Do the ninja really exist?

Can anyone give me a quick historical bibliography (Japanese Historians) about Ninjutsu? There is a person on one of the other lists (non MA related) that insists that there are no historical references to Ninjutsu pre 60's (his friend couldn't find any). I have seen such lists before, but don't know where to look at the moment.

This is such a bizarre conjecture, I would not even know how to begin to refute it. The proposition that this was somehow "made up" in the 1960s is beyond odd.

I have been to historical libraries in Odawara and Iga-Ueno that are full of ancient documents and scrolls describing methods and people that we would call ninja. The Iga people even let me take apart their displays and photograph the pages of the string-bound books and the scrolls back in the late 1970s; some of the shots have appeared in my books as illustrations, and Rumiko and I have been translating the material in our photo records for going on twenty years now.

(Ironically, that trip to Iga was right after Rumiko and I were married in a Shinto ceremony in Kumamoto, and was the closest thing to a honeymoon we had. Went to Iga with my bride and spent days combing through the ninja museum - what a romantic devil, huh?)

By the way, I have heard that there are people who insist that the Holocaust of 60 years ago "did not really take place", and that stories of such are some sort of hoax. Maybe these are cousins of the "there are no ninja" people...

- Stephen K. Hayes