The real story
Although the story is rich in circumstantial detail, unlike so many in the Bad Archaeological literature, the detail turns out to be fiction. The earliest source for it is an article in
Литературная газета (
Literaturnaya Gazeta) of 9 February 1960, p 2, discussing the speculations of
Matest M Agrest (1915-2005) that aliens might have visited earth in the remote past and left traces of their arrival. It was subsequently reprinted in its entirety as “Hypotheses, assumptions and guesses: does the trail lead into space?” by Valentin Isaakovich Rich and Mikhail Borisovy Chernenko in the magazine
Новое Русское Слово (
Current Digest of the Russian Press, a Russian language newspaper published in the USA since 1910, Volume 12 No 9 (30 March 1960), p 24-6). Intriguingly, this contained the story before the alleged date of Tsum Um Nui’s translation of the disks as related in later accounts. Some have suggested that Valentin Rich and Mikhail Chernenko never existed and were pseudonyms. However, they published a book in 1964,
Сквозь магический кристалл: повесть о мысли (‘Through the Magic Crystal: a story of ideas’), on artificial diamonds, while Valentin Rich published Охота за элементами (‘The hunt for the elements’) in 1982 and В поисках элементов (‘In search of the elements’) in 1985 and so they appear to have been genuine popular science writers.
Two years later, the story turned up in the July 1962 edition
Das Vegetarische Universum, a German vegetarian magazine, which published a story attributed to a Reinhardt Wegemann called
Ufos in der Vorzeit? Die Hieroglyphen von Baian-Kara-Ula (‘Ufos in ancient times? The hieroglyphs of Bayan Kara Ula’). Intriguingly, the story is attributed to a news agency DINA, Tokyo; this is neither General Pinochet’s secret police nor the Mexican lorry manufacturer, so it is unclear what the acronym represents (it looks as if it could be the
Deutsche Internationale Nachrichtenagentur, although if the agency ever existed, it has left no trace). The same story, from the same (apparently non-existent) news agency, again credited to Reinhardt Wegemann, was published in
UFO-Nachrichten, a German UFO magazine, in July 1964. However, no trace of Reinhardt Wegemann can be found outside the story as published in
Das Vegetarische Universum. The Belgian UFO organization BUFOI published a French translation in the March-April 1965 edition of its newsletter (number 4), to be followed by a Russian translation in 1967, bringing the story full circle.
The Russian translation was condensed by Vyacheslav Zaitsev in the English language magazine
Sputnik: the Russian Digest dating from 1967, where it was called ‘Visitors from outer space: science versus fiction’.
Sputnik is a sensationalistic magazine similar to Britain’s
Daily Sport and the USA’s
National Inquirer (please note that you may not be able to see its pages outside the USA).
What can we make of all this? Firstly, that the story has a very, very dubious pedigree. A speculative article by a pair of science writers seems to have been expanded by an unknown writer into the story published in the name of Reinhardt Wegemann in 1962. Whoever was behind this seems to have been disappointed by the poor take up of the story (a page in a vegetarian newspaper can hardly have had the impact the author of the hoax would have wanted), so he pushed it out again in 1964. Although rewritten, there is a clue in the text that it was originally prepared two years previously: it describes the expedition in which Chi Pu Tei discovered the discs as having occurred forty-five years previously, which would have placed in 1939, rather than 1937 as originally claimed. It seems that 1964 was a better year for tall tales involving crashed UFOs, as the story was taken up in a variety of publications. It was through one of these that Vyacheslav Zaitsev’s popularisation made it known to a wider world, including the up-and-coming Erich von Däniken. From there, the story blossomed, giving rise to at least two works of fiction, one of which was to foist the non-existent
Lolladoff Plate on the gullible through the fictional
Sungods in Exile.
