The Fabulous 1,000-Foot White Pyramid of Xian
Since the end of the Second World War, rumors regarding the existence of giant pyramids in China have been appearing with increasing regularity in the press and literature of many countries. There has been talk of structures whose size puts to shame the Cheops Pyramid of Egypt and the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan in Mexico.
I’ve journeyed deep into China three times to discover the truth behind these rumors. All three times, these pilgrimages have taken me into Shaanxi Province, to an area about 40 miles south-west of the ancient Chinese capital of Xian, in the mountainous Qin Ling Shan region.
I was searching for a pyramid which was said to have been, once, many millennia ago, multicolored, and to now be a dusty white. This was a pyramid which, legend has it, rises to the aston-ishing height of 1,000 feet - four-fifths the elevation of the Empire State Building. Not only was this extraordinary structure said to be the largest pyramid in the world (the Giant Pyramid of Egypt, by comparison, rises a mere 450 feet); but, in the valleys surround-ing it, there were said to be dozens of other pyramids, some rising to an elevation almost as great.
Until recently, Chinese officials have rebuffed all questions about these pyramids and all requests to view them. And yet, over this century, a certain mythology has grown up around them. An American trader, stumbling upon these amazing structures in 1912, asked his Buddhist monk-guide about them. He was told that 5,000-year-old monastic documents not only contained informa-tion about these pyramids, but said the pyramids were extremely old when these records were made.
The trader, Fred Meyer Schroder, observed several smaller pyra-mids in the distance. He wrote in his travel diary that his first sight of the giant pyramid, along with its smaller cousins, ren-dered him almost speechless. "It was even more uncanny than if we had found it in the wilderness," he wrote. "But those [ pyra-mids) were to some extent exposed to the eyes of the world—but still totally unknown in the western world."
In the Far East in the spring of 1945, though Japanese troops were still fighting in China, the U.S. Army and its allies were well on their way to pushing the Japanese off the mainland. One day, U.S. Air Force Pilot James Gaussman was returning to Assam, in India, after having flown the ‘Burma Hump’-ferried supplies to Chungking, China, from India-when engine trouble forced him to descend temporarily to a low altitude over China. As he later wrote:
"I flew around a mountain and then we came to a valley. Di-rectly below us was a gigantic white pyramid. It looked as if it were from a fairy tale. The pyramid was draped in shimmering white. It could have been metal, or some other form of stone. It was white on all sides. VUhat was most curious about it was its capstone: a large piece of precious gem-like material. I was deeply moved by the colossal size of the thing."
When Gaussman arrived back in Assam, combat duties pushed the sighting from his mind. Photographs he had taken of the giant pyramid would not be published for another 45 years. Till then, even his report would be buried in the Secret Service files of the U.S. military
Two years later, in 1947, another U.S. aviator, Maurice Sheahan—this time flying over Shaanxi Province, not far from Xian-- caught sight of a giant pyramid in the misty landscape below and rapidly snapped pictures. This time, several U.S. newspapers, in-cluding the New York Times for March 28, 1947, published ac-counts of the airman’s sighting. But Chinese archaeologists con-tinued to deny the existence of such a structure, even though Sheahan’s photographs suggested it was higher than any pyramid in Egypt.
Captain Bruce Cathie, of Auckland, New Zealand, is an air- line pilot turned explorer and UFO investigator. In 1962, reading Schroder’s diaries, he decided to get to the truth about these pyramids in China. Cathie contacted the Chinese embassy in Wellington. To his surprise, he was told there were no such things as pyramids in China. Later, the authorities acknowledged the existence of such structures, but would not characterize them as pyramids. Rather, they told Cathie, these were trapezoidal burial tombs dating from the Han Dynasty
In his book, The Bridge to Infinity, Cathie sets forth his theory that the Great Pyramid of China—which he was never able to lo-cate—is part of an ancient network of pyramids built at key places around the world to tap the earth’s natural energies. He suggests that these structures mark the intersecting points of ley lines, or dragon ways. Does Cathie believe these ‘orthotenic’ lines, to use Aime Michel’s phrase, represent the flight paths of UFOs, with greatest activity at intersecting points like those of the pyramids? Yes, he does; and he seems to imagine the earth as encircled by UFO flights in the ancient past.
Whether what Cathie calls "world grid harmonics" includes in its network the legendary White Pyramid of China or not, it seemed clear to me that the symbol of a white pyramid of China resonated powerfully on a psychic level, that it was at the very least a powerful conduit of psychic energy—whether it had any physical reality or not.
But there was no shortage of those who claimed it did. Well-known American traveler and author David Hatcher Childress reports in his writings that archaeological excavations of the White Pyramid have brought to light magnificent jade objects and "green stones." But he offers no corroboration for this provocative state-ment. Still, along with the stories I have just recounted, I had heard so many vague rumors about the pyramid’s actual existence, that I resolved once and for all to get to the heart of the matter.
Journey into the "Forbidden Zone":
The Sixteen Pyramids of Xian
And so it was that, in the summer of 1994, I found myself along with my friend and colleague, Austrian journalist Peter Krassa-in a green agricultural area about 50 miles from Xian. It had not been easy for us to get here. We were in one of Chinas "forbidden zones"-it was, we thought, highly probable that we were near a top-secret military base-and we were certainly the only tourists here, and almost the only people.
We had managed to get to Xian almost entirely by chance. In Vienna, early in 1994, I had been lucky enough one evening to meet Mr. Chen Jianli, who had come to the Austrian capital to give a lecture promoting tourism in China. I had broached to him the subject of my research into the more mysterious artifacts of China, including its rumored pyramids.
My enthusiasm made Mr. Chen smile. It so happened that he had been born in Xian; that was why, despite the official party line, he did not consider the subject of pyramids in China to be nonsense. As a matter of fact, he had, even as a small boy, heard people talking about them. It was his understanding that there was a group of pyramids not far from Xian, all of them at least 2,000 years old, but not all of them necessarily regarded strictly as pyramids. But he didn’t know for certain; and people did not-or could not-go to where these structures were supposed to be.
And so it was that, after an evening of lively discussion, Mr. Chen Jianli offered to contact his acquaintances and officials at the appropriate ministry in Beijing, and make it possible for me and a small group of interested individuals to obtain permission to travel to this up-till-then forbidden zone in Shaanxi Province. And, through his connections in the Chinese capital, he was indeed able to obtain a special permit for me to travel to the forbidden zone near Xian-not once, but three times; in March and Octo-ber of 1994, and again in the summer of 1997.
Arriving for my first visit, I first spent a brief time in Beijing, where I discovered that the Chinese really do not like to talk about their pyramids. When I brought up the subject with certain high-ranking archaeologists at the Academy of Sciences, I couldn’t help noticing a certain anxiety. Only when I showed them the Gaussman photo did they reluctantly confirm the existence of "just a few pyramidal structures near Xian."
A few days later, Peter Krassa and I were standing in a green, partially cultivated plain j ust a mile from the township of Xianyang, and about 40 miles west of Xian, that former imperial capital that is now regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilization.
There was no 1,000-foot-high White Pyramid to be seen. But there were indeed pyramids in this silent plain which did not need my imagination to invest it with a certain magical beauty. Before me stood a beautifully symmetrical pyramid about 200 feet high. Numerous small trees were planted up and down its sides; I had been told that, over the past four or five years, the Chinese had been planting fast-growing conifers-a kind of Cypress tree—on the slopes of these pyramids. I wondered briefly what they were trying to hide by making these extraordinary artifacts blend so completely with their surroundings.
(alternative explanation given, ostensibly to hold the soil structure in place and prevent it from crumbling...Ash)
I scrambled quickly to the top of this pyramid, the first that we had encountered. The construction of these smaller Chinese pyramids is similar to that of the pyramids of Teotiuhuacan, near Mexico City: piled earth - almost clay, with stepped sides, hardly the spectacular engineering of Pharaoh Khufu. The tops of most of these Chinese structures are flattened off, as is the case with the often-rectangular structures of the Mayans.
These Chinese pyramids are undecorated, and significantly damaged by erosion and farming. Their earthen sides-or such was the case with the small pyramid on which I stood-have be-corne almost as hard as stone over the centuries. I noticed that I was standing in a sort of crater, indicating to me that there had once been a cavern in this structure before the elements had caused its roof to collapse.
What secrets might lie within this pyramid? It had been vaguely suggested to me that these were burial mounds dating back per-haps 2,000 years. When I had asked the local ‘archaeologist’ and museum curator in Xian, several days earlier, what work was being done on these smaller pyramids to discover their origins, he had replied: "None. We have been given no money nor instructions. It will have to be for the next generation."
At least as exciting for me as this pyramid was the view from its summit. In the distance, I could make out at least 15 other similar pyramids, spread out before me in a panoramic sweep. Some stood in solitary fashion, while others were grouped in twos or even in rows. There were pyramids as far as the eye could see. I wondered what strange events had unfolded in relation to these pyramids in ancient times. Now there was nothing but the green fields, the pyramids, and a silence broken only by the slow move-ments of the handful of farmers working the ground with ploughs so primitive they must have looked just the same when these pyra-mids were built.
Chinese Pyramids as Mirrors of the Stars
During this visit, and during my second later that year-and on my third in the summer of 1997-I found no evidence for the physical existence of the fabulous White Pyramid of China. But, strolling from one of these time-worn structures to another, I be-gan to feel almost at home in this strange, eerily beautiful, city of the dead? I didn’t know; but, as I continued to meet officials and to cautiously feel them out, I began to discover that there were indeed theories about these 16 pyramids near Xian, and that some of these theories were of a decidedly mystical nature. There were seemingly staid government scientists whose views were not entirely dissimilar to those of Bruce Cathie of New Zealand.
Professor Wang Shiping, of Xian, who discussed these matters with Peter Krassa and myself near the site of the pyramids, told us he believed they might in actual fact be part of a giant system of sacred lines expressive of the feng shui concept of the ‘ways of the dragon.’ Dr. Wang said he estimated the age of these pyramids at 4,500 years and that he believed they might have been arranged to mirror the shapes of certain constellations in the night sky, just as certain key pyramids in Egypt are now thought to have been con-structed in imitation of the constellation Orion and related stars. The Chinese pyramids near Xian bear witness, suggested Professor Wang Shiping, to the immense knowledge of geometry and math-ematics enjoyed by the Chinese of almost five millennia ago.
Peter Krassa and I discovered that these are certainly not the only pyramids in China. In January,1994, archaeologists discov-ered several pyramids near the Wei Ho River, north of Xian. One of them, we were told, is located almost exactly in the geometric center of the ancient Chinese empire. I believe there may be as many as 90 to 100 pyramids in China in all, with the White Pyra-mid of Xian towering above all the rest-if that enigmatic giant does indeed exist.
I discovered that, if scientists and investigators could tell me nothing about the White Pyramid, they all at least had heard that it existed. And I decided that where there is smoke there must be fire, even if the smoke is only the nexus of a resonating cluster of powerful, important, almost-psychic beliefs.
The Pool of Mercury in the Tomb-Chamber of theEmperor
And so it was that, in seeking to discover the true identity of the White Pyramid, I once more immersed myself in the history of ancient China. I read again the story of the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (259-210 B.C.), the man who not only began the Great Wall of China, but standardized his country’s weights and mea- sures, written language, and currency Shi Huangdi is also the emperor responsible for the army of life-sized terra cotta warriors- 8,000 of them in all! which were discovered, beginning in 1974, not far from the burial mound of the emperor himself
It is thanks to the Shih Chi (Records of the Grand Historian of China), by the very great Chinese historian Sima Qian (145-86 B.C.), that we can be fairly certain that the emperor’s grave is located beneath a particular hill 150 feet high and planted with grass and trees. Apparently, the hill is man-made; according to Sima, a 140-foot-high pyramid complete with five terraces lies beneath it.
In his Shih Chi, Sima Qian-who really was the Grand Histo-rian of China, though at the court of Emperor Wu - states that almost 700,000 workers labored for 20 years to create the tomb of the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. He says the earth was removed down to the ground water level. Then the floor was poured with molten bronze. A stone sarcophagus was laid on this platform. When the structure was completed, those who knew where the entrance was were silenced by being entombed alive. To further disguise the entrance, the pyramid was covered with earth and grass to give the impression of a natural hill-a strategy which is strangely present in the smaller Xian pyramids of today!
The pyramid’s interior, we are told, is astonishingly elaborate. Sima uses the term "artificial universe" to describe the ceiling of the emperor’s tomb-chamber encrusted with thousands of glitter-ing precious jewels to recreate the constellations of the heavens.
The Grand Historian goes on,
"In the tomb-chamber the hundred water-courses, the Chiang [the Yangtze River] and the Ho [the Yellow River], together with the great sea, were all imitated by means of flowing mercury, and there were machines which made it flow and circulate. Above [on the roof] the celestial bodies were all represented; below [presum-ably on the floor or on some kind of table] the geography of the earth was represented."
That is, the emperor’s tomb-chamber was meant to be a living replica of his empire, including both the earth and the heavens. The tomb was well-protected against grave robbers, with arrays of hundreds of crossbows with mechanical triggers targeted to kill anyone who broke into the tomb. (Just how effective this system was is somewhat in doubt, since the Huang I encyclopedia, edited by Miu Shih-Teng in 220 A.D., claims that robbers from Kuantung later broke into the emperor’s tomb and made off with all the mercury)
Recent excavations around the outer perimeter of this burial hill seem to confirm Sima Qian’s statements: Analysis of the sur-rounding earth revealed an exceptionally high concentration of mercury. Apparently, archaeologists are taking seriously the Great Historian’s description of what amounts to a ‘high-security’ tomb. They declare, "We are leaving [the tomb-chamber under the hill to the future, so the next generation has something to work on."
The Secret Society of the White Pyramid
How does the extraordinary story of the tomb-chamber of Shi Huangdi relate to the seemingly mythical White Pyramid of Xian?
I will explain. I believe that researchers have not concentrated sufficiently on one subtly revealing detail in Simas account: his assertion that Qin Shi Huangdi was to be entombed with his sarcophagus virtually floating in a pool of mercury
Yes, the mercury was used to provide a flowing liquid to make it possible for a vast relief map of circulating great rivers and streams of China to run forever in the tomb-chamber of the Emperor’s mausoleum. But, for the ancient Chinese, "forever" is a charged word when it comes to mercury We will recall that we have en-countered mercury before, in the guise of cinnabar, or mercury sulphide-perhaps the most potent of all the substances used in the vast, ongoing ancient Chinese industry of trying to discover the elixir of deathlessness.
The tomb of this emperor, surrounded as it is by a garrison of some 1,400 terra cotta statues including archers, cavalry troops, charioteers, infantrymen and horses, represents nothing less than a colossal effort to attain to the state of Hsien, or material immortality. This tomb is truly the ultimate Project Apollo of the Chi-nese emperors. The cost of the mercury alone must have been enormous-the equivalent of filling the tomb with uranium, or plutonium.
And what now lies in the tomb? Have we here encountered a clue as to why so little is known about the efforts of the Chinese government to excavate it? A year or so ago, a report leaked out of Beijing that the tomb-chamber of Qin Shi Huangdi was "like a palace." The implication was that a camera had been lowered into its unknown depths. Yet ofFcials have clearly stated that "nothing has yet been done" in terms of its excavation. Authorities have made similar claims regarding the 90 or 100 other tombs, or burial mounds, that rise up not far from Xian and the mausoleum of the emperor.
Ruthlessly plundering the wealth of his country and of its citizens, Shi Huangdi was one of the richest men who ever lived. On nothing did he lavish money more freely than on his quest for material immortality
If an entire terra cotta army stands outside his tomb, then what analogous splendors lie inside? Treasure, yes; treasure worth billions of dollars. Why then has the Chinese government not entered the tomb and retrieved these treasures, if for no other rea-son than to make use of the astronomical wealth they represent?
Because, I believe, there is more at stake within the tomb of Shi Huangdi than simply riches; there are unheard-of secrets of material immortality, which only this emperor had the power and the wealth to seize upon. I believe there are people within the Chinese establishment today who know of these secrets, and who see to it that the tomb of Shi Huangdi is never touched.
Yet rumours have filtered out; clandestine legends have built up over the past 2,000 years; these myths of wonders in the tomb of the First Emperor have taken on a veiled form-that of the White Pyramid of Xian.
This may be because the White Pyramid itself is more than legend.
I believe there is a Secret Society of the White Pyramid of China. I believe it is highly possible that the rulers of the vast and brilliant Middle Kingdom never ceased to believe in the reality and power of the state of Hsien and that their efforts to attain it would ultimately be successful. I believe there may be a secret society today - one incredibly ancient - whose members think, in fact know, that the tomb of the emperor, while filled with treasure beyond imagining, contains only the illusion of a body; who know that the emperor himself, wearing the vestigial body of the Hsien, has long since gone into the realms of material immortality, trans-muted into that state by the catalytic agency of his bath of mer-cury.
I wonder what other members of the Secret Society of the White Pyramid ‘reside’ in the 100 or so other burial pyramids rising up modestly, though not inaccessibly, distant from the tomb of the emperor? Are these tombs also empty? If they were to be opened, and a ragged corpse discovered there, would not that be merely an illusion meant to mock grave robbers while, thanks to the genius of the ancient art of alchemy - and perhaps a greater Genius, and one far more ancient - the former resident of this tomb has for centuries roamed the heavens and the earth?
Return of the White Pyramid
There may be, living among us today, members of the Secret Society of the White Pyramid - keepers of its secrets, aspirants themselves to the state of Hsien - who know that material immor-tality is a reality, and who hide this knowledge from the general public. These members who number among the living may also know the true facts behind the obscure memory of primordial contact with Alien Mind which ultimately prompted the ancient Chinese to strive to attain to the state of Hsien.
They may know these facts because of extraordinary, exquisite Alien artifacts stored within the tomb-chamber of Shi Huangdi. Or they may know them because the materially immortal dead can materialize among the living members of the Secret Society of the White Pyramid at any time, and provide them with yet more secrets of the state of Hsien.
One of these secrets may be that, in that realm that transcends time and space, it is once again possible to commune with Alien Mind, and to learn of all that has happened, and of all that will happen, and of the choices that mankind must now make.
The White Pyramid of Xian may be the Materially Immortal Pyramid. It may be the archetypal burial place, so closely attuned to the state of Hsien itself that it exists virtually plunged in that place of material immortality, and so invisible to mortals. It may be the meeting place of the members of the Secret Society of the White Pyramid - both the living and the dead.
It may be the ultimate Chinese Roswell - a benevolent Roswell, the necessary suppression of a truth so explosive that mankind as a whole is not yet ready to hear it.
What crises of the human soul cause the White Pyramid of Xian to wink into physical existence for a brief moment of time? was it the coming convulsions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that enabled an American flyer to glimpse it long enough to photo-graph it in 1945?
Was it the crash landing of two UFOs near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 - an alien intervention with no relation to Alien Mind, perhaps, and perhaps one which Alien Mind wished to pre-vent - that served as a catalyst enabling another American flyer to see and photograph the great White Pyramid a second time?
Is the White Pyramid in its ultimate reality another Shambhala, a portal into other worlds which is now rapidly regaining physical reality in ours, so that it may resume its immortal task of carrying out the intervention needed when an entire civilization stumbles toward its end?
Are there not those who can tell us? Why will they not speak out?
Subj: The Dwarfs of Bayan Kara
Ula #1
Date: 3/18/00 6:59:33 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: ashleyry@netcomuk.co.uk (Ashley Rye)
To: BARDSQUILL@aol.com, johnfwin@mlode.com, iufo@world.std.com,
starfriends@onelist.com
The Millennial Presence of Alien Mind
Homo sapiens emerged from homo erectus about 200,000
years ago. The beginnings of Altaic/matristic civilization go back
some 40,000 years.
That happened on our planet between 200,000 B.C. and
40,000 B.C.? was there only the long, slow march of homo
sapiens toward rudimentary control over his environment? Did
other civilizations rise to splendid heights and then enter upon a
decline over that enormous span of time, leaving not a trace be-
hind?
Or were there other sentient species on our planet, long be-
fore the ape-like creature that evolved into man? A species that
geological convulsions consigned to an oblivion so profound that
we can never, ever know that race was here?
About such matters we cannot be certain. Nor can we know
if places for which the name "Shambhala' has been used did not
come into existence as time capsules of a sort, Alien Arks - places
where Alien Mind saw fit to preserve something of the science
and arts of the civilization then vanishing through natural catas-
trophe, or through war, or for other reasons otherworldly or un-
fathomable. These way-stations, bridging the gap between the
extinction of old and the birth of new sentient species, would
contain artifacts carefully picked by alien hand and, perhaps, an
equally carefully chosen number of survivors. They might con-
tain, in a way we also can never fathom, the spiritual Essence of
that civilization - a simulacrum of its Soul.
Over the long march of the millennia, other aliens may have
come to earth, for reasons unrelated to the preservation of ele-
ments of earth's civilizations. They may have come to wage war
with the benevolent, protecting Alien Mind perhaps easing the
tormented transitions of our planet between intelligent species.
They may have come as sightseers, or as researchers in the name
of science. They may have come here quite by accident.
They could have been shipwrecked, and, on a world inhab-
ited by primitives without technology, been tragically unable to
signal from their ruined spacecraft their location and their need
for rescue or spare parts.
There is evidence to suggest that such a scenario may have
unfolded in the mountainous Bayan Kara Ula region of western
China some 12,000 years ago.
These bits of evidence are extremely difficult to follow up, and
lead us often to dead ends. Perhaps there are those who wish to
keep this knowledge from us.
Soviets Announce an Interstellar Tragedy
In the 1960's, the popular Soviet science magazine Sputnik
published a story about a sensational archaeological find in the
Bayan Kara Ula mountains of China, not far from the Tibetan
border. This tale of found alien artifacts and perhaps found re-
mains of aliens would have set the scientific community on its
ear, had they taken it seriously.
But Sputnik was not the kind of magazine that Western sci-
entists-even Soviet scientists-were in the habit of taking seri-
ously In the 1950's and 1960's, Soviet publications like Sputnik
and Russian Digest and Soviet Union Today served the function of
megaphones. They were used to shout news and opinion of a
non-political nature over the top of the Iron Curtain. This was
how these publications caught the attention of the West, and in
a fashion circumvented the censuring strictures of the leaders of
the U.S.S.R. Getting wind of these sensational stories, readers in
the West might make haste to get hold of the magazine by hook
or by crook.
The trouble was that so sensational did these magazines make
these stories in order to seize the attention of the Western reader,
that the readers got in the habit of not taking them very seri-
ously. Such was the case with the immensely provocative report
from Bayan Kara Ula. This was unfortunate, because, in Eastern
Europe and in the U.S.S.R. in the 1950's and 1960's, there were
credentialed, serious thinkers, such as professor Matest M. Agrest,
now living in the U.S., and his fellow Communist bloc member
philosopher-writer Dr. Vyatcheslav Saitsev, who were learned in
these areas. They sifted through the evidence and speculated freely
and intelligently in the pages of these Soviet journals about the
implications of these accounts, addressing every element contained
therein. Some of these thinkers later became linked with the
"ancient astronaut" movement inspired by Erich von Daniken
many others continued to go their own way
Some Western European magazines, at least, knew of the
credentials of the editorial staff of these superficially sensational
Soviet journals. It was due to them that, after Sputnik broke the
story, the revelations from Bayan Kara Ula became public knowl-
edge in the West. The Belgian magazine BUFOI (Belgian UFO
Investigator) picked it up as well as the esoteric German publica-
tion Vegetarian Universe, using not only Soviet but Japanese
sources.
Here is the story they ran.
Mass Grave of
the Dwarfish People of Bayan Kara Ula
In the first week of January,1938, a scientific expedition led
by Chinese archaeologist Chi Pu Tei penetrated deep into the
pathless mountain regions of Bayan Kara Ula, not far from Tibet
on the border of Qinghai and Sichuan Provinces.
This area is also known as Payenk Ara Ulaa, or Bayan Har
Shan. It is about the size of the State of Connecticut, and is the
place where the Yalong and Yangtze Rivers originate, and where
the Mekong River begins its long meandering course southward
toward Vietnam where, a thousand miles distant, it becomes the
life-line of that long-beleaguered country.
The mountains in the Bayan Kara Ula region rise to over
17,000 feet, but, in the valleys below, it is - though you are still
7,000 feet above sea level - pleasantly warm in the summer. Ge-
ologists believe it was even warmer 20,000 years ago; whatever
the truth of the matter, this area contains traces of human habi-
tation which go back to the very earliest prehistoric times.
One perhaps-not-quite-accidental geographical detail: Just
north of the principal chain of the Bayan Kara Ula mountains,
there lies a group of lakes with the ambiguous name of `Ocean of
Stars' (though `stars' can also be translated as `waters').
In the first week of the New Year, the party of Chinese ar-
chaeologists led by Professor Chi Pu Tei discovered, in a group of
caves in this mountainous region, a series of graves aligned in
rows. There were no head stones to mark the graves, nor were
there epitaphs; but, on the cave walls there were drawings of stick
figures with elongated heads and, apparently, the sun, the moon
and the stars.
BAYAN KARA ULA
The scientists carefully excavated the graves. They proved to
contain skeletons with abnormally large skulls and tiny bodies
no more than four feet long-far below the average size for the
ethnic groups of our planet. Only the pygmies of the rain forests
of Central Africa are in any way similar in proportion.
The anatomy of these creatures consisted of a very slender,
delicate skeletal structure, with narrow shoulders and thin ex-
tremities. According to the expedition's report, it was as if these
creatures had had rickets, or their skeletal structure was related to
that of flying mammals or birds whose limbs are built to with-
stand great stress.
To this day, extremely ancient legends circulate in this part of
China about small-bodied yellow beings said to have appeared
out of the clouds, and who, because of their strange, ugly ap-
pearance and bizarre behaviour, were attacked and in large part
murdered by the local inhabitants.
In more recent times, the rock caves upon which the archaeo-
logical team stumbled have continued to be shunned by the su-
perstitious and suspicious local people; the caves are in effect
taboo.
This may be why the mysterious relic also found by the sci-
entists at the grave site had lain undisturbed by grave robbers for
millennia.
The 12,000-Year-Old Long-Playing Record
What the scientists found was a single stone disk half buried
in the dust of the cavern floor. This stone disk resembled a long-
playing record from the early days of the gramophone. Its cir-
cumference was 12 to 12-l /2 inches and its thickness about 2/
5 of an inch. There was a hole in the middle large enough to
put a finger through. An incised groove spiraled outward from
the hole, winding its way to the perimeter of the disk and then
winding its way back in the overall pattern of a double spiral.
It was not apparent then, but closer inspection would later
reveal that the groove was a continuous, spiraling line of closely
written characters.
The contents of the discovery in the caves of Bayan Kara Ula,
as I have described them up to this point, are not entirely unique
in the annals of Chinese archaeology A tomb excavated in a cave
at Xishuipo, in Hunan Province, in 1987, contained clamshell
pavements thought to depict three prominent constellations, the
Tiger, the Dragon, and the Big Dipper. This tomb is believed to
date back extremely far in Chinese history, to 3000 B. C. This
burial, and others at Xishuipo, may have been of shamans, or of
other religious figures of high social standing.
Equally intriguing was a jade turtle found in the same year in
a 4,500-year-old tomb at Hanshan Lingjiatan, in Anhui Prov-
ince. The modeling on the back of the turtle, which seemed to
include a panoply of stars, strongly suggested that it was a sacred
replica of the cosmos.
Moreover, stone disks with a hole in the center and a basic
double-spiral pattern are not an uncommon component of the
grave sites of very ancient China. They are artifacts whose ori-
gins may be traced back to the beginnings of matristic (or `matri-
archal'), shamanistic societies of the Far East, and they are known
to have some relation - in that their patterns resemble the pat-
terns on a snake - to the worship of the serpent by the very ear-
liest of shamanesses.
But these stone disks at the Bayan Kara Ula grave site were
different. The spiraling grooves spelled out a message; and that
message was not of our planet.
Stone Disk as Alien Message in a Bottle:
"We Are Shipwrecked."
Not this expedition, but later expeditions, would unearth a
total of 716 disks from the grave site. They would be trans-
ported to institutes of learning in Central China. Over a period
of 20 years, a handful of scientists would periodically pore over
these odd, heavy, stone artifacts. During that period, one of
them, Professor Tsum Um Nui of the Beijing Academy for An-
cient Studies, would become convinced that the grooves con-
tained a kind of writing. In 19G2, the small group of scientists
working under his direction would announce that they had suc-
ceeded in decoding a story of an alien tragedy of epic propor-
tions.
The message on the stone disk was not entirely unlike a mes-
sage in a bottle thrown into the sea by someone who is ship-
wrecked and hopes that his message will reach a rescuer. The
spiral script, stated Dr. Tsum, contained an account of the crash
landing of an alien spacecraft in the mountainous region of Bayan
Kara Ula 12,000 years before. Almost all the occupants had sur-
vived; but the spacecraft, once it had come to rest in the harsh
and rugged terrain, had been too severely damaged to be able to
lift off from the surface again.
Repairs were impossible; the necessary materials could not be
found. The means for the craft to communicate its location and
plight to its home world had been damaged beyond repair. The
beings from outer space were forced to settle in a world and in a
place utterly alien to their kind. The local inhabitants of the
region had misunderstood these beings and - particularly fright-
ened by the small and ugly appearance of the aliens - this local
tribe, called the Ham, had hunted down and killed many of the
shipwrecked ETs.
The members of Professor Tsum Um Nui's team disagreed
about the precise origins of the engrooved message on the disks.
Some thought that sympathetic members of the Ham tribe, fi-
countered great difficulties in making it public), was greeted with
derision. Dr. Tsum was branded a liar and a fool. He later re-
signed from the Beijing Academy for Ancient Studies. Eventu-
ally, he emigrated to Japan. Embittered by the reaction of the
scientific establishment to his decipherment of the strange stone
disks, he died not many years after having completed his contro-
versial report.
The Soviets Uncover More Secrets
If the Chinese scientific community rejected this other-worldly
explanation for the stone disks of Bayan Kara Ula, its ideological
counterpart, the Soviet Union, did not. A group of Russian sci-
entists had heard the stories, and asked to be allowed to examine
the disks. A number of the strange stone artifacts were eventually
dispatched to Moscow. The Soviet scientists did not seem to be-
lieve Professor Tsum's story on the face of it. Or, perhaps, they
wished to attack the problem of the disks in another way. They
began to conduct a chemical analysis of the disks themselves.
The scientists entrusted with the investigation made a num-
ber of intriguing discoveries. Chemical analysis showed that the
disks contained large amounts of cobalt and other metallic sub-
stances. A magnetic metal like iron and nickel, cobalt is used
today primarily in alloy form with chrome, steel, and other met-
als. It is mined mostly in Canada and Central Africa. There is
one place, and only one, in China, where it is profitable to mine
it, and that is in Qinghai Province-where the region of Bayan
Kara Ula lies.
My assumption is that the group of space travelers, deter-
mined that their 716 stone disks would last at least till somebody
found them, deliberately hardened them with cobalt, in the same
way as cobalt is used industrially today to harden specialty tools.
The downed aliens wanted their disks to endure till somebody
came along who was capable of deciphering them (or perhaps,
till, over the long millennia, some of their own kind came to earth
and found them).
The Russian scientists not only discovered cobalt. When the
disks were placed on a special turntable and "played"-or so re-
counts Dr. Vyatcheslav Saitzev, who Frst told the story of the
alien disks of Bara Kara Ula for the Soviet magazine Sputnik
the long-playing record-like artifacts emitted a strange uneven
hum - a vibration. It was as if the grooves were also electrical
circuitry, or as if they had once been exposed to very high volt-
ages.
Cobalt contains a high-grade radioactive isotope. If there
were detectable traces of cobalt present in the stone disks, did
they also somehow spell out a second, deeper, more subtly en-
coded message?
Might there be an element of the subliminal message in these
enigmatic alien disks? Will the meaning of these messages, stored
in a form we don't yet understand, dawn upon us in the near or
distant future, when our own technology and our understanding
have come abreast of that of the shipwrecked aliens of Bayan
Kara Ula?
Was the more superficial message, composed of spiral script
and translated by Professor Tsum, merely a part of the story?
Tumult in Modern China
It is entirely possible that the documented reports from the
1937-38 exploration and the work of Professor Tsum-Um-Nui
were lost or destroyed during the chaotic turmoil of the Cultural
Revolution in China. The material could very well have been
viewed as subversive and banned. A wave of Communist ideol-
ogy started up in 1966, and, carried along by students and the
Red Guard, did not end till the late 1970's. In the almost Civil
War-like turmoil and excesses of the great proletarian Cultural
Revolution that went on in the name of Mao, death and horror
took its toll among the Chinese people. The number of dead it
claimed is almost impossible to determine, as is the extent of the
loss of Chinas cultural treasures.
When the Cultural Revolution was at its height, the particu-
lars pertaining to the stone disks were published in Japan and
Europe. It would have been no wonder if the ruling mob were to
have seized these reports and declared them to represent "bour-
geois decadence." Any notion of extraterrestrial intrusion or in-
tervention stood in sharp conflict to the strongly materialistic
bent of Chinese Marxism.
The Cultural Revolution flared up one last time in China
following the death of Mao in 1976. Mao's widow, Jiang Qying,
acting deputy Wang Hong-Wen, party leader from Shanghai
Zhang Chunqiaol, and former editor Yao Wenyuan, tried to usurp
the leadership of the party. Yao Wenyuan was particularly active
in this revolutionary turmoil. He was responsible for initiating
many highly negative campaigns, and never ceased to inveigh
against moderates in the government. He initiated a hate cam-
paign in the media which was entirely controlled by himself.
Only the downfall of this unholy Gang of Four, who were
arrested, tried and punished in 1981, brought an end to this vio-
lent and horrific period. Slowly thereafter life began to normal-
ize in China.
People who travel through the Republic of China today and
visit museums, pagodas and temples, are often told that these
Chinese treasures have only survived thanks to the heroic deeds
of some individuals. Sometimes, they are told, these individuals
risked life and limb to oppose the Red Guard and its unrestrained
vandalism.
Ash's Mural Gallery:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/3517/Ash/index.html
Subj: The Dwarfs of Byan Kara Ula
#2
Date: 3/18/00 6:59:53 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: ashleyry@netcomuk.co.uk (Ashley Rye)
To: BARDSQUILL@aol.com, johnfwin@mlode.com, iufo@world.std.com,
starfriends@onelist.com
Near the Emperor's Tomb, Two Disks Resurface
Our stone disks had not entirely vanished, however. Two of
them were to reappear some quarter-of a-century after they were
first discovered.
Through eleven dynasties and a time-span of 1,080 years,
Xian was the capital city of Imperial China. The capital city of
Shaanxi Province today, Xian is a veritable treasure trove of price-
less objects from the Qin, Tang and Ming dynasties. Situated at
the entrance to the legendary Silk Highway, the city was already
a major Far Eastern center of commerce 2,500 years ago.
Today, this city enjoys an excellent reputation as a first-class
tourist attraction. In any study trip taken through China, it is as
important to visit this city and its treasures as it is to see the
Great Wall of China or the incomparable river scenery at Guilin.
At the tender age of 17, the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (259-
210 B.C.) of the Qin Dynasty had already decided what form
his burial mausoleum would take. He seems to have begun his
life as ruler more concerned about the end of his days than about
what his years on earth would be like. To protect the holy silence
of his tomb, he ordered his subjects to fabricate an enormous
army of terra cotta soldiers, horses and wagons, which they then
had to distribute over a wide area around his grave site. Acciden-
tally discovered in 1974 by workers drilling a well, this life-sized
replica of an army has entered the annals of archaeological lore
and also become a staple of the travel brochures. These splendid
figures - 8,000 of which have been unearthed so far, with ar-
chaeologists still counting - are (as we will see!} only a small part
of the treasures waiting to be uncovered at the grave site of the
emperor.
As important as the terra cotta army of Qin Shi Huangdi
may be, however, there are two other artifacts which, in my view,
are every bit as important, and which at some point somehow
found their way to the vicinity of Xian: two of the stone disks
from the mountain burial cave of Bayan Kara Ula.
In 1953, in a suburb located on the east side of Xian, con-
struction workers digging the foundations for a proposed factory
unearthed the ruins of a Neolithic settlement whose age would
eventually be estimated by archaeologists at about 6,000 years.
This settlement, called the Banpo village, is one of the best-pre-
served Late Stone Age sites in China.
To protect from the elements the treasures of Banpo as they
came to light, and to make them accessible for viewing by visi-
tors and tourists, officials built a museum on the site instead of a
factory Scientists believe the find still represents only one-fifth
of the area to be profitably uncovered.
Around the Banpo Museum stand a number of smaller build-
ings, which also house exhibits from the last millennia of the
Stone Age. It is thought that 200-300 people lived here in that
epoch shrouded in the mists of antiquity. In one of these smaller
buildings, the Austrian engineer Ernst Wegener came across two
of the stone disks of Bayan Kara Ula.
Denial and Disappearance of Custodian and Disks
This was in 1974. Wegener was in the middle of a long jour-
ney through China. He seized the opportunity to photograph
these artifacts. The museum's director knew every detail of every
broken shard of pottery in the museum - but, when confronted
about the origins of these stone disks, she took refuge in the
explanation that they were `cult disks' whose true significance
was unknown.
The Austrian engineer was permitted to touch the objects.
They had a circumference of 12 to 12-1 /2 inches and a thickness
of about 2/5 of an inch, and bore grooves which spiraled from a
hole in the middle out to the outer edge, then back again.
A superficial examination persuaded Wegener that the disks
were made of granite, or perhaps even of a kind of marble. He
estimated the weight of each at about 2.2 pounds; certainly, they
were made of quite dense material.
Wegener's photographs have been preserved to this day
Unfortunately, they are not very helpful, since the engineer used
a Polaroid camera, and since the stone disks were already exhibit-
ing a great deal of fragmentation and crumbling.
But the story of the stone disks of the Banpo Museum does
not end here.
In March,1994, in the course of my second journey to China,
my friend Austrian journalist Peter Krassa and myself met with
then - director of the Banpo Museum Professor Wang Zhijun.
At first, Professor Wang Zhijun did not want to talk to us
about the disks. Then he revealed that, a few days after Wegener's
visit in 1974, both the stone disks and the museum director with
whom Wegener had spoken had vanished without a trace.
Director Wang Zhijun seemed uncomfortable with our dis-
cussion. When I asked him where the discs were now, he replied,
"The stone disks you have mentioned do not exist; but, being
extraneous objects in this museum, they were relocated."
This was a statement not without internal contradictions.
And it was all that Director Wang Zhijun would tell us.
Six Months Among the Aliens
In his 1978 book, Sungods in Exile, David Agamon tells the
story of the 1974 expedition of eccentric British scientist Dr.
Karyl Robin-Evans to the Bayan Kara Ula mountain range. Ac-
cording to Agamon, Robin-Evans came across several hundred
members of a dwarfish tribe known as the Dropa, who lived in a
remote valley and whose average height was no more than about
four feet.
Robin-Evans spent six months among the Dropa. He learned
their language and was introduced to their history and tradi-
tions. They told him their ancestors had come from a planet
revolving around the star Sirius, and had crash - landed in a space-
craft in this area a very long time before. Many had been killed.
The survivors had become acclimatized to living on our planet.
Ukrainian scientist Dr. Vladimir Rubtsov has written to in-
form me that Sungods in Exile is only science fiction woven around
rumor and legend, believable only by the very gullible. But the
Associated Press, in a November,1995 article, reported that some
120 dwarfish beings had been discovered living in Sichuan Prov-
ince in Central China, the tallest of them being no more than
three feet ten inches in height, and the shortest adult measuring
two feet one inch.
In January,1997, Chinese ethnologists tried to discount this
phenomenon of 120 dwarfish beings living in a single area by
attributing their dwarfism to the high concentration of mercury
in the soil of the region. They insisted the dwarfs must have
absorbed the mercury in their drinking water over many genera-
tions.
Dr. Norbert Felgenhauer, of the Munich Institute for Toxic
Surgery, tells me that this explanation is nonsense. He says that
mercury is a lethal poison harmful to any organ in the human
body, and that the dwarfs would not have survived. Moreover,
he says, mercury cannot change human DNA and so cannot cause
hereditary disease.
Modern-Day `Village of the Dwarfs'
The Chinese authorities have never denied the existence of a
`Village of the Dwarfs' in Sichuan Province, nor that the village
is located only two or three hundred miles east of the Bayan Kara
Ula mountain region. This latter fact may indicate that the Dropa
migrated from the mountains to the lowlands, and that they did
so only recently These tiny people must have been isolated for
many millennia before their discovery; otherwise, interbreeding
with other ethnic groups would have resulted in an increase in
their stature.
There is further evidence for the existence of a dwarfish people
in China. Joerg Dendl, a doctoral candidate in history who lives
in Berlin, has unearthed a report from 1911 which tells of re-
peated sightings of an extremely dwarfish people in Tibet and
neighboring areas. When I was lecturing in Brisbane, Australia,
in June, 1996, a young couple came up to me. They told me
that their grandfather had fought with the Allies in Central China
during World War Two. Till the day he died, they told me, he
never ceased to talk about his encounters with an extremely dwarf
ish tribe of people living in that area. According to his account,
these dwarfish folk were even smaller than the pygmies of Africa,
who normally grow to a height of between four feet eight inches
and five feet.
These anecdotal reports cry out for intensive research. I will
continue to do my best to get to the bottom of the mysterious
evidence pertaining to a UFO crash that occurred thousands of
years ago in a remote region of Central China - an incident the
discussion of which is so scrupulously avoided by any official with
whom I have spoken, that it smacks of a `Chinese Roswell.'
The Chinese Roswell
The serendipitous discovery of Mr. Wegener presents us with
far more questions than answers. Were the two disks exhibited at
the Banpo Museum near Xian unmistakably two of the disks
unearthed at Bayan Kara Ula? If so, what were they doing in
Xian?
It may be that the disks-taken away from Professor Tsum,
presumably, after he had completed his report, and before he had
retired to Japan - have been dispersed in a number of directions
by government offcials. This may have been a way, on the one
hand, of hiding them, and on the other, of assuring their safety:
All of China would have to be destroyed before all the disks could
be destroyed. This suggests that government authorities must
have thought the contents of the disks to be of some importance.
It would have been all the more vital, at the time of the tur-
moil of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, to spirit away at least
a part of this sensational find to the provinces of China, far away
from the vulnerable capital city of Beijing. We might ask our-
selves, also: What happened to the stone disks that were brought
to Moscow to be examined? At the time of the Cultural Revolu-
tion, relations between the Soviet Union and the People's Repub-
lic of China had deteriorated sharply; it may well be that Mos-
cow simply refused to return the artifacts that had been entrusted
to it.
And where is Professor Tsum Um Nui's report? All traces of
that extraordinary document seem to have vanished as well, just
as surely as have the other pieces of evidence pointing to the
shipwreck of an alien crew on earth 12,000 years ago.
When will the other disks, and the complete research papers
of Professor Tsum Um Nui, be made available by the govern-
ment of China to all interested parties?
And last, but not least: If an emergency landing really did
take place, where are the remains of the spacecraft? It seems
reasonable to assume that a vessel built to withstand the rigors of
interstellar travel would not easily crumble to dust during 12,000
years on earth.
The spacecraft may lie somewhere in the impenetrable forests
and ravines of western China, buried beneath the foliage of the
millennia.
Modern-day China has been surprisingly open
about UFO sightings, apparently making the
records accessible to everyone. Does such openness mask a higher
purpose? Does the spacecraft of Bayan Kara Ula sit in the labora-
tories of Chinese science, covered with equipment which - for
how many decades now? - has been probing its every nook and
cranny in an effort to decipher its alien secrets?
The Concealments of Western Man
The strange non-attempts at explanation by the Banpo
Museum's director vividly reminded me of another personal ex-
perience I had, this time when I was on a trip through Mexico in
1991. At one point, our local tour guide, a proud Mexican named
Enrique who was surely better schooled in Spanish than in Ger-
man, seemed suddenly to be struck dumb, and to act as if he
couldn't understand his mother tongue. Why was this? We were
in the pyramid city of Teotihuacan, 25 miles northeast of Mexico
City, and I was absolutely determined to show my fellow travelers
the so-called `glimmer chambers' of the pyramid, which are said
to be hidden behind padlocked doors.
When I mentioned these glimmer chambers to my guide, and
asked him where they might be found, he was suddenly ren-
dered speechless. An expression of complete befuddlement crossed
his face. He acted as if even the Spanish word mica, which means
"glimmer" or "glisten," were to him a total mystery wrapped in a
total conundrum.
Eventually, I was able to locate the chambers myself But I
noticed that our guide was clearly embarrassed by all this, and
that he offered no explanation for the clear evidence that this
section had recently been repaired with concrete.
Were the custodians of these pyramids hiding something from
us?
Several days later, I was witness to a far more positive event,
this time in Palenque, home of the tomb of the Mayan God-King
Pacal. A tour guide, obviously of Mayan descent, was talking in
quite uninhibited Spanish to a party from France about the
extraterrestres, the extra-terrestrials. Clearly, this man had been
able to avoid the forms of mental conditioning to which modern-
day Western society forces us to submit, and was purely and sim-
ply passing on truths that his ancestors had known for millennia
perhaps, and which were perfectly natural to them.
If only there were those who could talk to us like this about
Bayan Kara Ula.
Ash's Mural Gallery:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/3517/Ash/index.html
Ash’s Mural Gallery: