Late this afternoon, as the sun drops toward the horizon in the Yucatan, a snake made of light will crawl down the side of a pyramid.
It happens at Chichén Itzá, on the great stepped temple the Spanish called El Castillo. For a few hours around the equinox, the corner of the pyramid throws a row of seven triangles of light along the northern staircase. They ripple downward and join a massive carved serpent head waiting at the base. The feathered serpent, Kukulcán, returns to Earth.
Nothing about this building is an accident. Each of its four stairways has 91 steps. Add the top platform and you get 365, one for every day of the solar year. The Maya who raised it around a thousand years ago tracked Venus, predicted eclipses and kept calendars more accurate than the one Europe was using at the time.
And then there is the sound. Stand in front of the staircase and clap your hands. The echo that comes back is not a clap. It is a chirp, and acoustic engineers have shown it closely matches the call of the quetzal, the sacred bird whose feathers crowned the serpent god.
Light that moves like a snake. Stone that answers with the voice of a bird. All of it built without metal tools or the wheel.
Makes you wonder what else they knew, and how much of it burned when the Spanish put the Maya books to the torch.
Brilliant engineering, or knowledge handed down from somewhere older?
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?
What do you think about this? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
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