A remarkable discovery
The story of the Dropa Stones begins in 1938 with a purported archaeological expedition. A professor from Beijing University, Chi Pu Tei, allegedly led a team into the remote Baian-Kara-Ula mountains on the border between China and Tibet. Inside a network of caves, they found peculiar, neatly-aligned graves. The skeletons inside were small, reportedly around four feet tall, with unusually large skulls. The cave walls showed carvings of the sun, moon, and stars, connected by lines of small dots.
The most unusual find was a collection of 716 stone discs, most of them half-buried in the cave floor. Each granite disc was about one foot (30 cm) in diameter with a hole in the center. From the central hole to the rim, a continuous, microscopic double-spiral groove was inscribed, much like the groove on a phonograph record. The expedition claimed the discs were 12,000 years old. For two decades, the discs supposedly sat in storage, their purpose and markings a complete mystery.
Translation and fabrication
In 1958, the discs were allegedly given to another Beijing professor, Tsum Um Nui, for study. After four years, he announced he had deciphered the spiral script. The hieroglyphs told the story of a spacecraft from a distant planet that crash-landed in the Baian-Kara-Ula mountains 12,000 years ago. The survivors, called the Dropa, had peaceful intentions but were misunderstood and hunted by the local Ham tribe. Tsum Um Nui's paper was supposedly published in 1962, and was met with ridicule before he went into exile in Japan and died.
No evidence supports this story. There are no records of an archaeologist named Chi Pu Tei or a professor named Tsum Um Nui. "Tsum Um Nui" is not a real Chinese name. The supposed "Beijing Academy for Ancient Studies" never existed. The entire narrative is considered a hoax that originated in 1960s UFO literature, appearing in a German vegetarian magazine and later popularized by author Erich von Däniken. Photographs taken by an Austrian engineer, Ernst Wegerer, in 1974 are often used as proof. These images show Chinese artifacts called Bi discs, which are common in the region. Bi discs are circular jade objects, sometimes decorated with grooves, but they bear no resemblance to the microscopic spiral script described in the Dropa legend.