The Droppas

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High in the Himalayan mountains, the Bayan-Kara-Ula Range, on the boarders of China and Tibet - a team of archaeologists were excited by the discovery of a series of interlocking caves strange in appearance because the caves appeared to be forged or cut with a high heat source, they were more like interlocking tunnels with underground storage rooms with squared walls with a glaze on them.  In the caves or storage rooms they were excited to find a strange burial site in them.

There were ancient but neatly arranged, burial sites and within them the skeletal remains of a strange people.  They had extremely large heads and strangely formed, they had puny, spindly bodies, about 3 1/2 feet in length.

At first, it had been thought that the caves had been the home of a hitherto unknown species of ape but as the leader of the team - the Chinese archaeologist, Professor Chi Pu Tei - pointed out, "Who ever heard of apes burying each other?" It was while studying the skeletons that one of the team stumbled on a large, round stone disk, half buried in the dust on the floor of the cave.

The team gathered round the discovery, turning it this way and that. It looked, absurdly, groove like a kind of 'Stone Age Gramophone record'. There was a hole in the center and a fine, spiral attached to the rim. The discs were nine inches in diameter, 3/4 inch thick, and in the exact center was a perfectly round 3/4 in hole, and spiraling out from it was a groove making it look like a Stone Age record for a phonograph. This one disc was dated to 12,000 years ago.  Older by far than the great pyramids of Egypt.

Closer inspection, however, showed that the grove was, in fact, a continuous spiraling line of closely written characters.  The object was a 'Record'....in more ways than one.  Only nobody at the time-in the year 1938--possessed the key to its incredible message.  The disc was 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 hieroglyphs in the twenty years the disc languished in Peking.

They all failed. 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 by a select few.  The outside world remained in ignorance.  

The professor’s conclusions were so shattering that they were officially suppressed.  The Peking Academy of Pre-History forbade him to publish his findings.

Two years later, in 1965, the professor and four of his colleagues were finally given permission to reveal their theory.  It appeared under the unusual title---"The Grooved Script Concerning Space-Ships which, as recorded on the Discs, Landed on Earth 12,000 Years Ago"

The 'Records' - 716 of the grooved discs were later uncovered in the same caves-told an astonishing story of a 'space probe' by the inhabitants of another planet, which came to grief in the Bayan-Kara-Ula mountain range.

The strange, spiral script told how the peaceful intentions of the 'aliens' had been misunderstood and how many of them were hunted down and killed by members of the Ham Tribe, who lived in neighboring caves.

According to Tsum Um Nui, one of the lines of the hieroglyphs read, “The Droppa 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 understood the sign language of the Droppas,they realized that the newcomers had peaceful intentions...Another section expressed 'Regret' by the Ham Tribe that the aliens 'spaceship' had crashed-landed in such a remote and inaccessible mountain range and that there had been no way of building a new one to enable the Droppas to return to their own planet.

In the years since the discovery of the first disc, archaeologist and anthropologists had learned more about the isolated Bayan-Kara-Ula area.  And much of the information seemed to corroborate the bizarre story recorded on the discs,  Legend still preserved in the area spoke of small, gaunt, yellow faced men who 'came from the clouds long, long, long, ago'.

The men had huge, bulging heads and puny bodies and were so ugly and repellent that they were hounded and hunted down by local tribesmen on horseback. Strangely, the description of the 'invaders' tallied with the skeletons originally discovered in the caves by professor Chi-Pu-Tei.  On the walls of the caves  themselves, archaeologists had uncovered crude pictures of the rising sun, the moon, unidentifiable stars and the Earth.... all joined together by lines of pea- sized dots.  Along with the discs, cave drawings had been dated around 12,000 years old.

The cave area was still inhabited by two semi-troglodyte tribes known as the Hams and the Dropas, themselves extremely odd in appearance.  The frail and stunted tribesmen averaged only about 3’4 in height. They were neither typically Chinese nor Tibetan.  "There racial back-ground' said one expert, “is a mystery."  But even with the publication of Professor Tsum Um Nui's amazing translation, the story of the 'space discs' was not over.

Russian scientists asked to see the discs and several were sent to Moscow for examination.  They were scraped free of rock particles which had stuck to them and then put through chemical analysis.  

To the surprise of the scientists they were found to contain large amounts of cobalt and other metallic substances.  That was not all. When placed on a special turntable-according to Dr. Vyatcheslav Saizev, who described the experiments in the soviet magazine Sputnick, they vibrated or ' hummed' in a unusual rhythm as though an electric charge was passing through them.

Or as one scientist suggested "as if they formed some part of an electrical circuit. “At some time, they had clearly been exposed to extremely high voltages.

A report from China in 1995 also seems to support the tale of the Dropas. A new tribe had been found near the eastern border of the Byan-Kara-Ula Mountains. The most interesting fact about this new group of people--their height---averaging 3 feet in height.

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Throughout history there have been legends of ancient flight from magic carpets to chariots of fire to fire breathing dragons to wheels spinning within wheels, sometimes fiery wheels! All of which have been dismissed as legends. But are they?