The Dropa Stones: How a Man Who Never Existed 'Decoded' an Alien Script
On February 9, 1960, the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta ran a piece on page two about the ideas of physicist Matest Agrest.
Agrest was a real person. He worked in the Soviet nuclear program before going on to teach mathematics at Leningrad University.
A year earlier, he'd proposed that ancient civilizations might have had contact with visitors from space, making him one of the first scientists to seriously argue for what's now known as the ancient astronaut theory.
That article never mentions Tibet, caves, or stone discs.
The story now known as the Dropa stones wouldn't surface for another two years, in an entirely different magazine, credited to a man no one has ever been able to track down.
Follow that thread step by step, and you can trace exactly how one offhand hypothesis about alien visitors snowballed into a tale of a decoded script and survivors from another planet.
What the Dropa Stones Story Actually Claims
In the most commonly retold version, archaeologist Chi Pu Tei led an expedition into the caves of the Bayan Kara Ula mountain range, on the border between Tibet and China, in the late 1930s.
The team supposedly found row after row of graves holding skeletons of unusually short stature with strangely oversized skulls, while the cave walls, according to the same story, were covered in drawings of elongated-headed figures surrounded by the sun, the moon, and stars.
Alongside the graves, the story goes, were hundreds of stone discs engraved with spiral grooves that resembled some kind of script.
The first disc ever described measures about 9 inches (23 centimeters) across in some versions of the story and about 12 inches (30 centimeters) in others. That alone tells you there was never one original description that all the later versions drew from.
According to the story, Professor Tsum Um Nui announced in 1962 that he'd deciphered the engraved script.
The message supposedly described a spacecraft that had crashed in the region twelve thousand years earlier, survivors who called themselves the Dropa, and a conflict with a local tribe that different versions of the story call the Ham or the Kham, not the Han.
How the Story Traveled from Berlin to Moscow
The first known text to mention the expedition and the names Chi Pu Tei and Tsum Um Nui appeared in July 1962, in a German vegetarian magazine called Das Vegetarische Universum.
The author was credited as Reinhardt Wegemann, citing a Tokyo news agency called DINA as the source.
Neither Wegemann nor that agency has ever turned up in any other document, according to research by archaeologist Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews published on the site Bad Archaeology.
The same text, citing the same fabricated source, was republished in 1964 in the German UFO bulletin UFO-Nachrichten, translated into French in 1965 for the newsletter of the Belgian UFO organization BUFOI, then into Russian in 1967, and finally condensed by Vyacheslav Zaitsev for the Soviet magazine Sputnik.
Zaitsev added a detail of his own: that the discs had been sent to Moscow for chemical analysis, which supposedly turned up a high cobalt content.
That finding was never published in a scientific journal or confirmed by anything outside the story itself.
From Sputnik, the story reached writers like Erich von Däniken, who folded it into his books and carried it into the Western market.
One small detail suggests the 1964 version was really just a reworked copy of the 1962 one: the text describes the expedition as something that happened forty-five years earlier, which would place it in 1919, not in 1937 or 1938 as the story otherwise claims.
A Confession Under Someone Else's Name
In 1978, a book titled Sungods in Exile was published in Britain, presented as the notes of an Oxford professor named Karyl Robin-Evans, who supposedly met members of the Dropa people in 1947 and learned that their ancestors came from a planet in the Sirius star system.
In that version, the crash happened in 1014 CE, directly contradicting the earlier story, which placed the accident twelve thousand years in the past.
Professor Robin-Evans never taught at Oxford, and no record of him exists anywhere.
In a 1995 interview with Fortean Times, the book's real author, David Gamon, admitted that he had written it under the pseudonym David Agamon, inspired by the popularity of Erich von Däniken, and he called the book a satire, his "favorite hoax," according to extensive research by French ufologist Patrick Gross.
Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck later examined the case in Wonders in the Sky, a broader survey of undocumented aerial phenomena throughout history, where they filed the Dropa stones among stories with no credible source.
The 1995 confession didn't stop the story.
German author Hartwig Hausdorf presented the details from Sungods in Exile as documented fact all over again in his 1998 book The Chinese Roswell, and that book is now the most common source behind the versions circulating on social media today.
What's Left When You Strip Away the Legend
Outside this chain of retellings, the name Chi Pu Tei doesn't appear in a single archival or university record.
Tsum Um Nui, according to linguists who've looked into it, doesn't even resemble a real Chinese name.
Since the 2000s, some newer versions of the story swap in the names Qi Futai and Chen Wenming instead, but those names don't lead to any archaeologist whose work can actually be checked either.
According to a summary from the American site HowStuffWorks, not a single museum anywhere in the world has ever reported holding any of the 716 discs the story describes.
The real Drokpa are nomadic herders from the Tibetan plateau, of average height, whose name in Tibetan means "dweller of the high pastures." They have nothing to do with aliens.
The best-known photographs presented today as pictures of the Dropa discs are the ones Austrian engineer Ernst Wegerer reportedly took in 1974 at the Banpo museum in Xi'an.
The photos are too low-resolution for even a single hieroglyph to be made out.
Some researchers believe the photos actually show ordinary Chinese ceremonial "bi" discs, artifacts that have been known to archaeology for thousands of years and carry no engraved markings at all.
When Hartwig Hausdorf visited the museum in 1994, his own account says two of the pieces were no longer there, and the curator who had supposedly allowed the photographs to be taken had since retired.
Sixty-four years after the first known German text laid out the full Dropa stones story, no one has ever published a photograph clear enough to read even a single hieroglyph, and no one has ever tracked down a real person matching the name Chi Pu Tei or Tsum Um Nui.
What's left are ceremonial bi discs sitting in Chinese museums, and one writer's admission that, taking a page from Erich von Däniken, he wrote his favorite hoax.
SOURCES
- Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, "The Dropa (or Dzopa) stones", Bad Archaeology
- Patrick Gross, "UFOs at close sight: The Dropas lore – David Agamon's book"
- Wikipedia, "Matest M. Agrest"
- HowStuffWorks, "Are the Dropa stones authentic?"
- Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck, Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, Penguin Group, 2009.
- David Agamon (David A. Gamon), Sungods in Exile: Secrets of the Dzopa of Tibet, Neville Spearman, 1978.
- Hartwig Hausdorf, The Chinese Roswell: UFO Encounters in the Far East from Ancient Times to the Present, New Paradigm Books, 1998.
Aron Corvin
A researcher of the unknown who loves a good story. I won't sell you sensationalism just for a click. If you enjoy what I write, your support would mean a lot and help me keep going.