The story of events in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 is infamous; the subject of countless books, websites, periodicals, TV series et al. The story itself is also perhaps more famous for being quite possibly the biggest hoax ever played out in front of an initially American, and latterly, global audience.
Would such events have actually taken place; i.e the recovery of the bodies of two extra-terrestrial beings, the story would have been catapulted into becoming the biggest discovery of humankind in all history.
However, that is nothing compared to China, a land so massive, diverse and populous that almost every form of existence is exponentially larger than their equivalent in any other nation. It should be therefore be little surprise that this concept includes notions of alien life, frequency of UFO sightings (Nanjing boasts the highest occurrence in the country – that explains a lot), paranormal or psychic activity and so on.
Bai’an Kara Ula remains one of China’s most remote regions, lying at 97° east 34° north, near the intersection of Tibet, Sichuan and Qinghai; with an elevation of between two and five thousand metres much of it remains unexplored to this day.
It is said that fact is stranger than fiction, for this wilderness is the setting for a story so far flung that even Fox Mulder would have his hesitations.
Spare an open mind if you will, for the supposed events that began in this remote location around the year 9,000 BCE, give or take a thousand years. Here, a spaceship crash-landed, leaving the surviving occupants stranded. Unable to return to their home planet (primitive Earthlings were yet to invent the wrench), our spacefaring friends resigned themselves to living out their days on Earth.
Time passed and eventually, when the locals had become sufficiently used to the visitors, and somewhat inevitably, cross breeding began to take place.
The Dropa were the result; a group of semi-nomadic famers half human, half alien; short on gait but cranially blessed, whose extra terrestrial ancestors remained largely secret until 1938, when a team of archaeologists stumbled across the find that was to keep us guessing for over half a century.
Chu Putei was a Chinese archaeologist allegedly working for the then Chinese Academy of Sciences who led an expedition into said area and, upon seeking shelter in a cave, discovered a mass grave of beings each little more than a metre tall, accompanied by walled inscriptions plus hundreds of stones disks, each bearing hieroglyphs and measuring approximately 30 cm in diameter with a hole in the centre.
After years of fruitless attempts by a variety of scholars and scientists, in 1962 the disks were successfully decoded, revealing the story of the visitors’ predicament, the slaughter of many of their kind at the hands of local tribesmen and finally their integration into the community and eventual intermarriage with the locals.
The translation was published by Professor Um Nui of the Peking Academy of Prehistory, whereupon it was picked up by Chinese and Japanese media, making its way into appearing in the July, 1962 edition of the German magazine “The Vegetarian Universe”, in an article entitled “UFOs in Prehistory?” that also referenced a rough and supposed census of the time putting the Dropa’s numbers at 200, or less.
On the face of it, there is a lot about which to be highly skeptical. There was an almost complete lack of physical evidence and surprisingly little reference to the subject outside of a couple of core texts and more recently websites, all generally regarded as sure-fire signs of a hoax. The so-called Dropa Disks could well in fact be Bi disks, thousands of which have been found throughout China; they were commonly used during funeral rituals dating from the Shang dynasty (1600–1029 BC).
However, the Dropa stones did appear frequently in UFO subculture while the story garnered further attention through Hartwig Hausdorf’s 1998 book “The Chinese Roswell”.
That there was ever a Chinese Academy of Sciences or a Peking Academy of Prehistory has been called into question and there are no records of an archaeologist named Chu Putei. The prospects of us ever being able to meet any Dropa in real life also seemed to vanish forever when British author David Gamon admitted that he had pseudonymously written the book “Sungods in Exile” (1978) as a hoax; its storyline outlining the events of the 1938 expedition to Tibet, and supposed follow-on 1947 expedition that made contact with the Dropa and ultimately learned a little of their language; all being based on Russian and French science fiction stories of the 1960s.
The trail then goes quiet, until the mid-nineties that is, when there emerged two unconnected but quite remarkable announcements.
China confirmed its discovery of cobalt, iron and nickel deposits in the same remote mountainous area where the Dropa Disks were said to have been found. Professor Um Nui’s report published 30 years prior had referenced the very same elements as making up the composition of the disks. Then, in 1995 the Associated Press dropped its bombshell, confirming the existence of the Dropa. The AP stated that some 120 “dwarfish beings” had been discovered in a so-called “Village of the Dwarfs”, in which the tallest adult was 1.15m tall and the smallest 63.5 cm. The report was subsequently and independently verified.
And the kicker is…. the location of the Village of the Dwarfs; Sichuan province, only a few hundred kilometres from the Bai’an Kara Ula mountain range.
