Nor was Burrows aware of Henriette Mertz, a Lt. Commander in the Navy in WWII who was also a patent attorney and an internationally known expert in forgery. She had been challenged by a judge from Indiana who had a private collection of the Sopher tablets to prove by the rules of law (relating to forgery) that the Sopher or Detroit Plates were modern forgeries as the academic syndicate had proclaimed in their trial in the newspapers. She labored over the challenge for years and finally concluded that the rules of law fail to prove that the Detroit Plates were modern forgeries. On the contrary, she said, such rules state that the plates are authentic ancient artifacts. She added that the inability of the academics to read the script on the Detroit Plates and their arrogance in defending their unproven charges of forgery created a crime against science and our ability to understand the true history of this land, from which we will never be able to recover. She did not know of the additional several thousand carved and inscribed plates that Burrows was to later make public.
Mertz said that the proof that the academics had used was a legal method called "Ipsi Dicit" which means that the matter was settled by the unproven conclusions by someone in authority, a proclamation of belief which was widely accepted without challenge. She further stated that this affair created a climate in our colleges and classrooms which is still perpetuated; any artifact with apparent Old World script on it is rejected offhand as an obvious fake without further study or real proof of forgery. The Burrows Cave saga proves that Mertz was completely correct in these statements.
Although Mertz did not attempt to translate the ancient script on the Detroit Plates, she concluded from the art work that the plates had been made by a group of refugee Christians who had been outlawed after the Council of Nicaea in about 400 AD. Like the pagans before them, such non-orthodox groups had to change religion or flee from the Mediterranean in order to survive. Artists who have studied the Burrows Cave Rocks have concluded that the people who made these pieces had also been connected to ancient refugees from the Mediterranean. They would have been connected to high cultures that the Romans were beginning to conquer and enslave, and likely fled as refugees. The Burrows Cave art seems to relate best to southern Spain and northern Africa and covers a time about 500 to 300 years before the Detroit Plates.