Across the old Inca empire, Spanish priests hunted down a specific kind of stone. They called them idols and smashed nearly every one they found, carved granite pillars the Inca used to track the sun at the solstices and equinoxes. Only one of any real size survives intact today, and it survives because the Spanish never found the city it stands in.
The Intihuatana stone sits on a terrace above Machu Picchu, carved directly from the mountain’s own bedrock around 1450 under the Inca ruler Pachacuti. Its name translates roughly to hitching post of the sun. On the equinox, the stone casts almost no shadow at solar noon, a level of astronomical precision that took generations of observation to achieve without a single written record, since the Inca kept no written language at all. Machu Picchu itself was abandoned within a century, likely during the Spanish conquest, and sat hidden above the Urubamba River until 1911, when it was shown to the wider world.
In 2000, a film crew shooting a beer commercial dropped a crane and chipped a piece off the stone’s corner, the first damage the Intihuatana had suffered in five hundred years of surviving empires, weather, and conquest.
Makes you wonder what else the Inca built to that same precision that the Spanish did find and destroy before anyone thought to write it down.
Astronomical instrument, or something the Inca never meant outsiders to understand?
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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