One rainy night in Anchorage, Alaska, anthropologist Nancy Yaw Davis had an "Aha!" moment.

She began to make a connection between the Zuni people of the Southwest and a caravan of Buddhist monks who, she believes, migrated in the 14th Century from Japan to the west coast of what is now the American continent.

Her theory, 40 years in the making, could shake up the field of anthropology. So far, the scientific establishment has dismissed her notion, but she says with an impish grin, "I've got them nervous."

Since that rainy Alaskan night in 1960, Davis has been gathering information on her theory while teaching, raising a family and now running an Anchorage consulting firm involved in research, writing and applied anthropology.

The seeds of what became an obsession were planted when she was a graduate student reading "The Mind of East Asia" by Lily Abegg. When she came across a chart detailing the Chinese system of yin and yang, she found it remarkably similar to a chart on Zuni religion she had prepared for a class three years earlier.

By the next year, that discovery had led her on a path to her master's thesis comparing the Zuni and Japanese languages, including a long list of nearly common words. Her anthropology professor at the University of Chicago was not impressed. He read one paragraph of the paper and tossed it aside. "Go back to Alaska and do something respectable," he told her.

Traditional dogma rejected any notion that Native American languages might have connections with other languages.

"I was devastated," Davis says.

Crushed, she took the professor's advice. She returned to Anchorage, began teaching at Alaska Methodist University, married William Davis in 1962, bore three children and earned a doctorate from the University of Washington in 1971.

But the idea of a Japanese-Zuni connection continued to haunt her.

"It wouldn't stop," she says. "It's a theory with 1,000 ideas. . . . I knew I was onto something hot that would be accepted someday."

For more than 30 years, she pieced together those 1,000 ideas, reading every Zuni article published, logging every nugget of information. On Oct. 18, 1994 -- Alaska Day -- she began to write her book.

Here is her theory: Around the 11th or 12th Centuries, "all hell was breaking loose" in the social structure of Japan, and the island nation was plagued by repeated natural disasters, including a series of earthquakes. Davis believes Japanese sailors began to leave the country in successive waves.

One of the last of these waves of migration set sail around 1350, Davis believes, led by a group of Buddhist monks in search of Itiwanna, the center of the universe. Davis surmises that favorable currents landed the monks in what is now California.

As the pilgrims moved eastward, they attracted Native Americans drawn to the notion of Itiwanna. Disparate clans united in a kind of search for Oz. In an area of what is now west-central New Mexico and east-central Arizona, just south of Chaco Canyon, they believed they had found their Emerald City, Davis says.

Settlers in the Zuni territory, Davis says, were an amalgam of Japanese, Anasazi and A:shiwi -- the name the Zuni give themselves.

Evidence she has collected to support her theory includes language, religion and crafts with roots in Japanese tradition but distinctive from other Native American cultures. She has found biological links through blood type, tooth shape, skull configuration and a kidney ailment prominent in both the Zuni and the Japanese. Both cultures had a mythology that embraced images of the ocean.

Far-fetched? Some scientists believe so, holding to the traditional idea that Native Americans are descended from people who migrated from Siberia 12,000 years ago, traveling across the Bering Strait.

Others have postulated theories of trans-Pacific contact between people overseas and Native Americans without much credibility, says Keith Kintigh, professor of anthropology at Arizona State University. Kintigh, who specializes in Zuni and upper Little Colorado archaeology, is mentioned in "The Zuni Enigma."

"There's been a lot of ink spilled over these theories, and it hasn't gotten us very far," Kintigh says.

He would not comment specifically on Davis' book, since he has not read it, but says that out of 100 theories that seem to "upset the apple cart" of anthropology, only one pans out.

If true, Davis' theory would be "a major change in the way we think of these things," he says. "I'm kind of skeptical."

Though the scientific community has so far dismissed her work and snubbed her requests to present her findings at professional conferences, Davis is undaunted. If nothing else, she says, her book could spark a discussion of her ideas and blow the dust off the field of anthropology.

"That's the challenge, to open up the discussion," she says. "If I'm wrong, prove that I'm wrong."