by Ashley Rye
3/18/2000
from CyberSpaceOrbit Website

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 before 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 catastrophe, 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 contain, 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 elements 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 inhabited 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 scientists-even Soviet scientists-were in the habit of taking seriously 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 seriously. 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 knowledge in the West. The Belgian magazine BUFOI (Belgian UFO Investigator) picked it up as well as the esoteric German publication 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. Geologists believe it was even warmer 20,000 years ago; whatever the truth of the matter, this area contains traces of human habitation 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 archaeologists 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.

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 extremities.

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 appearance and bizarre behavior, were attacked and in large part murdered by the local inhabitants. In more recent times, the rock caves upon which the archaeological team stumbled have continued to be shunned by the superstitious and suspicious local people; the caves are in effect taboo.

This may be why the mysterious relic also found by the scientists 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 circumference was 12 to 12-½ 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 Province. 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 origins may be traced back to the beginnings of matristic (or ‘matriarchal’), 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 earliest 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.” ('THE CHINESE ROSWELL: UFO Encounters in the Far East from Ancient Times to the Present' by Hartwig Hausdorf).

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 Ancient Studies, would become convinced that the grooves contained a kind of writing. In 1962, the small group of scientists working under his direction would announce that they had succeeded in decoding a story of an alien tragedy of epic proportions.

The message on the stone disk was not entirely unlike a message 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 survived; 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 frightened 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, (encountered 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. Eventually, 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 controversial 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 scientists 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 believe 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 number 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 metals. 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 Ulalies.

My assumption is that the group of space travelers, determined 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 first 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 ideology 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 particulars 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 “bourgeois decadence.” Any notion of extraterrestrial intrusion or intervention 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 campaign 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 violent and horrific period. Slowly thereafter life began to normalize 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.

 

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 priceless 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.

Accidentally 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 archaeologists 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, construction 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 visitors 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 buildings, 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 journey 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 12-½ 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 exhibiting 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 discussion. 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. According 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 traditions. 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 inform 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 Province 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 generations. 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 repeated 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 dwarfish 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 officials. 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 turmoil 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 Revolution, relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China had deteriorated sharply; it may well be that Moscow 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 government 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 laboratories 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 experience 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 rendered 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 simply 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.