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 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?
What do you think about this? A 2,200 year old wooden bird dug up at Saqqara in 1898 has no legs, no feathers, straight wings and a tail that stands upright like the fin of an airplane. Some replicas glide. A child’s toy that looks like a plane, or a memory of something that flew?
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