The Ancient Alien Question (32 page)

This chief fetish was used only as a last resort, when an Indian was at the point of death. As far as we could discover only males were privileged to undergo the treatment, and if the sufferer subsequently recovered it was considered that a miracle had occurred. But to us the significance was in the fetish itself which proved to be unique, for it was found upon examination to be a human male fetus.

Professor Sir Arthur Keith, FRS...gives it as his opinion that its age was from five to six months when it was removed from the womb of the mother. It had been preserved perfect in every single detail, even the fine skin; and under a microscope one can see the beginning of the eyebrows. This preservation of an embryonic child shows a scientific knowledge of the highest order in contradistinction to their habits and conditions of living. All anthropologists who have seen it are unanimous in their opinion that is has neither been smoked, sun-dried nor cured by any process known today, neither has it been treated with spirit; yet it is as perfect as when first removed from the mother.

Subsequent close examination disclosed that the fetus had a skull formation hitherto entirely unknown.

When we were told by experts that it was probably the only specimen of its kind in the world, we felt its proper place was The British Museum, to which we gladly presented it.

The Chief Fetish currently remains in storage at the British Museum, where two friends of Anna Mitchell-Hedges, Jon Rolls and Cris Winter, viewed it in 2005. Jon says that it “was the most amazing object I have ever seen—and I have visited many museums. It had incredible detail and looked like it was sleeping; it was so lifelike I expected its eyes to open any second. As I examined it, a number of questions sprung to mind which remain unanswered to this day.”
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These questions involve the method of preservation, as well as various anomalies with the fetus, for example in its eyelashes, its bone structure, and the absence of any scar from an umbilical cord. As of yet, these questions remain unanswered. The object is about 4 inches high—making it too small to be a four- to six-month-old fetus. Those who have seen it also mention that the eyes and head are too big for a fetus of that age.

Apart from the extraordinary find, it is interesting to note that impersonating a visiting deity saved Mitchell-Hedges’s life. And though it is assumed that the fetish was given to him in gratitude for the extraordinary medical care he gave the tribe, one can also wonder whether, from the perspective of the tribe, maybe something that they felt or knew was from the gods was given back to the gods? Though little analysis has gone into the object, the expert opinion from one of the leaders in the field declared it to be a total anomaly!

The Dropa

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Chinese archaeologists stumbled upon a cave containing small skeletal remains. Alongside the bodies they found stone discs that, when deciphered 20 years later, seemed to tell of an extraterrestrial craft that had crash-landed in the mountain range of BaianKara-Ula 12,000 years ago.

The so-called Dropa disks were rumored to contain information about a crashed alien spaceship in the Chinese mountain range of Baian-Kara-Ula. They are among the most controversial evidence that extraterrestrial beings once visited our planet.

When the story of this craft reached the Western media, they treated the news with the usual attitude of “It’s Communist propaganda—don’t believe a word of it.” In the mid-1990s, German author and tour guide Hartwig Hausdorf reignited the debate as to whether aliens had crash-landed their craft in the remote mountainous region of Baian-Kara-Ula, in China’s Qinhai Province, and it became popularly known as “The Chinese Roswell” (after the Roswell, New Mexico incident of 1947, where it is popularly assumed an alien spacecraft crash-landed).

At the core of the story is this: In 1937–38, an expedition led by Chi Pu Tei, an archaeologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Peking (Beijing), was trying to find shelter in the Kunlun-Kette mountain chain. The team members entered a cave and found inscriptions on the walls. At the back of the cave they found several tombs, aligned in a row, containing strange-looking skeletons, each measuring about 45 to 50 inches in
length and having an abnormally large skull. Buried with the skeletons were unusual stone discs, 716 in all, each about 15 inches wide and half an inch deep with a hole in the center, each bearing strange hieroglyphs.

Few images of the Dropa tribe exist, but the few that do show that the facial features of these people are quite extraordinary. Scientists have made various attempts to explain these features away, but could it be that they look the way they do because their ancestors interbred with the survivors of a crashed spaceship, as the Dropa themselves believe?

Closer inspection revealed that each disc was a book, but, upon their discovery in 1938, nobody possessed the dictionary for this language so no one was able to read the books. All the discs were collected and stored along with the other findings from the area. There was no reason to consider these stone discs special or important; perhaps just odd.

The discs were kept in Peking, where, for the next 20 years, a line of experts tried to decipher the writing. Nobody succeeded. In 1962, Professor Tsum Um Nui did succeed, and learned of the astonishing message the discs contained. He announced his findings to a small group of friends and colleagues, but the
public remained unaware of his discovery. The authorities felt it wise not to announce the professor’s findings; the Peking Academy of Prehistory forbade the professor from publishing anything about the discs.

After two years of what must have been utter frustration, the professor and four of his colleagues were finally allowed to publish the conclusions of their research. They decided to call it “The cartelled script relating to the spaceship that, as is written on the discs, descended on Earth 12,000 years ago.” The discs told the story of inhabitants of another world stuck in the mountains of Baian-Kara-Ula. The peaceful intentions of these people had not been comprehended by the local population, and many extraterrestrials had been chased and killed by members of the Han tribe who lived in nearby caves.

Professor Tsum Um Nui offered a few lines of his translation: “The Dropa came out of the clouds in their aeroplanes. Before sunrise, our men, women and children hid in the caves ten times. When they finally understood the sign language of the Dropa, they realized the newcomers had peaceful intentions.”
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Another part of the text stated the Han tribe regretted that the Dropa had crashed in this remote area, and that they were unable to build a new spaceship so the Dropa could return to their home planet.

Since the discs’ discovery more than 25 years before, other archaeologists had learned more about the history of the area. That newly acquired knowledge indicated that the story, as it appeared in Tsum Um Nui’s translation, could be correct. Legends circulating even at that time spoke of short, skinny, yellow men that “had come out of the clouds a very long time ago.”
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These people had big, knobby heads and small bodies and were a terrible sight to see, according to the locals who had chased these people away on horseback. The description of these people is identical to the bodies Professor Chi Pu Tei had recovered in 1938.

Mural paintings were also found inside the cave. They depicted sunrise, the moon, unidentified stars, and the Earth—all
connected with dotted lines. The discs and the cave’s contents were dated to about 10000
BC
. In the 20th century, some of the caves were still inhabited by two tribes, calling themselves the Han and the Dropa—the latter people of strange expression. Barely 4 feet tall, they were neither Chinese nor Tibetan. Even the experts of Professor Tsum’s team could not indicate their racial background.

Next, enquiries came from the Soviet Union, with scientists requesting some of the discs to be sent to them for study, which the Chinese did. The Soviets removed pieces of “dirt” and made various chemical analyses. The Soviet scientists were surprised to learn that the discs contained fairly high amounts of cobalt and other metals. Dr. Viatcheslav Saizev reported in the Soviet magazine
Sputnik
that he had put the discs on a special machine that was somewhat like a gramophone. When turned on, the discs “vibrated” or “hummed” as if some kind of special electric charge had been pushed through the discs in a particular rhythm; or, as one scientist stated, “as if they formed a part of an electric circuit.”
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Somehow, at one time they had been exposed to high electric charges.

Such findings, however, had little to do with the other discs that stayed behind in China. Shortly after Tsum Um Nui’s decoding, the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s swept over China, and there was no public concern for the discs’ fate or their message. In 1974, an Austrian engineer, Ernst Wegerer, stumbled upon two discs in the Banpo Museum at Xian and photographed them. Erich von Däniken learned of the discs and Wegerer’s photographs, and wrote about the discs in one of his books. But in March 1994, Hausdorf and Peter Krassa, a friend of von Däniken, left for China and visited Xian and the Banpo Museum, searching for the discs that Wegerer had photographed two decades earlier. Nowhere could they find any trace of the discs. Had Wegerer made up the entire story? That seemed unlikely. They asked their guides and Professor Wang
Zhijun, the director of the museum. At first, they denied the discs even existed! Within an hour of having been shown the photographs, Zhijun stated that one of his predecessors had indeed given Wegerer permission to photograph the discs, and that the discs did indeed exist or had at least existed. Shortly after having given Wegerer permission to photograph the discs, that director was asked to resign.

Director Zhijun showed Hausdorf and Krassa a book on archaeology in which photographs of the discs could be seen. Afterward, he took them to the location where the museum’s artifacts were cleaned and catalogued. On one chair stood an enlarged copy of a stone disc. Zhijun hinted that, a few years ago, word had come down from above—from his superiors—that all traces of the discs had to be wiped out, and that he was to go on record as saying everything was one big lie. Had Hausdorf and Krassa been less obstinate, they might have classed Wegerer as a hoaxer.

In their efforts to find the truth about the Dropa saga, Krassa and Hausdorf also came across the story of an Englishman, Dr. Karyl Robin-Evans, who had traveled to China in 1947. Before his arrival, a Professor Lolladorff had shown him a stone disc that he believed to have been found in northern India. The object appeared to have belonged to a tribe, the “Dzopa,” who had used the discs during religious ceremonies. Dr. Robin-Evans stated the discs had a radius of about 5 inches and were about 2 inches thick.

The professor put the disc on a balance and connected the balance to a typewriter. He illustrated how the disc, throughout a period of three and a half hours, apparently gained and lost weight. After one day, this change in weight created a printed line on the paper in the typewriter. The change in weight had allowed the typewriter to print, leaving characters on the paper. The discs could (sort of) type! Though it was easy to explain what had happened, how it had occurred was basically impossible.
How could a stone disc change weight? (Apparently Dr. Robin-Evans was unwilling to lose face over the stunning weight experiment: Though his report had been written in 1947, it was not published until 1978, four years after his death.)