History Lesson 
Masquerader of The Lost Ark
Is a renegade Texas archaeologist the real Indiana Jones?
(Page 3 of 4)
Jones says he talked to Filmore with one stipulation. The writer had to promise not to reveal the location of the cave or the identities of the excavators. “I didn’t want a bunch of treasure hunters up there,” he says. But with typical verbosity, Jones regaled Filmore and the other volunteers with endless tales of the lost treasures. He told the story of the late German archaeologist A. F. Futterer, who wrote about his bitter competition with the British in his dogged search for the Ark of the Covenant in the twenties. He paraphrased Zechariah 14:12 about what will happen once the Ark is opened: “And the Lord will send a plague to all the people who fought Jerusalem. They will become like walking corpses, their esh rotting away; their eyes will shrivel in their sockets; and their tongues will decay in their mouths.” He showed off his West Texas handiwork when, Jones swears, he whipped five Arab pickpockets at once on a Jerusalem street while Filmore watched nearby. Finally, he introduced Filmore to his son, Gershum Bar Yones (Hebrew for “son of Jones”), who wore a cowboy hat as his fedora and actually cracked a bullwhip.
“In April 1979, I got a call from Randy,” Jones says happily. “He was real excited. He had shown his story to an agent, who said, ‘I want to show this to some people in Hollywood. I think it could be made into a film.’” When Jones returned to Tyler, which was then his home, after his second dig in late 1980, the premiere of Raiders of the Lost Ark was approaching—and without a word about Vendyl Jones or Randy Filmore. “Once the movie came out, everybody from the dig was calling, saying, ‘Vendyl, you had to have had something to do with this movie. There are just too many similarities with things that happened on our dig.’”
When Jones finally made contact with Filmore five years later, the writer claimed that he had been bushwhacked. He’d given the only copy of his manuscript to the agent, but then never heard from him again. “I was his only witness,” Jones says. “And when he first saw a promotional article about the movie, he tried to call me. But I wasn’t in the country. He told me, ‘If I was going to sue, I needed to do it up front, and I tried to call you. But now it’s too long after the fact.’” After that meeting, Jones never saw or heard from Filmore again.
But even without mentioning Vendyl Jones, the movie had an oddly positive effect on him. It started with a news story on the front page of the October 11, 1981, Tyler Morning Telegraph, under the headline Tylerite Hunts Ark of Covenant. Illustrated with a photo of Vendyl shrugging before a poster of Indy at Tyler’s Cinema 4 Theater, the story detailed his quest: “Tyler has its own ‘Raider’ of the Lost Ark. His real name is Jones just like the ‘Indiana Jones’ in the box office smash movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. But he’s ‘Texas’ Jones.”
After that first article, the story of Vendyl Jones’s search for the lost treasures of Israel was carried by dozens of newspapers, religious radio stations, and TV talk shows. Interest in Jones’s excavations “exploded,” he says. A Dallas philanthropist even donated $50,000 to the cause. And although Jones had led his 1977 and 1979 excavations with fewer than twenty volunteers, his third excavation, in 1982, attracted two different shifts of sixty. Each volunteer paid $1,250 in airfare and expenses to spend two months in the desert excavating hundreds of pounds of dirt and rock at the side of “the real Indiana Jones.” Vendyl Jones had become a star.
Okay, who’s seen the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark?” asks the president of the downtown Dallas Kiwanis Club, and his audience breaks into applause. “Well, it’s a true story. But Steven Spielberg was afraid he’d lose his credibility if he called it Texas Jones. But now, here he is, the real Indiana Jones, Professor Vendyl Jones!”
It is less than one month before the spring departure date for his eighth dig in the desert, and Vendyl Jones is making the Dallas media rounds. In his pin-striped suit and pointy-toed shoe boots, he has hit every stop from the Kiwanis Club to KLIF Talk Radio, until his country-boy baritone seems to be booming from every speaker in town.
“So, the movie was loosely based on you?” asks Al from Garland.
“Is the translation of the New Testament a farce?” asks Ed from North Dallas.
The speeches and the interviews always end the same way. “Can I make a commercial?” Jones asks on KLIF. “We have twenty-seven volunteers. We need fifty. So if anyone would like to go on our dig, just call Vendyl Jones. I’m listed in the Arlington phone book.”
Jones needs fifty volunteers for an optimum two-month excavation. And while a little more than half have confirmed, only seven have paid the $2,950 all-inclusive fee. Jones has amassed $250,000 worth of excavation equipment in the Judean desert and has assembled an impressive team of volunteer advisers: a Texas Department of Transportation supervisor, a Harvard Ph.D., and the senior archaeologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But if he can’t come up with enough volunteers, there might not be any dig at all. “It’s all about getting the word out,” he says.
A few days later, Jones is back at his seemingly typical suburban home, whose mortgage, like his truck and his $8,000-a-year salary, is paid by his institute. Inside, however, the house is typical of Israel. Israeli art and photographs cover the walls. Israeli food is in the kitchen. And waiting for Jones is his young Israeli wife, Zahava, a linguist uent in ancient Hebrew, who carries her own painstaking translation of the copper scroll in her purse.
How Vendyl and Zahava met is yet another tale in Jones’s endless inventory—a wily Israeli matchmaker! a plane scene straight out of Casablanca! “I needed a wife who loved God, Torah, and Israel,” he says. “And I knew I wasn’t gonna find that in a Baylor broad.” Zahava Jones crystallizes their courtship into a single meeting. She was working the reception desk at the Argaman Hotel in Acre, when she noticed the then-divorced Jones—“dressed like Indiana Jones: hat, khaki shirt, and pants and boots”—staring at her. “I asked him, ‘You want something?’” she remembers. “And he said, ‘Yes. I want to look at you.’ So a few days later, I said, ‘Are you married?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Are you Jewish?’ And he said, ‘No. You want to check?’” Jones ashes a sheepish grin and pretends to unzip his pants. “Meshugah!” Zahava screams.
The next day, Jones is busy in his office. The deadline for booking cut-rate airline tickets is approaching; he is running short of both volunteers and patience. He has been up all night working on the arrangements for the excavation. He is overseeing a team of editors and proofreaders, trying to beat a printing deadline for the current issue of his newsletter. (The headline: Excavation Update . . . Cost Reduced!) He is also preparing to meet with representatives of NASA, whose high-tech satellite equipment he wants to enlist to search for underground cavities in his caves.
And if that’s not enough, his day has been darkened by news of that other Jones. He is shown a copy of the current TV Guide, its cover picturing young Indiana riding a camel alongside the line “Indy and Me, by George Lucas.” Jones reads Lucas’ story aloud: “The character’s name came from my dog Indiana, who used to sit in the room with me while I was writing. I originally called the character Indiana Smith, but Steven Spielberg said it sounded too much like Nevada Smith, a movie character played by Steve McQueen. I suggested Indiana Jones.”
Jones puts down the magazine. “Well, isn’t that interesting,” he says, then falls silent for a moment. “I don’t think he stole this. But I think he got Randy Filmore’s manuscript. I don’t buy that he just pulled this thing out of the sky.” But Lynne Hale of LucasFilm says the first Raiders screenplay was an original story written by George Lucas in 1973—which predates Jones’s meeting with Randy Filmore by four years—and was inspired by Lucas’ love of the high-action cliffhanger serials of his youth. “It was not based on Wen-dyl Jones at all,” Hale told me.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Jones. “First of all, I would never sue Spielberg and Lucas because of what they did to spread the knowledge of the Ark of the Covenant. For four thousand years we’ve had rabbis around, and nobody got this story across like Spielberg and Lucas. But the bottom line is this: If Randy Filmore had not been on that dig, if there was not an Indiana Jones, it would not affect me and what I’m doing. I was doing it for years before all of that came off. It added a little gee-whizzism. But gee-whizzism doesn’t move dirt in buckets. It doesn’t raise money for the dig.”
He is told of the skepticism of scholars like Jacob Neusner, the author of two books on the ashes of the red heifer, who says, “[Jones] would be better off to go to the stockyards of Fort Worth and take a red cow to Jerusalem on El Al and burn it on the Mount of Olives. It would have the same effect [as finding the ashes]. [His quest] is a wonderful, romantic idea and absolutely crackpot.”
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