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Join historian Ambeth Ocampo as he revisits the curious case of Jose E. Marco, exploring how forgeries, myths, & historical imagination continue to shape the way we understand the Filipino past.

In 1911, three baybayin manuscripts, written on bonga bark and in cuttlefish ink, were donated to the ¾«¶«´«Ã½app Library of the Philippines. Historian James Alexander Robertson hailed these as the 'greatest literary find ever made in the Philippine Islands…the only known manuscripts of this class…that might have been written…in 1565.'

The donor of these bark manuscripts was Jose E. Marco, a prolific forger whose career spanned half a century before he was ultimately exposed through his most elaborate deception: the fabrication of an entire corpus of unpublished works attributed to Father Jose Burgos. While Marco’s story is well known, it acquires renewed significance in today’s Age of Fake News and Disinformation. His case serves as a cautionary tale about the (ab)uses of history in shaping, and sometimes distorting, the Filipino nation.