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Friday, January 14, 2011

I got nothin'... but stones

I surfaced from my work the other day, not because I am finished, but because I needed a break from the rewrite for a minute.

I can honestly say that I have never worked so hard on a project (and that's saying A LOT, considering how hard I work) as I have on this one.

Three page one rewrites since just after Christmas. When I sent in the first rewrite, I took the script in a slightly different direction and touched lightly upon a new storyline. My notes came back with "that's intriguing and there's a story there. Find it."

So, I've spent the last two drafts "finding" it and I think I finally have.

Only thing, with all the thoughts still swirling around in my head, I can't settle my mind down enough to be able to read this draft and see if I'm right. When this happens to me, I generally stop my "regular writing" and clear my mind by writing little inconsequential short scripts and short stories.

However, I'm not feeling it right now. I'm not feeling like writing a short script or story, but I need to write something in order to refocus myself, so here I am.

But... I got nothing to write about.

So, I'm gonna post about one of the many mysteries of the world that I find interesting. I picked this one at random:

The Ica Stones



In Peru, just north of the Pampa Colorada, lies the community of Ica, home to physician Javier Cabrera.

In 1966, an illiterate farmer gave Dr. Cabrera a stone for his birthday that had an image of a fish carved on it. Upon research, the doc discovered that the carving matched a specimen that has been extinct for thousands of years.

He questioned the farmer about where the stone had come from and the farmer told him that he found it in a cave after a flood, and that there were many more of them. He also said that he had been selling them to tourists so the good doc offered to buy whatever he had left and any more that he could find.

Dr. Cabrera ended up with more than eleven thousand of them.

Word of the stones and the farmer got out, so the BBC did a documentary on the subject. At the same time, the Peruvian government stepped in to question the farmer in depth about how he came to have the stones. The government also told the farmer that he would spend the rest of his life in prison for selling the rocks, as Peru has tough antiquity laws. The farmer quickly changed his story and said he had carved the rocks himself.

Since the government wanted to get rid of any controversy, they accepted the farmer's revised story without question. In addition, the BBC took a beating and were criticized for airing a story that was a hoax, so they quickly swept it under the rug, too.

And there it would have stayed if not for Dr. Cabrera.

For the last thirty years of his life, Cabrera researched and investigated the origin and content of the stones. He desperately tried to get the scientific community to join in, but they wouldn't because of the "hoax stigma" attached to the stones.

Here's what he found out on his own:

The stones are made of a local river rock that's a form of andesite, a hard volcanic material, and they are covered with a layer of natural oxidation, confirmed by German laboratories to be an ancient patina of oxidation that is impossible to recreate in this day and age.

The stones range in size from those that will fit in the palm of your hand to those the size of two basketballs.

The images etched into the stones depict humans, ancient animals, lost continents and the knowledge of global catastrophes. There are also images of brain transplants, heart transplants and cesarean sections using acupuncture as anasthesia and artificial life support systems that are just now being used by modern medicine.

There are drawings of men using telescopes and aerial images showing the earth with several unfamiliar land masses and a completely different continent configuration. When scientists compared these maps to computer animations, they were found to be highly accurate of what earth would have looked like thirteen million years ago, when the continents of Atlantis and Lemuria still existed.

So, who made the stones? And where did they come from? Do you believe that the farmer carved them himself so he could sell them to tourists?

I don't.

Even the scientists can't explain how an illiterate farmer could carve more than 11,000 stones, depicting intricate and ancient knowledge of the stars and planets, and the cynics can't account for those maps of ancient origin.

No one can.

The Ica Stones still remain a mystery that no one can explain with incontroversial proof, which of course, is why they interest me.

I'm going to Peru one day, and I am going to find one of these stones and I'm going to hold it in my hand.

And then maybe I'll know...