This is an extract of an article published by Fate Magazine, August 1998, written by Stig Agermose, entitled "The Chinese Roswell", and shortly published on the web at the URL http://www.llewellyn.com/fate/9808/pr2_0898.htm that has disappeared since. If you search the Fate Magazine web site now, you will not find anything about the Dropas anymore.
The main page about this case is here.
During 35 years, a history circulated in connection with an alleged crashed UFO 12000 years ago in distant a mountain sector in China. When I intended time to speak about this history for the first, I thought that it was science fiction. But new developments made me change my mind.
It began in 1937, with an expedition led by the archaeologist Chi Pu-Tei, through the mountains of Bayan-Kara-Ula, in the province of Qinghai.
The group discovered some caves in which strange skeletons were buried. All the skeletons had abnormally large heads and small, slim and fragile bodies.
There was no writing on the tombs, but the explorers discovered 716 stone discs on which strange hieroglyphs were visible. From the hole in the center of each disc, a groove spiraled from the inner to the external edge. The explorers did not have any idea of the meaning of these hieroglyphs.
Each disc weighed 900 grams and had 30 centimeters in diameter.
It is only at the beginning of the Sixties that Tsum Um Nui, a professor at the Academy of Science of Peking succeeded in translating some parts of the inscriptions on the stone discs. But before being able to finish his report, the scientist had a problem. The Academy banished the publication of its work. It is not surprising when one knows the unusual conclusions found by Tsum Um Nui and his four assistants. They were convinced that the hieroglyphs on the stone discs spoke about the crash of an extraterrestrial vessel in the mountains 12000 years ago!
After a long argument, the professor obtained the permission to publish his report. He introduced his readers into the history of extraterrestrial beings called the Dropa, which had crash-landed in the mountains of Bayan-Kara-Ula after a long space flight. A great number of these beings died, and the survivors could not repair their vessel, explained Tsum Um Nui. Of course, the scientific Establishment considered the story as nonsense, and Tsum Um Nui was accused of insanity.
But the skeptics were unaware an old tradition in the province of Qinghai which was about beings small, thin, and horrible, with a large and heavy head and extremely weak arms and legs. They descended from the sky a very a long time ago. The inhabitants had been frightened by the strange aspect of those invaders coming from the clouds.
Shortly after the publishing of his report, Tsum Um Nui emigrated in Japan. Depressed by the reactions of the other scientists, he died little after having completely finished the writing of a manuscript on the mystery of the stone discs. My book "Satellites of the Gods" was published in Japan in 1996, and I hope that Japanese readers will be able to provide new information on Tsum Um Nui and his destiny. Where was he buried? Which bookshop contains his report on the translation of the hieroglyphs?
Nobody knows what was done with the 716 discs. Their existence was traced until 1974, when the Australian engineer Ernest Wegerer showed himself up to the Banpo Museum at Xi'an to study two of the discs. They corresponded to descriptions of Tsum Um Nui's 1962 report. Wegerer asked the museum's managers for more detailed information on the objects. Strangely, he was given lots of accurate explanation about all the other objects in the museum, but all that he learned about the stone discs was that they were some "cult objects of no importance". This was their description on their display in the museum.
Nevertheless, the Australian was authorized to handle one of the discs and took the only known photographs of those. Wegerer estimates that they weighed 900 grams and measured 30 cm in diameter. They all had the strange hieroglyphs and the hole in the medium. The spiral cannot be seen on the photographs, partly because it had disaggregated and also because Wegerer used a Polaroid camera with an integrated flash.
It is more or less at this point of the research that Peter Krassa, the co-author of "Satellites of the Gods" and I have tried to continue to study the mystery of the century. It was not easy. China suffered from its Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. Many people lost their life, and of innumerable invaluable objects were victims of these disorders. During this time, much of hand-worked objects from the provinces were taken away to Banpo.
In March 1994, professor Wang Zhijun, director of the Banpo museum, received Krassa and I for a discussion on the stone discs. From the beginning, he did not seem to accept to give any information, and soon he told that the management of the museum assigned him to other tasks a few days before we visit the museum.
I had the feeling that Wang Zhijun was very anxious during our investigation. When we asked him for the current location of the discs, it answered: "the stone discs which you mention do not exist, but being foreign elements to the pottery collection of this museum, they were moved."
Isn't such a contradiction in such a short sentence amazing?
