What do you think about this?
Deep in the jungles of southern Mexico stand the ruins of Palenque, one of the most beautiful cities the ancient Maya ever built. In 1952, an archaeologist named Alberto Ruz Lhuillier lifted a hidden slab inside a temple there and found a stairway leading down to a sealed crypt no one had entered in over a thousand years. Inside lay the tomb of a great king, K’inich Janaab Pakal, who died in the year 683.
Over his sarcophagus lay an enormous carved stone lid, and it is one of the most argued over images in the world. Pakal is shown reclining, surrounded by intricate symbols, with what looks to modern eyes like a seat, a nose piece, controls under his hands, and flames trailing beneath him. In the 1960s writers like Erich von Däniken looked at it and saw an astronaut at the controls of a rocket.
To Maya scholars, every element has a clear meaning. Pakal is falling into the underworld at the moment of death, cradled by the great world tree that connects the layers of the cosmos, the flames below being the jaws of the earth. Nothing alien about it, they say, only a civilization mapping death and rebirth in its own rich language.
What if the truth is not aliens at all, but that we simply cannot look at an ancient masterpiece without pouring our own age of rockets into it?
A king riding into the afterlife, or something the Maya saw and we have forgotten how to read? What do you think Pakal’s stone really shows?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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