High on the mountains called BayanKara-Ula, which range through the borders of China and Tibet, a most fascinating series of caves is situated which are strangely interconnected — built by either man or nature.

Inside these caves lie buried bodies of the most unique hominoid species seen by man. The team of archaeologists that accidentally stumbled upon the discovery of the caves in 1938 first thought that they were bodies of apes. But apes do not bury their dead. If not animals then what or rather who did these odd-looking skeletons belong to?

Yes, they were not human and not animal, well not entirely human. The skeletons showed small and very thin arms and legs, almost spindly, but really large heads as compared to the short and thin frames. The Chinese archaeologist, Chi Pu Tei and his team were taking a closer look at the skeletons when they noticed something even stranger. Half buried in the cave floor was a round disc. It looked like it was made of stone with a hole in the centre. There were spiral engravings or grooves like two rings going around it.

On closer examination, it looked like some form of writing or hieroglyphs on the grooves. But no one could translate the strange language. Not even experts in ancient writings. More interesting is the fact that on the walls of the caves were carvings showing the rising sun, the moon and stars which were joined together by lines of small dots. Were the bodies of this unique species trying to tell us something?

It took 20 years for the disc to be deciphered or translated by experts in Peking. What he found was too much for the authorities that did not let him reveal his findings. During more searches of the caves in the area, 716 more of the same kinds of discs were discovered.

According to Dr Tsum Um Nui’s translation of the discs, they told a story — an unbelievable story of a space probe that came to Earth from another planet and crashed in these remote mountains. The inhabitants came in peace and were from a very advanced civilisation. But their taller neighbours made life difficult for them, thus they took off for other worlds. But the somewhat sad tale is that the inhabitants or natives of the area felt threatened by these creatures that they thought extremely ugly, and hunted and killed most of them.

Now the two native tribes that still live up in these remote and almost inaccessible mountains are called Dropa and Ham. It is said that the Ham killed them who came on horseback. Now this bizarre tale has been traced back to 12,000 years! Yes, that’s how old the cave carvings are. Moreover, no one at that time knew how to make these discs that are mostly made of cobalt and other metals.

The Russians also got very interested in the discs and took some of them to examine themselves. Not only were they also intrigued by them but while experimenting with them on a turntable, the discs gave out a kind of humming rhythm. It was as if they worked on an electric charge. The story was also published in the Russian magazine Sputnik.

Coming back to China, legends and folklore do speak of an ancient race that came from “the clouds” and was killed because they were small and very ugly and people did not like them. The carvings show constellation other than our own. Computer simulation of the diagrams showed that there were views of Earth from another star system where they came from.

Though Ufologists like Erich Von Daniken, who are believers in the ancient astronaut theory, have accepted it as it is. But for most sceptics and critics, it’s the same old story of ruling out all possibilities and putting everything in ET’s account. But the interesting fact is that the translation of the discs speaks of the alien race as ‘Dropa’.

The name has different spelling like Dzopa but there still exists a tribe in the same area called by the same name. They do not call themselves descendants of any alien race but their features are neither Chinese not Tibetan. Also here we have the native legend of the area that people with very large heads and big eye sockets with tiny bodies came and were hiding in the caves thousands of years ago.

Since legends are really old, the natives living on these mountains that live only in these isolated parts hardly know about advanced spacecraft and life in outer space. Then we have the discs. Strangely unique, mysterious but giving an account of the same legend and that too made out of hard granite and with metals that are powered by electric charges in order to work as presumed due to the fact that they kind of hummed in such a way that the scientists thought that they were like a series of circuits.

So this is not your regular “alien” encounter story!

The discs also tell according to the translation that the aliens, once their spaceship crashed, hid in these caves for nine suns meaning nine days so as to assure the humans already in the area that they meant no harm.

In 1995, in a news report from China, on the Eastern border of the Bian-Kara-Ula Mountains, (same mountain, different spelling), a strange tribe of a 120 people were found which no one had seen or heard of before. The unique feature of this tribe is that they are not more than three feet 10 inches tall. The sceptics, however, do not agree. The skeletons could be an extinct species of mountain gorillas. The discs could be the work of an intelligent artist good in carving. And the natives of the area could naturally have short bodies and unique features living in the remote area.

But has anyone ever heard of any kind of monkeys burying their dead neatly in rows inside caves? And how come the ancient legend tells the same story? What or whoever lived and died in those caves knows the real truth. For the rest of us, there is either a mystery here or none at all.