Wonders in the Sky (84 page)

 

After some more interpretation the researchers arrived at a breathtaking theory: the craft had come from outer space and crashed into a large body of water during the last ice age. The water extinguished the fire, but the craft sank to the bottom and became encased in sand and clay, becoming a fossil. There it lay dormant for some 400,000,000 years till Melvin Gray almost trod on it as he was mowing the lawn in his back yard in Louisville, Kentucky.

It is evident from the information presented in
Beyond
and
Flying Saucers
that neither Gray nor Ratliff were able to present any basis for their incredible theory other than their own imaginative interpretation of the rough exterior of the stone. What reference material the investigators used, and exactly what tests were carried out was not explained.

12,000 years ago
Granite disks tell a story about Alien vehicles

This is yet another case of crashed spacecraft leaving mysterious material covered with alien writing, a recurrent theme in contemporary ufology. In July 1962 a German magazine called
Das Vegetarische Universum
[The Vegetarian Universe] published an article about a strange finding made in the mountains between China and Tibet. It is a tale that regularly turns up in UFO contact lists, in books, magazines and on the Internet. It therefore deserves our attention. The author, Reinhardt Wegemann, reports that:

Wegeman went on to state that 716 rock plates had been recovered, each resembling records, with a hole in the centre and a groove spiralling to the outer edge. He stated that it took two decades for archaeologists and linguists to decipher the script, the content of which so stunned the Academy of Prehistory in Beijing that they forbade its publication. However, one of the researchers, Professor Tsum Um-nui, is said to have discussed this matter with a small group of colleagues and decided to release a report without official consent. The archaeologists reportedly came to the conclusion that “The grooved writing tells of vehicles from the air, which must have arrived 12,000 years ago. In one place it says literally that the Dropa came down from the clouds with their air gliders. Ten times the men, women and children of the Kham hid in the caves until dawn. Afterwards they understood the signs and saw that the Dropa came with peaceful intentions…”

The story adds that the aerial fleet was destroyed on landing and that graves of small humans of the Dropa and Kham race with thin bodies and unusually large heads can be found in the caves, along with star maps carved on the rock walls. Furthermore,

The critical analysis of this amazing tale yields certain surprises. Oddly enough, very few who support the reality of it know anything about its origins. Whole books and articles have been written on or around this story with absolutely no reference to its author or first publication. This absence of detail is what gives the impression that its origins are “shrouded in mystery,” and therefore leaves its reality status open to all sorts of theories. Unfortunately, after several years inquiring through colleagues and journalist friends, and conducting thorough searches of newspaper archives, no German writer by the name of Reinhardt Wegemann could be found.

Fig. 38: The Dropa hoax

In July 1964 the same article was published again, as if new, in the German UFO magazine
UFO-Nachrichten
. Here, “Wegemann” made no mention of the fact that his report was now ‘old news,' and added no new revelations about the discs.

From this moment on, the “Dropa” would become famous all over the world. The French/Belgian UFO organization BUFOI referred to them in March 1965, and in 1966 Wegemann's article was translated into Russian and published by the Soviet journal
Neman
. A year later, Dr. Vyatcheslav Zaitzev wrote about the discs of Baian Kara Ula for the first edition of the Soviet magazine
Sputnik
. Owing to the enormous distribution of this publication, many have erroneously cited Zaitzev as the original source of the story.

News of the Dropa was published for the first time in the United States on 26 February 1967. A journalist of the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
, using the article from
Sputnik
, compared the finding of the cave drawings to a star map allegedly seen by UFO abductee, Betty Hill. By this time Reinhardt Wegemann had been forgotten and the tale's origins completely obscured. Over the next three decades details would be lost, others invented, and the spelling of the name of the Dropa tribe would become increasingly exotic: Dzopa, Dhzopa, Dzohpa, Dhropa, and so on.

The first skeptical enquiries began in 1973, when the director of the British magazine
Flying Saucer Review
, Gordon Creighton, a serious scholar of the field, reported he could find no record of any archaeological expedition to Baian Kara Ula in 1938. Creighton also pointed out that the name of the mountains was more usually written “Bayan Khara Uula,” Mongol words meaning “the good black mountains” (“Bayan Har Shan” in Chinese), and that there were no records of any archaeologist named Chi Pu Tei. Likewise, all attempts to trace Tsum Um Nui or his report have failed.

In 1979 a further twist came in a book called
Sungods in Exile
, edited by one David Agamon, who declared it to be the posthumous work of a British scientist called Karyl Robin-Evans. The work describes an expedition to Baian Kara Ula led by Robin-Evans in 1947 with the aim to gather information about a disc that had been purchased in India or Nepal by a colleague of his in Oxford, a Polish scholar named Sergei Lolladoff. According to Agamon, the expedition met with a tribe of dwarves in a remote valley in the region and these beings, the Dropa, told him that their ancestors had come from a planet in the Sirius system and had been trapped on the earth in the year 1014 AD due to a mechanical problem with their spacecraft.

Years later, Agamon (using his real name, Gamon) confessed in letters to the editor of
Fortean Times
that
Sungods in Exile
was a hoax and none of the characters in it were real. Even so, photographs taken by Gamon of a fake “Dropa disc” are still believed by many to be authentic, giving rise to rumors and speculation. Meanwhile, the real Dzopa people of Tibet live in blissful ignorance of the whole affair.

Circa 4780 BC: The fiery Vimanas of King Citraketu

The earliest dated story we are able to find about flying devices of non-human origin comes from the ancient literature of India. For instance the
Bhagavata Purana
, also known as
Srimad Bhagavatam
, a text that is part of Hindu literature, states that while Indian King Citraketu was traveling in outer space on a “brilliantly effulgent ship given to him by Lord Vishnu,” he saw Lord Shiva: “The arrows released by Lord Shiva appeared like fiery beams emanating from the sun globe and covered the three residential ships, which could then no longer be seen.” (
Srimad Bhagavatam
, Sixth Canto, Part 3). If the reference to this particular King is trustworthy, the event would have taken place about 4,780 BC.

The Vedic literature, including India's national epic, the
Mahabharata
, a poem of vast length and complexity, contains many descriptions of flying machines generally called Vimanas. Another text, the
Ramayana
, which can be loosely translated as ‘the travels of Rama,' tells of two-storied celestial chariots with many windows that roar off into the sky until they appear like comets. Sanskrit books describe at length these chariots, “powered by winged lighting…it was a ship that soared into the air, flying to both the solar and stellar regions.”

There are no physical remains of ancient Indian aircraft technology but references to ancient flying machines are commonplace in the Indian texts. Several popular epics describe their use in warfare. Depending on one's point of view, either it contains some of the earliest known science fiction (a sort of Indian
Star Wars
) or it records conflict between beings with weapons as powerful and advanced as anything used today.

Fig. 39: Flying Vimana at Ellora caves, India

It is a curious fact that the yantras (Sanskrit for “machines”) described in later Indian texts were less powerful than those mentioned in greater and older works. Does this imply a gradual departure from fantasy towards realism? Some have proposed the change reflects a loss of knowledge. Richard L. Thompson writes: “Some ascribe this to the fantastic imagination of ancient writers or their modern redactors. But it could also be explained by a progressive loss of knowledge as ancient Indian civilization became weakened by corruption and was repeatedly overrun by foreign invaders. It has been argued that guns, cannons, and other firearms were known in ancient India and that the knowledge gradually declined and passed away toward the beginning of the Christian era.” (
Alien Identities
, San Diego: Govardhan Hill, 1993, 258.)