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Tuesday Blogscan 16-12-2008

By Gregon

A strange assortment to get you through the week…

Enjoy!

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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9 Comments

  1. Dropa hoax
    I can’t believe the Dropa Stone hoax continues to be pushed. Sorry Filip, I respect your work, but this Dropa fiction has to stop. It may have washed in the 1970s and 1980s, when the gates to Tibet and China were firmly shut, a forbidden mystery very few had penetrated, but not now.

    I first heard the Dropa story back in 1999, and immediately ordered Hausdorf’s The Chinese Roswell, I was hooked. But after a bit of research, it becomes very apparent that the whole thing is fiction. Gordon Creighton concluded this after exhaustive research, and more recently Chris Aubeck (of Strange Attractor Press) came to the same conclusion.

    • NO ONE has ever seen the alleged alien script. NO ONE. No photos, no copies, no sketches, NOTHING. All we have is the word of Erich Von Daniken and Hausdorf, and 1960s copies of German and Russian tabloids that make the National Enquirer look like Time Magazine. There is no evidence.
    • There is no mountain range called Bayan Kara Ula. The closest is the Bayan Har Shan in Qinghai Province, part of the Kunlun mountains . In the general area, but not the same.
    • Thousands of discs have been found in China. They’re known as Bi discs, and were used in burials, placed beneath the head or feet of the deceased. Most were made of stone and jade. None have been found with text (later versions had carved dragons, fish etc). You can buy your own authentic bi disc from art dealers, so many have been excavated.
    • Dropa is an obvious appropriation of Dropka, the name for Tibet’s nomadic people. They are not dwarfs, they are not half-alien, they are REAL PEOPLE. The Ham are also Tibetan, and very normal human beings. I find it reprehensible that Von Daniken and Hausdorf have allowed the Dropka and Ham to be sensationalised as half-alien dwarfs. They’re real, normal human beings!
    • Gordon Creighton, fluent in Mandarin and Russian, and attache to the British Embassy in Beijing, and editor of Flying Saucer Review, investigated the Dropa story thoroughly and found it to be complete fiction.
    • It’s also worth noting that the earliest publication of the Dropa Story was from a 1960 issue of Russian Digest — two years before Professor Tsum Um Nui supposedly translated the alien Dropa text in 1962!
    • Von Daniken claims his source for the Dropa story is a conversation in 1968 with a Soviet writer named Aleksandr Kazantsev. Gordon Creighton tracked down Kazantsev, but Kazantsev told Creighton that he got the story from Von Daniken!

    I could go on and on. Personally, I think it’s a perfectly valid possibility that extraterrestrials may have visited the Earth in ancient times — but the Dropa hoax makes a mockery of any serious study.

    Interestingly, Wikipedia has deleted the entry on the Dropa Discs, but luckily Crystal Links copy-and-pasted my Wiki entries. 😉

    1. How about reading the article?
      Rick,

      It seems, especially based on your third bullet point, that you didn’t read my article at all. I would suggest you do that first, before writing replies to it. If you did read my article, then it is clear, based on the third bullet point, you didn’t at all read it correctly.
      But from the general gist of your “comment”, it is clear you didn’t read it at all. A shame. For example, the article traces the origins of the story of the Dropa down, and at no point do you mention this in your comment, instead making general, sweeping statements, some of it incorrect.
      Take “Dropa is an obvious appropriation of Dropka”. Obvious to you, but “obviousness” is not scientific. For example, we have PHOTOGRAPHS of dwarfish people, and as my article states, a dwarfish people have actually been discovered. Again further evidence that you did not even bother to read my article.

      I could go on, but I think I’ve proven my point that you are totally close-minded on this topic, and didn’t even see what the article had to say on the subject matter. A shame, and a disappointment to me.

      1. How about accepting the facts, Filip
        I did read your article, Filip, and there’s no mention of Gordon Creighton’s research or Chris Aubeck. You present the Bayan Kara Ula mountains as a real range, when in fact the name is fictitious and they don’t exist. The Dropka and Ham are real people, a long way from the alleged village in Sichuan Province (that story has never been verified, by the way, and the original Chinese article only mentions possible mercury poisoning as a potential cause for a high incident of birth defects in the area — nothing about a “village of dwarfs”). The original Sputnik and German articles clearly state the Ham are dwarfish and alien, which is wrong and offensive — the Ham are normal, human Tibetans. There are no records of Professor Tsum Um Nui and his expert team — nor of the Peking Academy of Prehistory. You state in your article that the professor published his translation — what and where is the publication? Don’t use the excuse that all records were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, that’s facetious. Gordon Creighton was in Beijing, fluent in Mandarin he investigated thoroughly and found no records of Professors Chi Pu Tei and Tsum Um Nui. And we haven’t even addressed the issue of these alien stone discs that have never been seen by anyone.

        No Filip, your angry response is unwarranted and it’s you who needs to open your eyes and face the facts — the Dropa story is fiction, a big con.

        1. If you don’t get heard, just repeat…
          I am totally with you on the fact that we haven’t found alien stone disks, and that they might be bi disks. In fact, that’s in the article, I would think, but if you’ve read it, it’s definitely not something you’ve remembered.

          As to no dwarfs: “In fact, on 9 November 1995, the German publication B i l d ran a report titled “Das Dorf der Zwerge – Umweltgifte schuld?” [“The Village of the Dwarfs – environmental pollution to blame?”] about the discovery.)

          The title of the article itself speaks about dwarfs… You seem to suggest there is just ONE Chinese article at the source of this report? Or might it be that someone just found or bothered to read one article.

          All the rest of your comments are just repeats from your first post.

          I’ve seen what Creighton et al. did and especially on Sungods in Exile, is TOTALLY unconvincing. If anything, this article shows he’s totally wrong on it. I was merely so kind as to not to include him in the article, as it doesn’t need a layer of ad hominem attacks, which is something you force me to do here. But at this, I close that debate. Show me proper evidence, for I’m not interested in anything else.

          1. Evidence
            [quote=Philip_Coppens]Show me proper evidence, for I’m not interested in anything else.[/quote]

            I’m asking the same thing, Filip.

            Please also note that I’m not attacking you personally or your article, but the Dropa story in general. I hope that’s clear. The Dropa story has more holes than all the bi discs in the world combined.

          2. Bild
            The German newspaper “Bild” is one of the most unreliable publications in Germany. They make things on occasion, and they rerun stories from other sources without checking them. As long as it is sensationalist.

            —-
            It is not how fast you go
            it is when you get there.

    2. Hi,
      Anything I wrote on this
      Hi,

      Anything I wrote on this subject that’s currently online is woefully out of date, but two books I have authored, one of them to be published later this year, should provide enough details on the “Dropa” story to clarify the development of the “legend.”

      I hope someone finds the following useful:

      The Dropa Myth, by Chris Aubeck (extract and summary)

      In July 1962 a German magazine called Das vegetarische Universum [The Vegetarian Universe] published an article about a strange finding made in the mountains between China and Tibet. It is a tale that regularly turns up in UFO crash lists in books, magazines and on the internet. It therefore deserves our attention.

      The title of the original article was “12,000-year-old Groove Writing Tells of Air Vehicles,” signed by Reinhardt Wegemann for a news agency called DINA in Tokyo. It described the discovery of 716 disc-shaped tablets at a cave in the mountains located on the border between Tibet and China. Explorers had come across these artefacts in 1937 but the Academy of Prehistory in Peking had been reluctant to allow researchers to publish their report because of certain anomalies that had left them stunned. For one thing, the discs had been hewn from granite using unknown instruments twelve thousand years ago, something considered impossible. They were also covered in hieroglyphics in a language never seen before. Each disc had a hole in the centre with grooves spiralling outwards, not unlike a gramophone record.

      “It took over two decades for archaeologists and experts in ancient writings and hieroglyphics to decipher the grooved writing,” wrote Wegemann. When the scholar Professor Tsum Um-nui finally received permission to publish, his report took the enigma of the discs to a whole new level. In one place the hieroglyphics said, literally:

      “The Dropa came down from the clouds with their air gliders. Ten times the men, women and children of the Kham hid in the caves until dawn. Afterwards they understood the signs and saw that the Dropa came with peaceful intentions…”

      Elsewhere the discs explained the visitors’ ship had been destroyed by a crash landing in the mountains, trapping them on Earth.

      The Chinese researchers sent a sample from one of the plates to Moscow for analysis. Russian scientists then made a sensational discovery: the discs had a high metallic content and may have served as electrical conductors, perhaps in order to play them in some kind of advanced machine.

      Wegemann’s article notes that remains of the Dropa and Kham peoples had been found before in the high mountain caves. Scholars had never been able to classify these dwarf-statured humans ethnologically, as there was no parallel with the Chinese, Mongolians or Tibetans. The message on the discs could now provide an answer to the mystery. In fact, child-sized skeletal remains were located nearby, which exhibited a slight build and an enormous head. In case anyone could still doubt the Bayan Khara Uula Mountains had once been visited by aliens from another world, Wegemann adds that pictures cut into the cave walls had also been found, “depicting the rising sun, the moon and the stars and between it whole swarms of pea-size dots, which approach in elegant momentum the mountains and the Earth’s surface.”

      The first thing to note about this story is that very few who support the reality of it know anything about its origins. Whole books and articles have been written on or around this tale with absolutely no reference to its author or first publication. This absence of detail is the reason its origins seem “shrouded in mystery,” and therefore leaves its reality status open to all sorts of theories.

      My own attempt to shed some light on the origin of the story began with a search for the journalist responsible for the report, Reinhardt Wegemann. Unfortunately, after conducting thorough searches of newspaper archives, and several years inquiring through colleagues and journalist friends, I could not come up with any German writer of this name. Furthermore, nobody could tell me anything about the DINA news agency, either. To this day I have not been able to confirm the existence of either entity.

      Whether or not the DINA news agency ever existed, it soon became apparent that the report was unlikely to be authentic. In July 1964 the same article was published again, as if new, in the German UFO magazine UFO-Nachrichten. Here, Wegemann made no mention of the fact that that the report had been published before, and added no new revelations about the discs. The wording in some parts of the article was different, indicating that the article had been re-written, and now the writer mentioned another name, an archaeologist called Tschi Pu-tei, . It even repeated the claim that the discovery had taken place “25 years ago,” even though 27 years would have been more accurate.

      The legend of the Dropa became world-famous as UFO magazines began to reprint versions of the article in different languages. The French/Belgian UFO organization BUFOI released its own version in March 1965, and in 1966 a Russian translation was published by the Soviet journal Neman. A year later, a ufologist named Dr. Vyatcheslav Zaitzev wrote about the discs in the first edition of the Soviet magazine Sputnik. On February 26th 1967 a journalist of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, using the Sputnik article as its source, compared the cave drawings to a star map supposedly seen by UFO abductee, Betty Hill. At some point in this period Reinhardt Wegemann’s name would get lost and would never be associated with the story again. Furthermore, important details were dropped or changed. The year of the expedition was changed to 1938. The spelling of the names would become increasingly exotic with each new translation, making them almost untraceable. (In September 2008 I noted five variations on the word Dropa, from Dhropa to Dhzopa.)

      In 1973 the director of the British magazine Flying Saucer Review, Gordon Creighton, searched the archives of the Royal Geographical Society in London, for proof that any archaeological expedition to caves at Bayan Khara Uula happened at all and that the archaeologist was involved Chi Pu Tei. He found nothing at all.

      In 1979 British writer David Gamon published Sungods in Exile, a book devoted to the Dropa story. However, the book turned out to be a hoax. Gamon claimed a scientist named Karyl Robin-Evans led an expedition to Bayan Khara Uula in 1947. The tale involved the purchase of a stone disc in India or Nepal and an encounter with a tribe of friendly dwarves. In this version, the Dropa originated on a planet in the Sirius system. The book included photographs of a fake disc that many even today believe to be authentic.

      If Wegemann’s story were not so popular even today (a Google search for the keywords “Dropa” combined with “UFO” produced 716,000 hits in January 2010) we would have no reason to explore it in such detail. In fact, I have written a much longer report covering every aspect of the story, spanning 60 pages, and I can assure the reader the tale only gets more complicated, never more interesting. It was not the most carefully researched of hoaxes and collapses with the slightest scrutiny. We know, for example, that the Dropa – usually spelt Drokpa – and the Kham (more correctly called Khamba) are real peoples in Tibet. They are not deformed or dwarfish but have purely Indio-Aryan features. Drokpa means literally “mountain dweller,” a word synonymous with nomad for Tibetans. They have lived and farmed in the same region for 4000 years, though since the destruction of the nomadic economy which democratic reform brought in the 1950s their traditional way of life is dying fast.

      1. Dropa book
        Hi Chris,

        Great to hear from you, thanks for dropa-ing by and providing more information (sorry for the bad pun, couldn’t resist).

        I’m very open to the ‘ancient astronaut’ theory of ET visitation, but the Dropa disc story is fiction as far as I’m concerned. And as a supporter of human rights in Tibet, setting the record straight regarding the Dropka and Kham is even more important to me. It was easy to get away with a story like the Dropa discs back in the 1960s and 1970s, when very few people knew anything about Tibet; but not now.

        Who knows, ETs may have visited the Tibetan Plateau long ago. It’s a big universe, anything’s possible. In China, the myths and legends of the first Emperor, Huang-Ti, are intriguing, as Paul Stonehill outlines in Mysteries of the Yellow Emperor. It’s an old article, but well worth the read.

        Cheers,

        Rick

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