The Apocalypse Calendar (8 page)

A Mayan Indian boy in the village of Chicxulub in Yucatán ran to his father and exclaimed, “Father, look at the sky! There is a strange object coming down!” The father saw a cylindrical object slowly descending to the ground. He ran quickly to his chief to tell him of the impending danger. The Indians hid in the jungle and watched in horror as a large, glowing cylinder landed in the jungle near their village. The object extended from their village to a neighboring village nearly a day’s walk away.

An eerie green glow embraced the cylinder. The Indians heard strange pinging sounds from within the object. The sun was now directly overhead. The heat from the sun and from the space object was oppressive. The father, Mesocoxyl, told his wife to take the boy’s three sisters to a waterfall about a half a mile away from their home and to cover themselves with wet moss, large caladium leaves, and banana leaves. However, when Mesocoxyl’s wife and her children reached the waterfall, they noticed that there was a large overhang between the top of the waterfall and the plunge pool. They decided to go behind the waterfall and keep cool from the spray.

Chief Yucacatyl took his family to a cool, deep spring, which was reserved for the tribal leaders. He suggested that they stay in the spring as long as possible, but to be careful because the spring was very deep. Yucacatyl was concerned because his wife and daughters did not know how to swim. He knew that even the best divers among the local Mayan tribe could never reach its bottom. The chief advised his family and the families of the other tribal leaders to cover themselves with wet moss and any other vegetation available.

The remaining Indians managed to find other pools of water and streams to cool off in. However, many of these pools and streams got progressively warmer as the day went on. The Indians continued to bathe themselves with water to stay cool—but in most cases, this was of little help. Many of the women, children, and elderly people passed out. The chief’s grandmother was close to death.

Finally, as the sun set, the temperature began to fall and the people recovered from the scorching heat. Suddenly, openings appeared along the side of the sky object. Manlike figures wearing silver clothes and helmets descended from ramps at the openings of the sky object. The Mayans were desperately afraid and ran deeper into the cover of the lush tropical jungle. A few brave souls, like Mesocoxyl and his son, Izocotyl, stayed at the forest edge and continued to watch the beings from the space object.

Several of the space travelers near the father and the son took off their helmets and looked around. The father and his son determined that they were human in appearance, with fair skin and hair that was closely cropped to their heads. One of the visitors saw the father and his son and began to speak to them in flawless Mayan dialect. The stranger said that they came in peace and planned to perform studies on a meteorite that had landed in Yucatán long before man appeared on any part of the earth. By now, Chief Yucacatyl, accompanied by many of his warriors, had joined the father and the son at the edge of the forest in order to listen to what the stranger had to say.

Over a period of twenty years, the space visitors dug deep vertical shafts into the earth over and around the perimeter of the buried meteorite and its cover of sedimentary rock. Numerous rock samples were collected and analyzed in laboratories in the huge spacecraft. Much to their surprise, the space scientists discovered that there was no meteorite present at the Yucatán site. Instead, they found the remains of an ancient spacecraft from Parallel Universe 2. As a consequence, their studies became more archaeological in nature.

From the remains of the inhabitants of the ship, the visitors determined that they were not humanoid in nature, but were more similar to those of a spider-like arachnid, possessing compound eyes. There was little question, however, that these aliens were from a far-advanced culture. The space scientists literally stripped the spaceship of most of its equipment and artifacts. The ancient spacecraft was carefully mapped and photographed. A grid was set up for collecting. Items were labeled and packed for shipment to their own galaxy using grid coordinates.

During their long visit, the strangers taught the Mayans techniques in farming; mining for gold, silver, and copper; and constructing better dwellings, assembly halls, and palaces for the chiefs and emperor. The Indians were also taught basic astronomy and how to recognize the stars and planets in the sky; they were shown the distant galaxy where the visitors came from.

The spacemen used the Mayans to build large pyramids at sites throughout Yucatán, adjoining Mexico, and Guatemala. The visitors placed transmitters in six of the pyramids; these transmitters could only be activated by another spaceship from their far-off galaxy.

After twenty years, the boy, Izocotyl, who first saw the spacecraft, was now a prominent Mayan chief and was trusted by the spacemen. The visitors had completed their scientific studies of the ancient spacecraft and were now preparing to return to their own planet. Before they departed, they gave Izocotyl a shiny, disk-like object with a clear green pyramidal stone in its center. A series of symmetrically placed markings were visible in the metal around the stone. The spacemen told Izocotyl that the strange disk controlled the Mayans’ future, as well as that of every living thing on Earth. Izocotyl was told to take the disk to a cave in a canyon to the northwest in what is now called the Canyon of the Río Vinasco.

Izocotyl set out for the Canyon of the Río Vinasco with a band of fifty of his best warriors. After a journey of over thirty days, his party finally arrived in the headwaters of the Río Vinasco. The limestone cave was exactly where the visitors from space said it would be; it was situated in a cliff at the side of a tributary canyon with its entrance largely covered by large, dangling vines, huge elephant ear caladiums, and other dense tropical vegetation. Izocotyl directed his warriors to sweep the area on both sides of the canyon for possible onlookers. In addition, he instructed his best craftsman to place the disk, which was one foot in diameter, in a box made of the native fine-grained white limestone. An inscription was carved on the box, warning that the disk was the key to the future of the earth and that it must be kept in the cave along the Río Vinasco and never be moved. A curse would fall on any who removed it. The box containing the alien device was then hidden in a special chamber with a sliding stone panel in the cave wall. A picture of a pyramid surrounding a disk was carved on the cave wall. Finally, the cave entrance was sealed with large blocks of native white limestone.

In spite of the care taken by Izocotyl to sweep the canyon of any evidence of their presence, local Toltec Indians watched the Mayan group at the cave. Soon after the Mayan expedition left the cave and began their long journey down the valley of the Río Vinasco to the coast, the Toltecs went to the cave site and managed to remove the rocks at the cave entrance. The Toltecs entered the cave but did not find the hiding place of the alien device. Nevertheless, they reported their observations of the Mayans to their chief, Xiphocotla. Xiphocotla, accompanied by a group of his most talented artisans, went to examine the cave site with great care. Eventually, the Toltecs found the hiding place of the box containing the alien device and took it to Xiphocotla’s palace to examine its contents.

Xiphocotla and his councilors had never seen the type of hard, shiny metal that the disk was made out of, and they were puzzled by the pyramidal stone in the center of the disk. The Toltecs determined that the disk was much harder than gold and could not be scratched with their limestone, quartz, and obsidian tools. They believed that the disk must represent some sort of valuable treasure. When Chief Xiphocotla touched the pyramidal stone, however, a slight green glow was emitted. The Indians became frightened and decided that the green glow from the stone was tied into the Mayan curse. In spite of their fear, they chose to keep the disk and place it in Xiphocotla’s treasure chamber.

Years went past. The Toltecs dominated east-central Mexico and exerted their influence on the declining Mayan Empire in Yucatán. During the subsequent rise of the Aztec Empire, Aztec nobles intermarried with the Toltec royal family. As a consequence, a new empire was formed by combining the more politically and artistically sophisticated culture of the Toltecs with their own warlike culture. Eventually, the Aztec empire became known as the “Triple Alliance” formed by the Nahuatl-speaking Indians of Tenochitlán (now Mexico City), Texcoco, and Tlacopan. Tenochitlán was the heart of the Aztec Empire.

The Triple Alliance exerted its influence throughout Mexico. Numerous city-states were conquered by the Aztecs and forced to pay tribute to the empire. Tribes on the border of the empire resented the Aztecs and were only too happy to ally themselves with Cortés and the Spanish Crown. The invasion of Mexico by Hernán Cortés in 1519 ended the Aztec Empire at its peak of development.

With the discovery of Mexico by Juan de Grijalva in 1518, Velázquez, the governor of Cuba, chose Cortés to lead an expedition to the mainland. Cortés assembled five hundred well-armed men, eleven ships, thirteen horses, and a small number of canons for his invasion of the Mexican mainland. But at the time the expedition was about to embark, Velázquez became suspicious of Cortés’s intentions and told him to stand down. However, Cortés chose to ignore the Velázquez’s orders and left with his expedition to the mainland.

Cortés was the General Patton of Spain. He was a gifted military man who moved swiftly and decisively and wasn’t much for obeying orders from his superiors. After being blown off course by a storm, Cortés landed in Cozumel. There he met a Spaniard by the name of Jer´nomo de Aguilar, who had been captured by the Mayans but was allowed to become part of the tribe. Aguilar spoke Mayan and served as valuable translator for Cortés in Yucatán. The Mayans gave Cortés gifts of gold and told him of the great wealth of the powerful Aztec Empire on the mainland and of its emperor, Moctezuma II. The lust for gold, together with the conversion of the Indians to the Catholic Church, became the driving force of the Spanish exploration of the Western Hemisphere.

When Cortés and his troops subdued the Indians of Tabasco on the mainland, he found that his interpreter, de Aguilar, could not understand the Nahuatl Indian Language. Fortunately, one of his female captives, La Malinche, could speak both the Mayan and Nahuatl languages. Malinche and de Aguilar became a valuable team of interpreters for Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs.

After Cortés and his troops took over Veracruz, he denied the authority of the Cuban Governor, Velázquez, and claimed the land for the Spanish Crown. Moreover, he scuttled all of his ships to prevent his troops from retreating. In Veracruz, Cortés met envoys from Moctezuma II and requested a meeting with the emperor, but Moctezuma turned down this request. Cortés marched on Tenochitlán with several thousand Indian allies.

Moctezuma and his predecessors knew about the stone box containing the strange metal disk; they had translated the Mayan inscriptions on the box and had examined its contents many times. Moctezuma told his nobles and chiefs, “We now face doom because we failed to heed the words inscribed on the box.”

Moctezuma II and the Aztec nobles were at first friendly to Cortés. Many of them believed him to be the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl. This belief was perhaps fostered by the fact that Cortés was fair-skinned and covered with shiny armor not unlike that of the visitors from space that the Mayans had encountered. Cortés was allowed to enter Tenochitlán and was offered treasures of gold. In the meantime, Moctezuma II dispatched one of his war chiefs, Zapalotyl, and seventy of his best warriors to return the alien device to the cave in the canyon of the Río Vinasco.

The journey to the canyon took nearly three days. When the Aztecs neared the cave, they were attacked by Indians allied to Cortés. Zapalotyl and his group were annihilated. The chief, though badly wounded, managed to hide from his assailants. He finally was able to take the box containing the alien device to the far reaches of the cave. He died there, his body draped over the box.

After nearly losing Tenochitlán to the Aztecs and fighting numerous battles, Cortés was able to subdue the Aztecs and claim their empire for the Spanish Crown. Moctezuma II was allegedly stoned to death by some of his subjects.

However, rumors still exist today about the hiding place of his treasure. Some claim the treasure is hidden in Mexico; others claim that it may be hidden in Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, or even Colorado.

Over nine years had passed. Miller
was now sixty-five years old. He had the dubious duty of entertaining his three wild grandsons while his wife went shopping. The boys were eight, nine, and ten years old, respectively, and could drive any sane adult bonkers. Miller decided that he would take the boys to his office at the Institute and show them his rock collections. Surely they would be interested in rocks, minerals, and fossils.

Miller’s office was fairly typical of most geologists’ offices. There was a sign on his computer desk that said “A clean desk is the sign of a sick mind.” (His wife, of course, didn’t buy this argument; things were different under her rule at home.) The floor of Miller’s office was cluttered with boxes containing rock samples.

The three grandsons were not all that thrilled by Miller’s office. Miller tried to tell them about some of his rocks. In one box, there was a large hunk of a green rock called “serpentine.” Miller told his grandsons that this rock had formed nearly three miles beneath the floor of the oceans about two hundred million years ago, just about the time the dinosaurs were beginning to start their reign. This barely raised the interest of the three boys.

While Miller had his back turned, one boy, Alfred, opened up the lid of a dusty old stone box in the corner of Miller’s office. Inside the stone box, Alfred found a gold-colored metallic disk. He was fascinated by the green translucent stone in the middle of the disk and decided to give it a hard twist to the right. Suddenly, the whole office was enveloped by a pulsating, eerie green glow.

Miller turned around immediately when he saw the all-too-familiar green glow and said with a grimace, “My God, boy! What have you done? This could be serious!”

Miller jerked the disk out of Alfred’s hands and said in a somewhat shaky voice, “We still don’t understand the significance of this disk. Some other geologists and I found this thing in a cave in Eastern Mexico. It was pretty spooky. We found the skeleton of an Aztec warrior chief dressed in full battle regalia draped over the stone box containing disk.”

After the show that the disk had already put on and the talk about the Aztec chief, the three boys became transfixed by what Grandpa Miller had to say. Alfred, with a look of newfound admiration for his grandfather, said, “Gee, Grandpa—you’re like Indiana Jones!”

Miller said, “I’m not sure how serious this is. I’d better get you boys out of here as quickly as possible.”

Miller called his wife on his cell phone and told her about what had just happened. His wife told him not to get too angry with Alfred. Miller said he’d kept quite cool, considering the gravity of the situation. He told her he would return the three grandsons to her custody within the next fifteen minutes. He said, “I need to call Dr. Clark at the University of Pittsburgh about all of this.”

“Okay; I will meet you in the driveway along the west side of the Institute. See you shortly. I am sure everything will work out. You worry too much.”

“Maybe I do. I’ll see you in a bit.”

After saying good-bye to his three grandsons, Miller called Dolores Clark. Clark said in an apprehensive voice, “I think I’d better come down to Dallas and see what’s going on firsthand. The pictures you took of the inscriptions on the box and on the metallic disk are probably the key to the whole situation.

The inscriptions on the white limestone box are clearly an old form of the Mayan language. So far, nobody that I have contacted has been able to make a proper translation. One set of inscriptions on the metal disk is also Mayan. It seems to be an even older dialect. No one is familiar with this either, but they agree that this inscription is closely related to the one on the stone box. The second set of inscriptions on the metal box is definitely neither Mayan nor any other known language on Earth. Perhaps we can find somebody who is an expert on deciphering codes to run this strange inscription through a computer.”

Miller responded, “I’ll pick you up at the airport on Monday, if you’d like. E-mail me your flight arrival time. You can stay at our house. My wife and I would love to have you as our guest.”

“Thanks, Frank. I look forward to seeing you and meeting your wife. I am curious—is your friend the disk still putting out a green glow?”

“Yeah, the glow is still there. It occurs in a series of pulses, which may also represent some sort of code. I put the damn thing back in the stone box and it still glows. The green light even penetrates the sides of the box.”