This is not the first time Bellesiles has disavowed what he wrote. When the Boston Globe exposed his website report on probate records as fraudulent, Bellesiles claimed that the report he had been urging people to read for months was put there by someone else. Emory investigated and found that no one had hacked his website.
This guy's stories are not remotely plausible. Russell Baker called him "the Milli Vanilli of academic publishing." But the Grammys have higher ethical standards than academics do (Milli Vanilli, after all, had to give back their prize).