neighboring caves. The ham tribe distrusted them and hunted down the survivors and killed some
of them.
According to Dr. Tsum Um Nui, one of the first lines of the hieroglyphs reads: "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 mentions that the Ham Tribe
eventually became the friends of the Dropa and even expressed regret that their spaceship had
crash-landed in such remote and inaccessible mountains and that there had been no way of
building a new one to enable the Dropa to return to their own planet.
However, in those 27 years since the discovery of the first disc, archeologists and
anthropologists had also learned a good deal more about the isolated Bayan-Kara-Ula region and
much of the information seemed to corroborate the bizarre story recorded on the discs. Local
legends, still surviving in the area, also speak of small, gaunt, yellow faced men who 'came from
the clouds, long, long ago'. These legends tell of men who had huge, bulging heads and puny
bodies and were considered to be so ugly and repellent that they were hunted down by local
tribesmen on horseback and many were killed. The description of the 'invaders' is also remarkably
close to the skeletons originally discovered in the caves in 1938 by Professor Chi Pu Tei.
Most interestingly, the cave systems of the BayanKara-Ula Mountain area are still inhabited
today by two semi-troglodyte tribes known as the Hams and the Dropas. The Dropa tribesmen are
themselves, extremely odd in appearance, being somewhat frail and stunted and averaging only
about five feet in height. They are neither typically Chinese nor Tibetan and anthropologists
readily admit: "Their racial back-ground really is a mystery." Are the Dropa the descendants of
the people mentioned in the discs? Do these strange discs actually record a disastrous space
mission by alien astronauts 12,000 years ago? Nearly all the leading theorists believe so. We may
never know for sure but the message contained in the discs is extremely fascinating none the less.
A Fossilized Human Finger
Another similar artifact that simply just should not exist is this fossilized human finger. The
fossil, known simply as "DM93-083" dates from the Cretaceous Period or about 100 to 110
million years ago (fig.41). X-Rays of the specimen have also shown some less dense areas within
the finger revealing the presence of marrow within the bone, shown in the slide by the darker
areas.
Fig.41