Aliens · Ancient Astronauts · Conspiracy ·

The Stone Discs of Baian-Kara-Ula: Tracing the Origins of Ufology's Most Elusive Mystery

I've spent my career studying people who report extraordinary experiences. Contact with non-human entities. Medical procedures aboard craft that shouldn't exist. Stories that, on paper, sound impossible. What keeps me coming back to this work isn't blind belief. It's the patterns. The consistency across unrelated witnesses. The physiological markers that don't match known psychological phenomena.

So when I first encountered the legend of the Stone Discs of Baian-Kara-Ula, I approached it the way I approach any extraordinary claim: with genuine curiosity and a healthy appetite for primary sources.

What I found surprised me. Not because the evidence was overwhelming. Because it was almost entirely absent.

The Story Everyone Knows

You've probably heard some version of this tale. In 1938, a Chinese archaeological expedition led by Professor Chi Pu Tei of Peking University ventured into the remote Baian-Kara-Ula mountains on the China-Tibet border. Deep inside a network of caves, they discovered something that defied explanation.

Rows of graves. Skeletons of small beings, no taller than four feet, with abnormally large skulls. Cave walls decorated with figures wearing round helmets alongside depictions of the sun, moon, and stars. And buried in the cave floor? Hundreds of stone discs, each about a foot in diameter with a hole in the center.

The discs supposedly featured a double spiral groove running from the center to the rim, like a vinyl record. Within those grooves: microscopic hieroglyphs. 716 discs in total, according to most versions of the story.

Twenty years later, a linguist named Dr. Tsum Um Nui allegedly cracked the code. The translation? A 12,000-year-old account of an alien crash landing. A spacecraft from a distant star system had come down in the mountains. The survivors, called the Dropa, couldn't repair their ship. They became stranded among the local tribes.

It's the kind of story that should rewrite history. If it were true.

Where Did This Actually Come From?

Here's where my training kicks in. When patients report extraordinary experiences, my first question is always: what's the source? Can we trace the account back to its origin? Are there corroborating witnesses? Documentation?

With the Dropa Stones, the trail leads somewhere unexpected.

The earliest traceable version of this story doesn't appear in any Chinese archaeological journal. It shows up in the July 1962 issue of Das Vegetarische Universum. A German vegetarian magazine.

I want you to sit with that for a moment.

The article, titled "UFOs in Ancient Times? The Hieroglyphs of Baian-Kara-Ula," was attributed to someone named Reinhardt Wegemann and a Tokyo news agency called DINA. Neither the author nor the agency has ever been independently verified.

Every subsequent retelling, including the famous 1968 article in the Soviet magazine Sputnik and Erich von Däniken's best-selling books, traces back to this single, obscure publication. The story wasn't discovered in 1938. It was published in 1962, in a magazine primarily concerned with meatless diets.

The Phantom Professors

In my field, we call them "archival ghosts." Names that appear in stories but leave no footprint in the historical record. Professor Chi Pu Tei is one of them.

Exhaustive searches of Chinese academic databases, university rosters from the 1930s-1960s, and historical archives turn up nothing. No Professor Chi Pu Tei at Peking University. No archaeological expedition to the Baian-Kara-Ula region in 1937 or 1938. No expedition reports. No photographs. No correspondence.

The same is true for Dr. Tsum Um Nui, the alleged translator. His name doesn't appear in any Chinese academic record. The "Beijing Academy for Ancient Studies" where he supposedly worked? No such institution ever existed.

These aren't minor discrepancies. They're the complete absence of documentation for people who allegedly made one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in human history. In my experience working with experiencers, even the most extraordinary accounts usually connect to verifiable elements. A date. A location. A witness who exists in public records. Here, we have none of that.

One Polaroid to Rule Them All

So where's the physical evidence? Out of 716 alleged discs, the entire visual record consists of a handful of low-resolution Polaroid photographs.

These were taken in 1974 by an Austrian engineer named Ernst Wegerer during a visit to the Banpo Museum in Xi'an. He claims he saw two of the discs on display and was allowed to photograph them.

I've looked at these photos. Many times. They show circular objects with concentric rings and a central hole. The image quality is poor, partly due to the camera's flash washing out surface details. No scale reference. No museum label visible. And those "microscopic hieroglyphs" central to the entire legend? Completely invisible in the images.

When German author Hartwig Hausdorf visited the same museum in 1994, he was reportedly told the discs had been destroyed or removed. No explanation. No forwarding address. Just gone.

The Hoax That No One Mentions

There's a detail that gets conveniently left out of most Dropa Stones documentaries. A significant branch of the legend involves a 1947 expedition led by "Dr. Karyl Robin-Evans," who allegedly made contact with an actual Dropa tribe. This story was popularized in a 1978 book called Sungods in Exile.

In 1995, the book's editor confessed in Fortean Times issue #75 that the entire thing was his "favourite hoax." The expedition never happened. Dr. Robin-Evans never existed. David Gamon (writing under the pen name David Agamon) made it all up.

This isn't speculation. It's an on-the-record admission. Yet the Robin-Evans expedition continues to appear in modern retellings as if it were historical fact.

What Are These Things, Really?

If the discs exist at all, what might they be?

Chinese archaeology offers a perfectly mundane candidate: bì discs. These are circular jade artifacts with a central hole, common in ancient China from the Neolithic period onward. They served as status symbols and were frequently placed in burials.

Some bì feature parallel decorative grooves. Mineral changes from centuries underground can give them unusual colors. An archaeologist unfamiliar with Chinese cultural artifacts could easily misinterpret them as something more exotic.

The claimed Dropa discs differ in a few ways: they're supposedly made of granite rather than jade, they're larger (about 30 cm versus 16 cm for typical bì), and they allegedly contain spiral micro-inscriptions. But without an actual artifact to examine, these distinctions exist only as unverified claims in magazine articles written by people who may never have seen the objects themselves.

The Name Game

What about the Dropa tribe itself? Don't they lend credibility to the story?

This is where linguistics trips up the legend. The word "Dropa" is almost certainly a mangled transliteration of "Drokpa" (also spelled Brokpa or Minaro).

The Drokpa are real. They're an ethnic group living in the Ladakh region of India, speaking a Dardic Indo-Aryan language called Brokskat. They're thousands of kilometers from the alleged discovery site. And they're of normal human stature, not four-foot-tall cave dwellers with oversized skulls.

Genetic studies confirm their South Asian paternal lineage. No alien DNA. No mysterious origins. Just a distinct, endogamous ethnic group that got name-dropped into a UFO story.

The confusion may also stem from the Tibetan term 'brog pa, which simply means "nomad" or "herder." An outsider could easily mistake a generic description for a proper tribal name.

How Media Turns Speculation Into "Fact"

The Dropa Stones story is a case study in memetic evolution. Each retelling adds new details, strips away caveats, and treats previous speculation as established fact.

The 1962 German article introduced the basic narrative. The 1968 Sputnik piece added "scientific" details: the discs supposedly contained high concentrations of cobalt and emitted a peculiar "oscillation rhythm" when tested with an oscillograph. No lab report. No sample data. Just claims in a popular magazine.

Von Däniken's books brought the story to millions. Hausdorf's The Chinese Roswell revived interest in the 1990s by publishing the Wegerer photos and suggesting a cover-up. The 2012 Ancient Aliens episode introduced the legend to a new generation, stripping away decades of accumulated skepticism.

Each amplification was driven by commercial incentives. Book sales. Magazine circulation. TV ratings. YouTube ad revenue. The story persists not because new evidence emerges, but because mystery sells.

If We Found One Tomorrow

Here's where I want to shift gears. Because despite my skepticism about the existing "evidence," I'm not dismissing the possibility that something anomalous could exist.

What would it take to actually test a candidate Dropa disc?

Modern archaeology and materials science offer a clear blueprint. First, non-destructive analysis. High-resolution photogrammetry and 3D laser scanning could create precise digital models of the object's geometry. Reflectance Transformation Imaging would capture surface details under varying light conditions, revealing any inscriptions or tool marks invisible to the naked eye.

Standards from Historic England and photogrammetric best practices provide established protocols. Multi-light imaging techniques used in cultural heritage documentation could definitively confirm or rule out the existence of "microscopic hieroglyphs."

Portable X-Ray Fluorescence would test the cobalt claim without damaging the artifact. Trace element analysis could compare the stone's composition to the geological baseline of the Bayan Har region.

The tools exist. The methods are established. What's missing is the artifact.

Getting Access the Legitimate Way

If you wanted to actually investigate this in China, there are legal pathways. They're complicated, but they exist.

China's Cultural Relics Protection Law governs archaeological research. Any excavation requires a detailed program submitted to the National Cultural Heritage Administration, reviewed jointly with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Foreign researchers would need to partner with a recognized Chinese institution.

All excavated relics are state property. They must be registered and turned over to designated museums. Exporting artifacts for testing requires an exit permit from the NCHA, which makes the final decision after review by local audit agencies.

Museums like Banpo have scientific research services with published procedures for research access. University archives at institutions like Peking University have established processes for accessing historical records. Any investigation would need to comply with UNESCO conventions and the global heritage law framework.

It's not impossible. It's just bureaucratic. And no one has successfully navigated it to produce a verified Dropa disc.

What I'd Love to See

After years of working with people who report experiences outside the mainstream, I've learned to hold space for uncertainty. The universe is stranger than any of us fully grasp. Consciousness, perception, the relationship between mind and matter: these are frontiers we barely understand.

But I've also learned that extraordinary claims require more than extraordinary stories. They require verifiable evidence. Primary sources. Physical artifacts that can be tested by independent researchers.

The Dropa Stones don't have that. Not yet.

What I'd love to see is a genuine open-science effort. An accessible digital archive collecting high-resolution scans of primary source documents: that 1962 Das Vegetarische Universum article, the original Sputnik piece, first-generation prints of the Wegerer photographs. Searches of Chinese newspaper archives from the 1930s and 1940s. Official statements from the Banpo Museum or Peking University confirming or denying the existence of such artifacts in their collections.

If someone reading this has access to any of these materials, you could help transform a modern myth into a testable hypothesis. That's the only path forward that respects both our curiosity and our commitment to truth.

The Bottom Line

The Stone Discs of Baian-Kara-Ula are a story. A compelling one, repeated across magazines, books, and television programs for over sixty years. But when you trace the narrative to its source, you find a single 1962 article in an obscure German publication, written by an unverified author, describing professors who left no archival trace, translating inscriptions that no one has ever photographed clearly.

I don't say this to mock believers. I study experiences that mainstream science dismisses. I know what it feels like to encounter something that doesn't fit comfortable categories.

But the Dropa Stones aren't that. They're a lesson in how myths propagate. How each retelling adds details and drops caveats. How commercial incentives sustain stories that evidence cannot.

The mystery isn't whether aliens crashed in the Himalayas 12,000 years ago. The mystery is how a vegetarian magazine article became one of ufology's most enduring legends. That story, at least, I can verify.