from a lost continent
who may have visited at one point
and had some reason to build walls.
I heard somebody suggest
there's gotta be a Vatican
tie in to this somehow.
At one point there was a
researcher from Berkeley.
He claimed that he had
evidence of an ancient city
in the Berkeley hills and he
had a kind of divining rod
that would help him locate
where this city was.
There was a school of thought
that perhaps Chinese explorers
had come over at some point and
built walls for some reason.
- [Narrator] We know the
Chinese began building
the Great Wall of China
thousands of years ago.
Did they build a similar structure here?
- [Dan] Which seems
incredibly unlikely, anyway.
The basic problem with
the walls in determining
their provenance is that nobody bothered
to keep any records of building them.
They were incidental structures.
Many people have researched them.
Some of them are amateurs
and some of them are
professional archeologists.
Lo and behold, I was
alerted to the existence
of somebody named Jeff
Fentress who's an archeologist
with San Francisco State.
- [Jeff] So there's a fairly
intact segment of wall.
It goes for 100 to 200 feet.
- [Dan Brekke] His expert opinion,
now he will caution you,
he doesn't know for sure,
but his expert opinion is these were built
probably as a part of ranching
or other agricultural operations.
- You know, a few years
before the gold rush
there were only a few
hundred non-Indian people
in San Francisco.
Two years after the gold rush,
there were 200,000 people.
A lot of these people were
running sheep and cattle
and they had to keep their
cattle and sheep herds
separate from everybody else.
- [Dan] So nobody bothered
to document these things
because they were very practical.
They were trying to mark
a property line, my idea,
or they were building corrals
or where they wanted to direct
how cattle were moving.
I don't know how to
explain it other than that.
People see these things
and they naturally wonder
well, why is that there?
They create a story around it and I think
that's a natural human tendency.
This sort of need to access
the magical to explain
the perhaps very mundane has
been around for a long time.
