For centuries a giant lay on his back in a dry creek bed outside the village of Coatlinchan, east of Mexico City. He was carved from a single block of stone, twenty three feet long and about 168 tons, one of the largest monoliths ever cut in the Americas. The villagers called him Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain, and they believed he was the reason their fields stayed green.
In 1964 the Mexican government decided he belonged in front of the new National Museum of Anthropology. The people of Coatlinchan disagreed. When the engineers arrived, villagers sabotaged the transport rig and slashed its tires, and the army had to be sent in to hold the town while the stone was lifted onto a custom trailer rolling on dozens of wheels.
On April 16 the rain god made his slow journey into the capital. Power lines were taken down to let him pass. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets and packed the Zócalo at night to watch him arrive.
And then the sky opened. April is the heart of the dry season in Mexico City, and yet witnesses and newspapers recorded a violent storm that flooded parts of the city as Tlaloc rolled in. One of the heaviest downpours anyone could remember for that time of year.
The engineers called it weather. The people of Coatlinchan say their rains have never been the same since he left.
Some scholars now argue the statue is not Tlaloc at all, but the water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue. Either way, the water answered.
Makes you wonder what our ancestors understood about these stones that we have forgotten.
Coincidence, or a god announcing his arrival?
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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