:)

Xian

But the story of the stone disks of the Banpo Museum does not end here. In March,1994, in the course of my second journey to China, my friend Austrian journalist Peter Krassa and myself met with then - director of the Banpo Museum Professor Wang Zhijun. At first, Professor Wang Zhijun did not want to talk to us about the disks. Then he revealed that, a few days after Wegener's visit in 1974, both the stone disks and the museum director with whom Wegener had spoken had vanished without a trace. Director Wang Zhijun seemed uncomfortable with our discussion. When I asked him where the discs were now, he replied, "The stone disks you have mentioned do not exist; but, being extraneous objects in this museum, they were relocated." This was a statement not without internal contradictions. And it was all that Director Wang Zhijun would tell us.

Six Months Among the Aliens
In his 1978 book, Sungods in Exile, David Agamon tells the story of the 1974 expedition of eccentric British scientist Dr. Karyl Robin-Evans to the Bayan Kara Ula mountain range. According to Agamon, Robin-Evans came across several hundred members of a dwarfish tribe known as the Dropa, who lived in a remote valley and whose average height was no more than about four feet. Robin-Evans spent six months among the Dropa. He learned their language and was introduced to their history and traditions. They told him their ancestors had come from a planet revolving around the star Sirius, and had crash - landed in a spacecraft in this area a very long time before. Many had been killed.The survivors had become acclimatized to living on our planet. Ukrainian scientist Dr. Vladimir Rubtsov has written to inform me that Sungods in Exile is only science fiction woven around rumor and legend, believable only by the very gullible. But the Associated Press, in a November,1995 article, reported that some 120 dwarfish beings had been discovered living in Sichuan Province in Central China, the tallest of them being no more than three feet ten inches in height, and the shortest adult measuring two feet one inch. In January,1997, Chinese ethnologists tried to discount this phenomenon of 120 dwarfish beings living in a single area by attributing their dwarfism to the high concentration of mercury in the soil of the region. They insisted the dwarfs must have absorbed the mercury in their drinking water over many generations. Dr. Norbert Felgenhauer, of the Munich Institute for Toxic Surgery, tells me that this explanation is nonsense. He says that mercury is a lethal poison harmful to any organ in the human body, and that the dwarfs would not have survived. Moreover, he says, mercury cannot change human DNA and so cannot cause hereditary disease.

Repairs were impossible; the necessary materials could not befound. The means for the craft to communicate its location and plight to its home world had been damaged beyond repair. The beings from outer space were forced to settle in a world and in a place utterly alien to their kind. The local inhabitants of the region had misunderstood these beings and particularly frightened by the small and ugly appearance of the aliens - this local tribe, called the Ham, had hunted down and killed many of the shipwrecked ETs. The members of Professor Tsum Um Nui's team disagreed about the precise origins of the engrooved message on the disks. Some thought that sympathetic members of the Ham tribe, ficountered great difficulties in making it public), was greeted with derision. Dr. Tsum was branded a liar and a fool. He later resigned from the Beijing Academy for Ancient Studies. Eventually, he emigrated to Japan. Embittered by the reaction of the scientific establishment to his decipherment of the strange stone disks, he died not many years after having completed his controversial report.

-The Soviets Uncover More Secrets
If the Chinese scientific community rejected this other-worldlyexplanation for the stone disks of Bayan Kara Ula, its ideologicalcounterpart, the Soviet Union, did not. A group of Russian scientists had heard the stories, and asked to be allowed to examinethe disks. A number of the strange stone artifacts were eventuallydispatched to Moscow. The Soviet scientists did not seem to be-lieve Professor Tsum's story on the face of it. Or, perhaps, theywished to attack the problem of the disks in another way. They began to conduct a chemical analysis of the disks themselves.The scientists entrusted with the investigation made a number of intriguing discoveries. Chemical analysis showed that the disks contained large amounts of cobalt and other metallic sub stances. A magnetic metal like iron and nickel, cobalt is used today primarily in alloy form with chrome, steel, and other metals. It is mined mostly in Canada and Central Africa. There isone place, and only one, in China, where it is profitable to mineit, and that is in Qinghai Province-where the region of Bayan Kara Ula lies. My assumption is that the group of space travelers, deter- mined that their 716 stone disks would last at least till somebody found them, deliberately hardened them with cobalt, in the same way as cobalt is used industrially today to harden specialty tools. The downed aliens wanted their disks to endure till somebody came along who was capable of deciphering them (or perhaps, till, over the long millennia, some of their own kind came to earth and found them). The Russian scientists not only discovered cobalt. When the disks were placed on a special turntable and "played"-or so re- counts Dr. Vyatcheslav Saitzev, who Frst told the story of the alien disks of Bara Kara Ula for the Soviet magazine Sputnik the long-playing record-like artifacts emitted a strange uneven hum - a vibration. It was as if the grooves were also electrical circuitry, or as if they had once been exposed to very high volt- ages. Cobalt contains a high-grade radioactive isotope. If there were detectable traces of cobalt present in the stone disks, did they also somehow spell out a second, deeper, more subtly en- coded message? Might there be an element of the subliminal message in these enigmatic alien disks? Will the meaning of these messages, stored in a form we don't yet understand, dawn upon us in the near or distant future, when our own technology and our understanding have come abreast of that of the shipwrecked aliens of Bayan Kara Ula? Was the more superficial message, composed of spiral script and translated by Professor Tsum, merely a part of the story?

-Near the Emperor's Tomb, Two Disks Resurface
Our stone disks had not entirely vanished, however. Two of them were to reappear some quarter-of a- entury after they were first discovered. Through eleven dynasties and a time-span of 1,080 years, Xian was the capital city of Imperial China. The capital city of Shaanxi Province today, Xian is a veritable treasure trove of price- less objects from the Qin, Tang and Ming dynasties. Situated at the entrance to the legendary Silk Highway, the city was already a major Far Eastern center of commerce 2,500 years ago. Today, this city enjoys an excellent reputation as a first-class tourist attraction. In any study trip taken through China, it is as important to visit this city and its treasures as it is to see the Great Wall of China or the incomparable river scenery at Guilin. At the tender age of 17, the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (259-210 B.C.) of the Qin Dynasty had already decided what form his burial mausoleum would take. He seems to have begun his life as ruler more concerned about the end of his days than about what his years on earth would be like. To protect the holy silence of his tomb, he ordered his subjects to fabricate an enormous army of terra cotta soldiers, horses and wagons, which they then had to distribute over a wide area around his grave site. Accidentally discovered in 1974 by workers drilling a well, this life-sized
replica of an army has entered the annals of archaeological lore and also become a staple of the travel brochures. These splendid figures - 8,000 of which have been unearthed so far, with archaeologists still counting - are (as we will see!} only a small part of the treasures waiting to be uncovered at the grave site of the emperor. As important as the terra cotta army of Qin Shi Huangdi may be, however, there are two other artifacts which, in my view, are every bit as important, and which at some point somehow found their way to the vicinity of Xian: two of the stone disks from the mountain burial cave of Bayan Kara Ula. In 1953, in a suburb located on the east side of Xian, construction workers digging the foundations for a proposed factory unearthed the ruins of a Neolithic settlement whose age would eventually be estimated by archaeologists at about 6,000 years. This settlement, called the Banpo village, is one of the best-pre- served Late Stone Age sites in China. To protect from the elements the treasures of Banpo as they came to light, and to make them accessible for viewing by visitors and tourists, officials built a museum on the site instead of a factory Scientists believe the find still represents only one-fifth of the area to be profitably uncovered. Around the Banpo Museum stand a number of smaller build- ings, which also house exhibits from the last millennia of the Stone Age. It is thought that 200-300 people lived here in that epoch shrouded in the mists of antiquity. In one of these smaller buildings, the Austrian engineer Ernst Wegener came across two of the stone disks of Bayan Kara Ula.

Denial and Disappearance of Custodian and Disks

This was in 1974. Wegener was in the middle of a long journey through China. He seized the opportunity to photograph these artifacts. The museum's director knew every detail of every broken shard of pottery in the museum - but, when confronted about the origins of these stone disks, she took refuge in the explanation that they were `cult disks' whose true significance was unknown. The Austrian engineer was permitted to touch the objects. They had a circumference of 12 to 12-1 /2 inches and a thickness of about 2/5 of an inch, and bore grooves which spiraled from a hole in the middle out to the outer edge, then back again.A superficial examination persuaded Wegener that the disks were made of granite, or perhaps even of a kind of marble. He estimated the weight of each at about 2.2 pounds; certainly, they were made of quite dense material. Wegener's photographs have been preserved to this day Unfortunately, they are not very helpful, since the engineer used a Polaroid camera, and since the stone disks were already exhibiting a great deal of fragmentation and crumbling.

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-Modern-Day `Village of the Dwarfs'-
The Chinese authorities have never denied the existence of a `Village of the Dwarfs' in Sichuan Province, nor that the village is located only two or three hundred miles east of the Bayan Kara Ula mountain region. This latter fact may indicate that the Dropa migrated from the mountains to the lowlands, and that they did so only recently These tiny people must have been isolated for many millennia before their discovery; otherwise, interbreeding with other ethnic groups would have resulted in an increase in their stature. There is further evidence for the existence of a dwarfish people in China.

Joerg Dendl, a doctoral candidate in history who lives in Berlin, has unearthed a report from 1911 which tells of repeated sightings of an extremely dwarfish people in Tibet and neighboring areas. When I was lecturing in Brisbane, Australia, in June, 1996, a young couple came up to me. They told me that their grandfather had fought with the Allies in Central China during World War Two. Till the day he died, they told me, he never ceased to talk about his encounters with an extremely dwarf ish tribe of people living in that area. According to his account, these dwarfish folk were even smaller than the pygmies of Africa, who normally grow to a height of between four feet eight inches and five feet. These anecdotal reports cry out for intensive research. I will continue to do my best to get to the bottom of the mysterious evidence pertaining to a UFO crash that occurred thousands of years ago in a remote region of Central China - an incident the discussion of which is so scrupulously avoided by any official with whom I have spoken, that it smacks of a `Chinese Roswell.'