The Ancient Alien Question (27 page)

Jaramillo and Hall realized that had it not been for Moricz, who focused attention on the Cueva de los Tayos, the 1976 expedition could have resulted in the discovery of the century—and what a track record for Armstrong it would have been! And yet also, had it not been for Moricz, the story would never have come out the way it did. Hall also remembered how he had shown Moricz a manuscript about the 1976 expedition, which Moricz then point-blank refused to return. The incident actually ended their friendship, but Hall never understood why Moricz did it—until 1991, when he realized that the manuscript mentioned Jaramillo. It was a name Moricz did not want to see published, as he had confirmed in the 1973 German newspaper interview.

Jaramillo and Hall became friends, though both agreed Jaramillo would not reveal the location of the site. Still, he was willing to talk in detail about its contents and any other aspect of it Hall wanted to discuss. From Jaramillo, Hall was able to learn the true story of the Tayos library—which was not in the Cueva de los Tayos at all! Jaramillo stated that he had entered the library in 1946, when he was 17 years old. He was shown it by an uncle, whose name has gone unrecorded but who was known as “Blanquito Pelado” (a loving description of the man’s appearance). He was apparently on friendly terms with the local Shuar population, who invited him to see a secret in gratitude for the kindness and goodness he had shown toward the tribe. The story, of course, brings back memories of what likely happened with Mitchell-Hedges and the Mayan descendents who showed him the cave that contained crystal skulls.

Jaramillo entered the system at least once after that. On that occasion, he saw a library consisting of thousands of large, metal books stacked on shelves, each with an average weight of about 45 pounds, each page impressed from one side with ideographs, geometric designs, and written inscriptions. There was a second library, consisting of small, hard, smooth, translucent—what seemed to be crystal—tablets, grooved with parallel channels, stacked on sloping shelves of trestled units covered in gold leaf. There were zoomorphic and human statues (some on heavy column plinths), metal bars of different shapes, and sealed “doors”—possibly tombs—covered in mixtures of colored, semiprecious stones. There was a large sarcophagus, sculpted from a hard, translucent material, containing the gold-leafed skeleton of a large human being. In short, an incredible treasure.

On one occasion, Jaramillo took down seven books from the shelves to study them, but their weight prevented him from replacing them. This also meant that they were too heavy to remove from the library and reveal to the world. Jaramillo never produced any physical evidence for his claims, which may
explain why he wanted to live in the shadows of this story. He had seen it with his own eyes, but would anyone else
believe
it?

Hall did ask him why he never took photographs: “He said that it would not prove anything,” Hall told me. Still, Jaramillo stated that he had left his initials in these seven books so that, if the library were ever discovered, it could be proved that it was he who had entered it.

Jaramillo and Hall wanted to combine forces to see whether the Metal Library could be opened: One knew the location, and the other had a proven track record of organizing proper expeditions. First, contact with various ambassadors and politicians was established; then the scientific community was brought in. The plan was for Jaramillo to lead the team to the site, where they would remain for a period of three to four months (during the dry season), cataloguing the contents of the site and guaranteeing that nothing went missing. Everything would remain in situ. A report with recommendations would be the only outcome of this expedition, which would involve UNESCO.

Then, in 1995, Peruvian jets bombed an Ecuadorian military base and the project had its first setback.

In 1997, Hall used a major anthropology conference to promote the idea of his expedition. Six anthropologists came to meet him, interested in what he was trying to accomplish. But that same year, Ecuador’s political regime changed (in Hall’s opinion, for the worse); Hall felt that his family could not live in the new political reality, so he moved back to Scotland with them. Nevertheless, planning for the expedition continued. But in 1998, the expedition had a major setback: Hall received by telephone the sad news from the mother of Petronio Jaramillo that he had been assassinated. Was he murdered because of the plans that were in motion? Life in South America is cheap, as anyone who has visited or lived there knows, and that day Jaramillo was carrying a large amount of money on him. He was
killed in a street robbery, close to his home. Random violence stopped one of the world’s biggest discoveries dead in its tracks.

Now, Moricz and Jaramillo had both died, and Hall was in his 60s. Would he go it alone and claim the Metal Library for himself? Hall wasn’t a treasure-seeker, but he knew that the region was a veritable El Dorado, with gold everywhere; the roads are quite literally paved with it. It’s possible that the library books are made out of gold—though Jaramillo never spoke of gold but of “metal” (in fact, it seems copper was an ingredient, as Jaramillo had seen a green color on the books)—but in any case there is more gold outside the library than inside. In fact, the reason Moricz was in the region in the first place was because he held extensive gold concessions; his interest in the library was not for its monetary value but for its historic importance.

Though Moricz was not one of them, various treasure hunters did try to open the cave throughout the years. One of them, Count Pino Turolla, made contact with Jaramillo in the 1960s through the same channels that later brought Moricz to him. Turolla was obsessed with Edgar Cayce’s theory of a Hall of Records, which the American prophet claimed resided under the Sphinx at Giza. He claimed there were other such halls, each containing evidence of the existence of Atlantis, elsewhere in the world. For Turolla, the Metal Library would be absolute proof of Cayce’s prophecies. But Turolla’s attitude prevented he and Jaramillo from getting along. Turolla pressed Jaramillo for details that the latter was simply unwilling to offer, so Turolla opted to search around the Cueva de los Tayos and came up empty-handed.

One active Indiana Jones–type today is Stan Grist, who knew Juan Moricz as well as his confidante, Zoltan Czellar, also a good friend of Hall. In 2005, Grist wrote: “As I write these words, I am in negotiations with the native Shuars who live near the Cueva de los Tayos, whose permission is necessary to enter and explore the area of the caves. I plan to mount an expedition
in the coming months to search for the secret entrance to the cave from which the alleged metallic library can be accessed. Many people have entered the cave by the well-known, vertical entrance near the top of the mountain. However, I calculate that it is nearly impossible or is impossible to reach the metallic library through this well-known entrance. The secret entrance is only accessed from underwater!”
⁸
When I confronted Hall with Grist’s opinion, he said, “Jaramillo always said that the entrance was under the river. But that river is not near the Tayos Cave. That river is the Pastaza River.”

Though Hall never learned the location from Petronio Jaramillo himself, after Jaramillo’s death in May 1998, Hall organized a trip with Mario Petronio, Jaramillo’s son, in which they combined their knowledge about the site. The trip had to be abandoned before “point zero” could be reached. In May 2000, Hall returned. He said, “When we were preparing the expedition in the 1990s, whenever diving equipment was discussed as a necessity Petronio would say that even though [the entrance to the cave] was under the river, it did not mean we would get wet.” Hall showed me aerial maps, pointing out a bend in the river that meets a fault line, which is known to open up into a cave system that runs for several miles. His suggestion is that the fault line opened up the underground network, which someone at some stage in the distant past then discovered and used as a place to install the Metal Library. Hall had visited this location and deduced that it fit Jaramillo’s description perfectly.

So, what happened next? When Hall was 68, he decided that he more than likely would not see this story come to its conclusion. So, on January 17, 2005, Hall informed the Ecuadorian government of the location of a cave that fits Jaramillo’s description, and that he hopes will one day become the focus of an expedition. That location is at 77° 47’ 34” west and 1° 56’ 00” south. GoogleEarth brings you very close and can satisfy any
initial curiosity—but knowing the location doesn’t mean it will be easy to find! Hall thinks it will take decades or a paradigm shift before people can work together in a manner that will result in a successful expedition. He argues that the 1976 expedition only succeeded because a military regime was in power; “a democratic bureaucracy will swamp the expedition before it crosses any swampy river,” he said. What is required, Hall felt, is a sense of cooperation and openness. Stan died in September 2008.

Is the Metal Library or the “treasure of the Aztecs” as revealed to White Tiger evidence of alien beings, on par with what Indiana Jones discovers in
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
? No. But it is evidence that the civilization of the New World was far more complex than we think or even can imagine. It is evidence that there is so much left to discover, if only we are willing to
believe
that history isn’t a closed book. What the New World does prove is that it is very much like the Old World. There are pyramids. There was building on a massive scale. Some of these buildings were constructed using massive stones. There are stories of gods apparently coming out of nowhere, who taught the people civilization. The ensuing civilization ever since has contained evidence of that encounter with the divine, for those who are willing to recognize the artifacts for what they are.

All of this is clearly evidence that our history is not as simple as what we read in standard reference works. There is a large body of evidence, on various continents, that shows that someone in our past was far more advanced than we assume, possessing technology and/or knowledge that today is not part of our society, which is precisely why we cannot truly explain these archaeological sites and artifacts. But they do not
prove
that we were not alone. Fortunately, however, they are not the best evidence available in our efforts to answer the Ancient Alien Question.

Chapter 6
The Best Evidence

What would constitute the “best evidence” to convince a jury that ET dropped by, maybe as early as many millennia ago? First, we need to assume that ET will have left physical traces of his presence, and further that these traces have withstood the test of time. This is not a given. A spaceship landing off the shores of some country, followed by ET walking onto the beach and speaking with the local inhabitants, will have left no physical traces—except, perhaps, an oral or written tradition of “some ancestor” conversing with “a mysterious being” on the shore “a long time ago.” We could hope that this being left a gift with our ancestors, who in turn carefully preserved it, and that this gift can be proved to be of alien origin. But this is once again not a given.

The “best evidence” therefore needs to be a clear, long-lasting sign that contact was made. There have been a number of “oop-arts”
(out-of-place artifacts) that have been looked upon as furthering the cause of the Ancient Alien Theory, but they are not evidence of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization—only evidence that some of our ancestors, or entire civilizations, were (and sometimes are) far more clever than academics are willing to concede.

Dr. Vladimir Rubtsov thinks that “the search for ancient ‘extraterrestrial artifacts’ (ETAs) is one of the most important and worthwhile directions of investigation in paleovisitology.”
¹
His focus has been on trying to identify artifacts on planet Earth that might be of extraterrestrial origin, and he believes he has found a few candidates for that extraordinary distinction.

Rubtsov has identified a metal object found in 1976 near the Vashka River, a river in the Komi Republic and Arkhangelsk Oblast in Russia, as a possible alien artifact. The object is a cylinder, about 4 feet in diameter. When it was subjected to coercion, or rubbing, the object sparkled. The object was cut into several pieces and studied in various Soviet laboratories, including the All-Union Institute of Nuclear Geophysics and Geochemistry, the S.I. Valiov Institute of Physical Problems, and the V.I. Vernadsky Institute of Steel and Alloys. Dr. Vladimir Fomenko coordinated the research, and published its findings in 1985, noting that the object consisted of an alloy of the following rare earths: cerium (67.2 percent), lanthanum (10.9 percent), and neodymium (8.78 percent). There were also small amounts of uranium and molybdenum (less than 0.04 percent). The alloy clearly had artificial origins, but, as it contained no traces of calcium or sodium, it was noted that it was impossible to create such an artifact on planet Earth with the current technologies. The fragment appeared to be made of a mixture of powders with various crystalline structures. The finest particles of the powder each consisted of several hundreds of atoms only.