What do you think about this?
Across the rock shelters of the Kimberley, in the remote north of Western Australia, the same haunting figures appear again and again. The Aboriginal people call them the Wandjina. They are painted with brilliant white faces, large dark eyes, and no mouth at all. Around their heads spread halos, or headdresses, or what some have called rays of light. Some stand taller than a person.
To the traditional custodians of this land, the Wandjina are not aliens or strangers. They are powerful ancestral spirits of cloud and rain, the bringers of the wet season, the shapers of the land itself. The paintings are sacred, and for countless generations the right people have carefully repainted them, keeping the images and their power alive.
But to outsiders who first saw them, the mouthless faces and radiant heads looked like nothing on Earth, and the comparisons to spacemen came fast. That reading says far more about us than it does about the art.
Still, the questions linger. Why no mouths. Why the same striking form held so steady across thousands of years and hundreds of miles. Why these figures, and not others.
The truth may be far stranger than we have been told, not because visitors came from the stars, but because a culture this old understood and remembered something we have only begun to grasp.
Ancient spirits of the rains, or something the first artists actually saw? What do you think the Wandjina represent?
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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