Dropa – Fact or Fiction?

In 1937, a Chinese archaeologist named Chi Pu Tei discovered strange cave burial sites in the Baian-Kara-Ula mountain range, located in the borderland between China and Tibet. The skeletons found were roughly 4 feet tall, and displayed heads which were considerably larger than their slender frames. In each of the 716 graves, Chi Pu Tei found a stone disk approximately a foot in diameter and almost an inch thick. Chi Pu Tei published his findings stating that the burial sites were made by mountain gorillas and that the disks were placed there by later cultures. Chi Pu Tei was rightfully ridiculed by the Chinese archaeological community for this absurd claim.

The caves themselves had the appearance of being ‘carved’ from the mountain, according to Chi Pu Tei. The walls were squared and glazed and were more akin to an underground system of interlinking tunnels. The disks, upon closer inspection, were inscribed with a strange, unknown writing. In 1962, Chinese scientist Professor Tsum Um Nui managed to partially decode the inscriptions, telling a wild tale of an alien spacecraft that had crashed to Earth. Many of the occupants were hunted and killed by local tribes because of their strange appearance, and with no means to re-build their craft, were stranded on our planet. Indeed, an old Chinese legend describes a race of small, yellow-skinned humanoids, with large heads and slender, frail bodies. Their supposed descendants live in the area of the Baian-Kara-Ula and are of very small stature, encompassing none of the features associated with the Chinese, Mongols or Tibetans.

In 1947, Dr Karyl Robin-Evans travelled through Tibet bound for the “mysterious land of the Dropa”. He met with the Dalai Lama and eventually found the tribe, who were indeed small in stature and of strange appearance. He conversed with a language teacher of the Dropa who told him the same story of an alien race being stranded on Earth. Apparently they had been here roughly 12,000 years ago on an exploration mission, and that another craft had crashed here around 1014AD. Robin-Evans took a photograph of the supposed Dropa leaders (see below) but this seems to be the ONLY photo of this race of people in existence.



Russian scientist W. Saitsew published a paper in 1968 which raised the interest of extraterrestrial visitors in our past. Much of the information published was from the work done by Professor Tsum Um Nui, but included information of the make-up of the stone disks, which had large metallic traces such as cobalt. When the disks were placed on an oscillator, they produced a vibratory hum that suggested the flow of energy. The centre hole in the disks was cut with such precision that it defied explanation, considering the disks were aged at around 12,000 years.

In 1974, Austrian engineer Ernst Wegener was able to photograph two of the disks being displayed in the Banpo Museum in Xian. The museum curator could tell Wegener nothing of the disks, and when Hartwig Hausdorf visited the museum twenty years later, the disks had disappeared. Wegener’s photos are published all over the internet, but their quality is poor, having been taken with an old Polaroid camera. No inscriptions are visible, and while they are as they had been described in the past, the photos are hardly proof of anything.

For this is the problem with the story of the ‘Dropa Stones’ and the small skeletons supposedly found in the mountains of the Baian-Kara-Ula – the lack of proof. It is highly unlikely that Dr Karyl Robin-Evans trekked into Tibet and took only ONE photograph of this mysterious race of people supposedly descended from extra-terrestrials. There might be a logical reason for this, but it escapes this author. The other ‘facts’ of the case are suspect as well – for instance the reported transcription by Tsum Um Nui and the details regarding the properties of the disks. The complete lack of evidence to support a discovery of this magnitude lends credence to the idea that this is all an elaborate hoax. A number of photos have surfaced on the internet claiming to be the skeletal or mummified remains of the Dropa ‘aliens’, but most are proven fakes or from another location on the planet, passed off as ‘Dropa’. And where are the 716 stone disks supposedly discovered by Chi Pu Tei in 1937? Were subsequent expeditions undertaken to recover any disks or skeletal remains that were left behind? It’s a great story, but is it anything more than that…?

Of course, a discovery like this would invariably draw the attention of the world’s governments and it is quite possible that the entire discovery has been quashed. Perhaps the evidence is locked away deep underground in a top secret installation – deemed far too unsettling for the minds of the average person….

by Max Drake
(Freelance writer and artist for GritFX.)