Twice a year, for about a week around the spring and fall equinox, something walks onto the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix. About half an hour before sunset the light drops across the western cliffs at just the right angle, and the shadow of a crouching cougar appears on the face of the mountain, head low, shoulders bunched, as if it is about to spring down on Apache Junction. It holds for twenty or thirty minutes and then dissolves as the sun goes. People park along Goldfield Road to watch it. The rest of the year it is not there.
A shadow that only appears at the equinox has a famous cousin. At Chichén Itzá, on those same two days, the setting sun throws a chain of triangles down the north stairway of the great pyramid so that a serpent of light seems to slide down to the stone head at the bottom. That one was built on purpose. The Maya engineered a pyramid so the sky would draw Kukulcán, the feathered serpent the Aztecs called Quetzalcoatl, on the equinox and nowhere else. The equinox was the hinge of the Mesoamerican calendar.
The Superstitions were sacred long before the Lost Dutchman. The Apache held them as the home of the Thunder God and the doorway to the lower world, and the Hohokam who farmed the valley below tracked the sun with the care of any priest at Chichén Itzá. The Aztecs themselves said they came from a homeland in the north.
So here is the question. Is the cougar a trick of rock and light that a people who watched the equinox would simply have noticed and revered? Or did someone, a very long time ago, engineer the mountain and know exactly where to stand and when to look? What do you think?
What do you think about this? The carrier USS Hornet, docked in Alameda, lost more than 300 men in service. Her museum crew logs sailors in passageways who vanish, hatches slamming alone, and a voice from an empty compartment saying “I’m still here.” Old steel, or a crew still aboard?
What do you think about this? In 1995 more than a thousand animals in Puerto Rico were found dead in six months, each with puncture wounds and no blood left. A witness described a four foot upright creature with spines and gray skin. Mangy dogs came later. What drained the goats?
What do you think about this? The wall at Sacsayhuamán above Cusco is built of stones up to 120 tons, cut with twelve angles and fitted so tight a sheet of paper will not slide in. The Inca told the Spanish an earlier people built it. Lost skill, or a civilization we have not named?
What do you think about this? Bernadette of Lourdes was buried in a damp vault in 1879. When the Church opened her coffin in 1909 her body was intact and her limbs still bent. Opened again in 1919 and 1925, same result. She lies in a glass case today. Dry crypt, or something else?
What do you think about this? In 1969 explorer Juan Moricz swore under oath that a cave in Ecuador’s jungle held thousands of stamped metal plates. In 1976 an expedition with Neil Armstrong went in and found pottery, not plates. Moricz died without giving the spot. Still down there?
What do you think about this? On October 11, 1973, two men fishing the Pascagoula River said three gray creatures with claws floated them into a craft. Deputies left them alone with a hidden recorder, expecting a confession. It caught them terrified and praying. Hoax, or the real thing?
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