In 1969 an Argentine Hungarian explorer named Juan Moricz filed a sworn statement with the government of Ecuador. He claimed that deep inside the Cueva de los Tayos, a cave system in the Morona Santiago jungle, he had found a library: thousands of thin metal plates stamped with writing in an unknown script, stacked in a chamber along with a sarcophagus and statues of gold and stone. He said the Shuar people who guarded the cave had taken him in. He would not say exactly where.
The claim found its way into a bestselling book, and in 1976 a British Ecuadorian expedition of more than a hundred people went into the cave to settle it. Their honorary president was Neil Armstrong, seven years after the Moon, and he went down. The team mapped miles of passages and brought out pottery and burial goods. They did not find the library. Moricz had refused to guide them to the right entrance. He died in 1991 with the location unshared.
The cave is real, and strange on its own. The entrance is a 200 foot vertical shaft the Shuar descend on vine ladders once a year to gather oilbird chicks. Some of the passages have flat ceilings and square cut corners that visitors have said look worked rather than eroded. In 2018 a researcher reported a second entrance, a mile away, that may be the one Moricz used. Nobody has gone through it with a camera.
A metal library under the Amazon, a man who swore to it under oath, and an astronaut who went looking. 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? The wall at Sacsayhuamán above Cusco is built of stones up to 120 tons, cut with twelve angles and fitted so tight a sheet of paper will not slide in. The Inca told the Spanish an earlier people built it. Lost skill, or a civilization we have not named?
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? 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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