What do you think about this?
Deep in the jungles of southern Mexico stand the ruins of Palenque, one of the most beautiful cities the ancient Maya ever built. In 1952, an archaeologist named Alberto Ruz Lhuillier lifted a hidden slab inside a temple there and found a stairway leading down to a sealed crypt no one had entered in over a thousand years. Inside lay the tomb of a great king, K’inich Janaab Pakal, who died in the year 683.
Over his sarcophagus lay an enormous carved stone lid, and it is one of the most argued over images in the world. Pakal is shown reclining, surrounded by intricate symbols, with what looks to modern eyes like a seat, a nose piece, controls under his hands, and flames trailing beneath him. In the 1960s writers like Erich von Däniken looked at it and saw an astronaut at the controls of a rocket.
To Maya scholars, every element has a clear meaning. Pakal is falling into the underworld at the moment of death, cradled by the great world tree that connects the layers of the cosmos, the flames below being the jaws of the earth. Nothing alien about it, they say, only a civilization mapping death and rebirth in its own rich language.
What if the truth is not aliens at all, but that we simply cannot look at an ancient masterpiece without pouring our own age of rockets into it?
A king riding into the afterlife, or something the Maya saw and we have forgotten how to read? What do you think Pakal’s stone really shows?
What do you think about this? Scans of Gunung Padang in Indonesia show hidden chambers deep inside the hill, and one team dated its oldest layers to 25,000 years ago. The study was retracted in 2024. The chambers have never been opened. Natural hill, or the oldest pyramid on Earth?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
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