"Through the great canyon a large river flows from the north to the south and falls into the northern end of the Gulf of California. Now, in the useful translations of the Spanish authors of 1540 AD we find that the scribe of the Conquistadors placed near the Colorado River, in a small island, a sanctuary of Lamaisra, or of Buddhism. He mentions a divine personage living in a small house near a lake upon this island, and called, as he says, Quatu-zaca, who was reputed never to eat."

VOYAGES: l'Histoire de la D'couverte de l'Amerique, Vol IX, Henri Ternaux-Compans (1836)

"A deified priest or lama, who is said to have lived on a small island near the Colorado River, had the name of Quatu Sacca which seems to combine the two names Gautama and Sakhya."

The Buddhist Discovery of America a Thousand Years Before Columbus, John Fryer (1901)

It was during the first summer following my last major excursion into the High Sierras and the desert southwest with my Uncle in 1971 that I recall hearing for the first time since I was eight years old the ancient Mesoamerican name Quatu zaca --- and most especially so, referring it back to the great Enlightened sage from India, Gautama Shakyamuni, the Buddha.

I was updating my uncle via phone regarding the health of his brother, my father, who had the year before been caught in a fire while on the job. He received some rather severe burns as well as an excessive amount of smoke inhalation leading to a collapsed lung and most of the hair on his head and arms burned off. Right after the fire my uncle came to see him in the hospital with the two of them spending most of the time talking about the old days. After a week or so my uncle headed back home to Santa Fe. Since that visit my father had been released and become an outpatient. The primary reason I was updating my uncle was because the doctors had become much more concerned that my dad was not showing the amount of recovery they were hoping for, still having a great deal of trouble with his lungs and breathing. They had dealt with all of his symptoms and lungs as best they could and told me, among other things, they had ruled out for example, tuberculosis and that sort of thing, but to still expect the worse, telling me one year, two at the most.

A few days before calling my uncle I was sitting in a hospital waiting room stalling for time as my father went through some test or the other, going over in my mind what the doctor had told me, including even, being relieved over the not to be concerned with tuberculosis aspect of it all. I had long known tuberculosis was a deadly disease having learned about it when I was ten years old or so. My uncle and I, in the process of our travels throughout the desert southwest in my early years, had gone to the 'town to tough to die,' Tombstone, Arizona. While there I saw a reenactment of the shootout at the OK Corral. The narrator said that one of the participants in the real shootout, Doc Holliday, had tuberculosis and since he was going to die anyway he was 'fearless in the face of death.' For some reason, as the kid I was, I loved that 'fearless in the face of death' comment and never forgot Holliday or the word tuberculosis.

In conversation on the phone with my uncle that day I brought up the tuberculosis story and in passing just happen to mention I had it in my mind to visit Holliday's gravesite some day just for the heck of it.

A few months later, in fall of 1971, my uncle called and asked me to meet him in Denver, Colorado. Now while it is true the two of us catching up for that meeting ended with us driving down to Glenwood Springs to see Holliday's gravesite and seeing a bunch of petroglyphs during our trip, his call was for much more than that. At first he was very shook up saying it was imperative that we meet, almost as though for ME there was no other option. Apparently the day before he had been sitting in a cafe with a Native American spiritual elder in Taos, New Mexico when a peyote road man by the name of Little Joe Gomez along with two other men stepped up to his table. Gomez, who my uncle knew, introduced the two men then left. According to my uncle the two men said they were emissaries of a supposedly highly regarded Buddhist monk then residing in Boulder, Colorado and of which, at the time of the call, my uncle couldn't remember his name let alone pronounce it. The two men said the highly regarded monk, who turned out to be Chegyam Trungpa Rinpoche, wanted to meet with my uncle and were there to escort him back to Boulder. He said the two men were very insistent, almost to the point of coercion, and seemed more like thugs than you would expect so-called Buddhist emissaries to be like, with a just below the surface demeanor reminding him of my ex-stepmother's onetime friend, mobster muscle and gentleman enforcer Johnny Roselli. In any case, in that I had a Buddhist background --- and the fact that my uncle was somewhat apprehensive over the whole thing --- he wanted me to meet him in Denver on his way through to Boulder. Which I did.

After arriving in Boulder, per Trungpa's request, we met in a small closed-door room on one of the upper floors of the library at the University of Colorado. At first he seemed set-back when he saw my uncle was traveling with someone like me, but without missing a beat, after brief introductions and selectively leaving me out of the conversation, he immediately went to the subject at hand as though he and my uncle had been friends forever. As Trungpa put it, he had become privy to strong rumors, at least in how it related to the legends and lore of the desert southwest, that an ancient Buddhist temple, perhaps Tibetan, existed deep in a cave high along the walls of the Grand Canyon, and if it was so, he wanted to see it. He said where he came from there was usually more truth to such legends than falsehood, it was only that the truth was veiled to the unknowing. He had been told by powers that be if there was anybody that would know or could get him there, it would be my uncle. My uncle told him that as long as he could remember he had heard of such rumors and legends, but that as he was presently constituted and stood before him, he himself had never tread foot in such a place as he described. Such places, my uncle said, when they do exist are typically known only to a few and not meant to be trespassed against.

It seemed as though an instant flash of anger crossed Trungpa's face hearing my uncle's response, then dismay and maybe even distraught but for sure, laced with disappointment. Trungpa asked if my uncle had any other suggestions. My uncle looked down toward the floor and shook his head no. When we turned to leave the two men who brought us were in effect, blocking the exit, but with a slight one-finger hand gesture Trungpa waved them off. They moved aside, my uncle exited and just as I was about to fully pass from the room Trungpa asked, "Who was your Teacher?" Other than a slight smile I offered no response. Without saying a word, with a quick one-arm push he spun the office-like chair with roller wheels he was sitting in away from the table toward the window, turning his back and silently staring into the darkness beyond.

The next morning after having breakfast with a friend of my uncle, an artist named Howard Fogg, we headed toward Glenwood Springs and Holliday's grave site following a night of silence regarding Trungpa or the meeting in the library.[1] As the morning wore on my uncle began elaborating on the legend Trungpa was interested in --- without revealing how much of it was known to him to be true or not. From the very moment my uncle gave his carefully worded response to Trungpa, saying "as he was presently constituted and stood before him, he himself had never tread foot in such a place as he described," I knew there was more to the story than he was letting on. As he was presently constituted opens up a lot of doors for someone like my uncle who operated on a number of spiritual planes, without actually answering the question. While we were driving my uncle didn't have every one of the specific facts at his fingertips (i.e., all the names, dates, etc.), more or less paraphrasing the story as we traveled along. Although I let him continue as he knew it, what my uncle didn't realize at the time was that I already had a fairly good working knowledge on the subject and easily filled in the blanks. What I didn't know, or at least it was new to me under that name, was Quatu zaca and the Grand Canyon cave part of the story. Since then I have gone back and researched the subject on and off over the years, mostly out of curiosity, and filled in most of those blanks.

Basically, as the story goes, in 458 AD a Buddhist monk named Hui Shen from somewhere within the landlocked area adjacent to China which now days would be considered Afghanistan, along with several other monks (some say as few as four, others say as many as 40), sailed across the north Pacific from China to North America, with Hui Shen returning in 499 AD to report his adventures to the court of the Chinese emperor.

The following is said to have been translated as found in the History of the Liang Dynasty, compiled circa AD 600, regarding Hui Shen and his trip to America:

"In former times, the people of Fusang guo knew nothing of the Buddhist religion, but in the second year of Da Ming [around AD 458] five monks from Chipin traveled by ship to that country. They propagated Buddhist doctrines, circulated scriptures and drawings, and advised people to relinquish worldly attachments. As a result, the customs of Fusang changed."[2]

The Grand Canyon part of the story actually has three tied together parts, two from ancient Chinese history and one stemming from more recent times in America. Fusang or Fu-Sang, is considered to be the land that existed to the east of China beyond the Great Sea. References to Fusang begin to show up most seriously in Shan Hai King, the "Classic of Mountains and Seas," an ancient multi-volume set of Chinese books compiled in 2250 BCE that contain accounts of Chinese geographers that traveled throughout the world gathering up information on the surface features of the Earth and their locations. According to scholars who study such things there were originally 32 books, but in the 5th century AD, all of the subject matter was condensed into 18 books, and of those 18 not all have been translated into English. Two of the books in translation, the Ninth and Fourteenth Books, carry the subtitles "In Regard to the Regions Beyond the Sea, from its Southeast Corner to its Northeast Corner" and "The Classic of the Great Eastern Waste," both of which relate to the Grand Canyon and surrounding territories, to wit the following quote. While reading the quote below remember, albeit in translation for our purposes here, is cited as being written in 2250 BCE, over 4000 years ago:

"Nature's most magnificent display of her handiwork, the Great Luminous Canyon with the little stream flowing in a bottomless ravine outspectacles every other natural extravaganza on this earth with its brilliant yellows, vibrant oranges, deep subtle reds and in its shadows pale lavenders toning into rich, velvet blues like a glorious sunrise or sunset. Nothing but the sun itself could have imparted such rich color and nowhere else does it exist."

The second part of the three parts relating to the Grand Canyon circles around the previously mentioned Buddhist monk Hui Shen and his travels to, from, and in Fusang circa 458 AD to 499 AD. In the book Inglorious Columbus (1885) by Edward Payson Vining there is a map that outlines Hui Shen's voyage and travels to the new world. Basically, according to Vining, he followed the curve of the Aleutian Islands from China to Alaska and down the west coast of America to Mexico. However, Hui Shen's own record of his travels indicates he went inland from the coast at least as far as the Grand Canyon before turning south toward Mexico. In a book by Henriette Mertz titled Pale Ink (1953), Mertz postulates, and I am in agreement with, that although Hui Shen may have used the sea route as described by Vining, he only did so as far south as southern California. There he and his party went ashore in an area located just north of present day Point Hueneme between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles where the Santa Clara River exits into the Pacific. How he knew about or went about selecting the Point Hueneme location I'm not sure, but considering the distance one would have to travel, plus all the hardships, difficulties, and potential lack of water one would encounter trying to reach the Colorado River on foot from the Pacific, it is probably the best of all starting points.

For the third part of the Grand Canyon saga we have to move from 458 AD and return to the works of Edward Payson Vining and his book Inglorious Columbus published in 1885. However, between the start and finish of that move there needs to be a little bit more ground work and explanation inserted. If you remember from above I said some say Hui Shen traveled to Fusang with as few as four, others say with as many as 40 people (monks) in his entourage. Where those who say such things come up with such figures I am not sure. However, the written account of Hui Shen indicates that before he even got to Fusang in the first place his trip had already been proceeded by five monks. The author Charles G. Leland in his tome on Hui Shen titled Fu-sang points out that in the narrative by Hoei-shin (Hui Shen), he mentions that five beggar-monks (whom Hui Shen purportedly met there) were already in Fusang in A.D. 458 and that they had brought with them images of Buddha.

The question has always been, in that Hui Shen traveled thousands of miles east from China and almost an equal number of miles down the west coast of North America, why did he suddenly disembark his ships and turn inland on foot somewhere around Point Hueneme and cross eastward over a harsh and hostile desert for 300-400 miles? The answer may well be because of the five itinerant beggar-monks. Nowhere has it been recorded how, when, or the amount of time any of the five monks had been in America, only that they were. It is my belief they were not all present at the same time but, like the Dali Lama, the Pope, or the Phantom, one replaced the other in a long line of secession creating in a sense a venerated holy man. Hui Shen turned inland to pay homage to that venerated holy man. The Buddha was reputed to have been born around 563 BCE and died around 483 BCE. By the time of Christ some 400 years or so later the Buddhist religion was well established and shown to be so, for example, as found in such Buddhist texts as the Hemis Manuscripts. So said, by the time Hui Shen showed up in America circa 458 AD there had been plenty of time to have established lineage.

In the volumes of information regarding the Chinese and Buddhism in America before Columbus there is only a thin veneer that comes close to meeting the necessary criteria we are talking about here regarding Buddhism, Hui Shen, the Grand Canyon, and/or the Colorado River and the existence of a potential venerated holy man --- a thin veneer of which within are only two stories --- with the credibility of one, although repeated over and over as if it was so, is considered highly suspect by most.

That story, and the reason Chegyam Trungpa Rinpoche contacted my uncle, begins in 1909 and revolves around a man identified in newspaper accounts as an archaeologist and explorer, reportedly working for the Smithsonian, and said to go by the name G.E. Kincaid (sometimes Kinkaid). On Friday, March 12, 1909 the Arizona Gazette, the leading evening newspaper in Phoenix, printed a small story about Kincaid completing a one-man voyage down the Colorado in a small skiff, having traversed the full length of the Grand Canyon and the river clear to Yuma, Arizona. In having done so the article says Kincaid stated that he had some very interesting archaeological discoveries he unearthed on the trip and they were of such interest he planned to "repeat it next winter in the company of friends." Then, three weeks later, rather than waiting until the next winter, on Monday April 5, 1909, the evening edition of the Arizona Gazette printed a semi-follow up article on the front page. The article went on to say that on the previous day, Sunday April 4th, Kincaid "related to the Gazette" that archaeologists of the Smithsonian Institute, of which he was one and of which was financing the expedition, were exploring a mysterious cave high up on the walls of the Grand Canyon hewn out of solid rock by human hands that he, Kincaid, discovered. Among other things the article goes on to say:

"Over a hundred feet from the entrance is the cross-hall, several hundred feet long in which is found the idol, or image, of the people's god, sitting cross-legged, with lotus flower or lily in each hand. The cast of the face is oriental, the carving shows a skillful hand, and the entire object is remarkably well preserved, as is everything in this cavern.

"The idol almost resembles Buddha, though the scientists are not certain as to what religious worship it represents. Taking into consideration everything found thus far, it is possible that this worship most resembles the ancient people of Tibet."

Many people, both credible and questionable, have researched and investigated all aspects of the contents of the article and have continued to come up short with any hard evidence of such a cave or even the existence of Kincaid himself. Many of those same investigators say the Smithsonian has no record of having any such person, persons, researchers, or archaeology-like teams participating in any venture similar to or like the ones so attributed to in the article.

Complete and full linked internet access to the Monday April 5, 1909 evening edition of the Arizona Gazette Grand Canyon cave article can be found in Footnote [7] which follows in a few paragraphs.

For the second of the two stories we have to go back to circa 1540 and the Spanish expeditions into the Grand Canyon and Colorado River area under the command of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Coronado had a diarist or scribe, a chronicler if you will, by the name Pedro de Castaneda de N'jera that traveled with and recorded all aspects of the majority of the Coronado expeditions. Castaneda's original account, Relacion de la jornada de Cabola compuesta por Pedro de Castaneda de N'cera donde se trata de todas aquellos poblados y ritos, y costumbres, la cual fuel ago de 1540, has been lost, but a copy is still in existence that was made in 1596.

In Appendix B of Inglorious Columbus the author, Edward Payson Vining, includes in his book a copy of a letter to the French Academy of Sciences by Charles Hippolyte Paravey de Chevalier dated April 26, 1847. In that letter Paravey cites, in that his research on the area is from the works of Henri Ternaux-Compans, in of which he includes the writings of scribe Castaneda and from those writings, presents the following:

"One of the countries of America which was first converted by the shamans of Cabal, arriving from the southern point of Kamtchatka at the excellent port of San Francisco, in California, to the north of Monterey, must evidently have been the country upon the banks of the Colorado River, a large river which flows through these same regions from the north to the south and falls into the northern end of the Gulf of California. Now, in the useful translations of the Spanish authors made by Henri Ternaux-Compans, we find that Castaneda placed near the Colorado River, in a small island, a sanctuary of Lamaisra, or of Buddhism. He mentions a divine personage living in a small house near a lake upon this island, and called, as he says, Quatu-zaca, who was reputed never to eat."

In the above quotes there is made mention by the scribes of the Conquistadors of a small island in a lake placed in the Colorado River. That island is concluded to be the no longer in existent Cottonwood Island. Cottonwood Island was formed by a onetime lake created by a natural blockage some distance downstream that eventually became overcome releasing the main depth of the lake water to what became the more-or-less the normal outflow of the Colorado River. The island itself however still had sufficient water flow on either side of its banks to remain a viable intact island during the time of the Conquistadors and later European settlers. Today however, Cottonwood Island is completely submerged by Lake Mohave created by the manmade Davis Dam near Laughlin, Nevada. Lake Mohave in covering the island easily surpasses the width, length, and depth of the unnamed original lake that formed Cottonwood Island in the first place. As it was, none of the 1540s Spanish explorers, over land or by river, ever got much closer to Cottonwood Island than 40 miles if that. Anything they had to say was hearsay garnered from their Native American guides. It wasn't until the the white explorers, exploiters, miners, and settlers started showing up in the area that Cottonwood Island was actually accessed by them or began showing up on the radar. By then Quatu-zaca and any traces thereof were long gone.

-----

John Fryer (1834-1924) was an eminent Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1901 an article he wrote titled The Buddhist Discovery of America a Thousand Years Before Columbus, was published in the July 1901 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine, page 256. On page 256, mimicking the information provided by Paravey's letter to the Academy and or the original source by Castaneda without citing either, the following appeared:

"A deified priest or lama, who is said to have lived on a small island near the Colorado River, had the name of Quatu Sacca which seems to combine the two names Gautama and Sakhya."[3]

As interesting as all of that is, what Fryer has to say in another part of the same article is even more so:

"There exists in Mexico a tradition of the visit of an extraordinary personage having a white complexion, and clothed in a long robe and mantle, who taught the people to abstain from evil and live righteously, soberly, and peacefully. At last he met with severe persecutions, and his life threatened, he suddenly disappeared, but left his imprint of his foot on a rock. A statue erected to his memory still stands upon a high rock at the village of Magdalena. He bore the name Wi-shi-pecocha, which is probably a transliteration of Hui Shen bikshu."

Nine hundred years after Hui Shen, according to records reportedly found in China and elsewhere, over a period of several years during the 1420s AD, China launched a series of seven long distant voyages intended to explore the world. The voyages were said to be under the command of Admiral Zheng He (1371-1435). As a part of those seven voyages, one of his four vice admirals, Captain Zhou-man, using the Kuroshio current, embarked toward the Pacific coast of North America, landing at Vancouver Island. From there Zhou-man's fleet sailed along the Pacific coast founding a number of colonies along the way. When they reached the coast of Peru the fleet turned west, reaching China using the prevailing currents. In the book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, the author, retired British submarine commander Gavin Menzies writes:

"The Chinese set up settlements all along the west coast of North America, from Vancouver Island to New Mexico and inter-married happily with the local Indians. When the first Spanish colonialists arrived in the 16th century they found many Chinese, as well as wrecked junks. But the diseases the European colonists brought with them wiped out 90% of the Indians, and destroyed the Chinese influence."

Menzies says the Zhou-man expedition traveled as far south as the coast of Peru before turning west and then, using the prevailing currents, returned to China. Along the way it is said he founded or put into place a number of settlements from Vancouver to New Mexico.

About 200 years before the Chinese expeditions of the 1420s began sailing along the western coast of North and South America, their island neighbor Japan had already laid their own groundwork, remnants of which I came across as a young boy.

Right after World War II I started traveling around the desert southwest with my Uncle exploring it's many natural wonders and interacting with it's indigenous cultures. It was during those early travels that I met members of a group of Native Americans from the Navajo Tribe known as Code Talkers. They had been recruited and placed on the war front in the South Pacific by the U.S. Marines to speak their own language back and forth between themselves via radio communication creating in a sense a secret code. Because of it, the whole of the Japanese war machine from Hirohito to Tojo to the lowest private were not able to decode or make heads or tails out of what was being said.

At the same time I was hearing about Navajo code talkers for the first time I was also hearing about their neighbors, the Zuni. As the story came down to me was that the Marines were able to use the Navajo as code talkers but not the Zuni because the Zuni spoke Japanese.

The Zuni native tongue supposedly being closely similar to that of the Japanese language in many respects has always been accepted on the ground in local lore, rumor, and legend. However, rising above the lore, rumor, and legend, it has been suggested there is strong evidence of rather substantial physical contact having existed between the two cultures, an inter-connection that occurred in the not-so-distant past. An anthropologist, Nancy Yaw Davis PhD, promulgated just such a theory, stating that between 1250 AD and 1400, a major change in settlement patterns occurred in the Zuni area, a major change she attributes to a large influx of Japanese into their culture. She backs up her theory with reams of research published in her book The Zuni Enigma (2001). Davis writes:

"This period, the late thirteenth century A.D., is proposed as the probable time for the arrival of Japanese pilgrims with new language, religion, and genes. If a freeze-frame could capture that event, I believe it would reveal an entourage of people from many backgrounds arriving and deciding this was the exact middle of the universe, and then commencing to build large pueblos, drawing in straggling survivors of the Anasazi civilization.

"Of course we have neither a photograph nor a written record of what happened and why such a consolidation occurred. But this is an unusually thoroughly studied area: Sophisticated tree-ring dating, dendrochronology, provides a rich record of when structures were built, and the timing, severity, and length of droughts; skeletal remains indicate significant physical changes in the population; measurements and excavations of ruins reveal major changes in settlement patterns; glaze on pottery suddenly appears."(source)

Now, in an effort to tie all of the elements above together, we need to jump from the 1250s of Davis and 1420s of Menzies, neither author of which mentioned Buddhism to any degree, to the present day --- to the time when I was in high school and shortly thereafter. Near the top of the page I write that when my uncle was filling me in on some of the information above, what I didn't tell him was I already had a fairly good grasp on the subject and easily filled in the blanks. That learning curve came about because of a series of events that happened during my last two years of high school.

Sometime just before the start of my junior year in high school I began study-practice in Zen under the guidance of the person I call my Mentor. In the process of that study I developed an interest in and became familiar with the history and background of the Buddha. At the high school I attended the graduating class had what they called 'Senior Ditch Day,' wherein a regular school day was officially set aside to ditch and go somewhere as a class en mass. My senior year the class selected Catalina Island as our destination. During that high school excursion I participated in all the usual tourist stuff with my girlfriend and buddies: go on the inland motor tour, ride the glass bottom boat, hang out at the beach. I also went to the Catalina Island History Museum housed in those days on the ground floor of a harbor front building called the Casino. There I saw what was to me, thanks to my growing Buddhist knowledge, a truly remarkable artifact --- an artifact that was on exhibit as though it was nothing special, but for me at the time, really blew my mind.

Sitting in a glass case amongst a myriad of other Native American artifacts was two halves of an open abalone or clam shell that had at one time been closed and sealed with natural occurring asphaltum. The sealed shell had been found, as I was to learn much later, in 1922 in an ancient Indian burial site located on the island at a place called Empire Landing. When the abalone shell was opened, inside, and the same thing I saw and was set aback when I did, was a small ceramic fired Buddha-like image, looking all the same as high quality white porcelain. And it was. Again, as I was to find out later, the Buddha-like image was way beyond any of the knowledge or ability to do so or make by Native American cultures prior to the burial. Professor T. Y. H. Ma (1899-1979), late of the National Taiwan University, Taiwan, and his colleagues reported that the ceramic image was certainly of Chinese origin and that the workmanship showed it to be from the Tang dynasty circa 618-907 AD. My mentor, who was quite familiar with the object, having lived on the Channel Islands off the coast of California for seven years prior to me meeting him, brought up the artifact in conversation one day several years after my graduation when I told him a buddy and I were planning an extended trip through Mexico.

It was the summer of 1960 and I had tired of the day-to-day grind working as a technical illustrator since high school. I had been working on the high altitude breathing equipment for the then super-secret U-2 spy plane, which was exciting work. With the contract nearing an end, my job was beginning to get stale. Adding that to the fact the draft was looming over my head and my long term semi-on-and-off high school and after girlfriend --- who had gone off to college while I remained home being nothing but a dunce working stiff --- hit me with the fact she had met and fallen in love with some hunkering down stud and they were planning on getting married didn't help. When my buddy, who was in much the same boat I was, suggested an extended, open-ended trip to Mexico I decided to take a never-come-back leave of absence from my job and go for it.

My buddy and I shopped around and bought a used six-cylinder 1951 Chevy panel truck just for the trip that was in pretty good shape and over a period of a few months the two of us outfitted it like a camper with fold down bunks, table, sink, stove, and portable toilet. We got a bunch of new fan belts, radiator hoses, inner tubes and tools, then, early one Saturday morning we crossed into Mexico with no idea how long we were going to be gone. My mentor told me, referring back to the ceramic Buddha I had seen at Catalina, there were Buddha-like references all over ancient Mexico and to keep my eye open for them. He emphasized over the centuries that the most important Buddhist related site had been found in the mountains several miles north of the southern city of Tehuantepec and if I got that far south and didn't do anything else, not to miss an attempt to locate it.

There was as well he said, a highly relevant and much more recently discovered second site that, because of how close it was to the border considering the full length of Mexico, would actually have been the first of the two sites to have been explored during our travels. However, no sooner had we crossed the border into Mexico than the bony arm and hand of Fate intervened and inexplicably altered our trip to such a point we were never able to get close. The site was said to have been discovered in the 1800s in the Mexican state of Sonora east of Hermosillo near the small village of Ures. There archaeologists unearthed what appeared to be the remains of an ancient Chinese temple complex in excellent condition along with a number large stone tablets clearly covered with Chinese characters.(see)

I had all honorable intentions of visiting the site during our trip except the itinerary of our journey in relation to the Ures, Sonora, site was changed so much I never did get close. Nor too, up to the present, have I attempted to return in some fashion to make up for it.(see) For further elaboration on the above travels please visit the following:

THE MAYA SHAMAN AND CHICXULUB

TRAVELS IN THE YUCATAN
ASTEROIDS, SHAMANS, AND THE HIDDEN MAGIC OF MAYA TEMPLES

The following year, months after having returned from my trip to Mexico, my mentor gave me a brand new book that was only just published titled They All Discovered America (1961) by Charles Michael Boland. In doing so he had carefully bookmarked Chapter 4, Hoei Shin, for my own edification. And that's how it was all tied together --- from the abalone shell in Catalina to the carved figure in the mountains above Tehuantepec to the book with the chapter on Hoei Shin --- Boland's Hoei Shin being, of course, the same Hui Shan I write about above AND the same personage whose memory still stands a high on a rock in a village north of Tehuantepec that bares the name Wi-shi-pecocha, a transliteration of Hui Shen, bhikshu.[4]

Legend has it that Hui Shen, after paying homage to the holy man, left the Grand Canyon area heading overland through Mexico reconnecting with his fleet moored in the bay either as far north as Puerto Vallarta or as far south as Acapulco. From there he sailed further south apparently going ashore at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and traveling inland to the various cultures preaching his ways. Eventually he made his way back to the Pacific side of isthmus and was last seen sailing toward the west, never to return. Before he departed, however, the years he was in Mexico and the Yucatan many a legend and story grew up around him, of which the story surrounding Wi-shi-pecocha and memorialized in the carved figure in the mountains above Tehuantepec is but one.

While it appears there is a very strong parallel to Hui Shen and Wi-shi-pecocha being the same person, the name of the holy man Hui Shen crossed the Mojave Desert to see and/or pay homage to is highly elusive and never specifically designated. It is my belief he was the same deified priest or lama said to have lived in a small house on an island near the Colorado River and called by the name Quatu Sacca (Quatu-zaca) --- said by Coronado's scribe Pedro de Castaneda de N'jera to exist or to have existed. Again, who that deified priest or holy man was is not known specifically, as only vague references to him can be found. However, whoever he was, he was important enough for Hui Shen to leave the comparable comfort and safety of his ship and hike 300 plus miles inland across the scorching desert to pay homage to him. The closest anything in English I have located that even comes close to narrowing it down is found in a rather obscure 1913 treatise by Alexander M'Allan (sometimes McAllan) titled Ancient Chinese Account of the Grand Canyon, or Course of the Colorado. Even then, for an answer, because of how it is written by M'Allan it can't be capsulized, but needs to be read, then extrapolated.

As for Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's interest in seeing, visiting, or going to an ancient Buddhist temple, perhaps Tibetan, said to exist somewhere in a cave high along the walls of the Grand Canyon, there may have been a tinge or element of traditional beliefs interjected, however slight, but where Trungpa seemed to be coming from to me was based more on the Kincaid story rather than any traditional beliefs. The more traditional beliefs, i.e., Indian legends, folklore, et al, hold more closely to what I present about Quatu zaca below than the more over the top Kincaid story.

In the end, my uncle offered no other alternative to Trungpa that I know of, nor have I heard of the existence of such a cave prior to Kincaid's. In Native American and Grand Canyon lore of the desert southwest there are a number of stories related to mysterious caves and such as found written about so well in The Haunted Mesa by Louis L'Amour, but the foreshadowing of Buddha and Buddha images as it has come down into the hands of the Europeans and their descendants (i.e., white man) is pretty much limited to Quatu zaca. True, if you read M'Allen's account linked above, you will find, according to M'Allan, many similarities of words and nomenclature with many of the same sounds and meanings in the language of indigenous cultures of the desert southwest as compared to that of various Chinese syntax, but not always Buddha related specifically.[5]

Personally I think there is more to the story than we have command of. So said, it is my opinion that there may be some sort of a connection between the potential existence of a Buddha Cave and the deified priest or lama said to have been living in a small house on an island near the Colorado River. If such is the case then, just what does a sanctuary of Lamaisra, or of Buddhism located on the North American continent in present day Nevada around 500 AD, and clearly stated in the written accounts to be in a small house near a lake on an island in the Colorado River, have to do with anything? Possibly, for example, the two Buddhist monks and a woman, as found in The Mystic Aztec Sun God, traveling southbound on a raft loaded with goods apparently from quite a distance north up the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon some 500 years after Hui Shen visited Quatu Zacca and on the way to the same Lamaisra circa 1100 AD. A trip that the three appeared to have done many times.

In the book The Coronado Expedition, 1540-1542, Smithsonian Institution, 1892-1893, Part 1, author George Parker Winship, on page 406, Winship, speaking of one of Coronado's captains, Hernando de Alarcon questioning Native Americans he came in contact with along the Colorado River in 1540 AD, writes:

"When asked about gold and silver, the Indians said that they had some metal of the same color as the bells which the Spaniards showed them. This was not made nor found in their country, but came 'from a certain mountain where an old woman dwelt.' The old woman was called Guatuzaca."

(source)

That certain mountain where an old woman called "Guatuzaca" dwelt, a mountain that the Indians said had gold and silver, is quite possibly the spawning ground where the stories of the Grand Canyon Buddhist cave first emanated. It is not totally unusual for gold and silver, if not placer driven, to be dug out of the ground meaning a good chance of a cave, i.e., a mine. However, was the old woman really mining for gold or simply gathering it up off the floor of the Kincaid cave and sending it down river a little at a time? Was the cave as big and as elaborate as told by Kincaid or was it just a mine to get gold and silver out of the ground? So too, if Guatuzaca was a Buddhist, it wouldn't be beyond comprehension that she might fashion a statue of Buddha. From that one small story, a cave, a carved Buddha, gold and silver, a whole legend could grow. As for Guatuzca, a woman at the mine in the mountains, and Quatu Zacca being deified priest or lama at the Buddhist sanctuary on an island in the Colorado River, I think they were separate people, it's just that the Indians blanketed them all under the broader term Quatu Zacca.

HIDDEN AZTEC GOLD: THE LEGENDS OF THE LOST DUTCHMAN MINE

(please click image)

Lots of people, both credible and questionable, have researched and investigated all aspects of the contents of the Kincaid Grand Canyon article top to bottom and from inside to inside out, and have continued to come up short with any hard evidence of such a cave or even the existence of Kincaid himself. Many of those same investigators say the Smithsonian has no record of having any such person, persons, researchers, or archaeology-like teams participating in any venture similar to or like the ones so attributed to in the article.

A number of those same credible and questionable people who have investigated and researched all aspects of the 1909 article, plus a smattering of others it would seem if you read some of the internet accounts, have actually physically got up out of their computer-generated armchair explorations and actually, legally or illegally, gone into the canyon searching for the cave on their own

There are strengths and weaknesses to all sides of the story, with the strength part, in my opinion, at least as it relates to Hui Shen, adding a whole other level of credibility to most of the concept as I have presented it. On the weakness side one could easily argue that the Chinese records are few and fragmented and easily open to interpretation or misinterpretation because of language differences and age of the manuscripts reaching so far back in history. Such is not the case with the Spanish manuscripts. The scribe for Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, Pedro de Castaneda de N'jera, recorded page after page, year after year of the explorer's travels. Since then scores of people have gone over and over what he has written. His descriptions and chronicles of the explorations have proven incredibly durable and accurate over the years, withstanding inquiry after inquiry. So said, there is no reason then to suddenly believe the following is suspect in its accuracy for some reason:

"(P)laced near the Colorado River, in a small island, a sanctuary of Lamaisra, or of Buddhism. He mentions a divine personage living in a small house near a lake upon this island, and called, as he says, Quatu-zaca, who was reputed never to eat."

Now true, Castaneda's original account, Relacion de la jornada de Cibola compuesta por Pedro de Castaneda de N'cera donde se trata de todas aquellos poblados y ritos, y costumbres, la cual fu el ao de 1540, has been lost, but, like I have stated previously, a copy is still in existence that was made in 1596. Other portions of the copy has withstood the test of time as to its accuracy, so as with the above quote referring to Quatu-zaca there is really no reason to dispute it.

While it is possible the suspected cave location within the Grand Canyon is viable, I personally do not believe such a cave would be anything remotely comparable to what has been reported, that is being able to house 50,000 people for example. First of all, if conventionally created, the logistics of hand hewing such a cave from the living rock would require if nothing else, a great deal of manpower and there is nothing to suggest, archaeologically, that any large contingent of workers inhabited any area near the suspected location of the cave --- especially so considering the amount of time to make such a cave. Secondly, digging it out of the canyon walls would have created tons and tons of debris. If any of you have seen even a small mine dug into the mountains in the desert there are nearly always huge talus slopes outside the entrances or nearby. Can you imagine how much rock debris would have to be removed from the mountain to create a cave that could house 50,000? If one were to give in that the Colorado was able to wash away a good part of it there would still remain tons of rock along the base and of which over the years could still be recognizable as not being natural to the setting.[6]

Even if I were to cede existence of such a cave as so described, more than likely it would not have been made by coming through from the sheer face of the canyon wall but from above by punching through from the overlaying plateau. That is to say, some distance back on the plateau above and back from the suspected cliff-side cave opening, a fairly long low angled ramp-like hole in the direction of the cliff wall could have been dug. Using the ramp the dirt could easily be removed and spread all over the plateau surface. As the centuries passed the debris would just get intermixed into the regular soil and natural overgrowth would take over. Once the cave was completed the ramp entrance could be filled in, sealed, covered over, or hidden in some manner. Then, closer to the main complex, a straight up-and-down vertical entrance shaft could be dug into the cave proper. That way access up the cliff walls would be eliminated or unnecessary as well as making it easier for water and supplies to be transported into the cave interior.

People are just too taken by the mystique and grandeur of the Grand Canyon. If I was searching for the cave I would be looking for evidence of an entrance or air shafts somewhere on the plateau. If the interior of the cave is as large as they say, any inhabitants or workers would have needed air and illumination. Most likely any conventional illumination device of the era would have required as much oxygen if not more than the inhabitants would have consumed, hence the need for airshafts. Kincaid himself, the so-called discoverer of the cave as outlined in the 1909 Arizona Gazette article is quoted as saying himself, after having entered the cave:

"The perfect ventilation of the cavern, the steady draught that blows through, indicates that it has another outlet to the surface."[7]

EXPLORATIONS IN GRAND CANYON

Regardless of the size of the cave, for me much greater things are in the works. Kincaid said the cave was on the 'east' wall of the canyon which would mean the cave opening faced west, that is with the rising sun behind it in the morning and the setting sun facing it from sometime after mid-day on. Although nobody ever brings it up except me, there is most likely a major significance to the specific location of the cave and the face-direction of the opening relative to some outside phenomenon, most likely equinoxes or solstices or the setting of a specific star or constellation --- otherwise it could have been built anywhere along the myriad of canyon walls facing in any direction. I only say so because when I was around ten years old, on one of my excursions with my uncle I came across just such a scenario --- that is, where a cave created by the ancients of the desert southwest was carved facing west so that on a certain day the sun set directly over a distinct peak. The following is what I write about the experience from the source so cited. There is a footnote associated with the quote that is well worth reading as well:

"The cave was perfect for the two of us to sit in side by side out of the sun. My uncle's head nearly touched the top of the cave and our backs fit almost perfectly along the cool surface of the curved rock wall. When I commented on how nice the cave was my uncle told me it was man-made, having been carved out by ancient people thousands of years ago and that animals and insects and even people shied away from it because it had been infused with something that made living things feel ill at ease. Even so, I didn't feel it. At first, except for being tired from the climb, I felt quite comfortable there, I even liked it. Something about it gave me a good feeling inside. However, as time passed and in that we had no food or water and the sun began to drop low in the sky flooding the cave with heat and light, that feeling of good and comfortableness began to wane. Still we sat. The sun finally reached the top of the mountains across the valley. The very second the sun touched the mountains in its downward path I could clearly see it was centered exactly behind the point of the tallest mountain peak along the chain and perfectly aligned with the cave. I had watched the shadow of the peak and that of the wedge shaped sides from the mountain slowly crawl cross the valley below and upward along the foothills like a giant wave engulfing everything in its path until the very tip of the shadow touched into the cave. Then suddenly like an explosion of light it was gone, the black of the mountain glowing with illumination of the setting sun going down behind it leaving nothing but a slight glow along the horizon. With the sun gone it got very dark and cold."(source)

It just so happens there is a very high-profile promontory, an outcrop peak of sorts, on the west side the river located about a quarter of a mile downstream from mile 57 called Malgosa Crest that would be a perfect candidate, mimicking in effect the Heel Stone, albeit in an opposite way in that it would mark the setting sun rather than the rising sun, at Stonehenge. In theory, barring physical changes that may have occurred over the centuries, one would only have to position oneself in a direct line across from the promontory on one or the other equinoxes to see where the tip of the shadow fell --- in theory, Malgosa Crest being only one example of a potential Heel Stone among many, of course.

(please click image)

So too, there is a possibility a reflection device of some sort may have been constructed and placed across the canyon on the west plateau or cliff walls to focus a beam from the rising sun directly into the cave opening to brilliantly illuminate the interior. If so, remnants of such a device or evidence where it stood may still remain. Archaeologically speaking, the remnants of such a device could help in narrowing down the location of the cave without the need to physically scour miles of surface area. As well, the use of thermal imaging, aka infrared thermography (IRT), from the opposite side of the canyon might be considered as a method to locate the cave entrance as the interior of the cave would be noticeably cooler than the cliff walls.[8]

In 1540 AD when the expedition under Francisco Vasquez de Coronado marched north from New Spain (Mexico) into what is now Arizona and New Mexico their main goal was in locating the Seven Cities of Cibola, said to be filled with gold and riches. Basically all they ended up doing was ransacking all of the major pueblos starting with Hawikuh, the southernmost of the Zuni pueblos in western New Mexico, and leave a year or two later with neither gold nor treasure.

During the time Coronado was holed up in the general area he was told of a great river some distance north. In September 1540 Coronado sent one of his Captains, Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, in command of about 30 men and led by Hopi Indian guides, to locate and report back what he learned of such a river.

After about 20 days the expedition eventually came across the south rim of the canyon, most likely somewhere between Moran Point and Desert View. Easily seeing the river in the distance, Cardenas sent several of his men into the canyon in an attempt to reach it. After climbing down to a point about a third of the way and finding no way to descend any further they were forced to return. There is a good chance the Hopi guides purposely took Cardenas to one of the most difficult areas of the canyon to traverse down to the river from the rim. All the centuries their people inhabited the area they most certainly knew or were familiar with a variety of viable routes to the river or canyon floor, as for example the ancient and oft used Hopi Salt Mine Pilgrimage Trail, but selectively chose not to reveal any to the Spaniards.

Around the same time Coronado heard about the river he also heard another rumor about a great city to the north called Quivira where the chief supposedly drank from golden cups said to hang from trees as plentiful as fruit on a fertile tree --- which was enough of an incentive to send Coronado looking for it. After an initial ruse by his guide in the wrong direction, Coronado sent most of his slow-moving army back to New Mexico and continued on with only 30 mounted soldiers and a myriad group of camp followers. All he found was villages of thatched huts and sticks.

The common theme that runs through the above, except for NOT finding any gold or treasures, is how the Spaniards were duped by the Indians. It wasn't that way in all cases --- and if it was a continuing theme it was much more subtle. Generally, Coronado and his men, like a good deal of the conquistadors, were not known for their compassionate treatment of the indigenous peoples they came in contact with. For two under his command the story was much different, and as it were, for the most part, so were the results.

A captain under the command of Coronado by the name of Melchior Diaz was one that typically got good results, primarily through trust and humane treatment. Diaz was sent on a scouting party toward the Gulf of California in search of three ships under Hernando de Alarcon that were to meet up with Coronado --- with nobody knowing it would never happen because the distance between the inland city or Cibola and the gulf continued to widen as Coronado's army marched north eastward. Diaz, traveling basically west-south-west from Cibola and thinking he would eventually come to the gulf, and, although some reports have him arriving south of the delta he actually reached the Colorado River well over a 100 miles north the delta. He was told by Indians of the area that some days before, what they described as ships, had been seen on the river basically staying in the same location for two or three days. When Diaz reached the spot where the ships had been seen, he found a stash of supplies left by Alarcon who had sailed up the Colorado thinking he could meet up with Coronado. Alarcon, also known for gaining trust and humane treatment of the Indians he came in contact with, after waiting several days and with no sign of Coronado's army, offloaded the supplies, but what he did next is not clear.

How far up river Alarcon traveled and where the location of the supplies were stashed is not known with any amount of certainty. The two however, are not necessarily tied together. Lewis R. Freeman, in his book The Colorado River (1923), not talking about where the supplies were left, but how far Alarcon traveled up river, cites the work of Frederick S. Dellenbaugh who determined he got as far as the Blythe Canal. He also cites Dr. Elliott Coues who felt that Alarcon was even farther north, reaching clear to present day Needles, California. Freeman himself suggests that Alarcon offloaded his supplies somewhere along a 15 mile gap between the present day ghost town of Picacho located some 35 miles north of the Gila River and Lighthouse Rock, which is 50 miles north of the Gila River, with Freeman really never getting into how far up river Alarcon may have really gone.

The uncertainty of Alarcon's travels rests on the fact that he never got around to submitting the required formal report on his expedition. In lieu of the report he sent an exhaustive multi-page letter to the Viceroy of New Spain, Don Antonio De Mendoza, implying that the formal report would follow. If it did, it has never shown up in any archives or files that anybody knows about. Years later Alarcon's letter fell into the hands of an Italian, Giovanni Ramusio, who translated the Spanish of the letter into Italian and published it in 1556. In the letter are continuing references of days and days travel up the river.

Complicating matters, overlapping endeavors along the Colorado River, Diaz and Alarcon just missed each other. So too, as fate with have it, before Diaz could return to Coronado's command he was severely injured in a freak accident wherein he fell from his horse onto his own lance, penetrating his thigh into his groin. He died 20 days later, and all before he too had written and submitted his formal report. So taken together, between Diaz and Alarcon there is a big unofficial blank on their travels.

Because of Alarcon's return to New Spain and disappearance in the mist of time and the death of Diaz, Coronado's scribe Pedro de Castaneda de N'jera did not get to interview each of them personally nor was he traveling with either contingent. He did however, because there was no formal report on the expedition, interview Diaz's men and it is from those interviews that word of Quatu Zacca came to light. The thing is, in Diaz's case, as Castaneda presents it in his works, he does not make it clear IF Diaz's men actually claimed to have made contact with Quatu Zacca.

Interestingly enough, Alarcon's letter, in a stand alone verification separate from Castaneda's interviews of Diaz's men, mentions Quatu Zacca. After many days journey upriver interacting with various tribes along the way an old man, through Alarcon's interpreter, told him basically the same thing that Castaneda reports. He regaled Alarcon and his men with tales of grand rivers, mountains of copper, and seemingly ancient traditions of bearded white men. The old man told Alarcon it would take many, many days to reach the point Quatu Zacca lived, but it is not clear if the old man meant sailing or marching overland. It is assumed the old man would know how much distance a typical Indian could cover walking in a day, but most likely not have the same knowledge when it came to how much distance a boat could cover. He did say, after seeing various metal fixtures on the boat, that those in accompaniment of Quatu Zacca used the same color and type of material to make things that made sounds (i.e., bells, presumably made of metal). Indigenous tribes working in metal during that era was unheard of. When asked where they got the material, the old man said deep in the mountains. I just find it interesting and an incredible coincidence that the two main people to have garnered personal knowledge of Quatu Zacca, and of which one or the other or both, may had made contact, thus becoming privy to information that was never passed down, are the only two to have NOT delivered required formal reports, whose diaries and notes disappeared, and both seem to have died under unusual or unknown circumstances.

As stated previously, except for not finding any gold or treasures, there seems to be a common theme that runs through the narratives provided by the Spaniards, and that is how they seem to have been duped by the Indians. And that is what I think we are dealing with when it comes to the existence of the cave and the Buddhist on the island in the Colorado.

When Juan Cabrillo was exploring along the Pacific coast of California in 1542 he was told several times by various Native Americans he came in contact with, especially so the Chumash Indians near Santa Barbara, that they knew of "men like them," (i.e., Spaniards) five days to the east, identifying them with having beards, helmets, swords and crossbows --- and that they had killed some of the natives. More than likely they were making reference to Coronado's men. If it was Coronado's men they were at least as far east as New Mexico, quite a distance to cover in five days. It took Cardenas 20 days to reach the Grand Canyon rim from Cibola a distance of about 200 miles, or about 10 miles per day. According to reports found in The Coronado expedition, 1540-1542 by George Parker Winship (1896) Alarcon was told by a Native American he came in contact with that he had only just got back from Cibola and had seen who he assumed to be Coronado and his men and that it had taken him a month after leaving Cibola to reach the river. I think the old man was setting Alarcon up when it came to Quatu Zacca, albeit after the fact. He had let out of the bag all the riches and splendor, then, realizing what he had done started citing many days distance in the hopes that Alarcon would pass.[9]

HIKING THE FUSANG TRAIL

First of all, there isn't a Fusang Trail per se'. I invented it by basically retracing the nearly vanished trail(s) shown on the map at the bottom of the page that were meticulously carved out of the harsh prehistoric landscape by the Colorado River dewelling Mojave Indians centuries ago to trade with the Chumash along the Pacific coast near Ventura. Isabel Kelly writes in Southern Paiute - Chemehuevi Trails Across the Mojave Desert:

"It is known that several major trails were developed at various points in the past for the shell trade and other trafficing between the Pacific Coast and the interior, and then continuing on across the Colorado River into the Southwest. Although some suggest that they may date back 5,000 or more years, there is clear evidence that some date at least pre-900 A.D. In the contact period (1770s), several of these major routes were still in use by the Mohave, River Yumans and Chemehuevi to furnish trade goods such as shells, food stuffs, rabbit-skin blankets, salt, pottery and basketry to each other as well as the Cahuilla, Pai groups, Southern Paiute, Navajo, and reciprocally to various groups along the Pacific Coast. Stories of small groups of Mohave men running across these desert trails, often traveling at night to avoid the desert heat, and guided by reflective white stones as markers, are among the most impressive of southern desert travel narratives. They often ran 100 miles a day, reaching coastal destinations in three to four days."

As to the Fusang Trail as I call it, if you begin where the Santa Clara River enters the Pacific, then follow the stream eastward to the mountains you can easily continue right on up to the high desert floor picking up and following basically the same route as the Southern Pacific Railway tracks use today through Soledad Canyon, coming out just south of Palmdale. From there it is possible to cross the desert heading directly east hugging the base of the east-west transverse San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains until reaching the Mojave River where it exits onto the desert plain. Following the Mojave River north it eventually starts making a huge sweep toward the northeast. About 40 miles from your first contact with the river you reach a point near Yermo where it and an ancient trail used by Native Americans to traverse from the Colorado River to the sea, now called the Mojave Road, run side-by-side. Roughly 20 miles farther northeast and the trail turns more eastwards away from the Mojave River, eventually, after somewhat over a 100 miles across open desert, reaching the Colorado near present day Laughlin, Nevada.[10]

ON THE LEFT OF THE MAP IS THE WORD CHUMASH. ABOVE THAT SANTA CLARA R. AND A DOTTED LINE LEADING
TO SOLEDAD PASS THEN TO MOJAVE RIVER. THAT IS THE BASIC ROUTE USED BY HUI SHEN TO THE COLORADO.
(please click image)

A lot of people start jumping up and down pooh-poohing the route, but I know the area and have done it, so know it can be done. It just that in doing so you can't go off half cocked. The time of year has to be taken into consideration, enough water needs to be carried for unforeseen circumstances and the conservation of the water you do have must be adhered to. Also, the number of miles you can safely travel in a day needs to be divided into the number of miles to ensure you have sufficient supplies. It wouldn't be easy, but the five Buddhist monks did it circa 458 AD not to mention hundreds if not thousands of Native Americans over the centuries.[11]

OM MANI PADME HUM

INCIDENT AT SUPAI
A SHAMANIC JOURNEY OUTSIDE THE TRADITION

OPERATION HAT
THE CIA IN TIBET AND THE HIMALAYAS

THE FLYING MACHINE: CHINA CIRCA 400 A.D.

(please click image)

Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.

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WE DO NOT HAVE SHAMANS The Case Against "Shamans" In the North American Indigenous Cultures

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Footnote [1]

Most of my life, at least since visiting Tombstone as a 10 year old onward, I've had a somewhat more than passing interest in Doc Holliday. When I was participating in what the Army calls Advanced Individual Training I had a buddy who carried what I would call more of a burning interest in the old west gambler and gunfighter. As it turned out Holliday was born in a small town in Georgia called Griffin, not far from the military base where we were training at the time. One weekend on a three day pass my buddy decided to go see Holliday's birthplace and talked me into going with him.

Many years after my Army days were over, during the aforementioned phone call to my uncle, like I say, Doc Holliday popped into my mind. I told my uncle in that I had seen where Holliday was born and Tombstone where he came close to dying, I was thinking about going to Glenwood Springs, Colorado to see his grave site. My uncle told me there was some petroglyphs he had been hoping to show me in Utah for some time, including some along the Black Dragon Wash in the San Rafael Swell (of which I had seen last at a very young age). He asked me to meet him in Denver, go with him to see Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in Boulder, then we could drop down to I-70 and head west to the petroglyph site in addition to a couple of other locations and along the way, in the process, go right through Glenwood Springs. Which, after having breakfast with an artist friend of his, Howard Fogg, followed by a couple short individual excursions, we did.

Prior to our Glenwood Springs departure, but after breakfast with Fogg, my uncle told me there was a small matter of importance he needed to take care of that he wanted to do without me accompanying him. I never found out what the big importance was, but since we had already checked out of our room, while he went to do whatever he was going to do, which I think because he said he didn't need the use of the car and we were within easy walking distance of the university, it had to do with reconnecting back up with Trungpa and possibly the Grand Canyon cave. Especially so, without me in attendance. In any case, it freed me up for a short time and left me with the use of the car if I so chose, which it did.

Even though I was going to visit Doc Holliday's grave site during this particular road trip with my uncle I wouldn't say I was a way up there visit a grave site kind of guy. However, finding myself in Denver and a few hours to spare and a car at my disposal, possibly because of a semi-grave site connection, I decided to make a quick trip up to Fort Collins and pay respects to someone that also had a "meaning" to me. He was a Flying Tigers pilot named Bert Christman, a former cartoonist who was killed in action over Rangoon, Burma during the early stages of World War II. After his P-40 was shot up he bailed out but instead of being given the benefit of the doubt his adversary had other ideas. The following quote cuts to the quick surrounding his horrific death:

"On Friday, January 23, 1942, 72 Japanese aircraft attacked Rangoon. Christman was one of the 18 planes that were launched to intercept them. He would never return. Christman's plane had come under fire and been hit in the engine. He was forced to bail out once more. This time, however, as he hung in his parachute and descended to the ground, a Japanese pilot strafed him. Bert was hit in several places and probably died as a bullet passed through the back of his neck. He was buried the next day at the church of Edward The Martyr in Rangoon. His remains were returned to Fort Collins after the war, where he was laid to rest on Saturday, February 4, 1950."

After the San Rafael Swell petroglyphs, in order to see another petroglyph of great importance to my uncle for me to see, he doubled back along Highway 50 to the 550 south through Durango, Colorado.

We stopped in Durango a couple of nights then headed west toward Bluff, Utah. In Bluff, where the Butler Wash and the San Juan River come together we stopped to take in the ruins and rock art attributed to the Anasazi and possibly earlier cultures. What my uncle had me see at San Rafael Swell was the petroglyph of what appears to be a pterosaur, a giant flying reptile that lived, and went extinct, at the same time as the dinosaurs.(see) What he wanted me to see near Bluff, Utah was the petroglyph located at the Upper Sand Island rock art site along the San Juan River that depicted an animal from the Middle and Late Pleistocene called a Columbian mammoth(see), suggested to him at one time as being worth seeing by Utah rock art and desert southwest advocate and archeologist, Alex Apostolides.

On one of the days before leaving Durango I rode the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad while my uncle met with a friend in town he said he hadn't seen in several years. Later he told me the man he met was the owner of the Toh-Atin Gallery, H. Jackson Clark, which at the time meant nothing to me. Since my uncle had never mention him, I didn't put his friend together as being Clark. It was only later that I connected all the dots. Apparently Clark and my uncle, in some fashion had been putting together Native American legend and lore background material for cowboy and western author Louis L'Amour for a book he was thinking about writing that ended up being titled The Haunted Mesa. The basic premise of the plot leans heavily toward the Hopi Myth via their Anasazi progenitors that circulates around the Third World, from which they believe they came, emerging through a hole in the ground into the present world they live in now, which the Hopis call the Fourth World. If the meeting between Clark and my uncle had anything to do with L'Amour and his book is not known. However, in that L'Amour didn't actually start writing the book until 1977, then worked on it on-and-off for ten years or more after that, it is hard to say.

As it came down to me was that my uncle, in consultation with L'Amour through Clark, presented legend much more as fact-based rather than story telling because over the years my uncle had actually seen, experienced, and participated in the physical manifestation of many phenomenon that was legend related. Clark, on the other hand, although deeply seeped in the folklore of the legends of the desert southwest and a major noteworthy among the various bands inhabiting the region, had a tendency to weigh in more heavily on the folklore side rather than placing them into the actual reality of the everyday world. L'Amour, drawing from his own background, was torn by the width of the discrepancy and had difficulty resolving the issue in clarification for his readers.

The thing is, as I look back, it is quite the coincidence that the subject matter of L'Amour's eventual book entertained such a close relationship to what I write about in the main text above and that you will be reading about in a few minutes. It is as though my uncle, after talking with Trungpa, had to rush right down to Durango and discuss something very important with Clark, a something he never discussed with me.(see)

One last thing before we move on, as written about in the main text above, in 1970 my father was caught in a fire while on the job. He held on for a couple of years but by the end of 1972 he had fallen into a deep coma and put on life support. The year after the 1971 trip with my uncle I write about in the main text above, meeting Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and all, sometime around the start of the summer of 1972 but prior to my dad falling into a coma, my dad called me to his bedside without the knowledge of family or friends, including his wife. He told me he had long rented a small, single-car garage-size storage unit unknown to anybody. Inside the storage unit he said, was a large locked trunk clearly marked with his brother's name and he wanted me to deliver it him unopened and without anybody's knowledge, even my brothers, and especially so before anybody discovered he had the storage unit.

Adhering to my father's request put me in Santa Fe unexpectedly on a quick couple of days turn around during late June early July of 1972. I say unexpectedly because as soon as I walked out of the hospital I went straight to the storage unit, picked up the trunk, and drove all night right to Santa Fe. Doing so put me into my uncle's schedule of doing things instead of the two of us designing time around me being there.

During that couple of days in Santa Fe my uncle had to meet up with, for some undisclosed reason, beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who just happened to be in town during the same period and I went along. I wasn't introduced to or meet Ginsberg, staying off some distance milling around the car as requested by my uncle while the two of them talked. However, I was close enough to see Ginsberg was traveling with a couple of hangers-on, one of which was a woman about 30 with ultra-short dark hair the other a very tall young man with full beard and dreadlocks. The young man with full beard and dreadlocks, who just happened to be a good friend of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was Bhagavan Das, age 27, only just returned from India.

I never met Ginsberg, another good friend of Trungpa, that afternoon. Being waved off by my uncle to stay with the car was the closest I came to meeting him that day. Although it was apparent my uncle and Ginsberg knew each other, why my uncle requested me to remain by the car while the two of them talked was never clear. I could have easily overridden the whole thing if I so chose, and perhaps I should have. I carried a major ace-in-the-hole relative to Ginsberg that would have elevated me quickly with him had I selected to do so --- that ace being me having met a few years prior a major high-profile woman in his inner circle that had disappeared, a woman by the name of Hope Savage. She had been with the Beats ever since Ginsberg's top player Gregory Corso brought her into their circle. She had gone to Paris and Corso had went in search of her with no luck. Ginsberg ran into her in India a few years later and was the last to see her when the two of them said goodbyes in Calcutta in 1962. However, I had inadvertently crossed paths with her wandering in a remote section of the Himalayas since then. He would have flipped had he found out about it.

The three-photo strip below was taken at the 1972 meeting in Santa Fe. The first photo show Alan Ginsberg. The center photo has Bhagavan Das and Ram Dass shown together. The third photo shows him with Ram Dass and Ginsberg. Ram Dass, again, IS Dr. Richard Alpert, the author of Be Here Now, the 1971 book that shot Bhagavan Das as well as both Ram Dass and Bhagavan Das' guru Neem Karoli Baba to fame.

Footnote [2]

The primary originating source for all information that has come down to us regarding Hui Shen and his travels to and in Fu Sang comes from a section of what is called the Liang Shu (The History of the Liang Dynasty), a huge multi-volume set considered the official Chinese dynastic history of the Liang era (486-621 AD). That section, or annal, Chu I Chuan (Record of the Barbarians), contains the single most definitive grounding source for all things Hui Shen. Charles G. Leland, an American scholar, first translated the Hui Shen portions of the Liang Shu into English for his book Fu-Sang, Or the Discovery of the World by Chinese Buddhist Priests in the Fifth Century (1875). Leland leaned heavily on the previous work done by a German scholar named Carl Friedrich Neumann in 1841. Neumann, in turn, had been influenced by the 1761 monograph of French sinologist Joseph de Guignes in the French scholarly journal Memoires de l'Acadamie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, tome 28, Paris, 1761. The original European version of Fusang's memoir was entitled Recherches sur les Navigations des Chinois du Cote de l' Amerique.

In a clarification of the lineage of historical research regarding his book Fusang, Leland, in the preface, writes:

"The original document on which the Chinese historians based their account of Fusang was the report of a Buddhist monk or missionary named Hoei-shin (Schin or Shen), who, in the year 499 A.D., returned from a long journey to the East. This report was regularly entered on the Year-Books or Annals of the Chinese Empire.

"In 1841 Carl Friedrich Neumann, Professor of Oriental Languages and History at the University of Munich, published the original narrative of Hoei-shin from the Annals, adding to it comments of his own elucidating its statements, and advancing somewhat beyond de Guignes. This little work I translated into English, under the supervision of Professor Neumann, and with his aid. I believe that, as he revised and corrected the English version here given, it may claim to be an accurate translation from the Chinese text of the Year-Book, and that of Hoei-shin. I have placed it first in this volume because it gives in a much more perfect form than is to be found in the memoir of de Guignes the original report on which the entire investigation is based."

A complete free PDF version of Leland's book (original 1875 copy including cover) is available online for your reading pleasure by clicking the link below. You have to scroll down the cover and several blank pages before the text shows up:

HOEI SHIN

FUSANG

Footnote [3]

Although Quatu Sacca shows up as reported by Coronado's scribe Pedro de Castaneda de N'jera and thus has come down to us, no ruins or artifacts, Buddha or otherwise, as ascribed to that of a house, sanctuary or Lamaisra on an island in the Colorado River or that sort of thing has ever been discovered or reported. So too conspicuously missing are any high profile Native American legends of same. However, such is not the case when it comes to potential visits by Vikings to the desert southwest circa 900-1100 AD, for example the following:

"A curious Indian legend implies that Vikings may have strayed as far south as Mexico. The Seri Indians of the Gulf of California's Tiburon Island still tell of the 'Come-From-Afar-Men' who landed on the island in a 'long boat with a head like a snake.' They say the strange men had yellow hair and beards, and a woman with red hair was among them. Their chief stayed on the island with the redheaded woman while his men hunted whales in the Gulf. When they had finished hunting, the strangers went back on their ship and sailed away."

VIKINGS OF THE DESERT SOUTHWEST

COTTONWOOD ISLAND (NEVADA)

THE DESERT SHIP: A LEGEND, OR TWO

(please click image)

Footnote [4]

From around 1500 BCE to 1500 AD the southern reaches of Mexico and the Yucatan, in an area generally known as Mesoamerica, was populated by any number of tribes and peoples, minor and major, with many reaching very high states of civilization. The high civilization tribes eventually became known under such names as Olmecs, Toltecs, Zapotecs, Aztecs, Mayans, etc. Most had the same or similar legends that a white or fair-skinned god would come from across the seas and change their cultures. Of those, in the annals of the Zapotec, there exists the strongest historic relation to Hui Shen and the aforementioned carved figure of Wi-shi-pecocha in the mountains above Tehuantepec.

The last sovereign king of the Zapotec was Cosijopii (1502-1563) having succeeded to the throne following the death of his father in 1529, just at the beginning of the Spanish conquest. About 20 years after taking the throne, for unknown reasons, Cosijopii moved his capital from Zaachila to Tehuantepec. In the book The Mexican Southland, Chapter XVI The King of Tehuantepec the author writes of Cosijopii and his interest, or perhaps his concern as the case may be, in the existence of the statue in his sovereign domain:

"But as one deeply versed in the mysteries of statecraft and religion, he was from the beginning greatly perplexed as he pondered upon the significance of a belief which had long prevailed among the Zapotecs and other tribes of the present state of Oaxaca. For a persistent rumor spread among the people that the time would come when there would arrive from the east a strange race of men, fair of complexion and strong in battle, who would conquer the land, despoil the people of their treasures, and eradicate their ancient beliefs, substituting therefor a new and unknown faith.

"This belief, and the circumstance that about this time the people of Tehuantepec became greatly exercised over a certain monument called Guixepecocha which existed within the confines of the kingdom, whose strange heiroglyphics the astrologers could not decipher, filled the mind of Cosijopii with grave misgivings, as it had the former rulers of the land.

"The origin of the monument in question has been imputed to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl who, in passing through the town of Magdalena, was said to have cut on the pinnacle of a great rock lying in the open country near an arroyo or dry watercourse, a figure representing a religious clad in a white habit and seated in a high-backed chair, with hood drawn and cheek resting on hand, the face turned toward the right, and on his left an Indian woman with dress and white mantle (like that used by the mountaineers to this day), covered to the head and kneeling as if in the attitude of confession.

"This figure so disquieted the Zapotecs that Cosijopii on the advice of his counselor gave command that the priests proceed to the holy island of Monapoxtiac and there consult Pezelao, that is to say, the Oracle of Heaven or, as they were also pleased to call him, the Soul of the World, to the end that it might be revealed to them what the carving signified. They did as commanded and the oracle answered vaguely: 'Behold you have the figure for a mystery and a great omen.'"

A couple of quick clarifications to the above. First, Guixepecocha, as named above, also sometimes Wixipecocha, is one and the same as Wi-shi-pecocha, with Wi-shi-pecocha being basically Guixepecocha spelled phonetically. Secondly, that the origin of the monument in question being attributed to having been carved by the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. The statue is said to commemorate Hui Shen. In some quarters Hui Shen has been, and incorrectly so, identified as possibly being Quetzalcoatl --- hence the confusion.

Traditionaly Wi-shi-pecocha has been described as having a long black beard, is said to have appeared from the south and to have disappeared southeast of Tehuantepec. Quetzacoatl is invariably said as having long white beard, coming from the north and departing toward the southeast without ever having entered the Oaxaca area.

Manuel Martenez Gracida (1847-1924), quoted by the author of The Mexican Southland, says Hui Shen arrived in the sixth century on the shores of Huatulco. Gracida then goes on to say:

"(As) he approached the Indians he saluted them in their own tongue, a circumstance which occasioned great surprise. He was, they averred, very old, corpulent, of a light complexion, and had a broad forehead, large eyes, long beard, and long black hair; and was clad in a long tunic and mantle. He remained among them for some time preaching his doctrine, and they observed that he was of a benevolent nature, humane, industrious, wise, prudent, and just; one who sought to introduce wise laws. At the same time they stated that it was he who had taught them the art of smelting metals and sculpturing stone. They seem to have considered him an extraordinary being similar to the Culchunchan of the people of Palenque and the Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs."

It should be noted the village of Magdalena so mentioned in the quote further back as being the traditional or original location of the statue is actually Magdalena Tlacotepec, a small town in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, 14 miles almost due north of Tehuantepec, and NOT the same Magdalena in northern Mexico 60 miles south of Nogales I mention elsewhere in my writings as having fallen off a horse. Falling off the horse in that Magdalena led to me being in the same bus station at the exact same time Carlos Castaneda met his shaman-sorcerer Don Juan Matus.(see) The village the statue is said to have been erected (carved) refers to the once ancient Quietabene, located about four leagues from Tehuantepec, the exact same distance the aforementioned present day Magdalena Tlacotepec is located.

The original mainstream article that brought the discovery of the existence of possible ancient Chinese temples in northern Mexico east of Hermosillo to public attention appeared in the New York Times July 10, 1897.

That 1897 New York Times article can still be found in it's entirety by going to the Times archives. Accessing the link below will take you to the PDF page where the article appears. When the page comes up scroll down the left-side column to the title TOPIC OF THE TIMES. The second article-paragraph in that column is what you are looking for. The first sentence of the complete 1897 article leads off with:

"Long sought and eagerly awaited light on the ancient civilization of Mexico and Central America may dawn from the recent discovery in the State of Sonora of stones bearing Chinese inscriptions of great age."

TOPIC OF THE TIMES

The New York Times article was picked-up by others in the news media and from there re-written and re-reported with their own spin in a number of other periodicals including for example, the October 7, 1897 American Architect and Architecture, Volume LVIII -- No. 1136, page 8. (see) Click XXa then scroll down page that comes up with a series of underlined in yellow sentences, then use the plus button (+) in the top upper left corner of the page to expand the text.

The following on the subject, published four years later in January 1901, is attributed to a correspondent writing for a major New York newspaper (not the Times). Why the story re-emerged four years later is not known:

REMARKABLE FIND IN MEXICO

Chinese temples in an excellent condition of preservation have been unearthed in the State of Sonora, in Mexico. Large stone tablets have been found in the ruins covered with ancient Chinese writings, which have been partly deciphered by an Oriental expert employed by the Mexican Government.

The inscriptions state that the temples were built between the years 300 and 40O AD by Chinese adventurers, who had crossed the "unending sea" at the insistence of Chinese men of science who were convinced that land of great richness existed in the East.(source)

Footnote [5]

Over and over in a variety of ways throughout the years I have been asked: In that the trip with my uncle to Boulder, Colorado to see Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was in 1971, how is it Trungpa knew about Kincaid's Grand Canyon cave when, other than the rather obscure lost in the mist of time 1909 article, it didn't become real public knowledge until David Hatcher Childress wrote about it in his book, Lost Cities of North and Central America in 1992, a full twenty-one years later?

Trungpa was no fly-by-night sham artist. He was actually the 11th descendent in the line of Trungpa tulkus, important teachers of the Kagy lineage of Tibetan Buddhism --- which may not mean a lot to some people but in Tibetan Buddhism he was a whoop-de-doo. So saying, in that he was traveling and visiting around the desert southwest meeting with Native Americans and others on a spiritual level, and, in that he was so high ranking, most probably someone brought to his attention that a cave with a Tibetan themed carved Buddha was said to exist in the Grand Canyon. Which takes us back to the original question regarding Childress. Childress' book wouldn't be published for twenty-one years and the article was printed in one, possibly two, regional desert newspapers some 60 years earlier, so, just for the sake of argument, it would be highly unlikely that the cave would be on the tip of the tongue of everybody he met.

The thing is, Childress wasn't the first person to write a book containing information on the 1909 article regarding the cave and Kincaid. Actually, a book titled ARIZONA CAVALCADE: The Turbulent Times, published in 1962 and edited by Joseph Miller contained all the same details. It has been surmised in some quarters that it was Miller's book that led Childress to the original archived article, having done so because he wasn't totally convinced Miller's account was believable.

There is no doubt that Miller's book was not a world-wide best seller, however, in Arizona and for those with a historic interest in Arizona, it was fairly popular. Relative to me personally, as fate would have it, there was a connection between Miller and my uncle, and because of which, regardless of how he may have feigned ignorance in front of Trungpa, made my uncle very familiar with Miller's book and it's contents, especially so the section on Kincaid titled Citadel of the Grand Canyon (which is not to say my uncle didn't know about it already as there is a possibility he may have been directly responsible in bringing the legend of the cave to Miller's attention).

When the 1909 article was published my uncle was somewhere around seven years old and yet to travel any farther west than Pennsylvania. It wasn't until his early 20s that he showed up in New Mexico, having followed the artist John Sloan, who he studied under, out to Santa Fe from New York. After a couple of summers of doing so, he decided just to stay. Fifteen or twenty years later, in 1940, the first edition of a book titled NEW MEXICO: A Guide to a Colorful State was published. The book dealt with New Mexico citizens that were artist-participants of the Depression era government program called the WPA, the Work Project Administration. The book, although a compilation, was by Joseph Miller, and, in that my uncle was both an artist-participant in the WPA and long established in New Mexico, through the creation of the book, he came to know Miller. Liking how the WPA artists were cast in a favorable light, including himself, he sort of followed Miller's career, thus coming into contact with his 1962 book. In turn, in the circles my uncle traveled in, if the Kincaid cave had not been on the forefront of things prior, after the publication of Miller's book the fact of it's existence relative to the newspaper article wasn't totally lost.

MEETING TRUNGPA, OR NOT

WPA FEDERAL WRITERS PROJECT

Footnote [6]

As to creating the cave by means other than conventional, such as using super normal perceptual states of Siddhis, the occult, psychic powers, or the supernatural, when it comes to any Buddhist connection relative to the cave, I refer you to the following attributed to Gautama Buddha as found in the book BUDDHISM: It's Essence and Development by Edward Conze (pp 104-5):

"One day the Buddha met an ascetic who sat by the bank of a river. This ascetic had practised austerities for 25 years. The Buddha asked him what he had received for all his labor. The ascetic proudly replied that, now at last, he could cross the river by walking on the water. The Buddha pointed out that this gain was insignificant for all the years of labor, since he could cross the river using a ferry for one penny!"

It should be noted in the DIGHA NIKAYA (Collection of Long Discourses), in the SAMPASADANIYA SUTRA, The Faith That Satisfied, Verse 18, makes it clear the supernormal perceptual states of Siddhis are, depending on who or how or why they are implemented, divided into two types, one of which is termed ignoble and the other noble. The following from the Sutra:

Moreover, lord, unsurpassable is the way in which the Exalted One teaches the Norm concerning modes of supernormal power, that there are two modes, to wit : Supernormal power which is concomitant with the mental intoxicants and with worldly aims. This is called ignoble (power). Supernormal power which is not so concomitant. This is called noble (power). And what, lord, is the former, the ignoble supernormal power? When, lord, some recluse or brahmin, by the means aforesaid, reaches up to such rapture of mind, that rapt in thought he becomes able to enjoy divers modes of supernormal power --- from being one he becomes multiform, from being multiform, he becomes one; from being visible he becomes invisible; he passes without hindrance to the further side of a wall, or a battlement, or a mountain, as if through air; he penetrates up and down through solid ground as if through water; he walks on water without dividing it as if on solid ground; he travels cross-legged through the sky, like a bird on the wing; he touches and feels with the hand even the moon and the sun, of mystic power and potency though they be; he reaches even in the body up to the heaven of Brahma. This, lord, is the supernormal power, concomitant with the mental intoxicants and with worldly aims, that is called ignoble. And what, lord, is the second mode, called noble? This is when a bhikkhu can, if he so desire, remain unconscious of disgust amid what is disgusting; or conscious of disgust amid what is not disgusting; or unconscious of disgust amid what is both disgusting and the opposite; or conscious of disgust amid what is both disgusting and the opposite; or, avoiding both that which is disgusting and the opposite, should remain indifferent to them as such, mindful and understanding. This, lord, is the supernormal power, incompatible with mental intoxicants or with worldly aims, which is called noble. Unsurpassable, lord, is this concerning modes of supernormal power.

THE NINE MAIN SIDDHIS

AKANKHEYYA SUTTA: Vol. XI of The Sacred Books of the East

Time on Earth passes. A person may experience an opportunity of 60, 80, maybe even 100 consecutive years to tread upon her soil. During those years there is a constant overlap. One is a child, then a parent, then a grandparent. Then gone. While a child there is a parent and a grandparent. As a parent there is a child and a grandparent. As a grandparent there is a child and their parent. A person may be born into an era when there was no electricity, or maybe electricity but no airplanes. But outside our sphere other things are in the works, other things that fall within their own bracket of overlap. Some ahead of ours, some behind. The following is from the source so cited:

"The next morning the storm was gone. The tower was knocked over and the whole upper level charred, most likely put out by the rain, the rest dampend by it. The activating mechanism was basically destroyed and the object --- or pistol or ray gun, whatever you want to call it --- was thrown free of it's clamping device four or five feet from the fallen tower. Even with the direct hit from the lightning there wasn't any sign of damage, no marks, scratches, or surface discoloration.

"The three men and my uncle walked down to the where the boulder had been and it was gone, completely gone, apparently obliterated into nothing but fine dust. My uncle along with one of the three men hiked clear across to the other side of the canyon hoping to find the impact point they had seen from a distance the night before. They were eventually able to locate a nearly perfectly round two inch in diameter hole that went at least 20 feet straight into the rock cliff positioned in exact alignment with where the object had been fired from. So clean was the cut it was as though it had been carefully drilled by a sharp water honed drill bit."(source)

SO WHERE DID ALL THE DIRT GO?

Footnote [7]

The following two paragraphs, which are found in the original 1909 Arizona Gazette article, are for no known understandable reason, invariably left out of most internet versions:

"Before going further into the cavern, better facilities for lighting will have to be installed, for the darkness is dense and quite impenetrable for the average flashlight. In order to avoid being lost, wires are being strung from the entrance to all passageways leading directly to large chambers.

"How far this cavern extends no one can guess, but it is now the belief of many that what has already been explored is merely the 'barracks,' to use an American term, for the soldiers, and that far into the under-world will be found the main communal dwellings of the families. The perfect ventilation of the cavern, the steady draught that blows through, indicates that it has another outlet to the surface."

To read an online photocopy of the article, albeit with the above mysteriously missing paragraphs missing --- except for the last sentence at the bottom of the paragraph --- please go to the link below. From there, there is a link that will take you to a clear-text typed version and a discussion about what is missing and where:

EXPLORATIONS IN GRAND CANYON

Footnote [8]

Perhaps the most knowledgeable person to have surfaced regarding Kincaid's cave is a man by the name of Jack Andrews. Andrews, was at onetime, on an almost unstoppable personal quest, and because of that quest has put together an exhaustive amount of seemingly credible information considering the topic and slim amount of known material to draw from. Especially noteworthy is his opinion regarding the potential location of the cave. Carefully breaking down the information provided by Kincaid in a step-by-step fashion Andrews has pretty much narrowed down the location to a six mile cliff-side section high above the Colorado River along an area called Marble Canyon starting south of Mile 56 just past the Kwagunt rapids. After going over most of what he presented publically along with some of my own research Andrews' results seem pretty convincing, IF such a cave existed. In his material scattered throughout the net, Andrews writes:

"There 'are' clues down at river level that might lead someone to the cave. (one being the 'stain') This would be a practical (on site) approach ... hike 32 miles one way and search out the clues. The 'stain' would most likely differ enough from the surrounding sedimentary rocks that a trained geologist may be able to spot it. But he/she would have to be on the river in the exact spot Kincaid saw the stain. River 'up' views are very restricted in that area due to high steep walls that are very close to the boat ... maybe 25 - 50 feet on average."

He then goes on to say:

"The cave should be near the top of the 'Redwall' or possibly on or just above the Supai formation. The Supai is a steeply slanting loose array of red looking shale 'surfboards,' just waiting for a simple mis-step that will send the expert climber over the edge of the Redwall below and to certain death. It is a convoluted array of cliff after cliff and gorge after gorge with impassable steep sided eroded canyons. No one has 'scoured' anywhere near the 6 to 8 miles needed to be searched and no one will since most all of the area is impassable horizontally. Only multiple vertical attempts up steep narrow opportune 'cracks' would yield the slightest bit of progress toward searching on site for this cave. The area of Marble Canyon has very few such passable cracks in the convoluted 6 to 8 mile stretch and one would be very lucky indeed to choose the correct crack up and then be actually able to trace Kincaid's route up to what should be an 8 foot wide cave opening hiding among an area 40,000 feet long and convoluted and an average of about 2500 feet high. that's 100,000,000 square feet of surface area to 'scour' (but only if the walls were perfectly vertical and the area a perfect rectangle, which we know it is not. So add much more square footage of search area."

THE LOCATION OF KINCAID'S CAVE REVEALED

MAP 10: MILE 52.5 TO MILE 58.2
BEST TOPO MAP SHOWING MILE 56 SOUTHWARD

JACK ANDREWS

Footnote [9]

THE GRAND CANYON, LOST AZTEC GOLD, EGYPTIAN CAVES, AND QUATU ZACCA

On November 18, 1519, after having sailed from Cuba and marching overland from Vera Cruz, the army of Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez entered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, overthrowing Aztec control and imprisoning their ruler Montezuma, effectively taking control of the empire.

Seven months later, on June 30, 1520, the Aztec people rose up against the Spaniards. In an attempt to pacify the people Cortez had the disposed emperor appear before them. In a stunning miscalculation Montezuma was stoned to death by his own people. With Montezuma dead and the angry crowd storming the palace Cortez and his men had no option but to flee the city. During their retreat they were attacked from all sides by rocks and spears, and in the process had to abandon most of their gold and treasures, littering their escape route with what they had stolen from Montezuma's treasury. A good portion of the army was decimated, but Cortez himself was able to escape unharmed.

One year later, on August 13, 1521, after rebuilding his army and recruiting a heavy contingent of Tlaxcalan indigenous fighters, to a man natural enemies of the Aztec, Cortez retook the city. However, after a thorough search of every nook and cranny, cave, hole, lake, pond and potential hiding place, the treasure and gold they had to abandon during their retreat was not to be found. Cuauhtomoc, the new emperor, who was captured before he could flee the city, along with some of his closest courtiers were tortured in an attempt to learn the whereabouts of the Aztec treasure. Even with his feet held to a fire, the emperor was unable to produce more than several dozen hand carried baskets full of minor gold items and trinkets. Because the new leaders that inherited the Empire after Montezuma's death did not have the full confidence or backing of the High Priests, being kept in the dark as it were, the only valid information Cortez was able to extract from anybody was that the majority of treasure Cortez had in his possession prior to his forced departure from the city the year before is that it had been taken north.

It is the absence of any gold of merit being found, which was known to have existed by the conquistadors prior to their retreat, along with the two words "taken north" after having been forced out only under torture and the threat of death --- and overheard by many --- is where most if not all of the stories and the legends about lost Aztec Gold come from, a legend that breaks down to roughly the following:

Even though Cortez and his men had been driven from the city in June of 1520, with Montezuma dead and the empire in disarray, the Aztec High Priests, knowing full well it wouldn't be long before Cortez regrouped and returned, figured it was only a matter of time before a full and total collapse of their civilization would ensue. Taking both prospects into consideration, as stealthy as possible and covering their tracks every step of the way in every fashion imaginable, the priests gathered up all the treasures of the Aztec empire, tons of gold and silver, leaving a good portion of it in the form of sacred religious objects needed to reestablish their once great civilization.

Then, digging up the body of Montezuma, which had since been put into a state of mummification following their overthrow by Cortez, the Aztec priests, in the Fall of 1520 AD the Aztec priests led a procession exceeding over 2,000 men and slaves on a mass exodus north in an attempt to return to their ancient and traditional homeland. Without draft animals or wheeled carts the treasure-bearing slaves traveled in a northwesterly direction for what has been said to have many moons, which has been interpreted to mean close to a year, possibly more. Upon reaching their destination the treasure was hidden and the slaves put to death.

Basically, what is being said is, just about the exact same time Cortez and his troops were reentering the city in August of 1521, the vast majority of the Aztec gold and treasure that had been there initially, according to legend, was either just reaching or had already been secreted away 1500 miles north in it's to this day unknown hiding place somewhere in present day Arizona, New Mexico, or Utah. Legend or no, the gold disappeared and 500 years later, still missing.

MYSTIC AZTEC SUN GOD

TIME TRAVEL, THE CURANDERO, AND MEETING QUATU-ZACA

(please click image)

The interesting part of the story is, even though Cortez searched for years in an ever expanding arc north of Mexico City, and of which nothing of note was found, when Coronado marched north he was in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola and not Aztec lost gold --- which in the scheme of things is a deep mystery. True, Coronado's quest north was 20 years later, but still no major amount of gold was ever found, at least at the levels Cortez had in his possession originally, so I think there were other things at work. First, there was a heavily enforced separation of powers between Coronado and any official group searching for Aztec gold or treasure north of Mexico City and secondly, nobody had a clue as to how far north the treasure was taken, in the process excluding any worries of Coronado and his men coming across it.

So now, for all of you who have read this far, and I commend you for having done so, it all comes together: Aztec lost treasure, Grand Canyon caves, and Quatu Zacca.

None of the conquistadors of the era had any knowledge of Aztec history. If they had, they would have realized forerunners to the Aztec culture arrived in Tenochtitlan after migrating from the north, having left a place they called Atzlan, home of the seven caves. In 1789, two hundred years too late for Cortez and his ilk, but early for our standards, a Jesuit priest and historian who was born in Vera Cruz, Mexico named Francisco Javier Clavijero, who studied heavily the ancient history of the country and especially so the Aztecs, going through every codex, script, and hieroglyph he could find, deduced that Aztlan lay in an area along or near the Colorado River, most likely in present day Arizona. Clavijero traced their route down the west coast of Mexico to where present day Culiacan is, then to Lake Cuitzeo then to Tenochtitlan.

Why they left their homeland and migrated south is not clear, but it may have been caused by two initially unconnected events and supported by a third --- all three carrying cosmic significance. According to Aztec legend their southward migration began on May 24, 1064 AD. Ten years before there was a rare celestial event, the super nova explosion that created the Crab Nebula. For most in the ancient world, the heavenly sky, except for the sun, moon and planets, was fixed and unchanging. Then suddenly in 1054 a brand new star appeared that outshone all others, only to dim and disappear a few months later. That event may have been seen as a precursor to events. Then, in 1064 a volcanic explosion that created the Sunset Crater in Arizona occurred, wiping out hundreds and hundreds of square miles of arable crop land right in the same general area the Aztecs were said to have come from, reducing the ability of the indigenous peoples for miles around to grow sufficient quantities food.(see). With little or no other choice but to migrate they headed south. Just when things seemed to have reached the worse, two years into their trek south the third sign occurred, Halley's Comet of 1066.

In the main text above I write that Hui Shen turned inland to pay homage to a venerated holy man. That was in 458 AD, 600 years before the people who were to become the Aztecs migrated south. I also said it was my belief the holy man, like the Dali Lama and the Pope, one replaced the other in a long line of secession, which would, if it were so, have the holy man in existence before, during and after the Aztec migration. If that were the case, there is a good chance he would be not only revered but looked upon as a trusted figure, in turn making him privy to lots of information, information passed down through each succeeding holy man --- in this case a revered holy sage that lived in a small house on an island in the Colorado River and known as Quatu Zacca.

In the legend of the Aztecs they are said to be descendent of tribes from seven caves. Codex drawings of where they were said to have come from shows a single entrance to a cave that fans out into seven separate caves.(see) When Kincaid entered the cave along the cliff walls above the Colorado River that he was said to have discovered, he entered a long passageway that fanned out into several underground hallways 'like spokes of a wheel.'(see) If any of the stories or legends are true, or even have the vestige of truth, what bubbles up in my mind is that the cave, or a similar cave, was in the past history of the peoples who were to become the Aztecs. The high priests that moved the Aztec treasure north centuries after they had migrated south, put the gold and treasures in the ancient cave. Quatu Zacca, a centuries long inhabitant of the area, living in a small house on an island in the Colorado River and possibly thought by the indigenous people to be immortal because of the lineage, may have been entrusted to care over the ancient cave from the time of the original departure to when the Aztec empire was to rise again.

AND NOW THIS:

The Spaniards in their explorations and expeditions had two prime motivating co-factors in their ever continuing thrusts into the hinterlands. First, pacify and convert the local inhabitants so they would be easier to exploit and secondly, find gold. It is the first part of the two goals that runs headlong into Quatu Zacca. Everywhere the Spaniards went they were bent on conversion. Notice they spent no time concerned with India, China, or Japan --- countries with already deeply established religions, religions totally counter to what they were promulgating, BUT, not only were they willing to go into, but actually went into the Philippines with same manner and fashion as they did in New Spain.

The Spaniards did not want anything that construed or intimated that there was an already established Buddhist presence or any Buddhist presence anywhere in the New World that might pose a potential threat to their plans for conversion or expansion. Any reference, no matter how small or insignificant that remotely hinted at such a prospect was ignored, left out, deleted, eliminated or rewritten --- rewritten as in the case of the revered Buddhist holy man being transposed first into an old woman then relegated to mythology by being footnoted. That way, if there was in fact a Buddhism presence it could be stamped out at its source and nobody would be any the wiser.

Why was any reference to Quatu Zacca not totally eliminated or deleted from the texts or records by the Spaniards? Although Alarcon never submitted an official or formal report Castaneda did not know that. Knowing too, that Diaz had learned of Quatu Zacca during his expedition, Castaneda was reluctant to leave out the knowledge of such a person because of potential conflict with what Alarcon may have presented, leading to the question of Castaneda's thoroughness and accuracy of reporting. However, in both cases, any references to Buddhism was left out or deleted by Spanish speaking scriptwriters, not so with their English and other language speaking counterparts. The French speaking de Chevalier was very clear in his translation and made no reference to any confusion with Quatu Zacca being other than a deified priest or lama, who was said to have lived on a small island on the the Colorado River in a sanctuary of Lamaisra, or of Buddhism.

SECRET OF THE AZTEC TREASURE, GENE AUTRY COMICS, NOVEMBER 1942 VOLUME 1, ISSUE #3
----
(please click any image)

DESERT SHIPS, SPANISH TREASURE

AND COLORADO RIVER FLOODS
(please click image)

Footnote [10]

Scattered here and there within the numerous glyphs, pictograms, and etched markings in stone and elsewhere attributed to the indigenous populations of North America and Mexico are any number said to have been made by cultures other than those considered native. Those designated with having a significant possibility of being Chinese in origin are a big part of those discovered. Although people often see a strong Asian influence in the concentrated Mesoamerica cultures in the southern reaches of Mexico and the Yucatan there is, for some reason, an extraordinary amount of Chinese ideograms that seem to be located paralleling long portions of the Colorado River valley, especially so not far from where the Mojave Trail intersects with the river, which inturn entertains the possibility of early Chinese presence in the area.

Except for what has been duly presented in Footnote [4], to date, no other proven forms of Chinese writing similar to or reaching the level of say the Kensington Stone have surfaced that actually tell a narrative. Scattered in widely separated areas there are numerous individual ideograms that clearly resemble known Chinese characters, again many concentrated along the Colorado. Two such instances are located in Grapevine Canyon and near Searchlight, Nevada, north and south of each other paralleling the Colorado. See:

• LINK 1
  

• LINK 2
  

• LINK 3
  

Now, while it is true the links could be taken with a grain of salt, especially the second one, I'm sure you get the picture. Again, why there are just individual glyphs scattered here and there and not a descriptive narrative of some type is not known. I have seen both the Kensington Stone and the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone and a whole lot of work would have to go into them --- plus, not only that, the person would have to possess the necessary carving skills so the glyphs would be accruate as well as being literate as well. I can't help but think any number of people crossing the desert carrying supplies for the contingent would not have the abilities to write. Maybe a pictograph here or there, but a whole narrative, questionable. The exalted Chinese monk, the 6th Patriarch of Zen, the venerable Hui Neng, was known to be illiterate. It wouldn't be totally beyond the realm of things that other monks and their supply bearers could find themselves in a similar quandary.

Footnote [11]

For a concise breakdown of the historic background of Hui Shen and his travels in America circa 550 AD, with a fairly thorough exploration of the pros and cons of the potential possibility, either in verification or discrediting my view as I have presented above, please go to Chapter IV THE CHINESE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA (page 37) of Michael Craig Delich's Masters Degree thesis THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA: A History of Conflicting Theories.

See also FUSANG HYPOTHESIS.

Not everybody agrees with what I have presented regarding Fusang, Hui Shen, et al. Although it is not directed towards me or my works specifically, but Fusang generally, a good example can be found in the link below. However, if you have read through what I have presented, including all of the footnotes, links, and sources of book after book and articles on the subject, most of what you will find that is regarded as fallacy in the link below has been pretty much been negated in one fashion or the other. See:

WHEN THE CHINESE DIDN'T DISCOVER AMERICA --FUSANG

HUI SHEN: BHIKSHU

ALEX APOSTOLIDES

"What he wanted me to see near Bluff, Utah was the petroglyph located at the Upper Sand Island rock art site along the San Juan River that dipicted an animal from the Middle and Late Pleistocene called a Columbian mammoth, suggested to him at one time as being worth seeing by Utah rock art and desert southwest advocate and archeologist, Alex Apostolides."

Some people have taken note that the rock art viewing event that transpired between my uncle and I in Bluff, Utah, as cited in the above quote, occurred during the fall of 1971 and that in the quote I refer to the fact that Alex Apostolides suggested to my uncle that the petroglyphs were worth seeing. They also take note that I mention elsewhere that my uncle and Apostolides didn't cross paths for the first time until 1978 or so, a negative discrepancy of seven years between the two events. Others also sometimes mention the fact that as late as 1985 the area where the mammoth rock art is located was not even mentioned nor the glyph itself known to exist when the whole of the glyph-area was first officially recorded, a clear 14 year gap in the other direction between events.(see)

From 1969 to 1974, Apostolides worked in Mexico as an archaeologist, photographer and feature writer. Apostolides told my uncle that before he went to Mexico the archaeological team he was coordinating his efforts with was looking to recruit one or two additional team members and in the process a man by the name of William Lawrence Campbell showed up as a potential candidate. Campbell had come highly recommended, however, since the archaeological investigations centered around Mayan sites in Mexico and possibly other countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, et al, any dig workers over any extended period of time would be required to have passports. The thing is, and unusually so for an experienced archaeologist, Campbell did not have a passport. At first the interviewers thought he just needed to renew his, but, as it turned out, he said he never had one.

Prior to any of those formal interview session and it became clear that Campbell would not be able to participate, Apostolides --- who was not part of the interview team and maybe even up to that point in time yet to be fully recruited himself --- and Campbell had sat around in casual conversations quaffing down a few beers over a period of several days bullshitting.

As it was, Campbell and my uncle were friends, of which their friendship is clearly delineated in the William Lawrence Campbell site linked above. Not long after Campbell and Apostolides met he and my uncle crossed paths. During the previously mentioned several day bullshitting session between Campbell and Apostolides, apparently one of things Apostolides mentioned was the petroglyphs in Bluff, most notably one that depicted a Columbian mammoth. When Campbell and my uncle met, in general conversation he brought up the petroglyphs and because he had not actually seen them in real life himself, attributed his knowledge of them back to Apostolides. Even though Campbell, to my knowledge, never saw the mammoth petroglyph in the flesh, as I look back it appears that before my uncle and I visited the site in the early 1970s he himself had already done so --- simply mentioning along the way his knowledge of their existence was garnered through Apostolides. When he attributed his knowledge of the site to Apostolides I just left it at that not realizing that up to that point they had never actually met.

I have no clue as to when and how Apostolides first became aware of the Columbian mammoth petroglyph for example and, even if he had, why it would come up specifically in conversation with Campbell. In the early years, before Campbell established himself as a fairly well regarded archaeologist he wasn't much more than a Pothunter dealing in stolen artifacts. Apostolides may have brought them up for just that reason possibly trying to figure out why Campbell either didn't have a passport or wouldn't or couldn't get one.

Campbell, who always maintained a very low profile, also had a pretty iffy background as well. During World War II he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands and, as both the William Lawrence Campbell page and especially so the Pothunter page allude to, got mixed up in any number of quasi-questionable situations. One of the things he got mixed up in that I eventually became privy to but left unmentioned anywhere in my writings until now because quite frankly I didn't want to get into it, may have had a direct impact on WHY the mammoth site came up.

There is a very remote small island located near the far reaches of the Aleutian chain called Shemya that during World War II, as part of a major attempt to stop the Japanese from working their way up the islands to Alaska and points beyond, the U.S. built an airbase. In the process of building that base the following is reported as to have happened and Campbell was part of a team called in to investigate:

"(An) engineer who was stationed on the Aleutian island of Shemya during World War II, while building an airstrip, his crew bulldozed a group of hills and discovered under several sedimentary layers what appeared to be human remains. The Alaskan mound was in fact a graveyard of gigantic human remains, consisting of crania and long leg bones. The crania measured from 22 to 24 inches from base to crown. Since an adult skull normally measures about eight inches from back to front, such a large crania would imply an immense size for a normally proportioned human.(source)

Be assured in what is being presented in the above quote or at the source am I in league with nor substantiating the existence of giant human remains on Shemya Island, that's for another time and place and for others to do. My main concern circulates around Campbell and being part of a team called in to investigate the find, NOT the find. He was an innocent in the ongoing events in that he was assigned by his military superiors to go to Shemya and go to Shemya he did. What was found or not found does not take away from that fact.

I have no clue as to when and how Apostolides first became aware of the Columbian mammoth petroglyph, although he was notorious for simply just wandering around stumbling on to all kinds things as some of is papers found in the Rock Art Database attest too. In his obituary his wife, Patti, writes "Alex was a charter member of the Utah Rock Art Research Association and we visited Utah every year for many years. We were on our way to Bluff when he became too ill to travel. There are many pictures (slides) of the writings [rock art] in Utah among the many collections Alex left as his heritage." Even so, the question still remains, why would the mention of mammoth petroglyphs come up specifically in conversation with Campbell in the first place, although I do have my suspicions.(see)

ALEX APOSTOLIDES

SHEMYA ISLAND: WORLD WAR II

In assisting L'Amour, in contrast to my uncle's more mystical input, H. Jackson Clark, the author of The Owl in Monument Canyon, updated L'Amour on more hard-fact on the ground research for The Haunted Mesa. Clark, who died in July of 1997 was a third-generation native of Durango, Colorado and had an almost unlimited knowledge of the physical aspects of the area as well as it's legends and culture. L'Amour told Clark that in his youth he had climbed No Man's Mesa, thought by many as being the mesa in his book, but when the two of them flew over it a few times he was not able to locate the trail he had used to get to the top. Clark, in his own book, makes several references to his excursions with L'Amour.

Clark founded the Toh-Atin Gallery in Durango after a long run in the trading post business. The gallery deals heavily in high quality Navajo weavings and Native American crafts and jewelry. Although my uncle operated out of the Santa Fe, Taos area he was extensively into the Native American art scene of the desert southwest from an early age. So said, because of Clark's involvement in similar areas they knew each other having come in contact on and off over the years. If there was any reciprocal sharing of information or feedback in connection with The Haunted Mesa it is not known with any amount of certainty. L'Amour was a real stickler when it came to what he presented in all of his books, so it my suspicion he may have put the two, that is, my uncle and Clark, together over time to compare notes.

THE HAUNTED MESA

The traditional date of departure given by the Aztecs is May 24, 1064 AD. Sunset Crater was said to have erupted three to four months later, in the fall of 1064. Hard to believe the departure date could be delineated so closely. But, lets say such is the case, the differences can be resolved thus:

The eruption of Sunset Crater in the fall of 1064 sent a thick layer of lava, cinder, and ash over an 800-square mile area around the cinder cone. Archaeologists have concluded that the resident Sinagua were able to gather their possessions and flee the area before the eruption, since such eruptions are usually preceded by a period of intense seismic activity, and archaeologist have found few possessions left behind in excavated pithouses. The volcano remained intermittently active until about 1250, when a final spew of red cinders coated the peak of the cone, giving the crater the fiery appearance for which it was named.(source)

MEETING TRUNGPA, OR NOT

"The Buddhist monk was a member of the KMT contingent searching the city when rumor had it there was a white American in one of the dens. Upon entering, the Buddhist was attracted to my constant repetition of the mantra. Then seeing the tiny medallion around my neck he knew I was under the protection of the Lord Buddha and could not be left behind --- no matter if I was or wasn't the one they were looking for."

DOING HARD TIME IN A ZEN MONASTERY

OM MANI PADME HUM
(please click)

For the record I never really met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in the classical sense, although the small medallion alluded to in the above quote, said to offer within it's power the protection of the Lord Buddha, played a huge role in our early interactions, albeit initially set into motion by the overhearing of the mantra, OM MANI PADME HUM by the Buddhist monk some years before.(see)

True, I was in the same small room in the library with him with only three or four people, but, other than the super brief encounter that occurred wherein Trungpa asked me who my teacher was just as I was leaving the room, there had been no introduction nor was there any more or longer interactions except for a few short almost cryptic moments at the very end. I accompanied my uncle because he felt uneasy and while there I simply stood by the door along the sidelines. I don't think Trungpa liked the fact that someone at my level was there from outside his circle, and, although he didn't dwell on it, I could tell he was sizing me up. Instantly he grasped I wasn't a bumpkin, but didn't like the unknown either, otherwise he would not have asked who my teacher was, a question that came up because of the following:

As my uncle and I entered the room one of Trungpa's men who had been shadowing us on-and-off over a period of of days picked-up a two-inch in diameter cardboard mailing tube leaning against the wall. He carefully pulled a rolled-up USGS topographical map of the Grand Canyon out of the tube, placing the map on the table with the designated bottom towards my uncle. As the man was putting a few items such as a stapler and coffee cup on the corners to keep the map from curling up, the tube inadvertently and without much fanfare rolled off the table onto the floor.

Looking at the map and seeing it seemed relatively complicated, at least visually and especially so to my uncle, he pushed it back saying he really didn't have the expertise to read it with any amount of accuracy. As he was turning to leave, without knowing the tube was at his feet he accidently kicked it further under the table and chairs.

Not wanting to raise the level of ire in the room any more than it was I bent down to pick up the tube. In doing so I had to bend down much further than I typically would to pick something off the floor. In the process the scoop-top of my tee-shirt hung forward just slightly enough to allow my necklace to fall forward. Without realizing it, when I stood up the necklace and the medallion it carried ended up clearly distinguishable on the outside of the tee-shirt for Trungpa and all to see. One glance by Trungpa and he wizard away like the witch in Wizard of Oz whose legs curled up after having a house fall on her.

It was quite clear that even with only that quick glance and immediate reaction Trungpa was well aware of the significance of the necklace and the power vested in it. Over the years I had run into like and similar attitudes up and down the scale. Although you wouldn't know it from what has been put forth on them, three of the highest profile believers I met in the past were in leadership positions over hundreds, possibly thousands of people in their roles of being warlords. The following is the take from the former Vietnamese Air Vice Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky:

"Many times death has taken those closest to me, but I was spared. No matter how great the peril I have encountered , I have emerged without harm. I am Buddha's child, and until my purpose in this life is fulfilled, Buddha will protect me."

His counterpart in Laos, the warlord Vang Pao is on record regarding the following:

"Their conversation turned to Buddha amulets of the kind Thong had worn. Joining in, Vang Pao explained that one kind of Buddha amulet protects from all bullets, and another attracts all bullets but causes them to ricochet."

Both of the above quotes and their sources as well as the view of the third of the three warlords, the Shan state drug warlord Khun Sa can be found by going to:

MEETING WARLORDS, ET AL

I know the following summer, as found in Footnote [1], I was in Santa Fe delivering a locked trunk per request of my dying father to his brother (my uncle) and while there my uncle had to see Beat poet Allen Ginsberg who was in town a couple of days for some reason or the other and I went along. Ginsberg and Trungpa were close friends. I am not sure of the level of the relationship between my uncle and Ginsberg, but from my observations of things they seemed as though they were previously acquainted in some fashion. If Trungpa knew my uncle knew Ginsberg I don't know, so too, if he was there I didn't see him. A person of some note who was there however, was Bhagavan Das, recently returned from India after six or seven years.

BHAGAVAN DAS

KERMIT MICHAEL RIGGS

THE WAY TO SHAMBHALA
MOLLIFYING THE NAYSAYERS

Sometime nearing the very last day of June 1944, just after returning from India while still a very young boy and having had the rare opportunity to sit before the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi in Darshan, I was put on a passenger train somewhere in Pennsylvania headed toward Chicago, traveling with who I do not know. In Chicago I boarded the Number 19 Santa Fe Chief westbound to Los Angeles. Toward midnight of July 3, 1944, between Flagstaff, Arizona and Williams, on a high speed downhill run and behind schedule, the Chief's locomotive, a powerful Baldwin built 4-8-4 Northern with 80 inch drive wheels and clocking out at over 90 miles per hour, hit a marked 55 mph speed limit curve, with the locomotive derailing and sliding in the dirt on it's side off the tracks for well over 500 feet before coming to a stop. The rest of the 14 car train ended up in various stages of derailment and wreckage on and off the track, some cars remaining upright with two actually staying on the tracks undamaged. The fireman and three passengers were killed. 113 passengers along with 13 train employees injured, among them the severely injured engineer.

In the main text above as well as the footnote this is attached to, I briefly allude to a person by the name of Howard Fogg with the following:

"The next morning after having breakfast with a friend of my uncle, an artist named Howard Fogg, we headed toward Glenwood Springs and Holliday's grave site."

The aforementioned Howard Fogg my uncle and I had breakfast with in Boulder was a former World War II P-47 pilot that became a highly regarded artist and watercolorist of much valued railroad themed art. Fogg created the watercolor painting I used on the page regarding the train wreck I was involved in. His watercolor depicts the exact same locomotive, number #3774, that was pulling the train that crashed that night outside Williams, Arizona and of which I was a passenger.

SANTA FE LOCOMOTIVE #3774

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LT HOWARD FOGG'S WW II P-47D-10 THUNDERBOLT CV-T 42-75104 AND HIS WATERCOLOR OF #3774 SANTA FE CHIEF BALDWIN BUILT 4-8-4 NORTHERN
(P-47 photo courtesy of Peter Fogg)

Although I was unhurt, the person or people I was traveling with was among the injured and taken, with me along with them, to either Williams or Flagstaff. Because of the nature of their injuries, whoever I was traveling with was held-up under doctors care for several days, leaving me without direct adult supervision. My grandmother, who had been contacted by the railroad, called my uncle in Santa Fe. He in turn contacted a nearby Native American tribal spiritual elder he knew to oversee me.

The events found in this footnote has also been presented by me in virtually the same manner and same form in any number of my other works. What I have not included in the above account or have not revealed previously is a part of the crash event that circulates around the somewhat mysterious tribal spiritual elder my uncle arranged for me to be watched by until he, my uncle, could catch up with me. As you may recall, after the wreck, because the adult or adults I was traveling with had been hospitalized, I was left without adult supervision. I write about sitting in the waiting room of some train station in Arizona with the tribal spiritual elder late at night until my uncle was personally able to intercede and safely get me to Los Angeles Union Station and thus then, to my grandmother's home in California.

What I don't write about is that I recognized the spiritual elder the moment he walked into the hospital waiting area looking for me as found in the following quote:

"Mid-evening on the night of the-unknown-to-me at the time up-coming crash I had gone to bed in the bunk in my compartment and as far as I knew had fallen fast asleep. Sometime during that period between the time I fell asleep and the crash occurred I found myself neither asleep nor in my bunk but outside of the train standing barefoot on the desert floor in the middle of the night in my PJs some distance off from a set of railroad tracks, my hand being held by an elderly Native American man."

THE SPIRITUAL ELDER AND THE SANTA FE CHIEF

LAST AMERICAN DARSHAN

RIDING THE CAB FORWARDS

THIS FROM PROFESSOR EKKEHART MALOTKI:

One of the people that contacted me regarding the discovery date sequence of the Columbian Mammoth Petroglyphs was much different than one would find in the typical everyday run-in-the-mill garden variety type contactee --- and because of his contact, the reason why here, now on this page, there is so much updated and extensive coverage found in several footnotes on the issue scattered throughout the site --- possibly way more than one would ordinarily encounter searching down information on Fusang.

In my writings related to all of what we are talking about here, I cite and link through to a paper titled COLUMBIAN MAMMOTH PETROGLYPHS FROM THE SAN JUAN RIVER NEAR BLUFF, UTAH, UNITED STATES by Ekkehart Malotki and Henry D. Wallace. Professor Malotki contacted me after reading similar information that I've presented here that I present on my Louis L'Amour page. The good professor was hoping to get some clarification as to how was it my uncle had information regarding the petroglyph much earlier than what is typically reported. The answer was somewhat more difficult than would appear on the surface. Malotki was taken to the site originally by local Bluff artist Joe Pachak who knew about the site, and because Pachak was an artist as was my uncle, wondered if there was a connection. The two people my uncle caught up with during that trip was Howard Fogg, a reputable artist in his own right and H. Jackson Clark, the author of The Owl in Monument Canyon who founded the Toh-Atin Gallery in Durango. If my uncle met with any other people, artists or otherwise when I wasn't in attendance, he never brought it up to me.

Apostolides was notorious for simply just wandering around stumbling on to all kinds things as some of his papers found in the Rock Art Database attest too. Some he reported officially, some he didn't. In his travels though, he was a known quantity in Utah, even to the point that in his obituary his wife, Patti, writes "Alex was a charter member of the Utah Rock Art Research Association and we visited Utah every year for many years. We were on our way to Bluff when he became too ill to travel. There are many pictures (slides) of the writings [rock art] in Utah among the many collections Alex left as his heritage." If the mammoth is among those slides and collections is not known.

It should be noted that after a few back and forth emails with Professor Malotki I gave him the above information about Apostolides and how it was my uncle came to know about the mammoth petroglyph well before most dates cite it as having been discovered. After my explanation Professor Malotki never got back to me. The quote below, which includes within it's contents the following sentence "The image was therefore known to some archaeologists and rock art enthusiasts, but because of its difficult access on a vertical cliff face several metres above ground level was never scientifically investigated" is found in the link cited below:

"Joe Pachak, an artist from Bluff, Utah, who with the aid of the Crow Canyon report began investigating the Upper Sand Island site on his own, introduced Malotki to it in the early 1990s and specifically pointed out a panel that in his eyes depicted two megafaunal genera: 'mammoth' and bison. The image was therefore known to some archaeologists and rock art enthusiasts, but because of its difficult access on a vertical cliff face several metres above ground level was never scientifically investigated."

The site was first recorded officially in the hallowed halls of archaeology in 1985 by the Crow Canyon Center for Southwestern Archaeology, Cortez, Colorado (Cole 1985), albeit without mentioning either the mammoth depiction nor any efforts by Apostolides. The key to it all being it "was never scientifically investigated." Now, if Apostolides efforts and how he conducted himself in the field relative to his rock art investigations is or would be considered as falling into scientifically investigated category is for others to determine. I can tell you this, however, Apostolides was never after glory. So said, without casting aspersions toward anyone specifically or previously mentioned, it would not be totally out of character for any number of otherwise qualified professors under the umbrella of the high exalted halls of academia to shunt aside the earlier footwork and sweat of someone the likes of Apostolides. My uncle, who I cite often, was what I call a biosearcher. In the process of his biosearching throughout the desert southwest he had a number of previously undiscovered or unknown desert bio-growth plants scientifically named after him. In his own words though, he told me he also had many more swiped.

COLUMBIAN MAMMOTH PETROGLYPHS FROM THE
SAN JUAN RIVER NEAR BLUFF, UTAH, UNITED STATES

CERUTTI MASTODON SITE
HUMANS IN NORTH AMERICA 130,000 YEARS AGO

EKKEHART MALOTKI

JOE PACHAK

FOR A RATHER COMPREHENSIVE SELECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE UTAH MAMMOTH ROCK ENGRAVINGS CLICK HERE.

"I have no clue as to when and how Apostolides first became aware of the Columbian mammoth petroglyph for example and, even if he had, why it would come up specifically in conversation with Campbell."

The above quote is found in the footnote this sub-section is linked to. As the quote clearly indicates, I may not know how or when Apostolides first became aware of the Columbian mammoth petroglyph, but I do feel confident that I can extrapolate fairly accurately from readily available information regarding Campbell as to WHY a discussion of mammoth petroglyphs --- or mammoths in general, thus leading to the petroglyphs --- might arise in conversation between them, the two archaeologists that they were. That extrapolation begins with the unit Campbell was in during World War II and where that unit was deployed and moves on from there. The following is found in the Pothunter link previously cited:

"Campbell, at or just after the beginning of World War II, attended the P-39 school at the Army Air Corps Technical Training Command at Camp Bell, N.Y., outside of Buffalo. From there he was assigned to the 57th Fighter Squadron before being transfered into or temporarily assigned (TDY) to the 77th Bombardment Squadron and becoming loosely associated with a variety of combat missions during the Aleutian Campaign and a number of covert missions over the Arctic, remaining in Alaska, it is thought, until the end of World War II in 1945. The 57th flew both P-39 Airacobras and P-40 Warhawks, sometimes called a Tomahawk, from an airfield carved into the side of Kuluk Bay on Adak, one of the islands along Alaska's Aleutian chain. From there the 57th launched attacks further down the chain against Japanese forces that invaded and held Attu and Kiska islands."

My extrapolation is fairly straight forward and simple. From investigation of already extant material, two major mammoth connections, no matter how shaky, were indicated. Each on its own or taken together would easily come up in conversation during any discussion on Campbell's archaeological background, in-turn, at least as I see it, opening a direct path towards discussing the Utah petroglyphs of which Apostolides was apparently familiar.

1. SHEMYA ISLAND:
   

   The reported bones discovered during the construction of the airstrip said to have been of a giant-size, and of which Campbell was called in on to investigate in some fashion, although attributed to being human in nature, were, because of their size (i.e., thigh bones, for example) initially thought to be the remains of a mammoth.

2. UNALASKA ISLAND
   

   Campbell's connection with Unalaska Island during World War II, as will be reported more thoroughly directly below, is, of all the Aleutian Islands in the Aleutian Island chain, the ONLY one known officially to have had remains of mammoths found.

On June 20, 1942 air echelon units of which Campbell was assigned moved their P-39s and P-40s to Alaska, with Campbell, because of his P-39 training, going along. Seventeen days before that move, during the two day period of June 3-4 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy, using Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero-Sen fighters and Aichi D3A Type 99 dive bombers, launched two raids from aircraft carriers against what was at the time relatively small U.S. military installations located in the Aleutian Islands called Dutch Harbor. Dutch Harbor is situated in relation to a small island called Amaknak Island located within the bay of its larger host island, Unalaska. Although Campbell was soon assigned to Adak he was brought in in some capacity to deal with some of the physical aftermath of the Dutch Harbor attack.

Now, how much time Campbell spent in and around Dutch Harbor or its larger host island of Unalaska is not known. What is known however, and what would most likely would have been known by both he and Apostolides, again archaeologists that they were, is that of all the Aleutian Islands in the Aleutian Island chain, ONLY Unalaska is known to have had remains of mammoths.(see)

ALEUTIAN TIGERS

CURTISS P-40E WARHAWK WITH ALEUTIAN TIGER MARKINGS

Unbeknownst to the Japanese a secret airfield about 60 miles southwest of Dutch Harbor was built on the island of Umnak under the disguise of being a cannery. Major John Chennault, son of the famed Flying Tigers commander was the leader of a group of P-40s operating out of the field. The first day of the Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor the Japanese basically went in and out unscathed. Returning from the second day attack, not knowing there was a secret base in the area, the Japanese regrouped off Umnak Island and were immediately confronted by a group of Chennault's P-40s. Although most of the Japanese planes made it back to the carriers, Chennault's P-40s shot down two dive bombers and a Zero against the loss of two P-40s. Two other dive bombers, damaged by anti-aircraft fire, failed to make it back. In the height of the battle another one of the Zeros, apparently trying to return to the carrier after having severed an oil line during one of its strafing runs over Dutch Harbor, crashed on Akutan Island, killing the pilot. Even though the pilot was killed the plane itself was left almost entirely intact. Americans retrieved, rebuilt, and tested the Zero discovering at least two possible Achilles' heels. First, it was practically impossible to perform rolls at moderately high speeds. If the Zero's pilot was forced into such a maneuver it would give a tactical advantage to our pilots. Second, a carburetor design flaw caused the engine to sputter badly when the plane was put into a dive at a high rate of speed. If the Zeroes were forced into dive during a dogfight it could possibly set them up as an easier target.

THE FLYING TIGERS
THE BOY IN THE MAN REMEMBERS THE LEGEND

AKUTAN ZERO

OM MANI PADME HUM

When I was just a kid I met an old man (at least to me) that worked in a bar as a dishwasher. He was sitting out back of the bar in an alley one day meditating. I was in elementary school, in the fourth or fifth grade or so, living maybe a year or two with my dad and Stepmother on the western edge of the central city section of downtown Los Angeles. Two of my grade-school buddies and I used to pull a Radio Flyer wagon through the alleys around the neighborhood collecting pop and beer bottles for the deposit. After we collected a wagon-full we would turn them in various places around of which one was a bar. In the process of pounding on the back door I got to know the dishwasher there, an elderly Chinese man.

As a young boy without a lot of experience in the matter --- and never with my buddies --- I used to go by the bar and meditate in the alley with the old man even without the necessity of turning in soda or beer bottles for the deposit. Sitting in the shade on the back steps amongst the garbage cans and flies behind the bar one afternoon, while drinking hot tea out of tiny little cups with no handles in a near ritual-like tea ceremony he insisted on, the Chinese man told me a story about the bombing of Japanese occupied Taiwan, China by the United States during World War II. He said from ancient times there was a "girl Buddha" whose followers believed that reciting the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum would, because of her compassion, deliver them from harm. He said even though he himself had not practiced or invoked the mantra, while seeking refuge in the midst of the attack he inadvertently ended up amongst a group of believers who were also running to find shelter from the explosions. Then, while within the group, most of whom were verbally repeating the mantra, overhead, pure white and almost cloud-like the "girl Buddha" appeared in the sky above them actually deflecting the trajectory of the bombs away from their exposed path until they reached safety and out of harms way.

The mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, came up because of a 1940s comic book superhero called The Green Lama that used the mantra much like Billy Batson used Shazam to become Captain Marvel --- to invoke superpowers --- and, in the Green Lama's case, gaining super strength, invulnerability, the ability to fly, and even being impervious to bullets to the point of being bulletproof. The old dishwasher, for whatever reason, had a six or eight copies of the Green Lama of which, for whatever reason, he gave to me.

During those back-alley sessions, if the Chinese man used any names relative to the "girl Buddha" I don't recall them. Anything I know about her other than his description of the protection she provided, I have garnered later in life. Basically the "girl Buddha," or more respectfully, female Buddha, is known as Kuan Yin (also know as Quan Shi Yin and Kwan Yin), a Chinese female incarnation of Chenrezig (Avalokiteshvara) the Bodhisattva of Compassion. A bodhisattva is an Enlightened being who has decided to "stay in the world" rather than becoming a fully Enlightened Buddha and living a compassionate life for the sake of all beings. With the mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, Kuan Yin tirelessly attempts to deliver all beings from suffering.

GREEN LAMA
(please click)

With the rise of the internet In the late 1990s or so, bits and pieces of information began to bubble up scattered around regarding the potentiality of a sandstone slab found in, around or near one of the seven pueblos originally associated with the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola located in Native American Zuni territory some distance south of the Four Corners area that had, it was said, unmistakable Tibetan script carved on it's surface. One of the inscriptions was said to clearly be the Om Mani Padme Hum mantra. For more please click image:

(please click image)

After those early years, other than the occasional connection back to the Green Lama comic books of my youth, the mantra, at least for me, pretty much passed into oblivion. Then, years later, as fully articulated in Doing Hard Time In A Zen Monastery (linked below), following a set of near kidnapping-like extenuating circumstances in the then wide-open railhead city of Chiang Mai located in the far northern reaches of Thailand, after an exhaustive search by a renegade group, I was found by a Zen Buddhist monk amongst their midst under somewhat ragged conditions:

"(T)he KMT searching the city came across me, finding me with bloodshot eyes, drooling at the mouth, unbathed, dirty, unshaven, no clothes, sitting in my own urine and defecation, rocking back and forth, and highly unusual for me, robotically repeating over-and-over a mantra from my childhood Om Mani Padme Hum and so mind-numb that I was worthless to their or anybody else's cause."

The KMT, fighting to stay ahead of other factions seeking my potential expertise, had been furiously searching the city trying to find an unknown white American for days. When they heard there was a person of white or Anglo extraction, possibly an American, in one of the dens they went straight there. The Zen Buddhist traveling with the KMT was attracted to my constant repetition of the mantra, then seeing the tiny medallion around my neck knew I was under the protection of the Lord Buddha and could not be left behind --- no matter if I was or wasn't the one they were looking for.

DOING HARD TIME IN A ZEN MONASTERY

FOR A CLEAR TEXT VERSION CLICK HERE

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FOR A CLEAR TEXT VERSION CLICK HERE

The trip my buddy and I went on through Mexico, from start to finish took all but a few days short of the whole of the summer of 1960, with the two of us ending up having seen the image of the Virgin Mary or Our Lady of Guadalupe that is said to have appeared miraculously in the year 1531 on the cape or cloak of Juan Diego and now in the basilica in Mexico City, the pyramids in Mexico City, the Great Pyramid of Cholula, Palenque, and a whole bunch of other Mayan ruins in the Yucatan. We stopped whenever we wanted and stayed as long as we wanted. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Eventually we made a decision to return home. We headed north along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico through Vera Cruz then westward inland toward central Mexico turning north along the spine of the Sierra Madres.

Somehow on the way north my buddy and I became separated in our travels after I was thrown from a horse I was riding while visiting a ranch outside the northern Mexico town of Magdalena. Not being able to catch up with my buddy for some reason, tending to my injuries and such, seeking a way home, I crossed alone and on foot, albeit still limping from the fall, into the U.S. at the Nogales gate, ending up at the bus station on the American side. There I bought a ticket to Los Angeles, and it was there, during the end of the summer of 1960, sitting in the Nogales bus station waiting for my bus to come, as destiny would have it, in that same waiting room at the very same time I was there, Carlos Castaneda met for the very first time, the Yaqui Indian shaman-sorcerer that he would soon apprentice under and the shaman-sorcerer, Don Juan Matus.

CARLOS CASTANEDA AND DON JUAN MATUS
THE NOGALES BUS STATION MEETING

In November 1960, a month or so after my buddy and I had passed through Vera Cruz the Museo de Antropologa de Xalapa (Xalapa Museum of Anthropology) opened. When we were in Chichen Itza we met a university graduate student taking latex molds off temple hieroglyphs, so in turn he could use the molds to make exact duplicate casts from a Plaster of Paris type material called Hydrocal. He had arrived at Chichen Itza on an official dig with a number of people, professors and such, and when they left he stayed on continuing to make molds. When he heard we were heading north, since he had a bunch of equipment and molds and since we had a truck, he asked if he could hitch a ride to Vera Cruz.

When we arrived in Vera Cruz the museum people were in the process of finishing the final touches of a new building to accommodate some 10,000 pieces of ancient local and regional artifacts that had field collected over the years. Just like wanting see the world's largest ball of yarn or the world's largest donut, I had to see it. Although the graduate student really didn't need any help with his molds and equipment, in the process of delivering them we faked it enough so my buddy and I could join him allowing us access to the yet to be opened museum. There were boxes and stuff spread out all over in the main building, outbuildings, and other places as people were sorting, counting, and setting up exhibits. Once within the perimeter my buddy and I were able to wander through looking at the artifacts unquestioned and unmolested.

In doing so, just like seeing the Buddha-like porcelain figurine in the abalone shell in the Catalina Island museum and was set-aback, I saw quite clearly an equally highly unusual artifact that has, since the rise of the internet, become quite controversial. At the time I was amazed by it, but really put it out of my mind as events of much greater significance during our travels overshadowed any other interest. Then one day on the internet I ran across an image of the same artifact and became aware of the controversy surrounding it. I make no comments regarding any of the controversy, but do present the image of what I saw in real life those so many years ago in Mexico, an Olmec figurine circa 1200-900 BCE looking all the same as an elephant:

Z. Sitchin 2000 Reproduced by Permission
(please click image)

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(please click image)

CERUTTI MASTODON SITE
HUMANS IN NORTH AMERICA 130,000 YEARS AGO

A WORLD AWAY THE STONEHENGE HEELSTONE MARKS A SUMMER SOLSTICE

MY TAKE ON THE ZUNI/TIBETAN TABLET

Not one credible archaeologist or scientist with strong undisputed credentials in the field has come forward substantiating the authenticity of the Zuni/Tibetan stone tablet, nor can I vouch for it myself. For one thing, no scientific archaeological backup documentation exists as to when, where, and how it was actually discovered, in other words, a la Carlos Castaneda, who I am totally familiar with, no field notes. The following is found in conjunction with the source so cited:

"The former pueblo site at the base of the mesa is where the archaeological dig was being conducted at the time of Dan's of the enigmatic tablets discovery by Dan. I asked them why the discovery wasn't mentioned to the other archaeologists and Clifford made the comment, 'Why show it to them, they'd just steal it like everything else.'"

Navajo Code Talkers

The quote clearly indicates a discussion of an archaeological dig and archaeologists, but of who or of what affiliation they represent isn't mentioned. As well, one could if so aligned, side with Clifford to some extent, however what he does say carries within it's contents the scent of archaeologists within the group other than Zuni --- possibly untrustworthy in some fashion. Why he would be working with such a group is not known. The thing is, you just can't put together a high profile ragtag group of pothunters and go jackbooting ramshackle through a bunch sacred Zuni archaeological sites whenever a whim comes up, Zuni or otherwise. If the so mentioned Dan, said to have found the tablet, was a Zuni archaeologist of some repute, then most likely the digging team was duly registered and authorized to be operating on the location. If such is the case, knowing how sacred the tribal lands and artifacts are to the Zuni, it can be ensured that records exist on who, what, when, and where the team whence came.

In my much younger days I would have made a road trip to at least see the stone for myself, so at this point I am taking the graphics of the stone as the stone being real, although for all I know it might not even exist. The credibility I give to the Zuni slab actually existing is the incredible coincidence of where and how it was said to have been found and my experience with my uncle at the same Zuni site 60 years or more ago, especially so the mention of the upright slabs as found in the quote below and of which I saw myself. The following is also from the same source as the above link which by going to gets more into the location of the discovery of the stone:

"The ancient pueblo site was located north of a dirt road that snaked east from the present day pueblo. We parked and began to walk up a sandy hill that was covered in prickly pear and rabbit-ear cactus. We wound our way up and over the hill headed toward the base of the beautiful mesa that towered over the site. We took a break as Dan showed us the exact spot where he found the tablet. I looked around and marveled that I was standing on such a historic spot and I wondered if this was the exact spot where Coronado got beaned off his horse. The view to the south was spectacular in the late afternoon light that graced the ancient site. Majestic clouds dotted the sky and a pair of soaring ravens eyed us from high above as we headed over to a line of large sandstone slabs that had been planted upright deep in the sand. 'Looks kind of like a Zuni Stonehenge,' I joked as we scratched our heads and tried to figure out why this unusual arrangement of large stone slabs had been placed there."

One of the complaints lodged against the the object is that it didn't seem old enough, that is, it did not have an ancient quality about it, the carvings looking as though they had been done fairly recently --- although I must say I've seen shards of painted pots at various archaeological sites that have been exposed to the weather for centuries and you would never know it. However, the author does have a valid point. Nowhere in anything I have read about the Zuni/Tibetan stone has it been brought up that it was wrapped in anything, leather or otherwise. As found in the Code Talker site I'm the only one that says anything about such a probability. For me there is no doubt that on the day I was at the pueblo, i.e., the day I saw the slabs, even at the distance I was from my uncle and the elder, that whatever they dug out of the ground and were looking at was wrapped in what appeared to be leather.

If the object the elder and my uncle were looking at was indeed the same stone depicted in the graphics, then being wrapped as it was would most certainly have shielded it from the ravages of time, allowing from whenever it was made to the present day to have remained relatively unharmed. One thing that can be surmised is that the stone was carved in America on sandstone and not transported from Tibet in some manner. When the tablet was carved and who carved it is another thing. It certainly isn't representative of typical Zuni handiwork. The day I was at the pueblo with my uncle, from a distance I saw what looked like a book, although truth be said leather wrapped around a piece of sandstone could easily take on all the semblance of book from a distance. If what the elder revealed that day to my uncle was NOT the stone but instead a parchment of some sort with the same Tibetan writing on it that appears on the alleged stone, then what's not to say that someone in more recent times didn't simply copy the inscriptions onto the sandstone to ensure it's longevity, with the book, if it was a book, secreted away for posterity.

It should be brought to the attention of the reader for their own edification that on Friday, March 12, 1909, preceding by nearly a full month the above article having been published, a small three-inch one-column-wide article, shown below under the title G.E. Kincaid Reaches Yuma, appeared stuffed away and unheralded several pages inside the paper. A clearer text version is immediately under the scanned version:

G.E. Kincaid Reaches Yuma

G.E. Kincaid of Lewiston Idaho, arrived in Yuma after a trip from Green River, Wyoming down the entire course of the Colorado River. He is the second man to make the journey and came alone in a small skiff, stopping at his pleasure to investigate the surrounding country. He left Green River in October, having a small covered boat with oars, and carrying a fine camera, with which he secured over seven hundred views of the river and canyons which are unsurpassed. Mr. Kincaid says one of the most interesting features of the trip was passing through the sluiceways at Laguna Dam. He made his perilous passage with only the loss of one oar. Some interesting archaeological discoveries were unearthed and altogether the trip was of such interest that he will repeat it next winter in the company of friends.

There are those that imply that the above small Kincaid article was "not real," created in a sense to establish a foundation for the main article being "real." However, someone went back through the Gazette microfiche files and located a copy of the original 1909 page that it appeared on:

Now, for a full and complete unabridged clear-text typed version of the original article from the archives with all available missing portions re-inserted click HERE.

NOTE: The clear-text typed version of the original article at the so cited above link was retrieved personally by me from: ARIZONA STATE LIBRARY, ARCHIVES & RECORDS: Arizona Newspapers MICROFILM COLLECTION: C.16 D.3: Arizona Gazette 10/28/1880 - 2/1912 (No 1/1886 or 1/1888-4/10/1889) Arizona Gazette Monday April 5th, 1909 Arizona Gazette Changed name to Phoenix Gazette Nov. 1926