A Qing-dynasty jade bi disc on display in a museum — a genuine Chinese bi disc of the kind the alleged Dropa discs are often compared with; no verified Dropa disc has ever been photographed

The Dropa Stones: The 716 Discs That Never Existed

by
About 4 min read

The story is one of the best-known in all of fringe archaeology, and it has everything: a remote mountain range, a lost tribe, a crashed spaceship, and a secret that the textbooks refuse to admit. In 1938, according to the tale, a Chinese archaeologist named Chi Pu Tei was exploring caves in the Bayan Kara Ula mountains, on the border between China and Tibet, when he found graves containing the remains of beings little more than a metre tall, with abnormally large skulls. The cave walls were decorated with drawings of people with elongated heads, alongside images of the sun, moon, and stars. And then came the discovery that made the story famous: 716 circular stone discs, each a little over 30 centimetres across, with a hole in the centre and a groove spiralling out from it — a groove that, on close inspection, turned out to be a line of tiny characters in an unknown language.

The Translation

The discs were sent, the story continues, to various scholars. One of them, Professor Tsum Um Nui of the Beijing Academy for Ancient Studies, spent years on them and in 1962 announced that he had managed to translate the grooves. The message, he said, told of an alien spacecraft that had crashed in the Bayan Har mountains 12,000 years ago. Its occupants, a people called the Dropa, could not repair their craft and tried to adapt to life on Earth. The professor’s publication was greeted with disbelief, the story goes, and he was branded a liar. His work was suppressed, the discs were hidden away, and the truth was buried with them.

The tale grew richer with each retelling. In 1974, an Austrian engineer named Ernst Wegerer was said to have located two of the discs in the Banpo Museum in Xi’an and photographed them. Some versions add that Soviet scientists examined discs sent to Russia and confirmed unusual properties in the metal. The discs were said to be granite, or stone with a high metal content, about a third of an inch thick, and at least 12,000 years old. The story entered the West principally through the French writer Robert Charroux and then through Erich von Däniken’s bestselling books Return to the Stars and Gold of the Gods, and it has been a staple of ancient-astronaut literature ever since.

The Paper Trail

There is only one problem with the story. None of it can be checked, because none of it appears to have happened. No archaeological institution, museum collection, or peer-reviewed publication has ever produced or catalogued the discs, the 1938 cave find, or the seven small corpses. No record confirms an academic named Tsum Um Nui — the name is not even Chinese; it is Japanese — and no institution called the Beijing Academy for Ancient Studies or the Beijing Academy of Prehistoric Research has ever been identified in any Chinese academic directory. No record confirms an expedition led by Chi Pu Tei, and no named team of amateur archaeologists has ever been independently identified. The last scientists to search for the discs, in 1994, were reportedly told they had been destroyed.

What can be traced is the story itself, and the trail leads to print, not to a dig. The earliest source is an article in the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta of 9 February 1960, discussing the speculations of Matest Agrest that aliens might have visited Earth in the remote past and left traces. The full disc narrative first appeared in July 1962 in Das Vegetarische Universum, a German vegetarian magazine, in an article by Reinhardt Wegemann that cited an untraceable item from a news agency in Tokyo. From there it spread through UFO magazines and books, gaining the 716 discs, the translation, and the museum sightings as it travelled. The photographs that Wegerer took in 1974, insofar as they can be assessed, appear to show ordinary bi discs — round jade discs with a central hole, a well-documented type of ancient Chinese ritual object, common in Shaanxi Province.

The Real Threads in the Story

A few real things are tangled into the legend. The Bayan Kara Ula range itself is real, straddling the China–Tibet border around 97°E 34°N, and it does contain the sources of the Yangtze and Mekong rivers. There is a real Tibetan nomadic people called the Dropka, or Droka — herders, not short-statured aliens, and the resemblance of the names is a coincidence the legend exploits. A separate thread sometimes woven into the story is also real: a village in Sichuan Province, usually called Yangsi, is reported to have an unusually high share of short-statured residents, a phenomenon that remains medically unexplained. That village has no documented connection to any discs, any caves, or any 1938 expedition. It is a genuine mystery of its own, borrowed to give a fabricated one a human face.

What Is Documented, and What Is Not

Documented: The Dropa story first appears in print in 1960–1962, in a Soviet newspaper article and a German magazine piece, with no earlier excavation report behind it; the narrative was popularised by Robert Charroux and Erich von Däniken; no museum anywhere holds the alleged discs; the photographs linked to the legend show bi-type discs; the Bayan Kara Ula mountains and the Tibetan Dropka people are real.

Unverified or disputed: Everything in the story itself — the 1938 expedition, Chi Pu Tei, the seven small corpses, the 716 discs, Professor Tsum Um Nui and his 1962 translation, the 12,000-year-old crash, and the museum sightings. No evidence has ever corroborated any of these details, and the named people and institutions cannot be traced.

Sources

Leave a Comment