The Chardin Collective

On June 9th, 2017, I met Morris Bussey, owner of the Stone Hut Fossil Shop in Glen Rose, Texas, while in town for a research trip. While there I got to meet Aaron Judkins, whom Bussey claimed was the right hand of Carl Baugh (director of the Creation Evidence Museum). We had a short but pleasant conversation about creation/evolution issues before he left, and it wasn’t until well after this that I learned more about him and his work as a notable figure in the Young-Earth Creationism community. Much of his content is focused on human-dinosaur coexistence, general biblical archaeology, cryptozoology, and what he believes to be the real existence of demonic extraterrestrials and the “crypto-Jews of New Mexico“. (Judkins & McDaniel, 2012) (Noory, 2012) He’s written several books, produced and has been featured in several films, including Ian Juby’s Genesis Week and Carl Baugh’s Creation in the 21st Century. I started to become slightly concerned about Aaron’s credentials when I noticed on his website that he claimed a Ph.D. and represented himself as “Dr. Aaron Judkins”, yet didn’t provide any details regarding where he got his degree, what field it was in, what his relevant training was, what his dissertation subject was or what it was about, etc. This prompted me to take a brief look into his CV that turned into a much longer investigation than I intended. Based on what I found, I regret to have to call out Aaron as someone more interested in pretending to be Indiana Jones and misleading those who might not know better regarding his level of education and experience. The best place to start my case is with Aaron’s earliest claimed position: a certified “omniologist”.

Certificate of Omniology, The Omniological Society, sometime prior to 2001

Aaron’s earliest claimed professional credential appears to be the title of “omniologist”, accompanied with a Certificate of Omniology, mentioned in an April 2001 inset article he authored for the Creation Evidence Museum, recounting how he and Don Patton cleaned up and mapped track sites of the Paluxy River. “Omniology” isn’t a field – it’s a slang term that refers to “the study of everything“.

Aaron was close friends with Joe Taylor, director of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, before Taylor’s passing (Aaron lists himself as the “field supervisor” for the museum on his LinkedIn page). Taylor is also the founder of the now defunct “Institute of Omniology/Omniological Society”, a niche Young-Earth Creationist organization that had two branches: The Texas Institute of Omniology (composed of a dead MySpace page) and the California Institute of Omniology, a green-text adjacent website from the 1990s that lists Taylor as the “Founder of the Omniological Society” and “First Professor of Omniology“. The California “branch” was headed by the late Henry Johnson, and offered a Certificate of Omniology, described by the site as “…an honorary degree from the Omniological Society and the California Institute of Omniology“. Apparently, in order to earn the title of “Omniologist”, all you have to do is print out the certificate and sign/date it. The title and certificate are essentially meaningless, as the CIO does not have the ability or reputation to grant recognized titles, degrees, diplomas, or certificates that carry any weight – Judkins and the late Taylor and Johnson are the only known members.

Judkins was using “Omniologist” as an honorific in other places as well. In the eighth edition of Cecil Dougherty’s Valley of the Giants, a credit is listed for the photo on the cover: “This photo was taken in September 2000 by AARON JUDKINS, Omniologist of Rainbow, Texas…” (emphasis original). He apparently was still using it just three years before I met him: as recently as April 2014 he told California based Target Truth Ministries that he was a member of the Texas Institute of Omniology when discussing fossilized human tracks being found with dinosaur tracks, and in October 2018 was featured as a speaker for a cryptozoology conference put on by Taylor that was associated with/”sponsored by” the Institute of Omniology. (Burney, 2014) (Myers, 2018)

Master of Arts, Biblical Studies, Bible Believers Christian College and Seminary, prior to 2013

An archived page for the 2015 movie Finding Noah lists Judkins as one of the explorers who went looking for Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat, and says that he holds an M.A. in Biblical Studies through the Bible Believers Christian College and Seminary (BBCCS), a correspondence school located in Los Angeles, California. BBCCS has no physical location other than a single building church that it lists as its campus, its website does not appear to have been updated since the early 2000s, and is not authorized to grant degrees of any kind. They claim accreditation through the Transworld Accreditation and Accrediting Commission International (TACI). TACI goes by several varying names and is not authorized to accredit universities as valid providers of degrees, is not recognized by the U.S. Department of Education or the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, and is currently:

• Included on GetEducated.com’s List of Accreditation Agencies Used by Fake Colleges
• Included on Wikipedia’s List of Unrecognized Higher Education Accreditation Organizations
• Included on Online College Info’s list of Fake College Degree Accreditation Agencies
• Included on the Ciri Foundation’s Fake Accreditation and How to Spot It
• Included in QuackWatch’s warning page of non-recognized accreditation agencies
• Included on the international Board of Quality Standards’ list of unaccredited agencies

Thus any degrees granted by BBCCS are not validly accredited and do not have any measurable academic value.

Doctorate #1 – Biblical Studies, Honoris Causa, Clifford Wilson/Unnamed Australian School, 2009

Over Facebook, answering several questions I had raised about Judkins’ record, he told me that his Ph.D. in Biblical Studies (which appears on the back of his 2009 publication Evolution and Human Fossil Footprints) was granted to him as an honorary degree by his mentor Clifford Wilson through an unnamed Australian school in 2009.

Clifford Wilson was the “president” of Pacific College of Graduate Studies (also known as Pacific College Incorporated or Pacific International University), which was a “…small, private religious school in Australia…(that) is not accredited or authorized to grant degrees. Any degrees from this college are illegal in Australia and are clearly being used fraudulently in the U.S.A.” (Kuban, 2022) Judkins also could have “received” the doctorate through Queensland Christian University, another illegitimate school linked to Wilson. Judkins claimed this honorary degree was included on the back cover of his book only at his publisher’s discretion, though one may note that he was already using the title of “Dr.”, as can be seen by Carl Baugh’s promo for the back of the same book. Regardless, it really doesn’t matter where he got the degree since it was granted honorarily (honoris causa), which means that Judkins self-promoted with a degree he did nothing to earn. It is generally understood that honorary doctorates don’t qualify an individual to label themselves with the misleading title of “Dr.”

Doctorate #2 – Doctorate in Biblical Archaeology, Bible Believers Christian College and Seminary, May 2011

Judkins’ second claimed Ph.D. is in Biblical Archaeology granted through his previously claimed alma mater, BBCCS. However, nowhere on the BBCCS website is there any mention of a Biblical Archaeology degree. In the correspondence mentioned above, Judkins claimed that it was a relatively new course when he enrolled and that they stopped offering it in 2012, a year after he graduated in May 2011. The claim that an unaccredited illegitimate correspondence school stopped offering its only science degree immediately after he graduated with one stretched credulity to its limit, so I dredged the BBCCS website to see if there existed any archives from the time Judkins was discussing. The oldest archives of the BBCCS website extend back to October 2008, and continue up to 2024, where there is absolutely no mention of a Biblical Archaeology doctorate. BBCCS has not offered this degree for at least the last sixteen years, despite the fact that Judkins claims to have received one a decade ago. Additionally, BBCCS has no science faculty, science department or labs, and is not authorized to grant any kind of science degree. Given the total lack of a published dissertation, it appears that Aaron’s second Ph.D. is literally made up out of whole cloth.

To make things even more complicated, Judkins contrarily claims to have studied Biblical archaeology, and not Biblical studies, under Wilson in his 2010 book The Global Phenomenon of Human Fossil Footprints in Rock:

“I also want to express my gratitude to Dr. Clifford Wilson. It is with great admiration that I have had the privilege of studying Biblical Archaeology under his mentorship. (2010, p. vii, emphasis added)

Despite 2010 being the final year of his alleged doctoral candidacy at BBCCS, he mentions studying with Wilson instead of the primary research he would be conducting if he actually was pursuing a doctorate. Further, his guest page on Coast to Coast AM says that he received his doctorate in Biblical Archaeology from Bible Believers University, and not Bible Believers Christian College and Seminary. This mismatching info tracks with Carl Baugh’s habit of forgetting which degrees he claimed to hold at a given time (Kuban, 2022), since Judkins seems to have picked up the habit from Baugh.

Thoughts on Judkins’ Education

I feel that enough information has been presented here to come to the conclusion that Judkins has at best exaggerated his academic education to a great degree and, at worst, has fabricated large portions of it. Since this has been brought to Judkins’ attention, he did engage in some minor damage control: he changed his profession on his YouTube channel from “professional archaeologist” to “biblical archaeologist”, and dropped the title of “Dr.”. On his personal website, he had changed his title of “career Ph.D. archaeologist” to “biblical archeologist” in multiple places. While this at first seemed to be an attempt to right his previously specious wording, the reader should note that nowhere on his website (or anywhere else) has Judkins published an actual CV, nor does he actually possess any legitimate credentials in biblical archaeology. He has simply exchanged one misleading/fake title for another. But regrettably, Judkins’ education isn’t where the issues end.

Predatory MLM Pyramid Schemes

On top of the issues above, Judkins has apparently begun to engage in the promotion of predatory multi-level marketing schemes to his followers. In October 2019, Judkins had an “iGo Travel” section on his website that has since been taken down but can be accessed by the Wayback Machine, where he was promoting the network marketing scam iBuumerang. The company began operating in March 2019 and is not accredited by the Better Business Bureau, and has a BBB review of 1 out of 5 stars. Both Scam Risk and the Economic Secretariat have noted that iBuumerang has a sketchy founder, past associations with other failed MLM schemes, and that it is difficult to make money with iBuumerang. Reddit user u/adaptaBill posted their experience in the MLM several years ago, describing the meeting as “…cult religious meetings. It was like I had stepped back into some cultish church. The language was cult language…He even said, How else will you get rich? There is no other way.” Others have provided info to help family members to get out of the scam, and Scam Risk even notes in their review that damaged relationships are a primary reason to avoid iBuumerang.

Then, in August 2020, Judkins tweeted that he had been made “…an accredited Electric provider…” for four states, directing his followers to visit a website that would allow him to help lower their electric bills.

The website that Judkins directed his followers to was for Kynect, an electric MLM formerly known as Stream/Ignite. While not illegal, tax lawyer Finis E. Cowan noted that most MLMs like Kynect don’t lead to a return on investment, and even those who buy into it have to reconcile its dodgy past of deceptive claims and several problematic lawsuits that surround it, such as indiscriminately charging rates for different customers and alleged violations of federal racketeering laws. (Truth in Advertising, 2024) (JP, n.d.)

Both iBuumerang and Stream/Kynect are cataloged by the Anti-MLM Coalition’s MLM Master List.

“The longest contiguous dinosaur trackway…”

Since at least the early 2000s, Aaron has claimed to be the primary mapper of the longest contiguous set of dinosaur tracks in the continental U.S., known as the Lone Ranger or Deep Dino II trail. Judkins’ story goes that in 1971, Mike Turnage felt out the trail by walking through the water and placing his feet in the tracks to get a general idea of its makeup, and then later in 2000 he was the one to map the whole thing. (Judkins, n.d.) The Creation Evidence Museum (2013) goes well out of its way to make it seem like it was the institution that “discovered” the trail, even though it is simply part of a larger area known as the Taylor Site, an area of the Paluxy composed of multiple trails. And the CEM follows this up by claiming that Carl Baugh was the one to name the main trail The Turnage Patton Trail, and named a small offshoot trail The Judkins Trail in honor of Judkins “200 hour” research project of mapping the entire thing. In their retelling, the trail was only vaguely known to exist prior to the year 2000 before they uncovered it in 2000. However, not only was the trail well-known to have existed before the CEM clean up, but significant map work had been conducted on the trail between the years 1969 and 2000. In a correspondence I had with Glen Kuban, who has spent the last 40 years working on the tracks in the Paluxy, he noted that map work for the tracks of the Taylor Trail (including the Lone Ranger Trail) had been undertaken by Stan Taylor in 1969-1970, Wilbur Fields in the 1970s, Ron Hastings in the 1980s, and himself and his wife Monique in 2000. Additional public work has been done by Glen and others following this, particularly in 2013 and 2022. (Kuban, 1986)

In addition to the misleading narrative, Judkins seems entirely unfamiliar with the traditional academic publication process despite claiming to have multiple doctorates. Up until 2022, the only work he had published on this map project is this very bare bones take from the Creation Evidence Museum’s website (2013).

This was his only public contribution to the Paluxy literature on the trail. Compare it to Glen Kuban’s 1985 map of the Taylor Trail area.

Now, the main problem here is not that Judkins didn’t do the work. It’s that he had nothing to show for the work he had done. In 2022, I was with Kuban and Tom Dill/Phil Scoggins of the Dallas Paleo Society in the Paluxy River taking photographs and video after a team of volunteers from the Texas Master Naturalists, Dallas Paleo Society, and Dinosaur Valley State Park led by Kuban had cleared most of the area after another historic drought period that made for optimal track viewing. Judkins happened to come out of nowhere walking down the river and said hello. While we were talking, he said that he wanted to tell us that he and his group were the ones who mapped the entirety of the trails, and Glen produced his map of the area and asked Judkins if they had recorded pace, stride etc. or if the only thing they had was the map depicted above. Judkins said he did, but had never published them. Then, several weeks after this conversation, even though he had been emailing Kuban regarding the maps he said he had, he just stopped out of nowhere, and then he posted a collage of nine images/maps that he had on his Lone Ranger Trail web page without any formatting, context or providing any interpretation. Both Kuban and myself have noted that Judkins may very well have produced some reliable data for the site, and may even be the first to produce a condensed, full map. But he’s more focused on telling people that he did it as opposed to publishing his work and making it accessible. If he actually were a doctoral-level researcher, he would know better.

Aaron also claimed that we (the DPS, TMS, and DVSP team working with Kuban) were working with him in a “collaborative effort” where we examined his data and compared it with ours.

To put it bluntly, Aaron is lying. He was not a part of our team, nor did he “collaborate” with us. Myself, Kuban, Scoggins, and Dill can all attest that he did not work with us. Our whole interaction was at the end of the day when he came walking down the river to chit-chat and take pictures of the tracks we had already cleaned. That’s it. Additionally, at no point did Judkins “share” his data with us. He’s since removed the bit about collaborating with us, and now just outright claims that he’s the one who went down and cleaned the tracks himself. Unless he ran some kind of parallel excavation to ours, this is just an outright lie.

The last thing I wanted to mention is Judkins referring to a section of the area being officially known as “The Judkins Trail”. In the near decade I’ve spent studying the history and paleontology of the Paluxy River, I have never heard another person refer to the trail as “The Judkins Trail” except for Judkins and Baugh, whom Judkins claims is the one who “named” the trail after him. Baugh never published any documentation on the work, and the trail was known of well before Judkins did his map work on the Taylor Trail. Kuban told me that the trail has never received any kind of name or designation that’s been popularly adopted, and he even said that he just used his wife’s first name “Moni” as a stand-in placeholder for a trail name. Judkins has apparently gotten sheepish about this sort of insistence, since between 2022 and 2024 he removed the claim that the area was “known as the Judkins Trail”, and added a much more modest (though no more accurate) statement that it was named that by Baugh.

Conclusion

I’d like to make it abundantly clear that I’m not advocating that someone shouldn’t be allowed into a scientific discussion if they don’t have a certain level of education. You don’t have to have attended a great school or have a ton of experience in order to make a discovery or contribution to the field. However, it is absolutely dishonest to claim credentials you don’t have and go around using them to gain a status of authority that you don’t really have. Why make up degrees or experiences if you’re trying to make an honest case? Why not just be honest about your level of education and experience? Aaron claims to be a fellow of the Biblical Institute of Anthropology, an online group run by Dr. Judd Burton. While Burton is into the same paranormal topics that Judkins is (aiming to offer online courses on topics like witches, vampires and werewolves) and has also engaged in some slightly sketchy Universal Life Church type ordination as a minister (Burton says he was ordained by World Christianship, a website that advertises “Simple Fast” pay-to-play ordination), he holds an actual doctorate in history from Texas Tech. He publicly provides his dissertation information and is listed as having completed his dissertation at the school by his supervisor. He is open about his academic history and publications and provides a very upfront record of them in an accessible way. These are all things you would expect of someone who actually had been a doctoral student at some point, unlike Aaron.

This article wasn’t put up in a malicious spirit, either. I have no desire to malign Aaron or assassinate his character. He’s not only a nice guy, but even helped me, Kuban, Scoggins and Dill when the state park accidentally locked our vehicles in a field near the Taylor Trail. He happened to know the guy who had the key and could come let us out so we didn’t have to call the police or fire department. This article is just an open review of Judkins’ actions and an open invitation to him to explain all of this. If he posts an explanation, can provide more info on the topics discussed here or improves his academic conduct, we’d be more than happy to totally revamp this article. Until then, I hate to say it, Aaron Judkins appears to have no regard for legitimate scientific inquiry and paints young-Earth creationism in a worse light than it needs to be, because he has settled for playing a game of Indiana Jones to assert a level of authority he doesn’t possess.

References

Burney, G. (2014, April 15) Human Footprints Fossilized From the Time of the Dinosaurs [Archive, Wayback Machine]. Target Truth Ministries.

Creation Evidence Museum (2013) Turnage Patton Trail.

JP (n.d.) Stream Energy: Growing opportunity or a waste of your time? [Review]. MLM Companies.

Judkins, A. (2010) The Global Phenomenon of Human Fossil Footprints in Rock. Lulu.

Judkins, A. (n.d.) Lone Ranger Trail. Man vs Archaeology.

Judkins, A. & McDaniel, M. (2012) Alien Agenda: The Return of the Nephilim. Lulu.

Kuban, G. J. (2022, April) A Matter of Degree: An Examination of Carl Baugh’s Alleged Credentials. paleo.cc.

Kuban, G. J. (1986) The Taylor Site “Man Tracks”. Origins Research, 9(1), 2-10.

Myers, P. Z. (2018, August 31) It’s called “Kook Magnetism”. Pharyngula.

Noory, G. (Host) (2012, August 7) UFOs and the Antichrist [Audio podcast episode]. In Coast to Coast AM. Premiere Networks Inc.

Truth in Advertising (2024) Stream Energy/Ignite.