In 1938, a team of archeologists, led by Professor Chi Pu Tei of Beijing University, was conducting a very detailed routine survey of a series of interlinked caves of Balan Kara-Ula, a district on the border of China and Tibet (at the time Tibet was independent).

He and his colleagues found skeletons of small beings with delicate frames, but with rather large skulls. At first, it had been thought by one of the assistants that the caves had been the home of a hitherto unkown species of ape. But as Professor Chi Pu Tei pointed out, "Who ever heard of apes burying each other?"

On the walls of the caves were found rock drawings which portrayed beings with round helmets. Engraved in the rock were also sun, moon, earth and stars, connected by groups of pea-sized dots.

It was while studying the skeletons that one of the team stumbled on a large, round stone disk, about two centimeters thick (0.8"), half buried in the dust on the floor of the cave. The team gathered around the discovery, trying to make some sense of the object. It looked, absurdly, like a sort of Stone Age gramophone record. There was a hole in the center and a fine groove, spiralling out from the center to the rim. Under closer inspection, however, it was obvious that the groove was, in fact, a continous inscribed double-line of closely packed characters. After a thorough search of the caves, additional 715 plates were found. These plates were records. Only nobody at the time was able to decipher the messages they contained. The discs were labeled and filed away among other finds in the area. Even those who knew of its existence knew nothing of its meaning.

Many experts tried to translate the inscriptions in the two decades during which the disc were stored away in Beijing, but without success. It was not until another professor - Dr. Tsum Um Nui - broke the code and started to decipher the speaking grooves that the extraordinary implications of the disc were realized. Realized, that is, only by only a select few. The outside world remained in ignorance, for the professor's conclusions on the meaning of the disc were so shattering that they were offically suppressed. The Prehistory Department of the Beijing Academy forbade him to publish his findings.

In cooperation with geologists and after spectrographic analysis, it was found that the plates had a high cobalt and metal content (the metals involved are not, though, referenced in the available sources). That implied an artificial origin of the plates; they were not of diorite as previously thought. The hardness of the material, however, compared to diorite.

Russian scientists asked to see the discs and several were sent to Moscow for examination. They were cleaned free of rock particles which had stuck to them and then put through analysis which corroborated the findings of Chinese scientists. That was not all. When placed on a special turntable, they vibrated or hummed with a high frequency resonance, which led to the conclusion that they had been exposed to very high voltages at some point in time. Or as one scientist suggested, "as if they formed some part of an electrical circuit."

In 1963, Dr. Tsum Um Nui decided to publish the findings in spite of the position of the Academy. The paper appeared under a long-winded but intriguing title, "The Grooved Script concerning Space-ships which, as recorded on the Discs, landed on Earth 12,000 years ago". It was not taken seriously in the West and, in short time, the whole matter seemed to fade into oblivion. That is, until 1967, when Russian philologist Dr. Viatcheslav Zaitsev published the extracts from the stone-plate story in the Sputnik Magazine. Allegedly, the whole story is preserved in the Beijing Academy, as well as in historical archives of Taipei, R.O.C.

The deciphered records contain story which may be upsetting to some and absurd or bizzare to others. The records told of a space probe by the inhabitants of another planet which came to an abrupt halt in the Bayan-Kara-Ula mountain range. The strange, spiral script told how the peaceful intentions of theirs had been misunderstood and how many of them were hunted down and killed by members of the Kham tribe, who lived in the neighboring caves.

According to Tsum Um Nui, one of the lines of the hieroglyphs read, "The Dropas came down from the clouds in their aircraft. Our men, women and children hid in the caves ten times before sunrise. When at last they [Kham] understood the sign language of the Dropas, they realized that the newcomers had peaceful intentions...". Another section expressed regret by the local Kham tribe that the aliens' spaceship had crash-landed in such a remote and inaccessible mountain range and that there had been no possibility to building a new one to enable Dropas to return to their own planet.

In the years since the discovery of the skeletons and discs, archeologists and anthropologists had learned more about the isolated Bayan-Kara-Ula area. And much of the information seemed to corroborate the astonishing story recorded on the discs. Legend still preserved in the area tells of small, yellow faced folks who came from the clouds, long, long ago. These people had huge, bulging heads and spindly bodies and were so ugly and repellent that they were hounded down by local tribesmen. Curiously, the description of the perceived invaders tallied with the skeletons orginally discovered in the caves by Professor Chi Pu Tei. Along with the discs, the cave drawings and skeletons had been dated around 10,000 BCE.

At the time of discovery, the cave area was still inhabited by two tribes known as the Khams and the Dropas, themselves extremely odd in appearance. The frail and growth-stunted tribesmen of Dropas averaged only about five feet in height and were neither typically Chinese nor Tibetan.

This is where the trail ends, at the end of 60's. To my knowledge, with an exception of paraphrasing the story by several authors, no new elements were introduced. The story exists in a form similar to this article, a brief summary, or sometimes as more colorful variant but the data are the same.

©1996 Brother Lumir G. Janku
Grand Overseer of the Anomalies & Enigmas Forum

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