Forgotten Ages Research

The Incredible Stones of Ica—A Hall of Records From the Age of Dinosaurs? Part One—Background and Authenticity

Report Topics:

• The Cabrera Museum in Ica, Peru holds over 11,000 stones with engravings depicting human-like beings living alongside dinosaurs, maps of the world hundreds of millions of years old, and intricate operations performed for both heart and brain transplant surgery
• This stone collection has been authenticated using the most sophisticated testing techniques known today, despite the fact that most conservative scholars have attempted to prove them to be modern forgeries

Full Report:

The modern city of Ica, Peru is located approximately 220 miles south of Lima, about a four-and-a-half hours’ tourist motor coach ride along the Pan American Highway on the way to the famed Nazca Lines, situated farther south of the town. It is the capital of the Ica region, mostly composed of the coastal Ocucaje Desert. Despite being known as one of the driest spots on the planet, this modest urban center of 220,000 manages to support a farming community that produces grapes, cotton, asparagus, olives and a good Pisco brandy. It owes its agriculture in large part to being located on one of the very few sources of water in the area, the Rio Ica.

Unfortunately, this combined urban and rural setting was spoiled on August 15, 2007, when an 8.0 magnitude earthquake devastated a large portion of Ica, from which it and the area are still trying to recover.

Ica was founded in 1563 by a Spanish aristocrat named Captain Don Geronimo Luis de Cabrera y Toledo. It was four hundred years later that his modern direct descendant—Dr. Javier Cabrera Darquea—began a firestorm of controversy surrounding his collection of prehistoric stone artifacts gathered from around the Ica region. There are presently over 11,000 of these on display in Cabrera’s private museum, and they depict such extreme oddities as human beings interacting with dinosaurs and Ice Age animals; other humans examining the heavens with telescopes and looking at fossils with magnifying lenses; still other men performing caesarian sections, blood transfusions, open heart surgery and even brain transplants; and maps of the world showing lost continents and geographies of bygone eras from our planet’s geological past.

The typical conservative historical response has been to condemn all these stone images as “modern-day forgeries” and “obvious hoaxes”—blanket assessments often made without even looking at the artifacts themselves. However, closer scientific inspection and the utilization of the latest sophisticated testing techniques indicate that Cabrera’s mystery stones cannot be so easily brushed off as fakes. Are they someone’s bizarre idea of an incredible and elaborate joke—or are they the testament to the existence of a lost advanced civilization millions of years old?

Javier Cabrera was born in Ica on May 13, 1924. He received his physician’s degree at the University of Lima, and subsequently served as general practitioner at the Hospital de Seguros Social in Ica. He eventually returned to Lima where he became a professor and head of the University’s Department of Preventive Medicine and the Felix Terrealva Gutierrex Hospital. Having an avid interest in geology and paleontology, he also took extensive coursework in these areas, as well as had access to the science resources and book collections of the University Library.

In 1961, Dr. Cabrera semi-retired to his birthplace and helped found the San Luis Gonzaga Ica National University, where he taught biology and anthropology before his final retirement. He was also the founder and director of the Casa de la Cultura of Ica, with its focus on the study of local antiquities, plus also served several years as the Director of Culture for the Province of Ica.

In his last years, the doctor worked exclusively on developing a museum for his stone collection, and working to catalog and photograph all the artifacts. He never lived to complete this major project. After a long bout with cancer, Dr. Cabrera passed away on December 30, 2001.

The Cabrera home and museum are part of the family mansion, locally known as the Colonial Great House, that was first built in 1570 by the first ancestral Cabrera. It is presently located on one corner of the Plaza de Armas, the old Spanish center of the city of Ica. When the doctor began collecting his enigmatic stones, he originally stored them all through the large house, filling up the bedrooms and the rest of the living quarters, in every location he could find. But soon there were too many to accommodate, so he finally converted the front two rooms near the entrance and some of their side chambers into a small warehouse-like museum open for display by appointment to private groups.

Originally it was named Museo de Piedras Grabados—The Museum of Engraved Stones—but since the doctor’s death in 2001, it has been re-christened the Cabrera Museum in honor of its founder.

In October, 1985, as part of a tour I conducted to Peru with a dozen participants, I made special arrangements to visit Ica as part of our day-long excursion south of Lima to see the world-famous Nazca lines. After spending the morning flying in groups of threes escorted by a pilot in a Piper Cub back and forth high above the Nazca Pampa—viewing the spectacular images of spiders, monkeys, birds, spirals and linear patterns scraped off for miles from the surface of the desert floor—our return journey northward by motor coach brought us to Ica. Following a local lunch of seafood, asparagus and Pisco sours, we arrived on time for our appointment at the Museum. Dr. Cabrera greeted us at the door, welcomed us into his home, and for the next hour graciously led us through his collection.

The two large rooms open to us were crammed from floor to ceiling with hand-made wooden shelves holding thousands of gray and black stones of all different shapes and sizes, the surfaces of which were filled with etchings, some in bas-relief. Scattered across the floors were large bounder-like stones that were too heavy to put up on shelves, likewise covered from end to end in fantastic images. Over the years Dr. Cabrera had made an attempt to classify the myriads of portraits into general categories. The overall affect of the sheer numbers of stones, as well as the subject matter of what is being depicted, always leaves first-time viewers overwhelmed and speechless.

The doctor, using a steel rod as a pointer, focused our attention on only a few of the more notable of the stone pictures, speaking in short sentences so that our local guide could better translate for us into English. Those of us who had brought cameras flashed away and took as many photos and slides as we could. Even though we were using up rolls of film, every one of us wished we had brought much more.

Our far too short tour closed with Dr. Cabrera answering a few questions. As we had moved around inside the Museum, I had noticed a few closed side rooms that were under lock and key. When I asked him about these, our host replied that, while the stones we were allowed to examine around us were already controversial enough, these secret rooms contained still more images that “the general public are not yet ready to see.” The doctor added that he believed the stones seen and unseen were all together part of a “time capsule” that had “a profound message for humankind,” and that he was merely acting as their “custodian“, until “future generations” will finally “recognize their genuineness” and the various artifacts are “fully interpreted for their hidden meanings.”

And with that mysterious yet profound statement, our tour came to an end, as it was time for us to return to Lima.

Since Dr. Cabrera’s passing in 2001, members of his family have formed a non-profit organization, the Ica Stones Association and Museum, to help raise donations in order to safeguard the collection and maintain its museum housing. As of this writing, the doctor’s daughter, Eugenia Cabrera Claux de Velasquez, is the acting main director for the new Association, which is also now offering books and DVD’s about the collection, as well as has its own web site with a membership for those wishing to study in more detail on-line pictures and drawings made by Dr. Cabrera himself.

Tragically, on August 15, 2007, Ica and the surrounding region was severely shaken by an 8.0 magnitude quake. While many of the buildings in the town were devastated, the Cabrera mansion miraculously managed to stay intact. However, the Museum was affected, many of the wooden shelves having collapsed, and several of the stones were broken or damaged in their fall. As repairs slowly continue, many of the artifacts have been bagged and placed in nearby storage facilities. While the old shelving units are being replaced, the Association would like to eventually find a more permanent, safer and larger display building. This is the long-term plan and goal for the future of the collection.

The Ica stones range from baseball-sized to the dimensions of a small dog, weighing anywhere between a few ounces to over 800 lbs. The overall stone material employed is called andesite, having an extremely hard volcanic or granitic semi-crystalline matrix. Andesite is the Andean mountan range version of what in Africa and Europe is called diorite. On the Mohs hardness scale it measures 6, equivalent to feldspar, with 1200 Kg/cm2 of compression. What this means is that this material is, under normal conditions, by no means easy to carve or even etch. Today, it takes a sharp steel carbide-tipped tool to make a significant and prolonged mark across its surface.

However, as Dr. Cabrera pointed out in his research, his stones are not typical andesite, but appear to have been subjected to peculiar forces. He noted:

“They are gray, black, yellowish and pinkish. They are shaped like river rocks, the pebbles and small boulders seen on river banks, beaches and alluvial plains. But river rocks are notable for their durability. The Ica stones, on the other hand, are so fragile that if one knocks against another or is dropped to the floor, it will shatter. This singular characteristic of the stones was suggested when I first held one. I refer to its high specific gravity compared with plain river rock.”

In my own visit to Cabrera’s Museum, I also noticed, when picking up the smaller stone samples, that they felt much heavier than they seemed they should for their size. It is as if the natural mineral had undergone an unexplainable atomic restructuring, making them denser yet more brittle, and therefore more manageable to work with for carving purposes.

Another peculiarity is that all the Ica stones (the ones that are known to be genuine) are covered with a layer of natural oxidation, called varnish or patina. This is caused by a bacterial process on the microscopic level of the stone surface, and is known to take an extremely long time to form. Especially in an arid desert environment like one finds around Ica, such a stone patina can take hundreds of thousands if not millions of years to develop. The fact that, on Dr. Cabrera’s artifacts, the patina is also found within the etching grooves of the carved images, is a major indication that they too have a tremendous age associated with them.

Another proof against the Ica stones being of recent origin is a number of reports concerning their existence made by the first Spaniards to reach the land of the Incas four centuries ago. In 1525, Padre Simon, a Jesuit missionary who accompanied Pizarro on his initial exploration of the Peruvian coast, described his amazement on first viewing a series of “carved boulders” which showed strange creatures and details of advanced surgery techniques unknown to any European scholar.

Another adventurer, Pedro de Cieza de Leon, recorded his seventeen-year odyssey through the Andes from 1535 to 1552. At an early point in his journey, he told how one of Pizarro’s captains, Juan de la Torre, found in a grave he looted in the Valley of Ica a rich treasure that also included stones carved with “pictures of fantastic beasts.”

A contemporary Peruvian chronicler, Juan de Santa Cruz Pachachuti Llamqui, also wrote that more stones portraying “a strange bestiary” were found inside several pre-Inca tombs in what is now the Inca region, and that the Jesuits had begun shipping several of these back to Spain starting in 1562.

In fact, there is evidence the Jesuits, among the most learned savants of the time, actively plundered and scoured the coastal Peruvian countryside looking for these unique stones, because they believed their inherent scientific wisdom was either something they could exploit, or if deemed too dangerous for pious believers, needed to be purposely hidden away. If there is any possibility that these purloined stones could yet be re-discovered, a good place to begin looking would be in the sixteenth century Index and Interdictum collections of forbidden knowledge still hidden in any number of Spanish Jesuit colleges, or in the depths of the Vatican Library itself.

The primary source of where the Ica stones originate is said to be in an as yet undisclosed “cave” or “tunnel”—or what Dr. Cabrera also called the “depot”—located somewhere near the banks of the Rio Ica in the white desert country not far from the town of Ocucaje, about 25 miles south of the city of Ica. It is likewise thought to be situated along the edge of the piedmont or Andean foothills.

About once a century the weather patterns in this region briefly shift dramatically, due to periodic manifestations of the El Nino and La Nina climatic phenomena, filling the Ocucaje Desert with rare bursts of torrential rain. As a result, the shallow river bed of the Rio Ica is topped beyond its usual meager capacity, and the flood waters wash away significant stretches of its banks. When this happens, it appears the hidden entrance to the secret cache of carved stones is also opened, and part of its contents is dislodged and carried downstream, where it is eventually re-deposited along the fluvial shores closer to Ocucaje.

In the 1500’s, a “storm of the century” helped supply the Spanish Jesuits with a fresh load of carved stones, which they sent to the motherland to study and hide away. During the 1600’s and 1700’s, more deluge waters sent additional stones downstream, but during these early Colonial years, the local indigenous people had no value placed on them. The artifacts, being so plentiful, were considered a nuisance to clearing the land and building irrigation ditches for agriculture—so much so that a number of the stones were used as grinding stones, doorsteps and to cover pig-pen floors.

The recurrence of flash floods too place late in the 1800’s, and by this time European and American scholars were just beginning to take an interest in Peruvian archaeology, especially those who represented growing new university and museum collections. There are many undocumented sources claiming that—at the same time as the nineteenth century “foreign” plundering of relics from Egypt, Greece and Iraq was going on in the Old World, the same wholesale unauthorized pilfering of antiquities by the same international powers was likewise taking place in Mexico and Peru in the New World.

Reports from this period indicate that some of the Ica stones were also taken abroad and briefly put on exhibit in various locations. But because toward the end of the century conservative historical orthodoxy was beginning to rear its ugly constrictive head, the Ica stone images showing humans and dinosaurs living contemporary to one another was deemed “too inappropriate” to be placed on public display. So the stones—like so many “unclassifiable” out-of-place artifacts—were conveniently relegated and “lost” in basement storage areas. A comprehensive survey done today of what is really hidden away in academic and museum darkened storerooms may yet reveal several examples of “unacceptable” Ica stones still neglected and gathering dust.

By the time of the next centennial downpours, which happened at the beginning of the 1960’s, a whole new cottage industry had arisen among indigenous locals in and around Ocucaje. University and museum solicitors had by now given way to wealthy private buyers who were willing to pay top money for practically any relic they could lay their hands on, that would enhance their amateur collections. As a result, overnight many Ocucajos became huaqueros or “grave-robbers,” indulging in the illicit yet lucrative trade of secretly digging up ancient burial sites that are scattered throughout the local desert, and selling their contents of mummies, ceramics and textiles to the highest bidders.

Peruvian authorities have passed strict laws forbidding the excavation and sale of all antiquities, because they are now the declared property of the Peruvian government. They have likewise enforced lengthy jail time for all offenders. Even so, the secret work of the huaqueros continues to this day.

Beginning in 1961—when the twentieth century river floods began—several authorized local private collectors in Ocucaje and Ica began being visited by the huaqueros who had something new and different to offer them. These were not the usual millennium-old Paracas, Nazca and other ancient indigenous cultural relics, but were a growing accumulation of unique stones engraved with the most intriguing if not fantastic pictures, no two of which were alike.

Among the earliest prominent collectors were two brothers, Carlos and Pablo Soldi, who ran a vineyard plantation on the outskirts of Ocucaje. Their main contact was a local named Don Mendoza, who supplied them with several hundred of the curious stones for only a few Peruvian soles each—equivalent at that time to about 13 to 17 cents.

At first the Soldis were under the impression that their budding collection was made up of “pre-Inca” relics. This they based on the fact that very similar carved stones had been unearthed in 1955 out of tombs centuries old located on their property. They soon realized, however, that the free-flowing engraved images were nothing like the highly stylized and somewhat static art styles of any other ancient Andean cultural genres they were familiar with.

From the beginning of their business relationship, Mendoza was upfront with the Soldi brothers about his source—he had first found a pile of stones along the washed out banks of the Rio Ica, which had in turn led him to an “opening into a large tunnel” where the main cache was located. He and his fellow huaqueros had agreed to keep the location of this treasure trove a secret among themselves, because they recognized they could slowly mine this resource for artifacts for a very long time, supplementing their very meager farming incomes for years to come.

Eventually, however, when other huaqueros began selling the carved stones to tourists, and samples showed up at the Lima International Airport in inspections of foreign luggage exiting the country, Peruvian authorities stepped in to investigate. Some of the huaqueros tried to bargain with them by expressing their willingness to show government archaeologists where the stones came from, but they were refused. The selling of any antiquities was and still is a criminal offense in Peru, and soon the huaqueros’ operation was shut down with threats of arrest and incarceration.

Officials then traced the stone trade to Mendoza, who quickly switched to a new tactic to avoid going to jail—he claimed instead that he had carved the stones himself, that they were all only fakes. If the stones were really of modern manufacture, then there was no selling of antiquities involved, and Mendoza could not be prosecuted. At this point Mendoza very quietly retired from his stone-selling enterprise, and was not heard from again.

Unfortunately, the end result was that Mendoza’s falsified admission began to cast the first doubts on the overall authenticity of all the stones in general. But the Soldi brothers knew the truth, and remained convinced that their collection was legitimately very old. Their initial proof had been that such stones had been found in ancient burials on their estate a decade before, so they knew the artifacts could not have been of recent origins. Pablo Sordi noted that most of the samples brought to them by Mendoza were covered by a thick layer of saltpeter, the very slow buildup of which is indicative of great age. Carlos, on the other hand, pointed to the intricacy of the artwork and the difficulty it would have taken to labor at producing the engraved images. He also stated his disbelief of how anyone would have expended so much energy in exchange for the extremely low prices the brothers had paid.

Even so, when Carlos died in 1967, and Pablo donated 114 of their carved stones to the Regional Museum of Ica, the persistent rumors that the stones were really of modern production soon followed them. Beginning in 1970 the artifacts were taken off display and relegated to the Museum’s back room, where they still remain today.

Later still, in the early 1970’s, Pablo gradually sold the remaining 341 stones in the Soldi collection to Dr. Cabrera, who added them to his own early collection.

In 1965, Peruvian scholar Herman Buse wrote a book about the local antiquities of the Ica region, and included material on the Soldi collection, which—based on his personal research—he believed to be genuine. Seven years later, however, when he presented his evidence before the First Congress of Andean Archaeology convening in Lima, the cultural authorities in attendance failed to take any action on his invitation to examine the stones firsthand. In an article published in the Lima daily paper El Comercio, Buse took his fellow colleagues to task for their refusal to face the implications of what the artifacts revealed.

By 1966, Santiago Agurto Calvo—who was then rector of the Universidad Nacional Ingenieria—had amassed his own collection of several hundred carved stones. In that year, Calvo began excavating several pre-Inca tombs in which he found more samples of carved stones identical to the ones he already had. He described them as portraying “unidentifiable things, insects, fish, birds, cats, fabulous creatures and human beings in elaborate and fantastic compositions.”

In subsequent digs, Calvo was accompanied by archaeologist Pezzia Assereto, who later published a book on local area relics, in which he offered this report:

“Agurto was able after several attempts to find an engraved stone inside a tomb in the sector of Toma Luz of the Hacienda Callango del Valle in Ica on 20 August 1966.

“After informing the Museo Regional of Ica of such an important find, Agurto and I made another excavation on 11 September of the same year, in the hill called Uhle of the sector La Banda in the Hacienda Ocucaje, and we found for the first time an engraved stone inside a tomb of the Paracas culture, a thing I was not expecting, but which proved, by association, the authenticity of these artifacts.”

These discoveries demonstrated that the carved stones were at least a millennia old, very likely much older, because such pre-Inca cultures often buried ancestral power objects in their tombs that were family heirlooms dating back hundreds of years more.

Equally surprising is that one of the stones Calvo and Assereto unearthed clearly showed a five-toed llama, a species that was supposed to have been extinct for 40 million years. But this was not a unique find, for a decade before the eminent South American archaeologist Dr. Julio Tello had brought to light ceramic figures at Tiawanaku of five-toed llamas, as well as fossilized llama bones indicating that such animals had indeed at one time been living in the area, but had long disappeared.

The mid-1960’s also saw other carved stone collections begun that were in a more official capacity. Colonel Omar Chioino Carraza, who was the Director of the Peruvian Aeronautical Museum in Lima, over the years managed to accumulate over 400 stones from various locations. After government-sponsored tests, Carraza was able to declare in 1974, “It seems certain to me that they are a message from a very ancient people whose memory has been lost to history.”

Several of the Museum samples are very heavily coated with patina, to the point that the engravings underneath are completely covered and can be seen only in intense lighting. This amount of patina suggests these particular stones may have come from a region other than the Ocucaje Desert, where there was much higher humidity and moisture in the distant past.

In the meantime, not to be outdone, Commander Elias, Curator and Director of Peru’s Naval Museum at Callao, likewise acquired 300 stones for that center’s own government-sanctioned display.

Still another group of 125 stones, known as the Calco collection, was donated to the Regional Museum of Ica. An American archaeologist, Neil Steede, was allowed to investigate these in some detail and declared them to be the “real McCoy.” Many of the artifacts had tell-tale shallow grooves averaging one-sixteenth of an inch deep showing no obvious tool marks and filled with patina. Others, identical with those that eventually came into the possession of Dr. Cabrera, were highly intricate in their design, and were both etched and in bas-relief.

On May 13, 1966, on Dr. Cabrera’s forty-second birthday, a childhood friend and photographer, Felix Llosa Romero, gave him as a present a small carved stone from his own collection, with the idea it could be used as a paperweight for the doctor’s desk. The stone depicted a small but peculiarly shaped fish. With his background in fossil studies, Cabrera immediately recognized that the creature in question was presumed extinct, possibly a species of coelacanth, even though a living example had been caught off Madagascar in 1938. He asked to see the rest of Romero’s collection, and the more he saw the more intrigued he became.

At first Cabrera bought up the stones the local haqueros kept finding and bringing to him. The doctor wrote:

“Six years after the first discoveries of the engraved stones, and without being aware of the work of the Soldi brothers and of Santiago Agurto Calvo, I came across several hundred examples. My investigations in the field of biology, in connection with my lectureship at the Universidad Nacional San Luis Gonzaga in Ica, allowed me to identify the unusual fauna engraved on the stones as animals which paleontologists tell us existed only in prehistory.”

Then, over the next few years, Dr. Cabrera also bought Romero’s stones, as well as those of the Soldi brothers and Calvo. This began his almost obsessive desire to acquire as many of the carved artifacts as possible, so that more than forty years later the doctor’s collection exceeded 11,000 in number.

In actuality, Dr. Cabrera had had previous encounters with these stones earlier in his life. Like many wealthy Peruvian families, the Cabrera clan had their private collection of Pre-Columbian relics that was considered a generational heirloom. Dr. Cabera’s grandfather, Dom Pedro, was nine years old in 1906 when he witnessed his father excavate a burial site outside of Ica, and found four carved stones inside. Thirty years later in 1936, when the doctor himself was ten years old, his father, Bolivia Cabrera, had received from locals working for him planting crops in a family-owned plot near Ica at Salas, a similar carved stone they had dug up in preparing the field. When Romero had given him his stone artifact for his birthday, the doctor quickly realized that it was made by the same enigmatic culture as those who had created the stones already belonging to his family.

During the rest of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the local huaqueros of Ica and Ocucaje reported unburying similar carved stones out of tombs they plundered in the neighboring Cahuahi and Chauchilla sites, which they sold to tourists for a mere pittance. Dr. Cabrera estimates that during this time period as many as 4,000 such stones were illegally trafficked out of the country.

In addition, many of the tombs broken into contained ceramic vases and textiles decorated with pictures of “strange beasts.” When shown images of modern reconstructions of dinosaurs out of a geology textbook, the huaqueros readily identified several ancient artwork examples they had unearthed as equivalent to stegosaurs, diplodocus, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors and pterodons. Again, however, all these specimens were sold away to unknown collectors, and are now nowhere to be traced.

Looking closely at the complete array of pre-Incan art from the Paracas, Nazca and other local cultures that have long disappeared, it is apparent that these ancient peoples were also very cognizant of the carved stones’ existence, for they actively copied the unusual decorations of extinct fauna as part of their own artistic expressions.

In June, 1968, Dr. Cabrera was invited to speak at the first Convention of Directors of the Departments of Culture in Peru. At the time, the doctor was the Director of Cultural Affairs for Ica. Cabrera urged his colleagues that the carved stones warranted a serious study to discover their true origins and meaning. The Convention participants gave their unanimous support for such a major project to be inaugurated and, based on their decision, Cabrera began to prepare the official authorization necessary to begin excavation work. He was to specifically designate certain sites for the search of stones still situated in their undisturbed geological matrix, in order to prove their great age once and for all.

Suddenly, without warning, Dr. Cabrera was relieved of his position as Cultural Director of Ica, and immediately was replaced by the Director of the Regional Museum of Ica, who declared that the carved stones were all fakes. He based this accusation on unsubstantiated rumors and reports that local huaqueros—like Mendoza claimed a few years before—had really not illegally dug up anything but instead had manufactured the stones themselves, as a way to bilk money out of both foreign tourists and local collectors. It was the choice forced on the huaqueros to either uphold this lie, or go to jail for a very long time.

Unfortunately the lies won out, much to the detriment of the doctor’s efforts to get further official support for outside independent research on the carved stones, which quickly dried up.

Despite these early setbacks, Dr. Cabrera remained confident concerning the prospects that move carved stones—genuine ones—could yet be found. He revealed:

“People have been finding these engraved stones in the region of Ica for years and thousands more are still uncovered. I do not claim I can explain everything, but one thing is for sure—the stones exist, and there are so many of these, perhaps a hundred thousand.”

That estimate was based on the doctor’s being taken in the early 1980’s to the actual “cave” or “depot” where the original library of stones are located, and his preliminary examination of its contents. This was done with the understanding that he was to keep its location an absolute secret. Dr. Cabrera faithfully did so, safeguarding the hidden stones and taking that information of their whereabouts with him to the grave. In his later years, a number of researchers and authors tried to convince Cabrera to have him show them the secret site, but the doctor steadfastly refused, for fear the hidden library would be looted and lost.

However, he himself continued to visit the place from time to time, and made significant discoveries. He wrote:

“In the desert of Ocucaje a few kilometers from the original deposit where the engraved stones of Ica were found, I have discovered a paleontologic measure set in sedimentary rock from the superior cretacid (Cretaceous) period of the Mesozoic geological era. It was here I began looking for fossils in this very rich measure in a systematic way and in accordance with the time and money I had available.

“On October 14, 1984 I found a section of sedimentary strata in which there was a number of fossilized animal and vegetable specimens from Mesozoic fauna and flora.

“Suddenly and with great surprise, I found part of a backbone—a dorsolumbar with its iliac bones that belonged to a human being similar to the men of our day. Nearby were three incomplete heads and fragments of a dinosaur backbone belonging to the triceratops species. Close to these I found egg specimens, sections of skin of dinosaurs of different species, and an almost complete skeleton of a phitosaur—an archaic reptile similar to a crocodile—equally fossilized.”

Since the andesite of the Ica stones themselves date to the early Mesozoic era—between 185 and 130 million years old—Dr. Cabrera’s finds only confirmed for him what he had previously suspected, that the reason why the stone images show no tool scratch marks is because the portraits were in fact imprinted at a time when the rock was still soft. This is also the reason why the subsequent long and slow patina buildup was equally distributed across both the stone surfaces and the image grooves—the two had been created together during the same remote time period.

Despite the doctor’s reticence to reveal more, other searchers have claimed to have discovered this same fossil-filled strata zone examined by Cabrera, as early as 1970. Yet in spite of repeated requests for authorization to perform excavations here from the Patronato Nacional de Arqueologia—the only Peruvian government institute that gives permission for such work to be done—the answers have always been stubborn refusal. And such refusals continue to the present day.

It was this kind of official resistance that likewise cut short Dr. Cabrera’s lifelong goal of being able to unearth still more important finds he anticipated, but was never able to fulfill. In 1989 he wrote:

“I have no doubt that I will continue to find objects, instruments, and even buildings in this stratum if I continue searching. Here is continued irrefutable proof of a scientific and technological standard of a pre-existing archaic humanity living concurrent with the dinosaur. There are also still untold numbers of carved stones lain hidden under the desert floor of Ocucaje waiting to reveal untold truths.”

Once Dr. Cabrera’s unusual collection fully came to the attention of the international news media in the early 1970’s, Ica soom began to swarm with visiting sensationalist documentary film crews, pseudo-scientific researchers, publicity-seeking authors and debunking journalist investigators trying to get their own particular slant on the carved stones and their revelations.

Swiss bestseller writer Erich von Daniken, of Chariots of the Gods fame, was among the first to arrive, representing the “ancient astronauts” extraterrestrial origin theorists. He at first claimed to find a good friend in Dr. Cabrera, but when later confronted by aspects of the doctor’s findings about the artifacts that were too avant-garde for his personal taste, von Daniken turned against him and wrongly condemned Cabrera as being nothing but a “storyteller”—a good case of an extremist creating his own orthodoxy to fit his severely limited personal misconceptions.

Robert Charroux, a popular author in both France and America, came next and was followed by a host of other myth-as-history conspiracists who thought they had found an ally in Dr. Cabrera who, like them, promoted maverick alternative interpretations of the past.

Eventually fundamentalist creationists like Don Patten and Dennis Swift soon beat a path to the doctor’s museum door, hoping to find proof from the stone images showing men and dinosaurs living together, that the Bible story of a pre-Flood world and a six-thousand-year-old Earth could be vindicated.

By far the largest influx, however, was of skeptical news reporters whose prevailing bias was in support of the established conservative historical concept of gradual evolutionary progress. They came to demonstrate conclusively that Dr. Cabrera was a fraud, and that all his stones were modern-made fakes. Sadly, they did not have far to look for the evidence they were looking for.

A BBC-TV documentary crew tracked down one of the suppliers of carved stones for Dr. Cabrera, Basilio Uschuya, who lived in nearby Callango, He made the mistake of telling them on camera that he had repeatedly gone out into the desert to find the artifacts and sold them to the doctor for a number of years. This admission on film led government officials to arrest Basilio for trafficking ill-gotten antiquities, and he spent time in jail before eventually being released.

By the time a second BBC-TV crew came back for a follow-up report in 1977, the hapless farmer had been forced to dramatically change his tune, now claiming that he had made the stones himself. With cameras rolling, he dug up a very small unworked stone about an inch and a half long, carved the letters “BBC-TV” into its surface using an old dentist’s drill, then painted it with black shoe polish and rubbed it with cow manure to imitate the patina covering. The stone wound up as a paperweight on the film producer’s desk back in London.

Pathetically, this one very crude example of fakery became the basis for the British documentary to declare conclusively that here was the answer to the riddle of how Dr. Cabrera had had all of his 11,000 stones produced.

Basilio’s testimony, however, began to be very inconsistent over the passing years. Back in 1973, in a conversation with Erich von Daniken, he reiterated that the had manufactured all he existing stones. But the author doubted him, pointing out the sheer number of artifacts involved and the highly skilled etching and carving work that would have been necessary in their creation—far beyond the abilities of a poorly educated farmer.

In 1975, in an interview with skeptic writer Massimo Polidoro, Basilio again claimed he had sold Dr. Cabrera stones he and his wife, Irma Gutierrez de Aparcana, had engraved themselves. They revealed further that for their art subject matter they had copied images out of “comic books, school books and magazines.” As Cabrera himself later pointed out, there were no contemporary literary or scholastic sources available that contained pictures or information concerning advanced concepts of paleontology, astronomy or surgery as revealed by his stone collection.

In that same year, a few days following, reporters from Mundial magazine of Lima also interviewed the couple, who stated once again that, “Yes, we made all of them ourselves,” including the thousands of stones in Dr. Cabrera’s possession. This time they revealed that the way they got the artifacts to have an ancient look to them was to lay them down out in their chicken pen and “let the chickens do the rest.”

Irma showed the reporters where she found unworked stones for carving. These had come out of a rocky promontory 165 feet high, located a little over a mile and a half from their house. She took them to two small pits, each 3 to 4 feet across and only a foot deep, out of one of which she spent a half hour digging a small stone the size of an orange. She then took several more hours etching it, with very disappointing artistic results.

We can make several important observations about this demonstration. First, if the two forgers had been responsible for carving all of Dr. Cabrera’s thousands of stones, then the rocky promontory used for source material should not have consisted of just two small pits, but rather a giant crater to accommodate such a huge mass of original stones as made apparent by the doctor’s museum collection.

. Second, as Dr. Cabrera himself calculated, if the two had somehow managed to dig out and carve an average of six stones a day between them—which is a somewhat ambitious estimate given the hardness and resulting difficulty of working with this type of stone—then to produce the volume of artifacts contained in Cabrera’s and all other stone collections, plus all those sold to tourists over the previoius decade and a half, it would have taken 23 years of continuous labor. Yet the stones we know first began appearing only 14 years before, in 1961.

Actually, Basilio claimed an ever slower rate of production, admitting that a soccer ball-sized stone took him more than two weeks to finish. Based on this rate, von Daniken calculated the equivalent of 85 years’ worth of total work. Another author gave an even greater estimate of 576.9 years, while Robert Charroux—looking more closely at the remarkable intricacy of artwork skills employed on the majority of samples in Cabrera’s museum—calculated the full production time as an incredible 900 years of constant labor.

There is also the unresolved problem of how the many stages of manufacturing of these stones would have been realistically executed if they had been all faked. The stones that were actually forged by Basilio and Irma and then sold to tourists were invariably orange-sized or baseball-sized, so that tourists could hide them in their luggage. In contrast, Dr. Cabrera’s stones averaged much larger and heavier, all the way up to boulders weighing 800 lbs. No private buyers let alone tourists could possibly have handled these, making them economically unfeasible to sell. So if these were meant to be hoaxes, why would they have been made to begin with?

Also, to mine these huge pieces out of the ground, move them to the forgers’ home to be carved, then transported to Dr. Cabrera’s museum, would have taken several types of modern heavy equimpment—bulldozers, backhoes and dump trucks. Yet, as the Mundial reporters observed, the only equipment that Basilio and Irma possessed was a small electric generator and a used dentist’s drill.

Equally problematic is the fact that the couple were the only two “manufacturers” ever identified. Yet the amount of excavation work, carving and hauling necessary to have produced all of Cabrera’s stones would have required hundreds of workers, not just two. Archaeologist Hamilton Forman, looking at the total artistry and logistics that would had to have been involved, remarked, “If one local family did all this, they must have had an army of elves helping them.”

Finally, there was the serious difficulty regarding the subject matter of the stones’ artwork. They contain inherent knowledge covering several diverse sciences, including advanced aspects of medicine and surgery that even Dr. Cabrera—as a well-trained physician and professional surgeon—did not fully understand. There is no way that a local farm family, with very limited formal education, could have simply guessed at such sophisticated information, and tried to portray it in great detail.

In truth, as Basilio began to gradually change his story, he confessed that the Cabrera stones in question were really authentic antiquities. To German journalist Andreas Fischer, he admitted that the artifacts were genuine, that he had said they were forgeries to avoid further imprisonment. The few stones he himself had made were for the tourist trade only. In 1997, speaking with archaeologist Neil Steede, he again revealed that he had produced only a very few. And in 2000, Basilio actually showed Spanish journalist J. J. Benitez where he had discovered the real stones, and subsequently Benitez dug up nine of them in situ. These were found to be identical to Dr. Cabrera’s in every respect.

When I toured Peru in 1985, I bought a small sample of a faked work at a vender’s stall at Nazca, located underneath the main observation tower. It was a small flat stone painted with shoe polish, upon which was etched a crude rendering of one of the giant bird figures depicted among the Nazca lines. The bogus stone’s bird outline was accentuated with the use of an old bottle of white correction fluid, in order to bring out the simple linear design. A few hours later I carried this pseudo-stone in with me into Dr. Cabrera’s museum, and held it up to compare it with the genuine stones surrounding me. There was absolutely no comparison.

Unjustifiably, several of Basilio’s forged samples have been deliberately tested, with obvious results, and then presented as incontroversial proof that all the Cabrera stones are a hoax. Such flagrant blanket assessments is typical of conservative historians who remain prejudicial in upholding their particular “accepted” vision of the past to the exclusion of all others.

The Institute of Geological Sciences in London was given one of Basilio’s faux relics to examine. They found modern blue pencil sketch marks to guide the carver, and evidence of the use of a hacksaw blade. A Nova television documentary, made in 2002, used this singular evidence to dismiss the whole Cabrera collection as an “obvious hoax.”

Jose Antonio Lamech, of the Spanish Hispergea Research Group in Barcelona, found tell-tale sandpaper abrasions on his bogus sample.

Another forged specimen shown to archaeologist Neil Steede was covered with patina, but no patina appeared in the etched grooves. He concluded, “This suggests that while the stones were certainly very old, the carvings were clearly of a far more recent origin.”

In 1998, Spanish researcher Vincente Paris, after four years of exhaustive investigation, declared that a Basilio stone given to him for examination was definitely a forgery. Microphotographs showed traces of modern paints and abrasive chemicals utilized in its production, as well as the “crispness” of the cut marks. In other words, it had no supportive evidence of erosion that naturally comes with the passage of time.

Other microscopic surveys have revealed the tell-tale signs of the use of a powered rotary tool which leaves a contoured groove and causes chips, flakes and cracks along the margins of the groove. In addition, the breakage of the stone patina surfaces exposed protruding mica and feldspar—indicative of recent carving. A rotary drill also creates whir marks and swirl fissures in the grooves. Likewise, there are often minute metal flecks left behind from the drill bit itself, either embedded in the stone or appearing on its surface. Such signature marks cannot be seen with the naked eye, but show up unmistakably under a high-powered microscopic scrutiny.

In sharp contrast, other scientific tests which are much less publicized by the media have been performed on Dr. Cabrera’s own museum stones and other genuine specimens.

In 1966, Santiago Agurto Calvo had samples from his early stone collection tested in the laboratories of the Faculty of Mining at the National University of Engineers, during his tenure as University Rector. The analysis, completed by the laboratories’ leading two engineers, Dr. Fernando de las Casas and Dr. Cesar Sotillo, reported the following findings:

“All the stones are highly carbonized andesites, despite their coloration and texture, which suggests a different nature. The stones come from lava flows dating from the Mesozoic era, characteristic of the zone where they were found. The surface has weathered, and feldspar has been turned into clay, weakening the surface and forming a kind of shell around the interior of the stones. This shell measures an average of grade 3 on the Mohs hardness scale, and up to 4.5 in the part not so affected by weathering. The stones can thus be worked with any hard material such as bone, shell, obsidian, etc., and naturally, by any prehispanic metal implement.”

A year after acquiring his initial carved stones that began his collection, in May of 1967, Dr. Cabrera sent 33 specimens to his friend Luis Hochshild, a professional mining engineer and Vice President of the Mauricio Hochschild Mining Company based in Lima. Cabrera requested that his laboratories perform an analysis to determine the nature and origins of the stones and their engravings. A month later the doctor received an answer from one of the company petrologists, Eric Wolf. The report included these findings:

“The stones are covered with a fine patina or natural oxidation which also covers the engravings by which their age should be able to be deduced. I have not been able to find any notable or irregular wear on the edges of the incisions which leads me to suspect that these incisions or etchings were executed not long before being deposited in the graves or other places here they were discovered. I will try to confirm this preliminary opiinion by means of a more detailed test in the laboratories of the Engineering School and of the University of Bonn, West Germany.”

A further analysis from Bonn by Professor S. Frenchen concluded that:

“1. The stones have a higher specific gravity than common river rocks.

“2. The engravings are old, to judge by the coating of natural oxidation that coveres the incisions as well as the stones themselves.

“3. The stones were engraved not long before being deposited, judging by the absence of wear on the edges of the incisions, which means that the stones were not engraved for utilitarian or even artistic purposes, but rather to be deposited in a safe place for preservation.

A few years later, Dr. Richard Fales, who is head of the Department of Archaeology and Paleontology at Shepherd University in Los Angeles, and has 27 years’ experience in analyzing artifacts from a dozen different ancient cultures, received a sample of one of Dr. Cabrera’s collection. With it came the request to examine it for his professional opinion concerning its authenticity and age. He concluded:

“Close examination showed weatherization and red iron oxidation that is most certainly of ancient age. The stone, colored a reddish brown, measures 9 by 6 inches, and is incised with two images which strongly remind us of a quadro-pedal sauropod dinosaur. Under magnification, it was noted that there was no evidence of modern hand or machine tooling.”

Dr. Sophia Melewska is a geomorphologist who was commissioned to investigate the Cabrera collection in its entirety and make a professional evaluation as to its overall authenticity. Her comments were significant and well worth noting:

“I am in a state of intellectual shock. The art that surrounds the entire rock faces is evidence of an advanced civilization that knew about surgery, the history of man’s past, and the Earth’s evolution. But how?”

Dr. Melewska has now been trying to get other professional researchers to at least take a look at her findings and examine the collection for themselves. But so far her efforts have met with obstinant resistance by her colleagues.

In 1976, a team of investigators including NASA chief engineer Joseph Blumrich visited Dr. Cabrera and his museum to do microscopic studies. To make the tests more interesting, the doctor gave the team four samples of genuine stones from his collection, and four samples of stones manufactured by a local vendor. Under a microscope the major differences between the genuine and fake specimens was indisputable. Later, Blumrich commented, “There is no doubt in my mind about the authenticity of these pictures.”

In that same year, an American biologist, Ryan Drum, carried out his own independent examination of Cabrera’s museum stones. He brought back with him two samples to America where he did an extensive microscopic investigation. He reported:

“I have examined the rocks at 30 and 60 magnification and found no obvious grinding or polishing marks or any other evidence of rotary power tool use in making the very regular grooves. I am not sure how to date the rocks since they are susceptible to potassium argon dating only if they are in volcanic deposit. If Cabrera is right and the rocks are genuine as claimed, they are incredibly valuable and should not only be held in awe, but studied thoroughly as products of human intelligence.”

Stone samples of two types were also brought for analysis to Mason Optical Incorporated, headquartered in Hillboro, Oregon, which had developed the revolutionary stereoscopic microscope that offered the best precision imagery available. The first specimen was a fake stone that had been produced by Basilio Uschuyo. The second sample was an artifact from Cabrera’s collection. Here was the analysis:

“1. The first stone under investigation showed very shallow incisions with small scratches and chips from the stone. Minute specks of blue metal (steel) were found on the stone. The incisions were clean and angled. There was no patina or film of oxidation on the stone, and no microorganisms or saltpeter were found. The laboratory conclusion was that the stone was of recent manufacture.

“2. The microscopic analysis of the Cabrera stone revealed that it had a fine patina covering the grooves and incisions of the stone. There was dirt and sand embedded in the crevices of the stone, including in some of the incisions. The natural oxidation had slightly colored the incisions so that they did not have a bright white look, indicative of recent cutting. No evidence of modern tool usage or minute metal particles were found.”

Regarding the presence of patina on the real stones, paleo-chemist F. G. Hawley noted that, “Many artifacts in dry desert country show little or no patina after seven or eight hundred years.” The fact that the Cabrera stones have significant patina surface coverage means they have to be at least a millennium old, most likely significantly older.

In 2004, another comparison test was conducted in Ica between genuine and fake stones under microscopic examination by Dr. Andres Zhurov, who holds a doctoral degree in Andean archaeology from Moscow State University. The analysis was peformed using a portable USB digitable microscope with attached camcorder and computerized image compiler. Forty samples of both stone types were chosen at random by a group of supporters and skeptics alike, who had negotiated and agreed upon beforehand what form the testing should take. The final results were very decisive.

The fake stones that had been made by Basilio were easy to spot. The forger’s hacksaw bite into his stones clearly pitted the grooves and left broken pieces of the stone along the saw-line. Neither was there the presence of any natural patina in the grooves. Instead, an imitation patina made from water, clay, sand and manure had been rubbed and baked into the sharp incisions. This could be easily brushed off with a cloth, because it was separate from the stone, in contrast to real patina which forms as part of the stone itself and cannot be removed.

The Cabrera specimens, on the other hand, had consistently deep and rounded grooves showing no signs of tool marks whatsoever, exhibited no mineral or patina breakage, showed evidence of having been smoothed by a very long period of erosion, and had bacterial patina, ancient soil particles and colonies of lichen growing in them—all indicative of a great age based on the extent of their formation and depth of layering.

The Cabrera stones thus ran away with the prize that day. They easily distinguished themselves as being genuine and distinctly separate from all those that had been forged. And the argument that all the Cabrera stones were forged has been proven wrong.

[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]