High in the mountains of BayanKara-Ula, on the boarders of China and
Tibet - a team of archeologists were conducting a very detailed routine
survey of a series of interlinked caves.

Their interests had been excited by the discovery of lines of neatly
arranged graves which contained the skeletons of what must have been a
strange race of human beings; strange because they had unnaturally
spindly bodies and large, overdeveloped heads.

At first, it had been thought that the caves had been the home of a
hitherto unkown species of ape. But as the leader of the team - the
Chinese archeologist, 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, like a kind of 'Stone Age Gramophone
record'. There was a hole in the center and a fine, spiral groove
radiated to the rim. Closer inspection, however, showed that the groove
was, in fact, a continous spiralling line of closely written
characters.

The object was a 'record' ... in more ways then one. Only nobody at the
time - the year was 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 20 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, 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 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
long- winded but intriguing 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
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 understood the sign language of the Dropas, they realized that the
newcomers had peaceful intentions...".

Another section expressed 'regret' by the Ham tribe that the aliens'
spaceship had crash-landed in such a remote and inaccessible mountains
and that there had been no way to building a new one to enable Dropas
to return to their own planet.

In the years since the discovery of the first disc, archeologists 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 ago'. The men had huge,
bulging heads and puny bodies and were so ugly and repellent that they
were hounded down by local tribesmen on horseback. Strangely, the
description of the 'invaders' tallied with the skeletons orginally
discovered in the caves by Professor Chi Pu Tei.

On the walls of the caves themselves archeologists 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, the 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 five feet in height and
were neither typically Chinese nor Tibetan. "Their racial back-ground,"
said one expert, "is a mystery."

But even with the publications 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 suprise of the
scientists, they we 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 Sputnik - they vibrated or 'hummed'
in an unusual rhythm as though an electic 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
extraordinarily high votages.

Did the discs actually record an abortive space mission by alien
astronauts 12,000 years ago? Nearly all the leading 'space speculators'
- theorists like Erich von Daniken and Peter Kolosimo - believe so. For
once one accepts the proposition that aliens may have already have
visted earth, then it follows that some of their space-probes must have
failed and the astronauts must have been destroyed.

Billy,
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