Above the city of Cusco, Peru, there is a wall built of stones the size of delivery trucks. The largest block at Sacsayhuamán is estimated at over 120 tons. The blocks are not square. They are many sided, some with twelve angles, and every one of them meets its neighbors so tightly that you cannot slide a sheet of paper into the joints. There is no mortar. The stones were shaped to fit each other like puzzle pieces, and the fit runs all the way through, not just on the visible face.
The Spanish chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, who grew up in Cusco in the 1500s with an Inca mother, wrote that the Inca themselves told him the walls were there before them, raised by an earlier people. The Inca built on top. Their own masonry, the upper courses, is smaller and rougher. The giant polygonal blocks at the base are the mystery.
Nobody has shown how the stones were cut. The nearest quarry is miles away. There was no iron, no wheel, no draft animal bigger than a llama. Some blocks show surfaces that look melted or glazed rather than chipped. Local legend says the builders used the juice of a plant that softened stone, and that birds in the Andes still use it to drill nest holes into cliffs. Engineers who have tried to reproduce the joints with bronze tools have managed small stones, not 120 ton ones.
The wall has stood through five centuries of earthquakes that flattened the Spanish churches in the valley below. 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? 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?
What do you think about this? The Dropa Stones, 716 grooved stone discs said to be found in Chinese caves in 1938 beside small bodied skeletons, telling of a crash 12,000 years ago. The 1978 book that spread the story was admitted to be a hoax. Pure fiction, or a truth wrapped in lies?
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