Some stories refuse to die no matter how many times they are declared dead. The Dropa Stones are one of them.
The tale goes like this. In 1938 a Chinese archaeologist named Chi Pu Tei led an expedition into the Bayan Har Mountains on the border of China and Tibet. In a network of caves his team found rows of graves holding small, frail skeletons with oversized skulls. And in the caves they found 716 stone discs, each about a foot across, each with a hole in the center and a fine spiral groove running out from it like the groove on a record.
Twenty years later, the story continues, a professor named Tsum Um Nui managed to read the tiny hieroglyphs inside the groove. They told of a people called the Dropa whose craft had crashed in the mountains twelve thousand years ago and could not be repaired. A neighboring tribe, the Ham, had hunted them down.
It is a tremendous story. It is also almost certainly invented. The names of the archaeologist and the professor have never been found in any Chinese records. The source of the tale in the West was a 1978 book, Sungods in Exile, whose author later admitted he made it up. Photographs of the discs shown on television are of stone rings that have no writing on them at all.
And yet in the Bayan Har range there really is a small tribe, and the people there really are unusually short, and there really were strange discs catalogued in Chinese museums that have since gone missing.
What if the hoax grew up around something that was real.
Pure fiction, or a true story that was wrapped in lies to protect it?
What do you think about this? The Dropa Stones, 716 grooved stone discs said to be found in Chinese caves in 1938 beside small bodied skeletons, telling of a crash 12,000 years ago. The 1978 book that spread the story was admitted to be a hoax. Pure fiction, or a truth wrapped in lies?
What do you think about this? The Paiute of Nevada told of red haired giants they trapped in a cave and burned, written down in 1883. In 1911 miners near Lovelock opened a cave and found red haired mummies and a layer of ash. Legend that matched a cave, or memory of real enemies?
What do you think about this? In 1987 a Wisconsin family bought a used bunk bed. Within weeks their kids were sick, a radio changed stations by itself, and a chair rocked with no one in it. They fled in the night in 1988 and burned the bed. Old house, or something that came with it?
What do you think about this? In 1904 an American dredged the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá and pulled up gold disks, jade, wooden idols and the bones of more than 200 people, many of them children. The Maya called such wells doorways to the underworld. Prayers for rain, or an open door?
What do you think about this? Norse settlers lived in Greenland for nearly 500 years, with farms, a cathedral and a bishop. The last record is a wedding at Hvalsey church on Sept 16, 1408. Then nothing. The church still stands, roofless and empty. Starved out, or walked away?
What do you think about this? In 1615 a Spanish pearl ship is said to have sailed into an inland sea that then dried up. In 1870 a Los Angeles paper reported its hull found in the desert near the Salton Sea. Every searcher since has lost it to the sand. Mirage, or a galleon in the dunes?
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