Well, uncovered by ground-pentrating radar. Can't wait for them to actually go inside:

Construction of this mausoleum began in 246 BC and is believed to have taken 700,000 workers and craftsmen 38 years to complete. Qin Shi Huangdi was interred inside the tomb complex upon his death in 210 BC. According to the Grand Historian Sima Qian (145 BC-90 BC), the First Emperor was buried alongside great amounts of treasure and objects of craftsmanship, as well as a scale replica of the universe complete with gemmed ceilings representing the cosmos, and flowing mercury representing the great earthly bodies of water. Pearls were also placed on the ceilings in the tomb to represent the stars, planets, etc. Recent scientific work at the site has shown high levels of mercury in the soil of Mount Lishan, tentatively indicating an accurate description of the site’s contents by historian Sima Qian.

Posted by Rob at  Survive2012.com/news - Wednesday, November 14, 2007

More at: Emperor Qin Shihuang's Tomb
From: China.org

by Ashley Rye 3/18/2000
Reprinted from Cyberspaceorbit.com

Note: This article contains many references to the mercury and surrounding archaeological issues. Those referenced will be highlighted.

Since the end of the Second World War, rumors regarding the existence of giant pyramids in China have been appearing with increasing regularity in the press and literature of many countries. There has been talk of structures whose size puts to shame the Cheops Pyramid of Egypt and the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan in Mexico.

I’ve journeyed deep into China three times to discover the truth behind these rumors. All three times, these pilgrimages have taken me into Shaanxi Province, to an area about 40 miles south-west of the ancient Chinese capital of Xian, in the mountainous Qin Ling Shan region.

I was searching for a pyramid which was said to have been, once, many millennia ago, multicolored, and to now be a dusty white. This was a pyramid which, legend has it, rises to the aston-ishing height of 1,000 feet - four-fifths the elevation of the Empire State Building. Not only was this extraordinary structure said to be the largest pyramid in the world (the Giant Pyramid of Egypt, by comparison, rises a mere 450 feet); but, in the valleys surround-ing it, there were said to be dozens of other pyramids, some rising to an elevation almost as great.

Until recently, Chinese officials have rebuffed all questions about these pyramids and all requests to view them. And yet, over this century, a certain mythology has grown up around them. An American trader, stumbling upon these amazing structures in 1912, asked his Buddhist monk-guide about them. He was told that 5,000-year-old monastic documents not only contained informa-tion about these pyramids, but said the pyramids were extremely old when these records were made.

The trader, Fred Meyer Schroder, observed several smaller pyra-mids in the distance. He wrote in his travel diary that his first sight of the giant pyramid, along with its smaller cousins, ren-dered him almost speechless. "It was even more uncanny than if we had found it in the wilderness," he wrote. "But those [ pyra-mids) were to some extent exposed to the eyes of the world—but still totally unknown in the western world."

In the Far East in the spring of 1945, though Japanese troops were still fighting in China, the U.S. Army and its allies were well on their way to pushing the Japanese off the mainland. One day, U.S. Air Force Pilot James Gaussman was returning to Assam, in India, after having flown the ‘Burma Hump’-ferried supplies to Chungking, China, from India-when engine trouble forced him to descend temporarily to a low altitude over China. As he later wrote:

"I flew around a mountain and then we came to a valley. Di-rectly below us was a gigantic white pyramid. It looked as if it were from a fairy tale. The pyramid was draped in shimmering white. It could have been metal, or some other form of stone. It was white on all sides. VUhat was most curious about it was its capstone: a large piece of precious gem-like material. I was deeply moved by the colossal size of the thing."

When Gaussman arrived back in Assam, combat duties pushed the sighting from his mind. Photographs he had taken of the giant pyramid would not be published for another 45 years. Till then, even his report would be buried in the Secret Service files of the U.S. military

Two years later, in 1947, another U.S. aviator, Maurice Sheahan—this time flying over Shaanxi Province, not far from Xian-- caught sight of a giant pyramid in the misty landscape below and rapidly snapped pictures. This time, several U.S. newspapers, in-cluding the New York Times for March 28, 1947, published ac-counts of the airman’s sighting. But Chinese archaeologists con-tinued to deny the existence of such a structure, even though Sheahan’s photographs suggested it was higher than any pyramid in Egypt.

Captain Bruce Cathie, of Auckland, New Zealand, is an air- line pilot turned explorer and UFO investigator. In 1962, reading Schroder’s diaries, he decided to get to the truth about these pyramids in China. Cathie contacted the Chinese embassy in Wellington. To his surprise, he was told there were no such things as pyramids in China. Later, the authorities acknowledged the existence of such structures, but would not characterize them as pyramids. Rather, they told Cathie, these were trapezoidal burial tombs dating from the Han Dynasty

In his book, The Bridge to Infinity, Cathie sets forth his theory that the Great Pyramid of China—which he was never able to lo-cate—is part of an ancient network of pyramids built at key places around the world to tap the earth’s natural energies. He suggests that these structures mark the intersecting points of ley lines, or dragon ways. Does Cathie believe these ‘orthotenic’ lines, to use Aime Michel’s phrase, represent the flight paths of UFOs, with greatest activity at intersecting points like those of the pyramids? Yes, he does; and he seems to imagine the earth as encircled by UFO flights in the ancient past.

Whether what Cathie calls "world grid harmonics" includes in its network the legendary White Pyramid of China or not, it seemed clear to me that the symbol of a white pyramid of China resonated powerfully on a psychic level, that it was at the very least a powerful conduit of psychic energy—whether it had any physical reality or not.

But there was no shortage of those who claimed it did. Well-known American traveler and author David Hatcher Childress reports in his writings that archaeological excavations of the White Pyramid have brought to light magnificent jade objects and "green stones." But he offers no corroboration for this provocative state-ment. Still, along with the stories I have just recounted, I had heard so many vague rumors about the pyramid’s actual existence, that I resolved once and for all to get to the heart of the matter.

Journey into the "Forbidden Zone":

The Sixteen Pyramids of Xian

And so it was that, in the summer of 1994, I found myself along with my friend and colleague, Austrian journalist Peter Krassa-in a green agricultural area about 50 miles from Xian. It had not been easy for us to get here. We were in one of Chinas "forbidden zones"-it was, we thought, highly probable that we were near a top-secret military base-and we were certainly the only tourists here, and almost the only people.

We had managed to get to Xian almost entirely by chance. In Vienna, early in 1994, I had been lucky enough one evening to meet Mr. Chen Jianli, who had come to the Austrian capital to give a lecture promoting tourism in China. I had broached to him the subject of my research into the more mysterious artifacts of China, including its rumored pyramids.

My enthusiasm made Mr. Chen smile. It so happened that he had been born in Xian; that was why, despite the official party line, he did not consider the subject of pyramids in China to be nonsense. As a matter of fact, he had, even as a small boy, heard people talking about them. It was his understanding that there was a group of pyramids not far from Xian, all of them at least 2,000 years old, but not all of them necessarily regarded strictly as pyramids. But he didn’t know for certain; and people did not-or could not-go to where these structures were supposed to be.

And so it was that, after an evening of lively discussion, Mr. Chen Jianli offered to contact his acquaintances and officials at the appropriate ministry in Beijing, and make it possible for me and a small group of interested individuals to obtain permission to travel to this up-till-then forbidden zone in Shaanxi Province. And, through his connections in the Chinese capital, he was indeed able to obtain a special permit for me to travel to the forbidden zone near Xian-not once, but three times; in March and Octo-ber of 1994, and again in the summer of 1997.

Arriving for my first visit, I first spent a brief time in Beijing, where I discovered that the Chinese really do not like to talk about their pyramids. When I brought up the subject with certain high-ranking archaeologists at the Academy of Sciences, I couldn’t help noticing a certain anxiety. Only when I showed them the Gaussman photo did they reluctantly confirm the existence of "just a few pyramidal structures near Xian."

A few days later, Peter Krassa and I were standing in a green, partially cultivated plain j ust a mile from the township of Xianyang, and about 40 miles west of Xian, that former imperial capital that is now regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilization.

There was no 1,000-foot-high White Pyramid to be seen. But there were indeed pyramids in this silent plain which did not need my imagination to invest it with a certain magical beauty. Before me stood a beautifully symmetrical pyramid about 200 feet high. Numerous small trees were planted up and down its sides; I had been told that, over the past four or five years, the Chinese had been planting fast-growing conifers-a kind of Cypress tree—on the slopes of these pyramids. I wondered briefly what they were trying to hide by making these extraordinary artifacts blend so completely with their surroundings.

(alternative explanation given, ostensibly to hold the soil structure in place and prevent it from crumbling...Ash)

I scrambled quickly to the top of this pyramid, the first that we had encountered. The construction of these smaller Chinese pyramids is similar to that of the pyramids of Teotiuhuacan, near Mexico City: piled earth - almost clay, with stepped sides, hardly the spectacular engineering of Pharaoh Khufu. The tops of most of these Chinese structures are flattened off, as is the case with the often-rectangular structures of the Mayans.

These Chinese pyramids are undecorated, and significantly damaged by erosion and farming. Their earthen sides-or such was the case with the small pyramid on which I stood-have be-corne almost as hard as stone over the centuries. I noticed that I was standing in a sort of crater, indicating to me that there had once been a cavern in this structure before the elements had caused its roof to collapse.

What secrets might lie within this pyramid? It had been vaguely suggested to me that these were burial mounds dating back per-haps 2,000 years. When I had asked the local ‘archaeologist’ and museum curator in Xian, several days earlier, what work was being done on these smaller pyramids to discover their origins, he had replied: "None. We have been given no money nor instructions. It will have to be for the next generation."

At least as exciting for me as this pyramid was the view from its summit. In the distance, I could make out at least 15 other similar pyramids, spread out before me in a panoramic sweep. Some stood in solitary fashion, while others were grouped in twos or even in rows. There were pyramids as far as the eye could see. I wondered what strange events had unfolded in relation to these pyramids in ancient times. Now there was nothing but the green fields, the pyramids, and a silence broken only by the slow move-ments of the handful of farmers working the ground with ploughs so primitive they must have looked just the same when these pyra-mids were built.

Chinese Pyramids as Mirrors of the Stars

During this visit, and during my second later that year-and on my third in the summer of 1997-I found no evidence for the physical existence of the fabulous White Pyramid of China. But, strolling from one of these time-worn structures to another, I be-gan to feel almost at home in this strange, eerily beautiful, city of the dead? I didn’t know; but, as I continued to meet officials and to cautiously feel them out, I began to discover that there were indeed theories about these 16 pyramids near Xian, and that some of these theories were of a decidedly mystical nature. There were seemingly staid government scientists whose views were not entirely dissimilar to those of Bruce Cathie of New Zealand.

Professor Wang Shiping, of Xian, who discussed these matters with Peter Krassa and myself near the site of the pyramids, told us he believed they might in actual fact be part of a giant system of sacred lines expressive of the feng shui concept of the ‘ways of the dragon.’ Dr. Wang said he estimated the age of these pyramids at 4,500 years and that he believed they might have been arranged to mirror the shapes of certain constellations in the night sky, just as certain key pyramids in Egypt are now thought to have been con-structed in imitation of the constellation Orion and related stars. The Chinese pyramids near Xian bear witness, suggested Professor Wang Shiping, to the immense knowledge of geometry and math-ematics enjoyed by the Chinese of almost five millennia ago.

Peter Krassa and I discovered that these are certainly not the only pyramids in China. In January,1994, archaeologists discov-ered several pyramids near the Wei Ho River, north of Xian. One of them, we were told, is located almost exactly in the geometric center of the ancient Chinese empire. I believe there may be as many as 90 to 100 pyramids in China in all, with the White Pyra-mid of Xian towering above all the rest-if that enigmatic giant does indeed exist.

I discovered that, if scientists and investigators could tell me nothing about the White Pyramid, they all at least had heard that it existed. And I decided that where there is smoke there must be fire, even if the smoke is only the nexus of a resonating cluster of powerful, important, almost-psychic beliefs.

The Pool of Mercury in the Tomb-Chamber of theEmperor

And so it was that, in seeking to discover the true identity of the White Pyramid, I once more immersed myself in the history of ancient China. I read again the story of the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (259-210 B.C.), the man who not only began the Great Wall of China, but standardized his country’s weights and measures, written language, and currency Shi Huangdi is also the emperor responsible for the army of life-sized terra cotta warriors- 8,000 of them in all! which were discovered, beginning in 1974, not far from the burial mound of the emperor himself

It is thanks to the Shih Chi (Records of the Grand Historian of China), by the very great Chinese historian Sima Qian (145-86 B.C.), that we can be fairly certain that the emperor’s grave is located beneath a particular hill 150 feet high and planted with grass and trees. Apparently, the hill is man-made; according to Sima, a 140-foot-high pyramid complete with five terraces lies beneath it.

In his Shih Chi, Sima Qian-who really was the Grand Historian of China, though at the court of Emperor Wu - states that almost 700,000 workers labored for 20 years to create the tomb of the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. He says the earth was removed down to the ground water level. Then the floor was poured with molten bronze. A stone sarcophagus was laid on this platform. When the structure was completed, those who knew where the entrance was were silenced by being entombed alive. To further disguise the entrance, the pyramid was covered with earth and grass to give the impression of a natural hill-a strategy which is strangely present in the smaller Xian pyramids of today!

The pyramid’s interior, we are told, is astonishingly elaborate. Sima uses the term "artificial universe" to describe the ceiling of the emperor’s tomb-chamber encrusted with thousands of glittering precious jewels to recreate the constellations of the heavens.

The Grand Historian goes on,

"In the tomb-chamber the hundred water-courses, the Chiang [the Yangtze River] and the Ho [the Yellow River], together with the great sea, were all imitated by means of flowing mercury, and there were machines which made it flow and circulate. Above [on the roof] the celestial bodies were all represented; below [presumably on the floor or on some kind of table] the geography of the earth was represented."

That is, the emperor’s tomb-chamber was meant to be a living replica of his empire, including both the earth and the heavens. The tomb was well-protected against grave robbers, with arrays of hundreds of crossbows with mechanical triggers targeted to kill anyone who broke into the tomb. (Just how effective this system was is somewhat in doubt, since the Huang I encyclopedia, edited by Miu Shih-Teng in 220 A.D., claims that robbers from Kuantung later broke into the emperor’s tomb and made off with all the mercury)

Recent excavations around the outer perimeter of this burial hill seem to confirm Sima Qian’s statements: Analysis of the sur-rounding earth revealed an exceptionally high concentration of mercury. Apparently, archaeologists are taking seriously the Great Historian’s description of what amounts to a ‘high-security’ tomb. They declare, "We are leaving [the tomb-chamber under the hill to the future, so the next generation has something to work on."

The Secret Society of the White Pyramid

How does the extraordinary story of the tomb-chamber of Shi Huangdi relate to the seemingly mythical White Pyramid of Xian?

I will explain. I believe that researchers have not concentrated sufficiently on one subtly revealing detail in Simas account: his assertion that Qin Shi Huangdi was to be entombed with his sarcophagus virtually floating in a pool of mercury

Yes, the mercury was used to provide a flowing liquid to make it possible for a vast relief map of circulating great rivers and streams of China to run forever in the tomb-chamber of the Emperor’s mausoleum. But, for the ancient Chinese, "forever" is a charged word when it comes to mercury We will recall that we have en-countered mercury before, in the guise of cinnabar, or mercury sulphide-perhaps the most potent of all the substances used in the vast, ongoing ancient Chinese industry of trying to discover the elixir of deathlessness.

The tomb of this emperor, surrounded as it is by a garrison of some 1,400 terra cotta statues including archers, cavalry troops, charioteers, infantrymen and horses, represents nothing less than a colossal effort to attain to the state of Hsien, or material immortality. This tomb is truly the ultimate Project Apollo of the Chi-nese emperors. The cost of the mercury alone must have been enormous-the equivalent of filling the tomb with uranium, or plutonium.

And what now lies in the tomb? Have we here encountered a clue as to why so little is known about the efforts of the Chinese government to excavate it? A year or so ago, a report leaked out of Beijing that the tomb-chamber of Qin Shi Huangdi was "like a palace." The implication was that a camera had been lowered into its unknown depths. Yet ofFcials have clearly stated that "nothing has yet been done" in terms of its excavation. Authorities have made similar claims regarding the 90 or 100 other tombs, or burial mounds, that rise up not far from Xian and the mausoleum of the emperor.

Ruthlessly plundering the wealth of his country and of its citizens, Shi Huangdi was one of the richest men who ever lived. On nothing did he lavish money more freely than on his quest for material immortality

If an entire terra cotta army stands outside his tomb, then what analogous splendors lie inside? Treasure, yes; treasure worth billions of dollars. Why then has the Chinese government not entered the tomb and retrieved these treasures, if for no other reason than to make use of the astronomical wealth they represent?

Because, I believe, there is more at stake within the tomb of Shi Huangdi than simply riches; there are unheard-of secrets of material immortality, which only this emperor had the power and the wealth to seize upon. I believe there are people within the Chinese establishment today who know of these secrets, and who see to it that the tomb of Shi Huangdi is never touched.

Yet rumours have filtered out; clandestine legends have built up over the past 2,000 years; these myths of wonders in the tomb of the First Emperor have taken on a veiled form-that of the White Pyramid of Xian.

This may be because the White Pyramid itself is more than legend.

I believe there is a Secret Society of the White Pyramid of China. I believe it is highly possible that the rulers of the vast and brilliant Middle Kingdom never ceased to believe in the reality and power of the state of Hsien and that their efforts to attain it would ultimately be successful. I believe there may be a secret society today - one incredibly ancient - whose members think, in fact know, that the tomb of the emperor, while filled with treasure beyond imagining, contains only the illusion of a body; who know that the emperor himself, wearing the vestigial body of the Hsien, has long since gone into the realms of material immortality, trans-muted into that state by the catalytic agency of his bath of mer-cury.

I wonder what other members of the Secret Society of the White Pyramid ‘reside’ in the 100 or so other burial pyramids rising up modestly, though not inaccessibly, distant from the tomb of the emperor? Are these tombs also empty? If they were to be opened, and a ragged corpse discovered there, would not that be merely an illusion meant to mock grave robbers while, thanks to the genius of the ancient art of alchemy - and perhaps a greater Genius, and one far more ancient - the former resident of this tomb has for centuries roamed the heavens and the earth?

Return of the White Pyramid

There may be, living among us today, members of the Secret Society of the White Pyramid - keepers of its secrets, aspirants themselves to the state of Hsien - who know that material immor-tality is a reality, and who hide this knowledge from the general public. These members who number among the living may also know the true facts behind the obscure memory of primordial contact with Alien Mind which ultimately prompted the ancient Chinese to strive to attain to the state of Hsien.

They may know these facts because of extraordinary, exquisite Alien artifacts stored within the tomb-chamber of Shi Huangdi. Or they may know them because the materially immortal dead can materialize among the living members of the Secret Society of the White Pyramid at any time, and provide them with yet more secrets of the state of Hsien.

One of these secrets may be that, in that realm that transcends time and space, it is once again possible to commune with Alien Mind, and to learn of all that has happened, and of all that will happen, and of the choices that mankind must now make.

The White Pyramid of Xian may be the Materially Immortal Pyramid. It may be the archetypal burial place, so closely attuned to the state of Hsien itself that it exists virtually plunged in that place of material immortality, and so invisible to mortals. It may be the meeting place of the members of the Secret Society of the White Pyramid - both the living and the dead.

It may be the ultimate Chinese Roswell - a benevolent Roswell, the necessary suppression of a truth so explosive that mankind as a whole is not yet ready to hear it.

What crises of the human soul cause the White Pyramid of Xian to wink into physical existence for a brief moment of time? was it the coming convulsions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that enabled an American flyer to glimpse it long enough to photo-graph it in 1945?

Was it the crash landing of two UFOs near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 - an alien intervention with no relation to Alien Mind, perhaps, and perhaps one which Alien Mind wished to pre-vent - that served as a catalyst enabling another American flyer to see and photograph the great White Pyramid a second time?

Is the White Pyramid in its ultimate reality another Shambhala, a portal into other worlds which is now rapidly regaining physical reality in ours, so that it may resume its immortal task of carrying out the intervention needed when an entire civilization stumbles toward its end?

Are there not those who can tell us? Why will they not speak out?

SOURCE
http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/text/dnew54x.htm

The Millennial Presence of Alien Mind

Homo sapiens emerged from homo erectus about 200,000 years ago. The beginnings of Altaic/matristic civilization go back some 40,000 years. That happened on our planet between 200,000 B.C. and 40,000 B.C.? was there only the long, slow march of homo sapiens toward rudimentary control over his environment? Did other civilizations rise to splendid heights and then enter upon a decline over that enormous span of time, leaving not a trace behind?

Or were there other sentient species on our planet, long before the ape-like creature that evolved into man? A species that geological convulsions consigned to an oblivion so profound that we can never, ever know that race was here? About such matters we cannot be certain. Nor can we know if places for which the name "Shambhala' has been used did not come into existence as time capsules of a sort, Alien Arks - places where Alien Mind saw fit to preserve something of the science and arts of the civilization then vanishing through natural catastrophe, or through war, or for other reasons otherworldly or unfathomable. These way-stations, bridging the gap between the extinction of old and the birth of new sentient species, would contain artifacts carefully picked by alien hand and, perhaps, an equally carefully chosen number of survivors. They might contain, in a way we also can never fathom, the spiritual Essence of that civilization - a simulacrum of its Soul.

Over the long march of the millennia, other aliens may have come to earth, for reasons unrelated to the preservation of elements of earth's civilizations. They may have come to wage war with the benevolent, protecting Alien Mind perhaps easing the tormented transitions of our planet between intelligent species. They may have come as sightseers, or as researchers in the name of science. They may have come here quite by accident. They could have been shipwrecked, and, on a world inhabited by primitives without technology, been tragically unable to signal from their ruined spacecraft their location and their need for rescue or spare parts. There is evidence to suggest that such a scenario may have unfolded in the mountainous Bayan Kara Ula region of western China some 12,000 years ago. These bits of evidence are extremely difficult to follow up, and lead us often to dead ends. Perhaps there are those who wish to keep this knowledge from us.

Soviets Announce an Interstellar Tragedy

In the 1960's, the popular Soviet science magazine Sputnik published a story about a sensational archaeological find in the Bayan Kara Ula mountains of China, not far from the Tibetan border. This tale of found alien artifacts and perhaps found remains of aliens would have set the scientific community on its ear, had they taken it seriously.
But Sputnik was not the kind of magazine that Western scientists-even Soviet scientists-were in the habit of taking seriously In the 1950's and 1960's, Soviet publications like Sputnik and Russian Digest and Soviet Union Today served the function of megaphones. They were used to shout news and opinion of a non-political nature over the top of the Iron Curtain. This was how these publications caught the attention of the West, and in a fashion circumvented the censuring strictures of the leaders of the U.S.S.R. Getting wind of these sensational stories, readers in the West might make haste to get hold of the magazine by hook or by crook.

The trouble was that so sensational did these magazines make these stories in order to seize the attention of the Western reader, that the readers got in the habit of not taking them very seriously. Such was the case with the immensely provocative repor from Bayan Kara Ula. This was unfortunate, because, in Eastern Europe and in the U.S.S.R. in the 1950's and 1960's, there were credentialed, serious thinkers, such as professor Matest M. Agrest, now living in the U.S., and his fellow Communist bloc member philosopher-writer Dr. Vyatcheslav Saitsev, who were learned in these areas. They sifted through the evidence and speculated freely and intelligently in the pages of these Soviet journals about the implications of these accounts, addressing every element contained therein. Some of these thinkers later became linked with the "ancient astronaut" movement inspired by Erich von Daniken many others continued to go their own way 

Some Western European magazines, at least, knew of the credentials of the editorial staff of these superficially sensational Soviet journals. It was due to them that, after Sputnik broke the story, the revelations from Bayan Kara Ula became public knowledge in the West. The Belgian magazine BUFOI (Belgian UFO Investigator) picked it up as well as the esoteric German publication Vegetarian Universe, using not only Soviet but Japanese sources.

 Here is the story they ran.
 

Mass Grave of the Dwarfish People of Bayan Kara Ula

In the first week of January,1938, a scientific expedition led by Chinese archaeologist Chi Pu Tei penetrated deep into the pathless mountain regions of Bayan Kara Ula, not far from Tibet on the border of Qinghai and Sichuan Provinces. This area is also known as Payenk Ara Ulaa, or Bayan Har Shan. It is about the size of the State of Connecticut, and is the place where the Yalong and Yangtze Rivers originate, and where the Mekong River begins its long meandering course southward toward Vietnam where, a thousand miles distant, it becomes the life-line of that long-beleaguered country.

The mountains in the Bayan Kara Ula region rise to over 17,000 feet, but, in the valleys below, it is - though you are still 7,000 feet above sea level - pleasantly warm in the summer. Geologists believe it was even warmer 20,000 years ago; whatever the truth of the matter, this area contains traces of human habitation which go back to the very earliest prehistoric times. One perhaps-not-quite-accidental geographical detail: Just north of the principal chain of the Bayan Kara Ula mountains, there lies a group of lakes with the ambiguous name of `Ocean of Stars' (though `stars' can also be translated as `waters'). In the first week of the New Year, the party of Chinese archaeologists led by Professor Chi Pu Tei discovered, in a group of caves in this mountainous region, a series of graves aligned in rows. There were no head stones to mark the graves, nor were there epitaphs; but, on the cave walls there were drawings of stick figures with elongated heads and, apparently, the sun, the moon and the stars.

BAYAN KARA ULA

The scientists carefully excavated the graves. They proved to contain skeletons with abnormally large skulls and tiny bodies no more than four feet long-far below the average size for the ethnic groups of our planet. Only the pygmies of the rain forests of Central Africa are in any way similar in proportion. The anatomy of these creatures consisted of a very slender, delicate skeletal structure, with narrow shoulders and thin extremities. According to the expedition's report, it was as if these creatures had had rickets, or their skeletal structure was related to that of flying mammals or birds whose limbs are built to withstand great stress.

To this day, extremely ancient legends circulate in this part of China about small-bodied yellow beings said to have appeared out of the clouds, and who, because of their strange, ugly appearance and bizarre behaviour, were attacked and in large part murdered by the local inhabitants. In more recent times, the rock caves upon which the archaeo-
logical team stumbled have continued to be shunned by the superstitious and suspicious local people; the caves are in effect taboo. This may be why the mysterious relic also found by the scientists at the grave site had lain undisturbed by grave robbers for millennia.

The 12,000-Year-Old Long-Playing Record

What the scientists found was a single stone disk half buried in the dust of the cavern floor. This stone disk resembled a long playing record from the early days of the gramophone. Its circumference was 12 to 12-l /2 inches and its thickness about 2/5 of an inch. There was a hole in the middle large enough to put a finger through. An incised groove spiraled outward from the hole, winding its way to the perimeter of the disk and then winding its way back in the overall pattern of a double spiral. It was not apparent then, but closer inspection would later reveal that the groove was a continuous, spiraling line of closely written characters.

Moreover, stone disks with a hole in the center and a basic double-spiral pattern are not an uncommon component of the grave sites of very ancient China. They are artifacts whose origins may be traced back to the beginnings of matristic (or `matriarchal'), shamanistic societies of the Far East, and they are known to have some relation - in that their patterns resemble the patterns on a snake - to the worship of the serpent by the very earliest of shamanesses.
But these stone disks at the Bayan Kara Ula grave site were different. The spiraling grooves spelled out a message; and that message was not of our planet.

Stone Disk as Alien Message in a Bottle:
"We Are Shipwrecked."

Not this expedition, but later expeditions, would unearth a total of 716 disks from the grave site. They would be trans-
ported to institutes of learning in Central China. Over a period of 20 years, a handful of scientists would periodically pore over these odd, heavy, stone artifacts. During that period, one of them, Professor Tsum Um Nui of the Beijing Academy for Ancient Studies, would become convinced that the grooves contained a kind of writing. In 1962, the small group of scientists working under his direction would announce that they had succeeded in decoding a story of an alien tragedy of epic proportions.

The message on the stone disk was not entirely unlike a message in a bottle thrown into the sea by someone who is shipwrecked and hopes that his message will reach a rescuer. The spiral script, stated Dr. Tsum, contained an account of the crash landing of an alien spacecraft in the mountainous region of Bayan Kara Ula 12,000 years before. Almost all the occupants had survived; but the spacecraft, once it had come to rest in the harsh and rugged terrain, had been too severely damaged to be able to lift off from the surface again.

Repairs were impossible; the necessary materials could not be found. The means for the craft to communicate its location and plight to its home world had been damaged beyond repair. The beings from outer space were forced to settle in a world and in a place utterly alien to their kind. The local inhabitants of the region had misunderstood these beings and - particularly frightened by the small and ugly appearance of the aliens - this local tribe, called the Ham, had hunted down and killed many of the shipwrecked ETs.

The members of Professor Tsum Um Nui's team disagreed about the precise origins of the engrooved message on the disks. Some thought that sympathetic members of the Ham tribe, fi- [missing test] countered great difficulties in making it public), was greeted with derision. Dr. Tsum was branded a liar and a fool. He later resigned from the Beijing Academy for Ancient Studies. Eventually, he emigrated to Japan. Embittered by the reaction of the scientific establishment to his decipherment of the strange stone disks, he died not many years after having completed his controversial report.

The Soviets Uncover More Secrets

If the Chinese scientific community rejected this other-worldly explanation for the stone disks of Bayan Kara Ula, its ideological counterpart, the Soviet Union, did not. A group of Russian scientists had heard the stories, and asked to be allowed to examine the disks. A number of the strange stone artifacts were eventually dispatched to Moscow. The Soviet scientists did not seem to believe Professor Tsum's story on the face of it. Or, perhaps, they wished to attack the problem of the disks in another way. They began to conduct a chemical analysis of the disks themselves.

The scientists entrusted with the investigation made a number of intriguing discoveries. Chemical analysis showed that the disks contained large amounts of cobalt and other metallic substances. A magnetic metal like iron and nickel, cobalt is used today primarily in alloy form with chrome, steel, and other metals. It is mined mostly in Canada and Central Africa. There is one place, and only one, in China, where it is profitable to mine
it, and that is in Qinghai Province-where the region of Bayan Kara Ula lies.

My assumption is that the group of space travelers, determined that their 716 stone disks would last at least till somebody found them, deliberately hardened them with cobalt, in the same way as cobalt is used industrially today to harden specialty tools. The downed aliens wanted their disks to endure till somebody came along who was capable of deciphering them (or perhaps, till, over the long millennia, some of their own kind came to earth
and found them).

The Russian scientists not only discovered cobalt. When the disks were placed on a special turntable and "played"-or so recounts Dr. Vyatcheslav Saitzev, who Frst told the story of the alien disks of Bara Kara Ula for the Soviet magazine Sputnik the long-playing record-like artifacts emitted a strange uneven hum - a vibration. It was as if the grooves were also electrical circuitry, or as if they had once been exposed to very high volt-
ages. Cobalt contains a high-grade radioactive isotope. If there were detectable traces of cobalt present in the stone disks, did they also somehow spell out a second, deeper, more subtly encoded message?

Might there be an element of the subliminal message in these enigmatic alien disks? Will the meaning of these messages, stored in a form we don't yet understand, dawn upon us in the near or distant future, when our own technology and our understanding have come abreast of that of the shipwrecked aliens of Bayan Kara Ula?
Was the more superficial message, composed of spiral script and translated by Professor Tsum, merely a part of the story?

Tumult in Modern China

It is entirely possible that the documented reports from the 1937-38 exploration and the work of Professor Tsum-Um-Nui were lost or destroyed during the chaotic turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in China. The material could very well have been viewed as subversive and banned. A wave of Communist ideology started up in 1966, and, carried along by students and the Red Guard, did not end till the late 1970's. In the almost Civil
War-like turmoil and excesses of the great proletarian Cultural Revolution that went on in the name of Mao, death and horror took its toll among the Chinese people. The number of dead it claimed is almost impossible to determine, as is the extent of the loss of Chinas cultural treasures.

When the Cultural Revolution was at its height, the particulars pertaining to the stone disks were published in Japan and Europe. It would have been no wonder if the ruling mob were to have seized these reports and declared them to represent "bourgeois decadence." Any notion of extraterrestrial intrusion or intervention stood in sharp conflict to the strongly materialistic bent of Chinese Marxism. The Cultural Revolution flared up one last time in China following the death of Mao in 1976. Mao's widow, Jiang Qying, acting deputy Wang Hong-Wen, party leader from Shanghai Zhang Chunqiaol, and former editor Yao Wenyuan, tried to usurp
the leadership of the party. Yao Wenyuan was particularly active in this revolutionary turmoil. He was responsible for initiating many highly negative campaigns, and never ceased to inveigh against moderates in the government. He initiated a hate campaign in the media which was entirely controlled by himself. Only the downfall of this unholy Gang of Four, who were arrested, tried and punished in 1981, brought an end to this violent and horrific period. Slowly thereafter life began to normalize in China.

People who travel through the Republic of China today and visit museums, pagodas and temples, are often told that these Chinese treasures have only survived thanks to the heroic deeds of some individuals. Sometimes, they are told, these individuals risked life and limb to oppose the Red Guard and its unrestrained vandalism.

Ash's Mural Gallery:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/3517/Ash/index.html

SOURCE
http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/text/dnew54x.htm

Subj: The Dwarfs of Byan Kara Ula #2
Date: 3/18/00 6:59:53 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: ashleyry@netcomuk.co.uk (Ashley Rye)
To: BARDSQUILL@aol.com, johnfwin@mlode.com, iufo@world.std.com, starfriends@onelist.com

Near the Emperor's Tomb, Two Disks Resurface

Our stone disks had not entirely vanished, however. Two of them were to reappear some quarter-of a-century after they were first discovered. Through eleven dynasties and a time-span of 1,080 years, Xian was the capital city of Imperial China. The capital city of Shaanxi Province today, Xian is a veritable treasure trove of price-
less objects from the Qin, Tang and Ming dynasties. Situated at the entrance to the legendary Silk Highway, the city was already a major Far Eastern center of commerce 2,500 years ago.

Today, this city enjoys an excellent reputation as a first-class tourist attraction. In any study trip taken through China, it is as important to visit this city and its treasures as it is to see the Great Wall of China or the incomparable river scenery at Guilin. At the tender age of 17, the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (259- 210 B.C.) of the Qin Dynasty had already decided what form his burial mausoleum would take. He seems to have begun his
life as ruler more concerned about the end of his days than about what his years on earth would be like. To protect the holy silence of his tomb, he ordered his subjects to fabricate an enormous army of terra cotta soldiers, horses and wagons, which they then had to distribute over a wide area around his grave site. Acciden-
tally discovered in 1974 by workers drilling a well, this life-sized replica of an army has entered the annals of archaeological lore and also become a staple of the travel brochures. These splendid figures - 8,000 of which have been unearthed so far, with archaeologists still counting - are (as we will see!} only a small part of the treasures waiting to be uncovered at the grave site of the emperor.

As important as the terra cotta army of Qin Shi Huangdi may be, however, there are two other artifacts which, in my view, are every bit as important, and which at some point somehow found their way to the vicinity of Xian: two of the stone disks from the mountain burial cave of Bayan Kara Ula. In 1953, in a suburb located on the east side of Xian, construction workers digging the foundations for a proposed factory unearthed the ruins of a Neolithic settlement whose age would eventually be estimated by archaeologists at about 6,000 years.

This settlement, called the Banpo village, is one of the best preserved Late Stone Age sites in China. To protect from the elements the treasures of Banpo as they came to light, and to make them accessible for viewing by visitors and tourists, officials built a museum on the site instead of a factory. Scientists believe the find still represents only one-fifth of the area to be profitably uncovered. Around the Banpo Museum stand a number of smaller buildings, which also house exhibits from the last millennia of the Stone Age. It is thought that 200-300 people lived here in that epoch shrouded in the mists of antiquity. In one of these smaller buildings, the Austrian engineer Ernst Wegener came across two of the stone disks of Bayan Kara Ula.

Denial and Disappearance of Custodian and Disks

This was in 1974. Wegener was in the middle of a long journey through China. He seized the opportunity to photograph these artifacts. The museum's director knew every detail of every broken shard of pottery in the museum - but, when confronted about the origins of these stone disks, she took refuge in the explanation that they were `cult disks' whose true significance was unknown.

The Austrian engineer was permitted to touch the objects. They had a circumference of 12 to 12-1 /2 inches and a thickness of about 2/5 of an inch, and bore grooves which spiraled from a
hole in the middle out to the outer edge, then back again. A superficial examination persuaded Wegener that the disks were made of granite, or perhaps even of a kind of marble. He estimated the weight of each at about 2.2 pounds; certainly, they were made of quite dense material.

Wegener's photographs have been preserved to this day. Unfortunately, they are not very helpful, since the engineer used a Polaroid camera, and since the stone disks were already exhibiting a great deal of fragmentation and crumbling. But the story of the stone disks of the Banpo Museum does not end here.

In March,1994, in the course of my second journey to China, my friend Austrian journalist Peter Krassa and myself met with then director of the Banpo Museum Professor Wang Zhijun. At first, Professor Wang Zhijun did not want to talk to us about the disks. Then he revealed that, a few days after Wegener's visit in 1974, both the stone disks and the museum director with whom Wegener had spoken had vanished without a trace. Director Wang Zhijun seemed uncomfortable with our discussion. When I asked him where the discs were now, he replied,

"The stone disks you have mentioned do not exist; but, being extraneous objects in this museum, they were relocated."

This was a statement not without internal contradictions. And it was all that Director Wang Zhijun would tell us.

Six Months Among the Aliens

In his 1978 book, Sungods in Exile, David Agamon tells the story of the 1974 expedition of eccentric British scientist Dr. Karyl Robin-Evans to the Bayan Kara Ula mountain range. According to Agamon, Robin-Evans came across several hundred members of a dwarfish tribe known as the Dropa, who lived in a remote valley and whose average height was no more than about four feet.

Robin-Evans spent six months among the Dropa. He learned their language and was introduced to their history and traditions. They told him their ancestors had come from a planet revolving around the star Sirius, and had crash landed in a spacecraft in this area a very long time before. Many had been killed. The survivors had become acclimatized to living on our planet. 

Ukrainian scientist Dr. Vladimir Rubtsov has written to inform me that Sungods in Exile is only science fiction woven around rumor and legend, believable only by the very gullible. But the Associated Press, in a November, 1995 article, reported that some 120 dwarfish beings had been discovered living in Sichuan Province in Central China, the tallest of them being no more than three feet ten inches in height, and the shortest adult measuring
two feet one inch.

In January, 1997, Chinese ethnologists tried to discount this phenomenon of 120 dwarfish beings living in a single area by attributing their dwarfism to the high concentration of mercury in the soil of the region. They insisted the dwarfs must have absorbed the mercury in their drinking water over many generations. Dr. Norbert Felgenhauer, of the Munich Institute for Toxic Surgery, tells me that this explanation is nonsense. He says that
mercury is a lethal poison harmful to any organ in the human body, and that the dwarfs would not have survived. Moreover, he says, mercury cannot change human DNA and so cannot cause hereditary disease.

Modern-Day `Village of the Dwarfs'

The Chinese authorities have never denied the existence of a `Village of the Dwarfs' in Sichuan Province, nor that the village is located only two or three hundred miles east of the Bayan Kara Ula mountain region. This latter fact may indicate that the Dropa migrated from the mountains to the lowlands, and that they did so only recently These tiny people must have been isolated for many millennia before their discovery; otherwise, interbreeding with other ethnic groups would have resulted in an increase in their stature.

There is further evidence for the existence of a dwarfish people in China. Joerg Dendl, a doctoral candidate in history who lives in Berlin, has unearthed a report from 1911 which tells of repeated sightings of an extremely dwarfish people in Tibet and neighboring areas. When I was lecturing in Brisbane, Australia, in June, 1996, a young couple came up to me. They told me that their grandfather had fought with the Allies in Central China during World War Two. Till the day he died, they told me, he never ceased to talk about his encounters with an extremely dwarfish tribe of people living in that area. According to his account, these dwarfish folk were even smaller than the pygmies of Africa, who normally grow to a height of between four feet eight inches
and five feet.

These anecdotal reports cry out for intensive research. I will continue to do my best to get to the bottom of the mysterious evidence pertaining to a UFO crash that occurred thousands of years ago in a remote region of Central China - an incident the discussion of which is so scrupulously avoided by any official with whom I have spoken, that it smacks of a `Chinese Roswell.'

The Chinese Roswell

The serendipitous discovery of Mr. Wegener presents us with far more questions than answers. Were the two disks exhibited at the Banpo Museum near Xian unmistakably two of the disks unearthed at Bayan Kara Ula? If so, what were they doing in Xian? It may be that the disks-taken away from Professor Tsum, presumably, after he had completed his report, and before he had retired to Japan - have been dispersed in a number of directions
by government offcials. This may have been a way, on the one hand, of hiding them, and on the other, of assuring their safety: All of China would have to be destroyed before all the disks could be destroyed. This suggests that government authorities must have thought the contents of the disks to be of some importance.

It would have been all the more vital, at the time of the turmoil of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, to spirit away at least a part of this sensational find to the provinces of China, far away from the vulnerable capital city of Beijing. We might ask ourselves, also: What happened to the stone disks that were brought to Moscow to be examined? At the time of the Cultural Revolution, relations between the Soviet Union and the People's Repub-
lic of China had deteriorated sharply; it may well be that Moscow simply refused to return the artifacts that had been entrustedto it.

And where is Professor Tsum Um Nui's report? All traces of that extraordinary document seem to have vanished as well, just as surely as have the other pieces of evidence pointing to the shipwreck of an alien crew on earth 12,000 years ago. When will the other disks, and the complete research papers of Professor Tsum Um Nui, be made available by the government of China to all interested parties? And last, but not least: If an emergency landing really did take place, where are the remains of the spacecraft? It seems reasonable to assume that a vessel built to withstand the rigors of interstellar travel would not easily crumble to dust during 12,000
years on earth.

The spacecraft may lie somewhere in the impenetrable forests and ravines of western China, buried beneath the foliage of the millennia. Modern-day China has been surprisingly open about UFO sightings, apparently making the records accessible to everyone. Does such openness mask a higher purpose? Does the spacecraft of Bayan Kara Ula sit in the laboratories of Chinese science, covered with equipment which - for how many decades now? - has been probing its every nook and cranny in an effort to decipher its alien secrets?

The Concealments of Western Man

The strange non-attempts at explanation by the Banpo Museum's director vividly reminded me of another personal experience I had, this time when I was on a trip through Mexico in 1991. At one point, our local tour guide, a proud Mexican named Enrique who was surely better schooled in Spanish than in German, seemed suddenly to be struck dumb, and to act as if he couldn't understand his mother tongue. Why was this? We were
in the pyramid city of Teotihuacan, 25 miles northeast of Mexico City, and I was absolutely determined to show my fellow travelers the so-called `glimmer chambers' of the pyramid, which are said to be hidden behind padlocked doors.

When I mentioned these glimmer chambers to my guide, and asked him where they might be found, he was suddenly rendered speechless. An expression of complete befuddlement crossed his face. He acted as if even the Spanish word mica, which means "glimmer" or "glisten," were to him a total mystery wrapped in a total conundrum. Eventually, I was able to locate the chambers myself But I noticed that our guide was clearly embarrassed by all this, and that he offered no explanation for the clear evidence that this section had recently been repaired with concrete.

Were the custodians of these pyramids hiding something from us? Several days later, I was witness to a far more positive event, this time in Palenque, home of the tomb of the Mayan God-King Pacal. A tour guide, obviously of Mayan descent, was talking in quite uninhibited Spanish to a party from France about the extraterrestres, the extra-terrestrials. Clearly, this man had been able to avoid the forms of mental conditioning to which modern-
day Western society forces us to submit, and was purely and simply passing on truths that his ancestors had known for millennia perhaps, and which were perfectly natural to them. If only there were those who could talk to us like this about Bayan Kara Ula.

Ash's Mural Gallery:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/3517/Ash/index.html

SOURCE
http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/text/dnew54x.htm