Free Republic

A major discovery of a gold mask alongside a treasure trove of artefacts at a Bronze Age site in China has generated online debate about whether there were once aliens in China thousands of years ago. The gold mask, possibly worn by a priest, along with more than 500 artefacts in Sanxingdui, a Bronze Age site in central Sichuan province, have become the talk of China since the news broke on Saturday The mask is similar to previous discoveries of bronze human statues, however, the inhuman and foreign features of the finds have triggered speculation they may belong to a...

Within the unimaginable depths of the universe there is a small family of worlds circling about a star we call the Sun; it is just a single star among the billions upon billions which are shining in the cosmos. Against the awesome backdrop of the infinite blackness of space, our world is just another planet; nothing more than an insignificant speck on the cosmological scale of things, but it is our home, and as of yet we have found no other planets which are remotely like Earth. The history of our world is a story which is still largely incomplete....

A semitrailer driver ignored warning signs and drove over Peru's famous Nazca Lines on Saturday, causing significant damage to the UNESCO World Heritage site. The driver, identified as 40-year-old Jainer Jesús Flores Vigo, was detained and released, according to newspaper Peru21. The lines were scratched into the ground approximately 2,000 years ago and depict animals, plants, imaginary creatures and geometric figures miles long. Nazca's lines and geoglyphs stretch across an area of about 280 square miles. A magistrate concluded that there wasn't sufficient evidence to indicate the driver acted with intent, Peru21 reports. Peru's public minister announced that Nazca's prosecutor's...

Who created mankind? According to some researchers, the answer lies with those who came from beyond the stars. The imagery of extra-terrestrial visitors who came in from other planets, and possibly even other galaxies, to seed the human race is a fascinating one, although highly speculative. Erich von Daniken, who popularised this theory with his book, Chariots of the Gods, believes that these visitors — termed as ancient astronauts — landed on Earth when the planet was still in its infancy. As part of their breeding experiments, they seeded the first human being and imparted them with the skills required...

Erich von Däniken's Mystery Park has closed its doors. The pseudoarchaeological Disneyland opened in Interlaken, Switzerland in 2003 and was billed as the ultimate expression of von Däniken's theories, made famous by such books as Chariots of the Gods? ("Letter from Switzerland" January/February 2004). The Swiss hotelier became a best-selling author on the strength of his claim that aliens had a hand in virtually every ancient achievement, from the Giza pyramids to the Nasca lines. If you didn't make it to the park, a bizarre hodgepodge of pyramids and space-age pavilions surrounding a geodesic sphere, you weren't the only one....

The Hollow Earth Perhaps some of the most bizarre scientific theories ever considered were those concerning the possibility that the Earth was hollow. One of the earliest of these was proposed in 1692 by Edmund Halley. Edmund Halley was a brilliant English astronomer whose mathematical calculations pinpointed the return of the comet that bears his name. Halley was fascinated by the earth's magnetic field. He noticed the direction of the field varied slightly over time and the only way he could account for this was there existed not one, but several, magnetic fields. Halley came to believe that the Earth...

Nation Monday, July 22, 2002   Mystery of Delhi's Iron Pillar unraveled New Delhi, July 18: Experts at the Indian Instituteof Technology have resolved the mystery behind the 1,600-year-old iron pillar in Delhi, which has never corroded despite the capital's harsh weather. Metallurgists at Kanpur IIT have discovered that a thin layer of "misawite", a compound of iron, oxygen and hydrogen, has protected the cast iron pillar from rust. The protective film took form within three years after erection of the pillar and has been growing ever so slowly since then. After 1,600 years, the film has grown just...