The Ancient Alien Question (19 page)

As to the mounds, Erickson’s interpretation is that they were built to offer protection from floodwaters, with the most sacred buildings always at the center of the mound on the highest level. There is historical evidence for this: A Spanish expedition of 1617 remarked on the extent and high quality of a network of raised causeways connecting villages together. The area is so vast that it could have sustained hundreds of thousands of people. Erickson believes that the Mojos Plains were home to a society that had totally mastered its environment.

But how did they do it? Orellana reported that the indigenous people used fire to clear their fields. We know that the Bolivian savannah has also been the “victim” of fire—though perhaps we should argue that it was “blessed” with fire. Bruno Glaser has found that Terra Preta is rich in charcoal, which is incompletely burnt wood. Terra Preta contains up to 64 times more of it than the surrounding red earth. He believes that the charcoal holds the nutrients in the soil and sustains its fertility from year to year. In experimental plots, adding a combination of charcoal and fertilizer into the rainforest soil boosted yields by 880 percent compared with fertilizer alone. With this information, we have made an important step toward understanding one of the great secrets of the early Amazonians: Set the soil on fire, and it will regenerate. Of course, though science may have long forgotten about this technique, in the highlands of Mexico, these techniques can still be seen at night, when local farmers set parts of their fields alight. But the science of Terra Preta is not nearly as simple as that. A simple slash-and-burn technique does not produce enough charcoal to make Terra Preta. Instead,
a “slash-and-char” technique must have been used. Named by Christopher Steiner of the University of Bayreuth, this technique does not burn organic matter to ash, but incompletely, whereby the charcoal is then stirred into the soil. Carbon is, as mentioned, a key ingredient in this process. When a tree dies or is cut down, the carbon stored in its trunks, branches, and leaves is released, but when plants and trees are reduced to charcoal, the carbon remains in the charcoal, apparently for periods up to 50,000 years, according to research by Makoto Ogawa. This explains the high levels of carbon in Terra Preta.

Today, we know that the distribution of Terra Preta in the Amazon correlates with the places that Orellana reported were zones where farming occurred. Today, as in the past, Terra Preta holds great promise for the Amazonian population—as well as other areas of the world—where modern chemicals and techniques have failed to generate significant food from Amazonian soil in a sustainable way. Though some of the secrets of this soil have been discovered and will provide great help to many impoverished regions, some ingredients of Terra Preta remain unidentified—or at least difficult to reproduce. In fact, one missing ingredient is how the soil appears to reproduce. Science may not know the answer, but the Amazonian people themselves argue that as long as 10 inches of the soil is left undisturbed, the bed will regenerate in about 20 years. A combination of bacteria and fungi are believed to be the transformative agents, but the exact agents remain elusive from science’s microscopes.

So in the Amazon and on the Bolivian plains, we have a terraforming substance that someone in the distant past knew and developed, but whose secrets have been lost (though modern farmers in those regions know how to work with the manmade soil). The people who created it just disappeared. The communities Orellana saw were gone some decades later. What became of them? Tragically, Orellana’s and other groups were responsible for their demise. Such visitors brought diseases to which the
natives had little resistance: smallpox, influenza, measles, and so on. So even though perhaps hundreds of thousands of people could survive in the New World for millennia by transforming the land they lived on, they had no protection against the new viruses that were brought in by the Europeans. Contact with our own kind, after thousands of years of separation, is dangerous; what to think of making contact with an extraterrestrial species?

Crystal Skulls

It took 15 years before Harrison Ford, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg agreed on what
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
, the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones saga, had to be. The problem was not which object to have Indy chase; that decision had been made: crystal skulls. The problem was the realization by Lucas that this installment would have to involve extraterrestrials. Ford and Spielberg disagreed on this point, and it was a debate that carried on for several years. In the end, Lucas proposed that he would call the beings “intra-dimensional,” rather than extraterrestrial. But when Spielberg asked, “What are they going to look like?” Lucas replied, “They’ll look like aliens!”

Crystal skulls are not “just” objects like Indy’s prior treasures, the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. Crystal skulls are said to contain knowledge, and psychics who have come in contact with them have heard these skulls speak. Indeed, some believe them to be alien communication devices. But the interest in crystal skulls is more recent than the interest in the Ancient Alien Question. It was only in the 1980s, when U.S. citizens like Nick Nocerino traveled through what was once the Mayan heart-land and found that local shamans were offering crystal skulls, that their story began to emerge in the Western world. Since the late 1980s, crystal skulls have become a popular subject of
intrigue, some allegedly having been carved by a lost—if not alien—civilization.

The British Museum Skull in London is one of the most popular items on display in one of the greatest collection of artifacts in the world. The label on its case reads, “Originally thought to have been Aztec, but recent research proves it to be European,” of late 19th-century fabrication. The museum obtained the skull for 120 pounds in 1897 from Tiffany & Co. As to how Tiffany had acquired it, speculation was that it originated from a soldier of fortune in Mexico.

In 2004, Professor Ian Freestone, of the University of Wales at Cardiff, examined the skull and concluded that it was cut and polished with a wheeled instrument, which he said was not used by the Aztecs. Freestone argued that the sculpture was therefore of modern, post-Columbian origin, further noting that the crystal used was common in Brazil, but not Mexico—the Aztec homeland—and that “the surface of the skull, which contains tiny bubbles that glint in the light, is more sharply defined than softer-looking Aztec crystal relics with which it has been compared.”
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However, Freestone said that even though there was strong circumstantial evidence suggesting the artifact was 19th-century European in origin, this did not amount to cast-iron proof.

In recent years, the story of how the British Museum acquired the crystal was investigated by Dr. Jane MacLaren Walsh of the U.S. Smithsonian Institution. She concluded that the British Museum Skull and the one at Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris were both sold by Eugène Boban, a controversial collector of pre-Columbian artifacts and an antiques dealer who ran his business in Mexico City between about 1860 and 1880. Though it is indeed likely that Boban placed the British Museum Skull at Tiffany for auction, there is no hard evidence. However, such evidence does exist for the Musée de l’Homme Crystal Skull, which in 1878 was donated by collector Alphonse
Pinart, who had bought it from Boban. Boban’s 1881 catalogue does list another crystal skull, “in rock crystal of natural human size,” selling for 3,500 French francs—the most expensive item in the catalogue. It is possible it was never sold, and hence was offered to Tiffany to sell at auction.

Having established these facts, however, Walsh then argues that the skulls are not genuine artifacts but were instead manufactured between 1867 and 1886 in Germany, as German craftsmen were deemed to be the only people with the skills to be able to carve these skulls.

Though Boban was indeed a controversial figure, he was no different from all the other operators on the antiquities markets in those days—some of whom made deals for treasures such as the Rosetta Stone or the Elgin Marbles that continue to upset entire nations from which they were “exported.” No one disputes that the Elgin Marbles are genuine, but the same cannot be said for crystal skulls. There is
no
evidence—not even circumstantial—that Boban sourced these skulls from Germany. That is only a tenuous connection made by Walsh. Is it not more logical to conclude that, as Boban operated in Mexico, he may have acquired the skulls in Mexico? It would be completely logical to assume that, if they are Aztec in origin, they were offered on the Mexico City antiques market, where Boban then picked them up. This is the most logical scenario, yet academics seem to prefer the modern German fabrication theory for which there is no evidence. Why? Because science and crystal skulls is not a happy marriage.

As to the fact that the skulls were polished with a wheeled instrument, Professor Freestone himself argued that this in itself does not mean they are modern fabrications. Though Freestone, Walsh, and others have suggested that this overturns the likelihood that the skulls are pre-Columbian, other experts like Professor Michael D. Coe of Yale University stated that evidence of wheel markings in no way proves that the skulls are modern.
He actually said that although it has long been accepted that no pre-Columbian civilization used the rotary wheel, new evidence contradicts this scientific dogma, which Walsh and Freestone continue to adhere to as it seems to suit their agenda. Wafer-thin obsidian ear-spools are now known to have been made using some rotary carving equipment and to be dated to the Aztec/Mixtec period. When Coe was asked about the opinions of Walsh on the subject, according to Chris Morton and Ceri Louise Thomas in
The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls
, Coe concluded: “People who sit in scientific laboratories don’t know the full range of the culture they’re dealing with. We really don’t know half as much about these early cultures as we think we do. People need to reexamine their beliefs.”

Walsh and some of her colleagues have largely presented Boban as a charlatan, but they’ve failed to report that he was known to have owned genuinely ancient artifacts as well as a collection of rare books and early Mexican manuscripts. He had even written a scientific study,
Documents pour server à l’histoire du Mexique
(
Documents to serve the history of Mexico
), in 1891. Furthermore, he personally crusaded against frauds and fakes, such as in 1881 when he spoke out against forgeries that were being made in the suburbs of Mexico City. Would he shoot himself in the foot that same year by listing a fraudulent crystal skull in his catalogue?

Mentions of the German connection and claims of Boban’s dishonesty come from a single letter from one of Boban’s competitors, Wilson Wilberforce Blake. He wrote how they should buy from him, not Boban, who was, as he said, not honest, and he made accusations that the skull Boban had sold was a forgery, insinuating that the skull had been made in Germany instead. However, no evidence was ever produced for any of these claims, and Blake had an obvious motive for smearing Boban’s character: He was after Boban’s share of the market.

In short, Walsh has uncovered good indications that Boban had skulls and sold them, but regarding the German connection, she has relied on the words of a man who was out to smudge Boban’s character, and this is not evidence. The story of the way the crystal skulls have been treated by academics has—alas—all the usual hallmarks of the way the scientific establishment treats all anomalous finds: It pushes them aside, labeling them fakes.

But could these skulls be genuine archaeological finds? As Morton and Thomas pointed out, Boban’s artifacts went on sale at a time when Teotihuacán, just north of Mexico City, was being excavated. Teotihuacán is one of the most important archaeological sites in the Americas, containing pyramids—and a pyramid layout—on par with the pyramids of the Giza Plateau.

Boban is known to have visited the excavations; in fact, he did so in the company of Leopoldo Batres, the Inspector of Monuments. Interestingly, if we look at Blake’s incriminating letter a bit more closely, he claimed that Batres, too, was “not only a fraud but a swindler.”
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Is it even possible that Boban got the skull from Teotihuacán? If so, the finger of guilt should point to Batres, and because Batres sold other finds he made at this site, why not a crystal skull as well? In those days, half of the finds the excavators made ended up on the black market, and the other half became part of the “archaeological record.” It is known that even the great Howard Carter, in his exploration of the Tutankhamen tomb—heralded as the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century—fell victim to this scheme. Nonetheless, concluding that the skulls are genuine archaeological treasures is more logical—and better documented—than speculating about a theoretical German connection.

It was not only archaeologists who were selling crystal skulls. The Mayans themselves were selling them, too. Entire Mayan villages are known to have been financially supported by the sale of archaeological goods that at one point they had placed on the black market. Nick Nocerino claims that he met a shaman in
1949 while traveling in Mexico, who led him to a Mayan priest who said he was authorized to sell crystal skulls because the village needed money for food. Nocerino didn’t buy any of the skulls, but he did study them. With such things on offer, why would Boban need to source a German crystal skull, only to have great difficulty selling it? Walsh will have you believe that the reason is that there
are
no genuine crystal skulls and that the entire subject area is a modern myth. That is simply not true.