information on the dropas
Altair
Dropas File
In 1938, a team of archeologists, led by Professor Chi Pu Tei of
Beijing University, was conducting
a very detailed routine survey of a series of interlinked caves of
Balan Kara-Ula, a district on the
border of China and Tibet (at the time Tibet was independent).
He and his colleagues found skeletons of small beings with delicate
frames, but with rather large
skulls. At first, it had been thought by one of the assistants that
the caves had been the home of a
hitherto unkown species of ape. But as Professor Chi Pu Tei pointed
out, "Who ever heard of apes
burying each other?"
On the walls of the caves were found rock drawings which portrayed
beings with round helmets.
Engraved in the rock were also sun, moon, earth and stars, connected
by groups of pea-sized dots.
It was while studying the skeletons that one of the team stumbled on
a large, round stone disk, about
two centimeters thick (0.8"), half buried in the dust on the floor
of the cave. The team gathered
around the discovery, trying to make some sense of the object. It
looked, absurdly, like a sort of
Stone Age gramophone record. There was a hole in the center and a
fine groove, spiralling out
from the center to the rim. Under closer inspection, however, it was
obvious that the groove was, in
fact, a continous inscribed double-line of closely packed
characters. After a thorough search of the
caves, additional 715 plates were found. These plates were records.
Only nobody at the time was
able to decipher the messages they contained. The discs were labeled
and filed away among other
finds in the area. Even those who knew of its existence knew nothing
of its meaning.
Many experts tried to translate the inscriptions in the two decades
during which the disc were stored
away in Beijing, but without success. It was not until another
professor - Dr. Tsum Um Nui - broke
the code and started to decipher the speaking grooves that the
extraordinary implications of the disc
were realized. Realized, that is, only by only a select few. The
outside world remained in ignorance,
for the professor's conclusions on the meaning of the disc were so
shattering that they were offically
suppressed. The Prehistory Department of the Beijing Academy forbade
him to publish his findings.
In cooperation with geologists and after spectrographic analysis, it
was found that the plates had a
high cobalt and metal content (the metals involved are not, though,
referenced in the available
sources). That implied an artificial origin of the plates; they were
not of diorite as previously
thought. The hardness of the material, however, compared to diorite. =
Russian scientists asked to see the discs and several were sent to
Moscow for examination. They
were cleaned free of rock particles which had stuck to them and then
put through analysis which
corroborated the findings of Chinese scientists. That was not all.
When placed on a special turntable,
they vibrated or hummed with a high frequency resonance, which led
to the conclusion that they had
been exposed to very high voltages at some point in time. Or as one
scientist suggested, "as if they
formed some part of an electrical circuit."
In 1963, Dr. Tsum Um Nui decided to publish the findings in spite of
the position of the Academy.
The paper appeared under a long-winded but intriguing title, "The
Grooved Script concerning
Space-ships which, as recorded on the Discs, landed on Earth 12,000
years ago". It was not taken
seriously in the West and, in short time, the whole matter seemed to
fade into oblivion. That is, until
1967, when Russian philologist Dr. Viatcheslav Zaitsev published the
extracts from the stone-plate
story in the Sputnik Magazine. Allegedly, the whole story is
preserved in the Beijing Academy, as
well as in historical archives of Taipei, R.O.C.
The deciphered records contain story which may be upsetting to some
and absurd or bizzare to
others. The records told of a space probe by the inhabitants of
another planet which came to an
abrupt halt in the Bayan-Kara-Ula mountain range. The strange,
spiral script told how the peaceful
intentions of theirs had been misunderstood and how many of them
were hunted down and killed by
members of the Kham tribe, who lived in the neighboring caves.
According to Tsum Um Nui, one of the lines of the hieroglyphs read,
"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 [Kham] understood the sign language of the Dropas,
they realized that the
newcomers had peaceful intentions...". Another section expressed
regret by the local Kham tribe
that the aliens' spaceship had crash-landed in such a remote and
inaccessible mountain range and that
there had been no possibility to building a new one to enable Dropas
to return to their own planet.
In the years since the discovery of the skeletons and discs,
archeologists and anthropologists had
learned more about the isolated Bayan-Kara-Ula area. And much of the
information seemed to
corroborate the astonishing story recorded on the discs. Legend
still preserved in the area tells of
small, yellow faced folks who came from the clouds, long, long ago.
These people had huge,
bulging heads and spindly bodies and were so ugly and repellent that
they were hounded down by
local tribesmen. Curiously, the description of the perceived
invaders tallied with the skeletons
orginally discovered in the caves by Professor Chi Pu Tei. Along
with the discs, the cave drawings
and skeletons had been dated around 10,000 BCE. =
At the time of discovery, the cave area was still inhabited by two
tribes known as the Khams and the
Dropas, themselves extremely odd in appearance. The frail and
growth-stunted tribesmen of Dropas
averaged only about five feet in height and were neither typically
Chinese nor Tibetan.
This is where the trail ends, at the end of 60's. To my knowledge,
with an exception of paraphrasing
the story by several authors, no new elements were introduced. The
story exists in a form similar to
this article, a brief summary, or sometimes as more colorful
variant=97but the data are the same.
=A91996 Lumir G. Janku
Anomalies & Enigmas Forum is maintained by
Paradigm Systems
gor...@elkin.demon.co.uk
Sounds like early cd-rom technology, could this be the missing first beta of MS
Memphis?
Maybe DNA analylis will reveal the true origins of the Gates dynesty!
Of course it's true, the article is in a sci.* group. :-)
Gordon Keen
Martin Stower
Altair wrote:
>
> Dropas File
From an article by Gordon Creighton, which appeared in `Flying
Saucer Review' in the early 1970s:
After racking their brains for two decades in attempts to
decipher the mystery writing, the Chinese scientist Tsum
Um Nui [Creighton's note: `As it stands, this name is corrupt
and quite unidentifiable. Neither <i>Tsum</i>, <i>Um</i>,
nor <i>Nui</i> are monosyllables used in the transliteration
of standard Chinese (Mandarin) of Peking, though they might
perhaps be understandable in one of the more outlandish minor
dialects.'] and four colleagues had finally been successful,
but the results which they came up with were ``so shattering
that the Peking Academy of Prehistory banned publication.''
Later, however, the ban was relaxed and the story was finally
published in 1963. . . .
Since much of my work involves the part of the world in
question and seeing that the story was one in which considerable
linguistic investigation might be required . . . I decided that
I would put some effort into following it up to its source, and
see where it led me . . .
My inquiries started with a letter in February, 1968, to
the Soviet engineer in Moscow who is my regular correspondent
and who, being the unofficial secretary of the Russian group
of UFO investigators, performs the function of serving as the
link with some of us in the West. I asked him for any
information that he could supply about this story. He replied
in due course that, although the two English-language Soviet
publications where I had seen it were not available to the
Russian public, he had been able to ascertain that Vyacheslav
Zaitsev had done no original investigation of his own and had
simply taken the story as it had appeared in the the German
publication <i>Das Vegetarische Universum</i> (no date given)
and in the German publication <i>UFO-Nachrichten</i>, Number
95 (of 1964). He also said that he thought that it had
appeared in a ``French'' [sic] UFO journal described by him
as ``BUFOI'' journal Number 4, of March-April, 1965). My
Soviet correspondent confirmed that, according to the original
German version, the discovery of the discs had been in 1938,
the finder being ``the Chinese archaeologist Chi-Pu-Tei.''
[Creighton's note: `As it stands, this name is also corrupt
and unidentifiable. <i>Tei</i> is not one of the standard
Chinese monosyllables.']
The next step, in November, 1969, was to make inquiries in
Germany about <i>Das Vegetarische Universum</i>, and in due
course I was informed that it was an obscure vegetarian affair
produced by a firm known as the Vegeta-Verlag (in English
``Vegeta Press'') of 7291 Gr\"unthal b/Freudenstadt. So,
hopefully, I wrote off to them too, saying how anxious we were
to learn more about the marvelous stone discs. The date of
my letter was November 21, 1969, and the result was precisely
<i>nil</i>. Evidently the Vegeta Press was unwilling to
divulge its secrets.
I wrote next to the Soviet Novosti News Agency's London office,
and asked to be put in touch with the editor, in Moscow, of
<i>Sputnik</i>. They replied that the editor was Mr. Oleg
Feofanov and that his office was in the headquarters of the
Novosti News Agency of Pushkin Square, Moscow.
So I wrote off to Comrade Feofanov, asking for details as to
the authenticity of the wonderful tale.
Result: again <i>nil</i>.
My next letters went to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in
Peking (Red China) and to the Chinese Academy of Sciences at
T'ai-Pei, in T'aiwan (Free China). I also buttonholed several
visiting Chinese professors and academic types, and received
some more than usually astonished glances when I whispered the
tale of the spindly-legged spacemen who had dropped in on
China all that long time ago.
Results: <i>nil</i> again all round. No reply from either
Peking or T'aiwan.
It did not look as though the story enjoyed too much credit
anywhere.
Meanwhile the years were passing, and we have been favored with
a fantastic spate of books by Messrs. von D\"aniken, Peter
Kolosimo, and a shoal of imitators. . . .
One of the most enthusiastic propagators of the New Evangelium
is of course Herr von D\"aniken, who tells us in one of his
books that in May, 1968, he went to Moscow specially to hear
all about the stone discs and the <i>Hams</i> and <i>Dropas</i>
from another Russian popular-science and space-science writer,
Aleksandr Kazantsev.
Kazantsev told von D\"aniken that the plates and all the
documentation about the whole story were ``preserved'' in
the Peking Academy and the historical archives of Taipeh
in Formosa.'' (Vyacheslav Zaitsev, in his original article,
had said, however, that the discs ``had been sent to Moscow
for study.'')
It seems improbable that Comrade Kazantsev knows any more
about the matter than does his colleague Zaitsev.
Let us now return to our granite discs and, since we can find
nobody anywhere who will vouch for them or show us a photograph
or drawing of one of them or of one of the famous spacemen's
skeletons, let us examine some of the features of the well-loved,
well-parroted tale.
According to Vyacheslav Zaitsev, there was even in existence an
age-old Chinese legend to the effect that, thousands of years
ago, a horde of ``small, gaunt, yellow-faced men came down from
the clouds.'' The locals (presumably the ancestors of the
Chinese or of the Tibetans or of the Mongols in the area) took
a dislike to the ugly gentry with their huge heads and thin,
weak bodies and spindly legs, and there was soon conflict.
Evidently the struggle did not end in the total liquidation of
the aliens, for, while the graves in the Bayan-Khara Uula
contain their skeletons, Zaitsev goes on to tell us that the
present inhabitants of precisely that very area of China, who
are known as the <i>Ham</i> or <i>Dropa</i> peoples, evidently
contain much of the alien blood still, for they are <i>``frail,
stunted men, averaging four feet, two inches in height,''</i>,
who <i>``so far have defied ethnic classification.''</i>
Well, of course, it is undeniably a humdinger of a story, and
how lovely it would be if it were true. Because my own work
involves this precise area of Central Asia, I have, most of the
time, on my desk in the House of the Royal Geographical Society
in London, the maps showing the journey of all the foreign
travellers (including Russians) who have ever been in any part of
Tibet or Ch'ing-Hai in general or near the Bayan-Khara Uula in
particular, and I am familiar with, and have read, the official
accounts of most of them. Not one of them, and not a single
Chinese writer of whom I have heard, had a word about any
``small, stunted, big-headed, spindly-legged''' race or people
or tribe known as either <i>Hams</i> or <i>Dropas</i> and who
``defy ethnic classification.''
The sad facts of the matter are rather more prosaic and here
they are . . .
Let us take first the word <i>Ham</i>. This is obviously a
garbled rendering of a perfectly ordinary Tibetan word which
the Tibetans write <i>Khams</i> and pronounce <i>Kham</i>.
<i>And this word is in fact nothing more than the normal,
indeed the only, Tibetan name for the eastern portion of their
country</i>. <i>So everybody</i> living there is a <i>Khams-
Pa</i> (pronounced <i>Khamba</i>), meaning ``a man of Khams.''
The Bayan-Khara Uula (Mountains) lie in what is today the
Chinese province of Ch'ing-Hai, or, if one prefers its
Mongolian name, Kokonor. Both names mean ``blue lake'' and
derive from a large lake there. The population of the area
in past centuries included a few Chinese (it is today being
flooded with them), and sparse tribes of Tibetans and Mongols.
The region is not nowadays counted as part of Khams or of
Tibet at all, since Tibetan influence is now in retreat
there. But the region does lie on the the immediate northern
side of Khams, and in past times was usually considered by
the Tibetans to be part of their country. The whole area is
a melting-pot of Chinese, Mongols and Tibetans, plus a few
tiny minority peoples like the Muslim Salars. Since the
region adjoins Khams on the north, it is not surprising that
many of the ordinary Tibetans found today in Ch'ing-Hai are
identical with those of Khams. They are all <i>Khams-Pas
(Khambas)</i>.
Then what about the <i>Ham</i> and <i>Dropa</i> runts, frail,
stunted creatures averaging four feet two inches in height, who
so far have defied ethnic classification? (To quote Zaitsev.)
The people of eastern Tibet, Khams, far from being miserable
spindly-legged little folk, are great strapping robust fellows,
who make marvelous soldiers. They have long been dreaded by all
their neighbours, Chinese, Mongols, and western Tibetans alike,
for their martial prowess, particularly displayed as marauding
bandits, robbers, and highwaymen lying in ambush on the mountain
passes. . . .
There remain now the <i>Dropas</i>. ``Well, at least <i>they</i>
must have been spacemen!'' someone will perhaps hopefully argue.
I am sorry to have to be a wet blanket again, or to disappoint
anybody, but, once more, the sad fact is that, just as the word
<i>Ham</i> or <i>Kham</i> does not signify any species or tribe
or <i>kind</i> of men but simply a whole vast area of Central
Asia, so the Tibetan word <i>Dropa</i> (correctly rendered into
English under the Gould-Parkinson system of transliteration for
Tibetan as <i>Drok-Pa</i> means simply <i>an inhabitant of the
high pasture lands or high solitudes of Tibet. In other words,
what we might call, in Scotland, a ``highland herdsman,'' or a
crofter.</i> The primary meaning of the word is <i>solitude</i>.
Again, should anyone suffer from the misapprehension that perhaps
these <i>Drok-Pas</i> may be more promising candidates than the
<i>Khambas</i> for the description of ``stunted,'' ``frail,''
``spindly-legged'' and so on, I hasten to add that not one of
the European travellers (often terrified) who have encountered
these upland nomads, in their black tents, guarded by their
fierce and positively gigantic mastiffs, has ever described
them, so far as I know, in such terms. They are, in fact,
like their southeastern neighbours the <i>Khambas</i>, some
of the most impressive and robust-looking ruffians and robbers
on our planet. . . .
It looks, alas, as though our spindly-legged <i>Ham</i> and
<i>Dropa</i> ``spacemen'' of the Bayan-Khara Uula are beginning
to recede into the murky realms of speculation and fantasy
where they were now doubt begotten. It has been undeniably
most enjoyable to hear all about them and their cobalt discs
inscribed in a language from out of this world, and I have no
doubt that their saga will go on being repeated parrot-fashion,
without checking, and without the least comprehension, by
``ufologist'' after ``ufologist'' for many years to come, and
will feature in book after book. . . .
Can we now lay to rest this hoary old tale? Some hope.
Martin Stower