What do you think about this?
On the southern edge of Mexico City, swallowed by a field of black volcanic rock, sits a pyramid that almost no one talks about, and it may be the oldest in all of Mesoamerica. Cuicuilco was built around 2,700 years ago, long before the Aztecs, long before even the great city of Teotihuacan. And unlike the famous step pyramids, this one is round, a series of stacked stone rings rising from the plain.
Then the mountain came for it. A volcano called Xitle erupted and sent a river of lava across the entire site, burying the temple and the city around it under as much as seven metres of solid rock. In places the stone lies more than thirty feet deep. For most of the structure, excavation is simply impossible. We have only uncovered the top.
So we are left guessing. How old is it really, when the lava sealed away the lower layers and the foundations we would need to date it? Who built a round pyramid here, and why, before the cultures we credit with inventing them? The survivors of that eruption are thought to have walked north and helped build Teotihuacan, carrying whatever they knew with them.
Makes you wonder how much older our history runs than the parts we are able to dig up.
A forgotten first chapter of Mesoamerican civilization, or just an early experiment frozen in lava? What do you think is still buried under Cuicuilco?
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?
What do you think about this? A 2,200 year old wooden bird dug up at Saqqara in 1898 has no legs, no feathers, straight wings and a tail that stands upright like the fin of an airplane. Some replicas glide. A child’s toy that looks like a plane, or a memory of something that flew?
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