If you remain civil I'll debate with you.
Funny you should make that presumption, I wrote the same thing i that pos I made in the Wild Skunk thread 3 years ago, to quote myself:
Some very well informed old timers I used to talk to a lot were always adamant that the Haze Brothers were Robert Connell Clarke and Dave Watson, they also told me that for a long time out west, anything sativa was called Haze and anything indica was called Skunk, just simply because those names were well known and it helped move the product. Maybe the Haze Bros decided to breed what they considered the ultimate sativa and called it haze, or perhaps they worked with someone else's lines who had also been breeding towards the ultimate sativa, who knows, but one thing is certain, trying to say that there is an actual, original, real-deal Haze is ultimately pointless, we have no idea what Haze was for a long part of it's history, probably lots of sativas, buth pure and hybrids were called Haze, the first point in time that one specific seedline was taken as being the embodiment of Haze was 1984 when Sam arrived in Holland. All Dutch Haze descended from this 84 stock is therefore a restricted, closed genepool, just one expression of what is/was possibly a very broad genepool of Haze types.
I have no idea at all where Haze came from, all we know is it existed in the late 70s as it was entered in Cali harvest festivals back then, it was mentioned in magazines of the time too, seeds of Haze appeared for sale in High Times in 1981, Sam says the advert was his but I doubt that's true, it's for Sacred Seeds which accoring to him was just him and according to others was a loose collective in the Bay Area in Cali.
But trying to trace Haze back earlier than the end of the 70s is very difficult, god knows I did a lot of research and found a few stories but nothing concrete.
One story I think may be verifiable with enough research is the one about the BOEL and Hawaii. Story goes the BOEL had a pot farm on Hawaii (that much is verifiable, they did) and they grew the finest dope anyone had seen (supposed to have employed people with advanced academic qualifications) and that dope was sealed into packages using what was then state of the art vacuum sealing technology The weed was sensimilla although one or two seeds were found from time to time in a package. Each package had a printed dragon logo on it. This weed was shipped to Cali and then from there all over the states with NYC being the largest market. This weed from Hawaii is supposed to have been called Haze, no idea if this story is true in whole or in part, we know the BOEL definitely grew a lot of weed in Hawaii and it was shipped to the US in dragon-labelled packages, all that is verifiable, what we don't know is if anyone ever called it Haze, I've tried to trace the origins of the term Haze and the earliest I can find in late 1966 which was when Jimi Hendrix wrote 'Purple Haze' which he said was written about a dream he had where he was chased by a purple cloud. Jimi performed Purple Haze for the first time in the US at the Monterrey festival in the sumer of 67 and it went to number one. Owsley Stanley saw Jimi at Monterrey and the following summer named a batch of acid after the song, the song inspired the acid, not the other way around, Owsley has stated that categorically. After that, all I have seen is a Haze poster from the 70s, which is referring to Haze weed. At what point in time the term Haze was first used to refer to weed is unknown and whether it was before or after the skunkman I have no idea. I strongly suspect people have been calling weed Haze since the 60s and some say the term was coined by surfers but who really knows?
One thing that is perhaps a little strange is that Nev mentions that Sam only had old Haze Seeds to sell and that is just 4 years after that 1981 advert that listed several version of Haze as well as Haze hybrids. In 1981, someone had a lot of Haze seeds, that advert proves that, but Sam only had small numbers of old seeds 4 years later?
Advert in HT, 1981, 5 versions of Haze, 6 if you include Burning Bush which Sam says was a Thai influenced Haze, 8 Haze hybrids, 2 Burning Bush hybrids, that's a lot of Haze seeds.
This is what Sam was selling in 1985 in Holland, one version of Haze. So if Sam was the man behind the 1981 advert what happened to all the other Hazes? Maybe the Santa Cruz cops got em when he was bust and he only managed to keep hold of a small number?
Personally, I think it's more likely Sam wasn't behind the 81 advert.
Another thing that's strange is that if seeds were being sold in HT in 1981 then why has no-one to date, apart from OT1 (which is another story altogether) surfaced that claims to have Haze seeds? Surely they must have sold a few hundred seeds at least, people have other strains from this period, but no-one has ever mentioned having Haze from this period other than Sam.
Finally we get on to the strange case of Positronics Haze. Tom Hill says he bought packs of it in 97 and worked it a bit to make it more suitable to indoors. Well, Tom's line is different to the Original Haze that Seedsman sell and Tom that owns Seedsman told me he bought from Sam in bulk. It's not the same at all, Tom's line has purple phenos and is much faster, people are finishing plants in 12 weeks with quite chunky buds. The Seedsman Haze would seem to me and others to be mostly Thai and South Indian, never seen a purple pheno, never seen a pheno that reminded me of Colombian either, whereas Tom's variant looks to have a lot of Colombian in it. Sam says Positronics got their Haze from him. Others say Old Ed brought it with him in 1978 when he emigrated from the US. No idea on this one, Positronics had a female Haze cutting in their library, Frans who worked there described it as a pure sativa that took 16 weeks and yielded very little but was too potent for a lot of people. Someone should ask Wernard about this sometime, I'm sure he would recall if Old Ed brought Haze or if Sam did.
So much is open to speculation and so little can be tied down as fact, maybe one day someone will turn up with some major evidence to fill in some of the blanks but I'm not holding my breath.
.. My old lady would probably break out the tongs and a cutting torch