The Worlds Beneath Our Feet
How much do we really know the world we inhabit? For me it just keeps getting stranger and stranger. I think I have a handle on something, a grip, so to speak, and it quickly slips away again. I am a true testament to my own shortsightedness and youthful arrogance. Everyday what I think I know is pushed, tested and blown to smithereens as my ego gets burned, my logical mind gets frazzled and my spirit sits back and patiently waits. Lately I’ve been fascinated with the theories of underground tunnels, bases, cities, hollow earth, giants and other such subjects. In my quest for information I bought David Hatcher Childress’ most recent book Lost Cities and Ancient Mysteries of the Southwest. It was yet another eye-opener. There are things in this book that are still connecting dots for me. I’m posting this material, some of the highlights for me, because I know we don’t always have the time to read the many books we’d like to if we only had the time (or we don’t have the money or want to focus in that direction), and because I thought the material should be shared with you fine folk. Note, if you don’t like a subject please just move on to the next because I believe the most interesting and revealing is towards the end. Alright, enough said. Here we go:
The Zone of Silence
On the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, across from the Big Bend area of Texas, is a twilight zone of weird animals, strange magnetic and vortex phenomena, mysterious lights and man-made hills called the Zone of Silence.
In the early 1980’s, paranormal investigator Gerry Hunt drove from the United States to Chihuahua to investigate the Zone of Silence. What Hunt reported seems fantastic by any standard. Hunt says in his book The Zone of Silence that the area has seen gigantic UFOs, is bombarded almost nightly by meteorites and has been the target of government investigations by both the U.S. and Mexico. The area became known as the Zone of Silence because normal radios do not work within the 1,500 square mile area. Some sort of interference generated within the zone jams the signals.
According to Hunt, a U.S. Air Force Athena rocket was fired in 1970 from Green River, Utah and was programmed to land in White Sands, New Mexico but instead was drawn 900 miles off course and plunged into the Zone of Silence. The missile carried a deadly radioactive cobalt warhead, and the U.S. military launched a massive recovery operation, building a special railroad spur into the zone and scooping up hundreds of tons of magnetic earth as well as the remains of the rocket.
Curiously, Hunt reports that rocket pioneer Werner von Braun made a mysterious visit to the zone just two months before the Athena rocket went off course. This raises speculation that the U.S. military purposely fired the rocket into the zone so as to be able to conduct special experiments there under the guise of recovering the rocket.
In exploring the zone, Hunt claims to have seen six mile-long rectangular platforms of earth that are apparently man-made, as well as a man-made hill in the shape of a crumbling pyramid. Small carved stone statues have been discovered in the zone; some of the statues are of pumas, and one is of a man wearing a turban!
According to an old Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoon “huge columns of sand appear suddenly and mysteriously whirl violently - although there is not the slightest breeze in the area.”
Hunt says that creatures living inside the zone are often bizarre mutants, including tortoises and insects that grow three times the normal size. Centipedes are sometimes a foot long with purple heads, and tortoises have strange markings on their backs and no tails. It is the only known place where cactus grows in certain shades of red and purple. There is even said to be a Bigfoot type creature living in the area.
Ojinaga and its Struggle with the Devil
Ojinaga is today a border town with a population of about 10,000, across the Rio Grande from Presidio, Texas. According to legend, the Devil lives inside the mountain in “La Cueva del Diablo,” or Devil’s Cave, where strange things happened. This cave, with its many side passages, has frightened the local residents for generations.
Four hundred years ago, the Devil terrorized people from time to time by bouncing a gigantic metal ball like a basketball-playing Godzilla, smashing everything in his path. To save the community, a young priest fought with the Devil and forced him back into his cave. In Ojinaga they say that the Devil is even now inside the mountain. The steel ball he used to crush people and homes can be seen in the middle of town. It is known as the Devil’s Ball and is now cemented into the sidewalk on Zaragosa Street. It has been painted yellow by the city, and is something of a small tourist attraction.
The Big Bend Mystery Tablet
In January of 1962, four hikers came to the Big Bend Hot Springs area and made the amazing discovery of the mysteriously inscribed stone tablet. Charles and Bernice Nickles operated a seaplane service in Alaska during the summers, but every winter they came down to San Marcos, Texas to stay with their son, Donald Uzzell and his wife, Reva.
The two couples had been out searching for petroglyphs when they spotted what they thought might be a cave above them after crossing Tornillo Creek. They decided to investigate it, and Donald Uzzell scaled the steep rocks for 30 feet. He then squeezed himself into a crevice that from below looked like only a shadow on the cliff wall.
Inside this narrow cave Uzzell found seven stacked clay tablets with strange writing on them. Uzzell handed the tablets down one at a time to Charles, who had climbed partway up the cliff. Soon they had the clay pieces safely down from the cave, and Donald, sometimes hanging by one hand, also made it down from the cliff.
The seven pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle to form a single, long tablet with 13 lines of writing. Fortunately, Donald remembered he had a camera in his car and photographed the stone tablet and its very legible writing before placing the pieces carefully in the trunk. Realizing that they had stumbled onto something of major importance, they contacted the Park Service.
The Park Service didn’t know what to make of them saying they were clearly not Apache artifacts, but could otherwise not be identified.
Uzzell began sending copies of the photos to try to get some interest in the artifacts and when he finally did the park’s chief naturalist, Rollin Wauer, reported back that a search of park records revealed no mention of the tablet. The ranger who had accepted the pieces of clay from the Uzzells had since been transferred to Nevada. When Wauer called him, he did remember the tablet.
“It lay on the floor of the maintenance building for months,” the ranger told Wauer. “I showed it to any and all that were willing to look at it, but everybody agreed it hadn’t any antiquity nor historical significance. It disintegrated from all that handling and, when we moved it down to the new administration building, it turned into a pile of dust.”
Having only the photograph left, the Uzzells continued to mail it out. The American Epigraphic Society would later call this “one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the century.”
Dr. Harry Fell, president of the American Epigraphic Society, attempted to translate the inscription on the Big Bend Mystery Tablet. The lines of characters traversed the tablet in curious ways. Like many ancient texts, it was written in “boustrophedon” style, meaning, “as the ox plows.” In this style, the first line is written from left to right, but the second line is written the reverse way, from right to left. Each phrase then alternates down the length of the text. Other oddball ancient languages are also written this way: Doric Greek, Hittite, Indus Valley script, Easter Island Rongo Rongo script, and others.
Fell read the text on the Big Bend tablet alternately left-right and then right-left. The first two sentences read:
Why this suffering?
Oh, what anguish.
The tablet then reads:
A call to prayer, 29th December, year 6
Heal us. Heal us. Heal us.
The faithful are beset by sorrows.
Guide, O Mithras,
Show forth thy strength and promise of aid
As revealed by Ahuramazda
The Flying Terror of Texas Thunderbirds
Big Bend is also where the largest of pterosaur fossils has been discovered, the Quetzalcoatlus, with a wingspan of over 15 meters (45 feet). Though thought extinct over 65 million years ago, sightings have continued in Texas right up to this day. A large concentration of pterosaur sightings happened around the Rio Grande in the mid 1970s.
In Raymondville, on January 14, 1976, at about 10:30pm, a young man named Armando Grimaldo was sitting in the backyard of his mother-in-law’s house when he was attacked by a strange winged creature.
“As I was turning to go look over on the other side of the house,” said Armando to the Raymondville press, “I felt something grab me, something with big claws. I looked back and saw it and started running. I’ve never been scared of nothing [sic] before but this time I really was. That was the most scared I’ve ever been in my whole life.”
This strange flying attacker dove out of the sky - and it was something Grimaldo described as being about six feet tall with a wingspan he estimated as being from ten to twelve feet. Its skin was blackish-brown, leathery and featherless. It had huge red eyes.
Grimaldo was terrified. He screamed and tried to run but tripped and fell face first into the dirt. As he struggled up to continue running for his mother-in-law’s house, the beast’s claws continued to attempt to grasp him securely, tearing his clothes, which were now virtually ripped to shreds. He managed to dive under a bush and the attacking animal, now breathing heavily, flew away into the sky.
Grimaldo then crashed into the house, collapsing on the floor, muttering “pajaro” (Spanish for bird) over and over again. He was taken to the hospital, treated for shock and minor wounds, and released.
A short time later, in nearby Brownsville, on the Rio Grande, a similar creature slammed into the mobile home of Alverico Guajardo on the outskirts of town. Alverico went outside his trailer to investigate the crash he had heard. When he noticed a large animal next to the crash site, he got into his station wagon and turned the lights on to see the creature, which he later described as “something from another planet.”
As soon as the lights hit it, the thing rose up and glared at him with blazing red eyes. Alverico, paralyzed with fear, could only stare back at the creature whose long, bat-like wings were wrapped around its shoulders. All the while it was making a “horrible-sounding noise in its throat.” Finally, after two or three minutes of staring into the headlights of the station wagon, it backed away to a dirt road a few feet behind it and disappeared in the darkness.
The San Antonio Light Newspaper reported on February 26, 1976, that three local school teachers were driving to work on a road to the south of the city on February 24 when they saw an enormous bird sweeping low over cars on the road. It had a wingspan of 15-20 feet and leathery wings. It did not so much fly, as glide. They said that it was flying so low that when it swooped over the cars its shadow covered the entire road.
As the three watched this huge flying creature, they saw another flying creature off in the distance circling a herd of cattle. It looked, they thought, like an “oversized seagull.” They later scanned encyclopedias at their school and identified the creature as a pterosaur.
There are quite a few more but I’ll move on.
Ancient Inlaid Mosaic Tile Floor
From the private correspondence of a W.W.McCormick of Abilene, who related his grandfather’s account of a strange wall that was found buried in a coalmine:
In the year 1928, I, A.A.Mathis, was working in coal mine No.5, located two miles north of Heavener, Oklahoma. This was a shaft mine, mine was so deep that they let us down into it on an elevator… They pumped air down to us, it was so deep.
One night I shot four shots [referring to the charge to blast the coal loose] in room 24 of this mine, and the next morning there were several concrete blocks laying in the room. These blocks were 12-inch cubes and were so smooth and polished on the outside that all six sides could serve as mirrors. Yet they were full of gravel, because I chipped one of them open with my pick, and it was plain concrete inside.
As I started to timber the room up, it caved in - and I barely escaped. When I came back after the cave-in, a solid wall of these polished blocks was left exposed. About 100 to 150 yards farther down our air core, another miner struck this same wall - or something very similar.
Immediately, [the mining company officers] pulled us out of this wing and forbade us to tell anything we had seen.
The mine was closed in the fall of 1928, and the crew went to Kentucky.
Before I started working on this crew, they had a similar experience in mine 24 at Wilburton, Oklahoma in about the year 1926. They said they dug up two odd things: One was a solid block of silver in the shape of a barrel, and the other was a bone that was about the size of an elephant’s leg bone.
The silver block had the imprints of the staves on it, and the saw that first struck it cut off a chip on the edge of one end. The miners saw the silver dust the saw was pulling out and went back to dig out the block.
What was done with these things, I do not know. In the case of the blocks in my room in No.5, I don’t think any were kept.
Giant Footprints of White Sands
The White Sands National Monument contains some 176,000 acres of white alabaster. Geologists theorize that this gypsum was precipitated as winds dried up an inland sea. Somewhere in the great expanse of gypsum are what appear to be the sandal prints of some prehistoric human giant, who could only have made such impressions when the muddy sediment of the primeval sea was beginning to harden.
In the 1970s, the White Sands National Monument distributed a small booklet entitled “Story of the Great White Sands.” In this little booklet was told the story concerning the discovery of the gigantic human tracks:
In the fall of 1932, Ellis Wright, a government trapper, reported that he had found human tracks of unbelievable size imprinted in the gypsum rock on the west side of White Sands . . .
As Mr. Wright reported, there were thirteen human tracks… each [one] approximately 22 inches long and from eight-to-ten inches wide. It was the consensus [of the investigating group] that the tracks were made by a human being, for the print was perfect, and even the instep plainly marked. However, there was no one in the group who cared to venture a guess as to when the tracks were made, or how they came to be of their tremendous size. It is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Great White Sands.
Mary Wright, a columnist for the Silver City Enterprise, wrote in the April 1, 1971, “Happenings - Past and Present” that a local group of people had contacted a national monument ranger for a tour of the area in which Ellis Wright (apparently no relation) had found the ancient tracks of prehistoric humans. She reported that the group had discovered additional imprints in the gypsum. “Since these traces, which were in hardened caliche, were twice the size of [contemporary humans], who were these early day travelers and what could they have been seeking in the San Andreas Mountains? They were wearing some type of sandal or moccasin. They crossed these lakes when the caliche was soft, as their tracks show.”
The Strange Tunnels of New Mexico
The great lost treasure of the Apache chief Victorio. This amazing story involves Aztec and Spanish treasure, and a hollow mountain with cut-stone stairs going down to a beach on an underground river. The staircase even included a booby-trap, and the whole story would seem like some adventure fantasy were it not for the involvement of Presidential candidate and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the famous lawyer F. Lee Bailey, President Richard Nixon and even some Watergate burglars. A lawsuit stood for many years, and was famous in New Mexico, against the U.S. Army and the White Sands Missile Base for its appropriation of the vast treasure.
But before we get into that story, let us look briefly at the reality of ancient tunnels and underground works. These sometimes go for considerable distances. Because of my years of travel in South America, I was familiar with the legends of tunnels beneath the Andes. As I reported in my book Lost Cities & Ancient Mysteries of South America, the gold-clad mummies of the ancient Inca Kings, and much of the treasure from the fabulous Sun Temple, are believed to still be hidden in the tunnels that run under Cuzco and the ruins of a megalithic fortress called Sacsayhuaman above the city.
There are many stories of these tunnels, including one that tells of a treasure hunter who went into the tunnels and wandered through the labyrinth for several days. One morning, about a week after the adventurer had vanished, a priest was conducting mass in the church of Santo Domingo, built on the ruins of the Incan Temple of the Sun. The priest and his congregation were amazed to hear sharp rapping coming from beneath the church’s stone floor. Several worshippers crossed themselves and murmured about the devil. The priest quieted his congregation and then directed the removal of a large stone slab from the floor. The assembled group was astonished to see the treasure hunter emerge with a bar of gold in each hand.
The Peruvian government got into the act of exploring these Cuzco tunnels, ostensibly for scientific purposes. The Peruvian Seria Documental del Peru describes an expedition undertaken by staff from Lima University in 1923. Accompanied by an experienced speleologist, the party penetrated the trapezoid-shaped tunnels starting from an entrance at Cuzco.
They took measurements of the subterranean aperture and advanced in the direction of the coast. After a few days, members of the expedition at the entrance of the tunnel lost contact with the explorers inside, and no communication came for twelve days. Then a solitary, starving explorer returned to the entrance. His reports of an underground labyrinth of tunnels and deadly obstacles were like an Indiana Jones movie. His tale was so incredible that his colleagues declared him mad. To prevent further loss of life in the tunnels, the police dynamited the entrance.
As for North America, at the turn of the last century, while the American army was pursuing Geronimo around Arizona, he and his braves would ride into box canyons with the Cavalry in hot pursuit. The Indians would literally vanish, leaving the U.S. Army totally mystified. A day or two later, it would be reported that Geronimo and his troops had suddenly turned up in Mexico, hundreds of miles distant. This happened not once, but several times. Is it possible that Geronimo was using a system of ancient tunnels that exist in the American southwest?
I won’t go into the long and storied past of Victorio Peak, but jump to the first recorded exploration of the cavern in 1937 by Doc Noss. Apparently he took shelter from a storm under a rocky overhang near the summit of the mountain and spied a stone on the floor that looked as if it had been “worked” in some fashion. Moving it he found a hole that went straight down into the mountain. Returning later with a rope, he climbed down about sixty feet to the bottom of the shaft. Walking forward into a passage he then entered a small room. There were some chiseled rock-art faces and paintings on the walls. At one end of the room was another shaft, going steeply down into the mountain. Doc descended down this passage, apparently not needing a rope, and after about 125 feet the shaft leveled off into a natural cavern that had held several rooms. Some small rooms had been chiseled into one wall and the cavern stretched off into other larger rooms in the eerie darkness.
Suddenly Noss saw the skeleton of a man whose hands had been tied behind his back. He was in a kneeling position with his neck tied to a stake driven into the ground - a prisoner tortured and left to die. Then, as the glare from his flashlight fell farther back into the cavern, Noss saw more skeletons, each bound to stakes with their hands tied behind their backs. He later found even more skeletons stacked in a pile in one of the chambers, and counted 27 in total.
He continued to explore the caverns and began to find treasure. He found chests, some saying Wells Fargo on them, of coins, jewels, saddles, and priceless artifacts, such as gold crucifixes and a statue of Mary. There were also old letters, the most recent dated 1880, the year Victorio fled to Mexico.
Doc came to an underground stream that was flowing westward - it was dark and wide. He did not want to cross the stream - it was too wide to jump across, and he could not tell how deep it was. In the dark recesses of the caverns, it was quite frightening - a River Styx heading to the underworld. He could see other rooms on the far side, and eventually, with a staff to help him, he carefully crossed the stream, wading through it one step at a time. It was not too deep to wade across.
After crossing the underground stream, Doc entered the main treasure area of the cavern which comprised an altar room, living room, bedroom and finally a room with stacked gold bars weighting about 40 pounds apiece.
Doc was unable to sell the gold bars on the open market because of the Gold Act of 1933, an important act to treasure hunters - and finders - that made the private ownership of large amounts of gold illegal.
Long story short, Doc got gold fever, began burying the bars all over the desert, tried to widen access to the cavern causing an avalanche and sealing it shut, and was eventually shot in a classic double-cross with $2.16 in his pocket. His wife tried to get the rights to the land but the military ended up buying it and refusing anyone to enter and the rest is not history.
Los Lunas Stone
About 35 miles south of Albuquerque, the Los Lunas Inscription is carved into the flat face of a large bolder resting on the side of Hidden Mountain. It is basically a stone with the Ten Commandments written on it. The language is Hebrew, and the script is the Old Hebrew alphabet with a few Greek letters mixed in. I include this because it is one of many different artifacts and legends that Childress brings to light in his book that would seem to directly contradict the isolationist theory of America’s beginnings.
The Strange Elephant Stones of Aztec
Here’s another: About 1910 a small boy playing in Flora Vista, New Mexico, a tiny settlement along the Animas River just north of the Aztec ruins, dug up two slabs of carved rock inscribed with what appeared to be some sort of ancient writing.
The young boy presented the slabs to local archeologists and a controversy raged. First of all, the slabs contained a number of symbols of an ancient language that no one could decipher, and secondly, the slabs contained petroglyphs (rock drawings) of easily recognizable local indigenous animals - and animals that were obviously elephants, drawn complete with trunks, floppy ears and tusks.
The fact that elephants were carved on the slabs presented some serious problems. While mammoths had once roamed the area, they had become extinct, supposedly, over 10,000 years ago.
Similarly, while elephants still live in parts of Southeast Asia and Africa, official history maintains that North American communities were isolated from the rest of the world and would have been totally unaware of what an elephant looked like.
The Granby Idol
Another is the Granby Idol, found in Granby, Colorado, in 1920. A rancher named Bud Chalmers was removing rocks from an excavation he was planning for a reservoir. Though he was pitching heavy granite blocks, one rock seemed heavier then the others and he paused to look at it. It was 18 inches long by 12 inches wide, the black basalt had been carved into a smiling, primitive face by some ancient artist who could carve very hard stone.
The Granby Idol has three-fingered hands and unintelligible symbols carved around him. On the backside of the stone two figures were carved, one a prehistoric hairy mammoth and the other a long-necked dinosaur, similar to a brontosaurus.
The Granby Idol was featured in an article in Old West magazine in 1969, and diffusionist authorities such as Cyclone Covey took interest in the curious stone. Covey believed that the idol had ancient Chinese symbols on it and was proof of trans-Pacific voyages from China in ancient times. The idol has now disappeared and the area where it was found is now the flooded site of Granby Lake.
A Roman Kiln in Arizona
On September 13, 1924 Charles Manier found artifacts on Silverbell Road northwest of Tucson that included an array of ancient Roman objects, mostly made of lead. The trove, discovered in a lime kiln, included more than 30 items, including a 62-pound cross, spears, daggers, batons and swords. The objects were encrusted in caliche - a sheet of hard, crusty material formed by the reaction of chemicals and water in desert soils over many years. This encrustation was proof to the excavators that the objects were hundreds of years old.
One of the swords, bizarrely, depicts what appears to be a brontosaurus! One of the swords is quite clearly etched with a picture of a large animal with a long neck and a long tail that is an excellent sketch of a dinosaur known as a diplodocus. With details like this we can see why mainstream archeologists refuse to consider such finds.
Giants
A curious story is told about the discovery of a sarcophagus of a giant that was unearthed by workmen in Fort Crittenden, just north of Patagonia and just west of the ancient city of Baboquivari.
In 1891, workmen were digging the foundation of a house when they unearthed a stone coffin that once held the body of a man approximately 12 feet tall. A carving on the granite case indicated that he had twelve toes.
According to Brad Steiger, The New York Times on December 2, 1930 carried an item that told of the discovery of the remains of an apparent race of giants who once lived at Sayopa, Sonora. Sayopa is a mining town three hundred miles south of the Mexican border, south of Crittenden and Baboquivari. Steiger says that J.E.Coker, a mining engineer, stated that laborers clearing ranchland near the Yazui River had dug into a very old cemetery and had found “bodies of men, averaging eight feet in height, buried tier by tier.”
An Ancient Cavern in the Superstition Mountains
Here is the curious story about a sealed cave with a door cut into the rock that was published in the Phoenix Herald in 1892. The article is quoted in a chapter entitled “Royal Treasure?” published in a book entitled Arizona Cavalcade by Joseph Miller in 1962. The book is a compilation of old newspaper reports and it contains several very curious articles.
The 1892 article is about a man named Andrew Pauly who claimed to have made a discovery around 1889 while searching for some stolen horses. He saw a “most peculiar appearance of the face of the rock in one of the remote recesses of clefts of the cliff up which I had gone looking for water, which gave me the impression of the work of some human hand. It looked like a small door cut in the rock and again skillfully closed by some dusty material. I was too thirsty to have any curiosity then, so I pulled on for the top of the range.”
Andrew Pauly then returned to the place in 1892, believing that the sealed cave entrance was a door to a treasure chamber. Says the Phoenix Herald:
As was noted last week that he was about to go out in search of what he considered a very peculiar artificial opening in the rocks among the mountain which now prove to be not very remote from the orchard of the upper valley, Pauly started out with a prospector’s outfit and succeeded in finding the object of his search, and furthermore, that it was a genuine piece of masonry in a cut opening in the solid rock and of such thickness and consistency that with a prospecting pick, hammer, and other tools, he was five days in making an opening through the cement and rock that packed the opening which is not now much larger than a man can crawl through.
Pauly tells a wonderful story of his discovery in the chamber behind the barricade through which he has worked his way. He found a chamber apparently cut from solid rock not less than twenty by forty feet in dimension and about ten feet in height. The floor was covered by seven immense skeletons of men who in life must have been not less than seven feet in height, and there was further evidence that they must have been warriors as the remains of what were copper shields, copper spear heads, and battle axes and other artifacts were found with the skeletons.
A most interesting discovery was a small ornament, a crude amulet, apparently of gold, a metal that has never before been found in all the searches that have been made of the ancient Aztec mounds and ruins so plentifully distributed through this region of country. A yet more important and startling discovery was an opening at the farther end of the chamber also closed with what appears to be a sort of rude bronze door. So neatly and accurately filled into the solid rock that barring a jut of the rock over and at the sides of the door it might have grown there, so solid does it appear. It is about two by three feet in dimensions and of unknown thickness, but when struck sounds as though it either lay against solid rock or was of great thickness.
The mystery of this second discovery now occupies Pauly’s attention and he provided himself with the necessary means to remove the door or heavy bronze plate set in the side of the cave, or whatever it may be. As we have above indicated, the place may prove the treasure house of the Aztec tribes or it may prove nothing more than has been found, but at any rate the discovery is a startling and interesting one. Pauly, who works entirely alone, so far, traveled to town on foot yesterday, and guards his treasure with the greatest secrecy so far as its location is concerned, though he talked very freely with a Herald representative as to what he had found and what he thinks he may find which he believes to be nothing less than the treasure vault of an ancient royalty.
Nothing more was ever heard about this astonishing find. The seven-foot skeletons on the floor are very intriguing. Whatever else he may have found, Pauly apparently decided to keep it a secret - when large treasures are located, it is not really in the finder’s best interest to have the fact publicized. If there is anything unusual about Pauly, it is that he is too talkative to the press, though he was a former newspaperman himself.
I relate a similar story in my book Lost Cities of North & Central America. In this book I tell of a conversation I had more than 15 years ago with a friend in Sedona named Richard. Richard told me about some acquaintances who told him they had discovered a tunnel that goes underground for quite a distance in the Superstition Mountains.
According to him, “After penetrating deep into the cave they came to cut stones and carvings in the rock. The remains of ancient structures and walls made out of well-dressed rock were found. They then discovered at this place a spiral staircase built out of cut stones that descended down, down, down into the earth.
One person in the group descended the staircase and came to a large room with more cut stones. A gigantic rock-cut throne, big enough for a giant, or two people sitting together, was in the middle of the room. Supposedly there were artifacts on the walls. The team felt that they were in a sacred place that should not be disturbed and so left the tunnel, and decided to keep the entrance a secret.
Another bizarre tale told of the Superstitions involves a crystal skull that could be seen inside of a fissure of rock inside a cave somewhere in the northeast Superstitions. I had recently met with an acquaintance named Rob Boomer in Phoenix for lunch, and he showed me an old newsletter from the 1990s called Treasure Hunter Confidential. In it was a story entitled “Skull Cave” by Chuck Kenworthy.
Kenworthy claims that in 1984 a group of six men discovered a cave that had room for five men to stand inside. This cave is “120 feet upslope from Labarge Wash.” From this cave the men could look through a rock fissure about a foot wide and see a crystal (or glass) skull that is wedged inside the fissure as if it was guarding a room beyond. In fact, the men claimed that they could see a room beyond the skull and in this room they could see seven wooden boxes.
According to Kenworthy, the men attempted to use dynamite to blast the fissure into a wider passage, but only got two feet into the fissure that they thought was about 50 feet in length. Presuming that there were other entrances to the cave, they threw smoke bombs into the far room in the fissure, hoping to see the smoke come out of a hidden entrance. Unfortunately, they did not block up the entrance to the cave that they already knew about, and all the smoke came back out the entrance where they stood. They claimed that a steady breeze came through the fissure and it was impossible to keep a match lit. The Superstitions (to the east of Phoenix) abound in strange stories such as these.
The Egyptian City of the Grand Canyon
I covered this story in my other post: http://www.gatheringspot.net/news-article/general-discussion/world-histo... I won’t go into this story much further except to add what the 1909 newspaper article said about what it would’ve done to the modern archeologists theory of isolationism: “If their theories are born out by the translation of the tablets engraved with hieroglyphics, the mystery of the prehistoric peoples of North America, their ancient arts, who they were and whence they came, will be solved. Egypt and the Nile, and Arizona and the Colorado will be linked by a historical chain running back to ages which stagger the wildest fancy of the fictionist.”
And Childress’ later comment was interesting too: Could the Egyptians have actually made voyages to Mexico and the American Southwest, such as a trans-Pacific voyage? According to an Associated Press story released on January 28, 2006 an Italian-American archeological team announced that it had found the remains of well-preserved Egyptian ships in five caves along the Red Sea. The ships were dated to be about 4,000 year old.
An inscription on some wooden boxes indicated that the artifacts were from the land of Punt. The press release said that artifacts recovered included 80 coils of rope, and that the Supreme Council of Antiquities (?) director in Egypt, Zahi Hawass, said the remains showed that the ancient Egyptians were “excellent ship builders” and had a fleet capable of sailing to remote lands.
Ancient Mummy Found inside the Jerome Mines
The following story appeared in the Jerome Mining News on Dec. 8,1900:
A MUMMY FOUND IN AN AZTEC CAVE
One of the Most Wonderful Relics of the Lost
Race Which Inhabited Arizona 1,000 Years
Ago
The finding of a mummified man by workmen at the United Verde Mines on Monday, December 3, created some little excitement in Jerome. The body is undoubtedly that of a man who, during life was a giant, at least everything surrounding the find would signify that such was the case, as beside him was found a fire arm somewhat similar to the shot-gun used at the present time, but so large and of such weight that the average man of today could not pose it for shooting; besides the gun there were found near him working tools all of which were manufactured of tempered copper, showing that the man must have been buried over 1,000 years ago - during the first age of copper. The body is well preserved but has evidently shriveled, yet many of the most important parts have undoubtedly remained their natural size.
The Search for the Lost City of Death Valley
Researcher Rene Noorbergen, in discussing the evidence for a cataclysmic war in the remote past that included the use of airships and weapons that vitrified stone cities, says of Death Valley in his book Secrets of the Lost Races:
The most numerous vitrified remains in the New World are located in the Western United States. In 1850 the American explorer Captain Ives William Walker was the first to view some of these ruins, situated in Death Valley. He discovered a city about a mile long, with the lines of the streets and the positions of the buildings still visible. At the center he found a huge rock, between 20 to 30 feet high, with the remains of an enormous structure atop it. The southern side of both the rock and the building was melted and vitrified. Walker assumed that a volcano had been responsible for this phenomenon, but there is no volcano in the area. In addition, tectonic heat could not have caused such a liquification of the rock surface.
An associate of Captain Walker who followed up his initial exploration commented, “The whole region between the rivers Gila and San Juan is covered with remains. The ruins of cities are to be found there which must be most extensive, and they are burnt out and vitrified in part, full of fused stones and craters caused by fires which were hot enough to liquefy rock or metal. There are paving stones and houses torn with monstrous cracks… [as though they had] been attacked by a giant’s fire-plough.”
Other vitrified ruins have been found in parts of Southern California, Arizona and Colorado. The Mojave Desert is reported to contain several circular patches of fused glass.
Modern Tales of the Death Valley Underworld
Jim Brandon says in his book Weird America, “Piute legends tell of a city beneath Death Valley that they call Shin-au-av. Tom Wilson, an Indian guide in the 1920s, claimed that his grandfather had rediscovered the place by wandering into a miles-long labyrinth of caves beneath the valley floor.
“Eventually the Indian came to an underworld city where the people spoke an incomprehensible language and wore clothing made of leather.”
At one point in Bourke Lee’s book, Death Valley Men, Lee meets two men, Jack and Bill, who describe to Lee their conversation with two other men named White and Thomason about an ‘underground city’ which they claimed to have discovered. White and Thomason claimed that they found the catacombs after one of them had fallen through the bottom of an old mine shaft near Wingate Pass, which is in the southwest corner of Death Valley. Wingate Pass was the old route the mule teams took when hauling borax out of Death Valley in the 1800s.
The men, Thomason and White, said they found themselves in a natural underground cavern that they claimed went for about 20 miles north into the heart of the Panamint Mountains. To their amazement, they allegedly found themselves in a huge, ancient, underground cavern city. They claimed that they discovered within the city several perfectly preserved ‘mummies,’ which were clad in fine leather and wore thick gold armbands and wielded gold spears. The city had apparently been abandoned for ages, except for the mummies, and the entire underground system looked very ancient. It was formerly lit, they found out by accident, by an ingenious system of lights fed by subterranean gases.
They claimed to have seen a large, polished round table which looked as if it may have been part of an ancient council chamber, giant statues of solid gold, stone vaults and drawers full of gold bars and gemstones of all kinds, heavy stone wheelbarrows which were perfectly balanced and scientifically-constructed so that a child could use them, huge stone doors which were almost perfectly balanced by counterweights, and other incredible sights.
Thomason and White further claimed that they followed caverns upward to a higher level that ultimately opened out onto the face of the Panamints, about halfway up the eastern slope, in the form of a few ancient quays. They realized that the valley below was once part of a series of lakes and they eventually came to the conclusion that the arched openings were ancient ‘docks’ for sea vessels. They could allegedly see Furnace Creek Ranch and Wash far below them.
They told Jack and Bill that they had brought some of the treasure out of the caverns and tried to set up a deal with certain people, including scientists associated with the Smithsonian Institution, in order to gain help to explore and publicize the city as one of the ‘wonders of the world.’ These efforts ended in disappointment, however, when a ‘friend’ of theirs stole the treasure (which was also the evidence) and they were scoffed at and rejected by the scientists when they went to show them the ‘mine’ entrance and could not find it. A recent cloudburst, they claimed, had altered and rearranged the entire countryside and the landscape did not look like it had before.
In Lee’s book Death Valley Men he recounts the fascinating conversation Bill and Jack had with Thomason and White. I have excerpted below certain parts of the conversation that give further description of the fascinating find:
“It’s too bad you were delayed by your car,” said Jack with a carelessness he did not feel. “That’s the way it is. As soon as you have serious business that should be attended to, your car breaks down. That’s one of the many reasons why I have never purchased a car. Most of the other reasons were lack of the purchase price.”
“No harm done by the delay,” said Thomason. “Our business is safe. And you can buy your car very soon if you want to. What brought us down here to Death Valley was millions and millions of dollars! Uncounted millions of dollars!”
Millions and millions!” echoed White, bobbing his bald and shining head…
Thomason said, “I’ve been in and out of the Death Valley country for twenty years. So has my partner. We know where there is a lost treasure. We’ve known about it for several years, and we’re the only men in the world who do know about it. We’re going to let you two fellows in on it. You’ve been good to us. You’re both fine fellows. You haven’t asked us any questions about ourselves, and we like you. We think you can keep a secret, so we’ll tell you ours.”
Jack blew smoke and asked, “A lost mine?”
“No, not a mine,” said Thomason. “A lost treasure house. A lost city of gold. It’s bigger than any mine that ever was found, or ever will be.”
“It’s bigger than the United States Mint,” said White, with his voice and body shaken with excitement. “It’s a city thousands of years old and worth billions of dollars! Billions of dollars! Billions! Not millions. Billions!”
…Bill’s voice was meek as he asked, “And this place is in Death Valley?”
“Right in the Panamint Mountains!” said Thomason. “My partner found it by accident. He was prospecting down on the lower edge of the range near Wingate Pass. He was working in the bottom of an old abandoned shaft when the bottom of the shaft fell out and landed him in a tunnel. We’ve explored the tunnel since. It’s a natural tunnel like a big cave. It’s over twenty miles long. It leads all through a great underground city; through the treasure vaults, the royal palace, and the council chambers; and it connects to a series of beautiful galleries with stone arches in the east slope of the Panamint Mountains. Those arches are like great big windows in the side of the mountain and they look down on Death Valley. They’re high above the valley now, but we believe that those entrances in the mountainside were used by the ancient people that built the city. They used to land their boats there.”
“Boats!” demanded the astonished Bill, “boats in Death Valley?”
Jack choked and said, “Sure, boats. There used to be a lake in Death Valley. I hear the fishing was fine.”
…Thomason explained quietly, “These ancient people must have been having a meeting of their rulers in the council chamber when they were all killed very suddenly. We haven’t examined them very closely because it was the treasure that interested us, but the people all seem to be perfect mummies.”
Bill squinted at White and asked, “Ain’t it dark in this tunnel?”
“Black dark,” said White, who had his voice under control again. His outburst had quieted him. “When I first went into that council room I had just some candles. I fumbled around. I didn’t discover everything all at once like I’ve been telling you. I fell around over these men, and I was pretty near almost scared out of my head. But I got over that and everything was all right and I could see everything after I lit the lights.”
“Lights? There was lights?” It was Bill asking.
“Oh, yes,” said White. “These old people had a natural gas they used for lighting and cooking. I found it quite by accident. I was bumping around in the dark. Everything was hard and cold and I kept thinking I was seeing people and I was pretty scared. I stumbled over something on the floor and fell down. Before I could get up there was a little explosion and gas flames all around the room lighted up. What I fell over was the rock lever that turned on the gas, and my candle set the gas off. Then was when I saw all the men, and the polished table, and the big statue.”
…White polished his shining pate with a grimy handkerchief. “after I got the lights going I could see all the walls of this big room and I saw some doors cut in the solid rock of the walls. The door are big slabs of rock hung on hinges you can’t see. A big rock bar lets down across them. I tried to lift up the bars and couldn’t move them. I fooled around trying to get the doors open. It must have been an hour before I took hold of a little latch like on the short end of the bar and the great big bar swung up. Those people knew about counterweights and all those great big rock doors with their barlocks - they must weight hundreds of tons - are all balanced so you can move them with your little finger, if you find the right place.”
Thomason again said, “Tell them about the treasure.”
“It’s gold bars and precious stones. The treasure rooms are inside these big rock doors. The gold is stacked in small bars piled against the walls like bricks. The jewels are in bins cut into the rock. There’s so much gold and jewelry in that place that the people there had stone wheelbarrows to move the treasure around.”
“…Yes,” insisted White, pleasantly sure of himself. “A small boy could fill one of those stone wheelbarrows full of gold bars and wheel it around. The wheelbarrows are balanced just like the doors. Instead of having the wheel out in front so that a man has to pick up all the weight with his back, these wise old people put the wheel almost in the middle and arranged the leverage of the shafts so that a child could put in a balanced load and wheel the barrow around.”
…Bill asked, “Did you ever bring anything out of the cave?”
“Twice,” said Fred Thomason. “Both times I went in we filled our pockets with gems, and carried out a gold bar apiece. The first time we left the stuff with a friend of ours and went to try and interest someone in what we’d found. We thought the scientists would be interested or the government. One government man said he’d like to see the stuff and we went back to our friend to get the gold and jewels and he told us he’d never seen them; and dared us to try and get them back. You see, he double crossed us. We were in a little trouble at the time and the loss of that stuff put us in deeper. We couldn’t get a stake because we were having hard work making anyone believe us. So we made another trip out here for more proof. That time we brought out more treasure and buried it close to the shaft entrance to the underground city before we went back to the Coast. I persuaded some university officials and some experts from the Southwest Museum to come out here with me. We got up on the Panamints and I could not find the shaft. A cloudburst had changed all the country around the shaft. We were out of luck again. The scientists became unreasonably angry with us. They’ve done everything they can to discredit us ever since.”
Jack watched Thomason and White across the rim of his coffee cup. Bill said, “And now you can’t get into your treasure tunnel. It’s lost again. That’s sure too bad.”
Thomason and White smiled. “We can get in all right,” said Thomason in the genial voice his cold eyes did not support.
…Thomason turned to White: “How high do you think those galleries are above the bottom of Death Valley?”
White said, “Somewhere around forty-five hundred to five thousand feet. You looked out of them; what do you think?”
“That’s about right,” agreed Thomason. “The openings are right across from Furnace Creek Ranch. We could see the green of the ranch right below us and Furnace Creek Wash across the valley. We’ll find those windows in the mountains, all right.”
“You goin’ down there now?” asked Bill.
“That’s what we came in for,” said Thomason. “We’re going to take out enough gold to finance ourselves, and we’ll open that underground city as a curiosity of the world.”
“That’s it,” said White. “We’re through with the scientists. We tried to make a present of our discovery to science because we thought they would be interested. But they tried to rob us, and then laughed at us and abused us. Now, we’ll make ourselves rich!”
When Lee again heard from the two men, Bill and Jack, they were preparing to climb the east face of the Panamints to locate the ancient tunnel openings or quays high up on the side of the steep slope. Bourke Lee was fascinated by the story and eventually tried to find the entrance in the Panamints himself.
Thomason mentions a “government man” that they tried to interest in their startling find. Is it possible that the government did indeed become very interested in the underground catacombs of Death Valley? The southwestern portion of Death Valley around Wingate Pass did, in fact, become part of the China Lake Naval Weapons Center. Had the government possibly explored the Wingate Pass underground passages themselves and then decided to take the area over?
Here we have the possibility that a similar lost treasure snatch by the military was made at Death Valley as was made at Victorio Peak in New Mexico, and possibly at the Egyptian caverns excavated in the Grand Canyon in 1909.
Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa
The Racetrack Playa is a dry lakebed (“playa” means “beach” in Spanish) where large rocks mysteriously move about on their own, as evidenced by trails in the ground on which these rocks lie. Scientists have wondered for years just how these stones move for hundreds of yards across the desert.
According to Mike Marinacci in his book, Mysterious California, rocks of various sizes and shapes lying on the lakebed move silently and secretively across its surface, cutting furrows in the earth and leaving trails up to 1,200 feet long. The rocks range in size from pebbles to 600-pound boulders. No one has ever actually seen the rocks moving, but careful recordkeeping by rangers and researchers shows that some unknown process does indeed roll and slide them over the alkaline flat lakebed.
Says Marinacci, “The most popular theory says that high winds push the rocks across a thin film of ice formed by rainwater. However, this doesn’t explain why some rock trails are zigzagged, while others are straight, curved, irregular or even full circles. Also, some formerly adjacent rocks have moved in completely opposite directions.”
Indeed, as we looked out across the playa in the late afternoon sun, we could see scores of rocks at the southeast part of the dry lakebed that had come off of a cliff at that end of the playa. These rocks had clearly fallen off onto the lakebed, and many had just taken off, apparently on their own, across the flat terrain.
Zoot Suit Giants and Dinosaurs
Death Valley Men had been written in 1932, and covered largely events from the 1920s. The stories of underground catacombs complete with mummies and artifacts just would not go away, however. Witness this press release from Los Angeles on August 4, 1947, concerning a group called Amazing Exploration, Incorporated, that appeared in a number of newspapers in California and Nevada. Says the San Diego Union version of the story:
TRACE OF GIANTS FOUND IN DESERT
Los Angeles, Aug 4. 1947. (AP) - A retired Ohio doctor has discovered relics of an ancient civilization, whose men were 8 or 9 feet tall in the Colorado Desert near the Arizona-Nevada-California line, an associate said today.
Howard E. Hill of Los Angeles, speaking before the Transportation Club, disclosed that several well-preserved mummies were taken yesterday from caverns in an area roughly 180 miles square, extending through much of southern Nevada from Death Valley, Calif. Across the Colorado River into Arizona.
Hill said the discoverer is Dr. F. Bruce Russell, retired Cincinnati physician, who stumbled on the first of several tunnels in 1931, soon after coming west and deciding to try mining for his health.
Mummies Found
Not until this year, however, did Dr. Russell go into the situation thoroughly, Hill told the luncheon. With Dr. Daniel S. Bovee, of Los Angeles - who with his father helped open up New Mexico’s cliff dwellings - Dr. Russell has found mummified remains together with implements of the civilization, which Dr. Bovee had tentatively placed at about 80,000 years old.
“These giants are clothes in garments consisting of a medium length jacket and trouser extending slightly below the knees,” said Hill. “The texture of the material is said to resemble gray dyed sheepskin, but obviously it was taken from an animal unknown today.”
Markings Discovered
Hill said that in another cavern was found the ritual hall of the ancient people, together with devices and marking similar to those now used by the Masonic order. In a long tunnel were well-preserved remains of animals including elephants and tigers. So far, Hill added, no women have been found.
He said the explorers believe that what they found was the burial place of the tribe’s hierarchy. Hieroglyphics, he added, bear a resemblance to what is known of those from the lost continent of Atlantis. (???) They are chiseled, he added, on carefully-polished granite.
He said Dr. Viola V. Pettit, of London, who made excavations around Petra, on the Arabian Desert, soon will begin an inspection of the remains.
Another version of this story appeared in the Hot Citizen, a Nevada paper, on August 5, 1947. The story is here reprinted in full:
EXPEDITION REPORTS NINE-FOOT
SKELETONS
A band of amateur archaeologists announced today they have discovered a lost civilization of men nine feet tall in California caverns. Howard E. Hill, spokesman for the expedition said the civilization may be “the fabled lost continent of Atlantis.”
The caves contain mummies of men and animals and implements of a culture 80,000 years old but “in some respects more advanced than ours,” Hill said. He said the 32 caves covered a 180-square-mile area in California’s Death Valley and Southern Nevada.
Archeologists Skeptical
“This discovery may be more important than the unveiling of King Tut’s tomb,” he said.
Professional archaeologists were skeptical of Hill’s story. Los Angeles County Museum scientists pointed out that dinosaurs and tigers which Hill said lay side by side in the caves appeared on earth 10,000,000 to 13,000,000 years apart.
Hill said the caves were discovered in 1931 by Dr. F. Bruce Russell, Beverly Hills physician, who literally fell in while sinking a shaft for a mining claim.
“He tried for years to interest people in them,” Hill said, “but nobody believed him.”
Russell and several hobbyists incorporated after the war as Amazing Explorations, Inc. and started digging. Several caverns contained mummified remains of “a race of men eight to nine feet tall,” Hill said, “they apparently wore a prehistoric zoot suit - a hair garment of medium length, jacket and knee length trousers.”
Cavern Temple Found
Another cavern contained their ritual hall with devices and markings similar to the Masonic order, he said.
“A long tunnel from this temple took the party into a room where,” Hill said, “well-preserved remains of dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, imperial elephants and other extinct beasts were paired off in niches as if on display.
“Some catastrophe apparently drove the people into the caves,” he said. “All of the implements of their civilization were found,” he said, “including household utensils and stoves which apparently cooked by radio waves.”
“I know,” he said, “that you won’t believe that.”
The extinct animals on display in the caves was the portion of the tale that caused the Los Angeles County Museum officials to lose interest in the story, as it was too incredible to be believed.
Dr. Russell apparently died near his car, another victim of one of the harshest deserts in the world. According to Mike Marinacci in Mysterious California, “The desert can be very deceiving to anyone not used to traveling it. Month’s later Russell’s car was found abandoned, with a burst radiator, in a remote area of Death Valley. His suitcase was still in the car.
Marinacci hints that there has been some sort of cover-up involving the supposed discoveries around Death Valley and concludes, “For now, these stories will have to be shrouded in mystery, along with the 21,000 year old bones found in California’s Imperial Valley, also rumored to have been spirited off by the Smithsonian.”
Excavations of Giants in Death Valley 1898
H. Flagler Cowden and his brother Charles C. Cowden, who were said to be scientists dedicated to the study of desert antiquities, uncovered the skeletal remains of a giant female, seven and a half feet tall. The fossilized remains of the seven-and-a-half foot woman were found at a depth of five feet in a “hard-rock formation of conglomerate containing small amounts of silica, which required a longer time to petrify than normal desert sands.”
Says Brad Steiger in his book, Montezuma’s Serpent:
In the June 1970 issue of Wild West magazine, Ed Earl Repp recalled that “in the same earth-strata where the giant female skeleton was found, they also recovered the remains of prehistoric camels and mammals of …an elephant-like creature with four tusks… With them were the remains of petrified palm trees, towering ferns, and prehistoric fishlike creatures.”
The two brothers also found that the giant woman’s skeleton bore a number of anomalous physical appendages and attributes not found in contemporary humans. The existence of several extra “buttons” at the base of the woman’s spine indicated that she and her people were endowed with tails. They also discovered that her canine teeth were twice the length of modern humans.
Mummified Giant Woman Found in 1895
In July 1895 a party of miners working near Bridlevale Falls found the tomb of a woman whose skeletal remains indicated that she had stood six feet, eight inches.
Yet More Mummies
In his book Stranger Than Science, Frank Edwards describes how, in 1833, soldiers digging a pit for a powder magazine at Lombock Rancho (near San Luis Obispo) hacked their way through a layer of cemented gravel and came up with the skeleton of a man about twelve feet tall. The skeleton was surrounded by carved shells, huge stone axes, and blocks of porphyry covered with unintelligible symbols. The giant was noteworthy in still another respect: he had a double row of teeth, both upper and lower. When local Indians began to attach a religious significance to the skeleton and artifacts, the authorities ordered it secretly buried, so it is lost to science.
Edwards also mentions that another giant man was found off the California coast of Santa Rosa Island in the 1800s. He also had a double row of teeth. These giants may have been the ones who roasted the dwarf mammoths on the island thousands of years ago.
Another interesting tale of California giants comes from one of the state’s most famous desert rats, a blonde-haired adventuress named Choral Pepper. Choral, with her husband Jack, published Desert Magazine in the 1960s and wrote books up until the 1980s. In her 1973 book entitled Baja California: Vanished Missions, Lost Treasures, Strange Stories Tall and True, she mentions a curious story from Mission San Ignacio de Kadakaman, known usually as simply San Ignacio, an oasis of the Cochimi Indians. Pepper says that the village became alarmed when sometime after 1752, Padre George Retz “dug up a gigantic skeleton at Rancho San Joaquin, about ten miles to the south. He reported that the bones exactly resembled those of a human being, with the dimensions of the skull, vertebrae and leg bones representative of a man over eleven feet tall. This find caused the missionaries to have second thoughts about the natives’ report that the cave paintings in the region’s canyons were executed by giants.”
Concludes Pepper in the story of the San Ignacio giant, “There was no further investigation along this line so far as I know, although ranchers in isolated places occasionally reported that they had come upon abnormally large skeletal remains.”
Mystery Ships in the Desert
Pepper, in her book Desert Lore of Southern California, mentions several interesting ships found in the desert. One persistent story concerns Senora Petra Tucker who, before she married her prospecting husband, was the widow of a man named Santiago Socia. It was Santiago who first found an “ancient ship of the desert.”
Santiago had recently moved from Mexico City to Tecate where his new wife was to join him. While awaiting her, he met a local with a map to some gold ore buried about forty kilometers northeast of Tecate. Armed with the map, which he had purchased from the man with his last pay, he set forth immediately after Petra’s arrival. Santiago came back a month later, poorer but wiser. However, he was not empty-handed. The souvenir he brought home was a shield made of metal in the shape of a round tortilla, only larger. Says Pepper:
Santiago had a strange story to tell. While searching for the treasure, he had entered several canyons near the floor of the desert. In the bottom of one with high sheer walls stood an ancient ship with round discs on its side. Only a portion of the ship projected from the sand. There was strange writing on the wall above the ship which Santiago didn’t recognize as Indian, Spanish or English. The bow of the ship was curved and carved like the long neck of a bird. It was one of the discs attached to the ship’s side that he had brought home to Petra. When she remarried after Santiago’s death, it was discarded, but she often spoke of the strange ship.
An intriguing record turned up in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the mid-50s that revealed an official inquiry held by the Spanish court in 1574. A strange fleet of three large and five small vessels had been sighted sailing north in the Gulf of California. The vessels resembled Galician caravels with carved pelican figureheads. Because they obviously were not of Spanish origin, the Crown had ordered an investigation. Witnesses included Spanish soldiers and Indians who lived in pueblos along the western coast of Mexico. All described the vessels in a similar manner. One of the witnesses was a Franciscan friar who was brought up in a European seaport and was familiar with the sailing vessels of many nations. Never had he seen vessels such as these.
Pepper and Marinacci both tell of how, back in the 1930’s, the Agua Caliente Springs were known only to a few locals, such as Myrtle and Louis Botts of nearby Julian. Myrtle, an amateur botanist, was especially fond of the springs, since brilliant wildflowers grew in the canyons above them.
The story goes that in early 1933, she and her husband, on a wildflower hunt here, were camped at the mouth of a canyon. Myrtle had just prepared a campfire meal when an old desert rat came up to them from out of nowhere. They invited him to share their dinner and he began to tell them a few stories. A few days earlier, he told the Bottses, he had been far into a canyon where he had seen an old ship sticking right out of the side of a mountain. Because he also claimed to know where the Peg Leg gold was, the Bottses laughed and went on with their dinner.
The next morning the Bottses hiked into the canyon. As the grade got steeper, they took a rest. Then, they saw, jutting out of the canyon wall, almost immediately overhead, the forward portion of a large and very ancient vessel. A curved head swept up from its prow. Along both sides of the vessel were clearly discernible, circular marks in the wood, quite possibly left by shields that at one time had been attached to the vessel. Near the bow, on one side of the ship, were four deep furrows in the wood. The craft was high enough to hide its interior from the Bottses’ view and the side of the canyon was so steep that it could be scaled only by an expert mountain climber.
For a long time, the Botts studied the curious sight. Then they retraced their steps back to their camp, taking careful note of the landmarks in order to experience to difficulty in returning to the ship. Suddenly, the big earthquake of 1933 struck southern California just as they were returning to their camp. Both were thrown to the ground and their car was bounced along the desert in front of them. The canyon they had just exited became a disaster of landslides. If they had lingered there any longer, they would have been buried in tons of earth.
Myrtle was tantalized by the mysterious wreck, and immediately began to read up on ancient ships at the library where she worked. After several days of study, she decided that the craft most closely resembled one of the old Viking sea raiders, though she couldn’t bring herself to believe that Norsemen sailed the ship over 40 miles of mountains to Agua Caliente. Other ancient ships looked like this as well, and it could have been Phoenician or Roman.
Myrtle and her husband resolved to visit Agua Caliente Springs the following weekend, and take pictures of the craft to prove it existed. But when they returned to the canyon, they were (not surprisingly) stopped short by a slide that blocked the trail where they had hiked a week earlier. There was no trace of the ship or the canyon wall that held it. The Bottses decided that the great 1933 earthquake had shaken tons of earth loose from the mountain, and buried the ancient ship beneath it.
Another example of stone doors with an intricate system of hinges and locks
When I came across the tales of the Death Valley underworld it immediately reminded me of another book I’d recently read entitled, A Dweller on Two Planets. Supposedly recounting an individual’s lives on both Atlantis and 19th Century earth, the story told how the protagonist died by being trapped in a bizarre stone house in a cavern at the foot of the Andes. I include it here for your consideration:
I found the bottom of the cavern to be of the same rocky character as the bed of the arroyo. I knew it was not mineral bearing, but my curiosity was aroused and I concluded to go to the end of the tunnel. In my pocket I had a small lighting battery and incandescent bulb, and when it grew dark in the cave by reason of my distance from the entrance, I used this to illumine by pathway. For fully half a mile I found the cave to open on before me. At that point I stopped, overcome by surprise. In all that region I had not seen a sign of human presence, recent or ancient, until now. But before me, only partially exposed, stood a house, presenting its corner and part of two heavy walls of basalt. I dropped my lumen in my surprise, and it broke on the rocky floor, extinguishing the light. But it was not altogether dark about me, for daylight filtered in from some source.
Long I stood there in that gloomy cavern, gazing upon the ruined house. Whence had come its builders, and in what forgotten age? Where had they gone? Was this but a solitary building, or were there others hidden in the sands of the plain nearby, but not uncovered? Conjecture had here full play, for in all the annals of Poseid, covering decades of centuries with concisely written records, no mention was made of any people, civilized, or even savage, having had inhabitants in this “No Man’s Land.” The only tenable conclusion was that I now gazed upon the relic of some people so ancient as to antedate even Poseid’s forty centuries. At length I crossed the cave’s short width in order more closely to examine this remnant of the dim past, a past forgotten even when Poseid was young. In the side of the building nearest to me was a doorway through the smooth, finely chiseled basalt blocks forming the wall. Partly ajar swung a door, apparently formed of a single slab of basalt about six inches thick by the proper proportions otherwise. Impelled by curiosity, I stepped into the room, which was easily done without disturbing the door from the position it had so long occupied. My reason greatly disliked the admission that even a stone structure should so long have withstood the effects of time; but it was only thus explainable, so I dismissed conjecture for the time.
I found the three dimensions of the interior apparently equal, and about sixteen feet every way. There was but the single door to give entrance. Excepting two parallel openings in the roof, formed by placing a stone of less width by a span on either side of the opening it would otherwise have filled, there was no break in the solid masonry. The floor, which was thinly covered by sand, I found to be made of granite, the jointure of which was as perfect as that of the walls - not a sheet of paper could have been slipped between any two blocks. After exploring thus far, I leaned against the wall, near enough to the door to touch it without change of place, and letting my gaze rest on the barred grating in the ceiling, gave myself to reflection. How cold and gloomy it seemed in that lonely room, relic of a bygone age, forgotten by even so old a race as ours. The solid construction, the simple severity of its plan, all forcibly brought to mind the descriptions given of prisons in Poseid in ante-Maxin days. Was it the solitary example of building skill of its constructors in which I now stood, or was it one of a collection forming a buried city? How this particular building came to be clear of sand in its interior was easy to see. The rain waters had percolated through the shallow soil above, and had run through the crack which I have mentioned as giving light to the cavern. A part of the flow had gone outside, thus exposing two sides of the corner of the house; the rest of the water, running on the flat roof, had entered through the grating. Seeping thence through the sand in the room it had carried it out of the door standing open at the side.
Satisfied with my reflective study, I began to think of returning to the open air, and to my horse (he also had a flying vehicle nearby called a vailx). As I turned to pass out, curiosity impelled me to swing the ponderous door on its hinges, if I had strength. Expecting that much effort would be required, I gave force to the action. Alas, for my superficial examination of the slab. I had observed no sign of a lock of any sort, and did not imagine any existed. Hardly any effort was needed to swing the deceitful door, and it went to with such quickness that I lost my balance and fell against the wall, striking my head so severely as to render me unconscious. When I recovered I found the door shut and securely locked. In my cursory notice of it I had not seen that instead of a simple slab it was made of two plates of stone, separated at the edges by a segment of a third plate, forming thus a hollow space between the outer surfaces. In that space there was concealed an arrangement of bolts and bars of stone, working on the gravity-drop principle and releasing the locking-bolts when the door shut tight to place. The ends of these, four in number, then shot into recesses in the wall, and the door was securely locked.
Being of a calm disposition, given to reliance on my scientific knowledge, the discovery that I was imprisoned did not discompose me in any great degree. Instead, I sought for some means of withdrawing the bolts. But none existed. I now thought in dismay that I had not a single tool with me with which to dig out of this gloomy prison.
Fascinating stuff, Francis! I've pasted it into a Word Doc for a later read. Thanks