Why did the islanders worship the same god as the ancient Egyptians? Where do the island statues have European faces, and the inhabitants have white skin? All this - in a special report from one of the most mysterious places on the planet.
- Come here! You can see it better that way.
Struggling with a strong wind at the top of the volcano, I approached a small depression in the rock and nearly tripped over a man's face. The nose and lips were touched by the eaten away sea salt, and the eyes (the size of an apple) had no pupils. The body of the giant got stuck in the volcano, as if trying to get out of there.
“That’s how they were cut down,” my guide shouted trying to drown out the wind. - First, the whole body was hewn with hammers, and then the statue was carried to the ocean. They say that the very first such giants were found nearby on a rock that suddenly emerged from the sea during a strong earthquake …
By whom hundreds of idols were erected, the natives could not explain.
“We just couldn't understand what happened here. Hundreds of giant statues are scattered throughout the island. Some of them depict people with European features, others - strange men with long ears, another - a man with a goatee.
The idols weigh from 10 to 80 tons and we use a crane to carry them. Who could create these giants, how could they be moved? What kind of civilization existed here, on an island in the middle of the ocean?"
A statue in a volcano.
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The famous Norwegian traveler Thor Heyerdahl, who spent years exploring the mysterious Easter Island (or, as the locals call it, Rapanui), made these notes fifty years ago.
From the very beginning, as soon as the Dutch Admiral Jacob Roggeven's ship landed on the "unknown land" early in the morning on April 7, 1722, Rapanui is considered one of the most mystical places on the planet.
The Dutch were amazed to see that the triangular piece of land is inhabited by three different races at once - black, red … and white people. Moreover, the latter were so white that the sailors at first mistook them for … Europeans thrown ashore as a result of a shipwreck.
The ears of some islanders were so long that they touched the shoulders, while others were specially cropped. There was not a single tree on the mysterious island.
By whom and why hundreds of huge idols were erected, the natives could not explain, they did not know it themselves. Later groups of researchers discovered hundreds of underground passages in the caves of the island, leading to no one knows where.
After about a dozen people disappeared without a trace in these labyrinths (the last - in 1965), the governor banned attempts to penetrate the lowest levels of the volcanic catacombs.
… The island really makes a strong impression. When you come to the foot of the Rano Raraku volcano and see hundreds of gloomy statues (in the local language - "maoi") at its base, looking calmly towards the sea, it takes your breath away.
Many statues are not finished - it seems that the crowd of carvers stopped work in one second due to an unknown cataclysm.
As the New Zealand ethnographer Macmillan Brown found out, the construction and installation of the Maoi required no less labor than the Egyptian pyramids.
Of course, the first thing that emerged was the theory that Easter Island was once part of a continent that subsequently sank. The creators of the statues were also called the inhabitants of the mythical Atlantis, and the more ancient (also hidden under water) continent of Lemuria.
“I don’t consider myself an Atlantean, but there was something like that,” the owner of the hotel, Martin Rodriguez, tells me. - Our ancient legends say that there was a huge flood, "from the sky and from inside the earth lightning fell," big water "came, and nothing could be seen around."
An ancient magnetic stone makes the clock stop
The famous submariner Jacques-Yves Cousteau, exploring the vicinity of the island, discovered a mountain ridge at the bottom of the sea - scientists have confirmed that these mountains could once have been above water.
In addition, you immediately notice that all the thousand-year-old paved roads on the island are very interesting. They lead directly into the ocean, where they drop abruptly.
The famous "magnetic stone" is installed on the seashore. When the clock approaches the boulder, the second hand freezes in place - for some unknown reason, the stone is really highly magnetized.
"Magnetic stone".
It was installed here five hundred years before the appearance of the very first statues. Heyerdahl specifically noted that in the ancient descriptions of the drowned continent of Lemuria, it is just about such a stone that the citizens of this state worshiped as a god.
Not far from the coast - tumbled statues of maoi, some of them have their heads off: it is assumed that the labor of at least two (!) Generations of stonecutters was spent on processing each of them.
Until now, only a part of the idols have been determined the exact age - many of them are significantly older than the Nativity of Christ.
They are still trying to figure out how old the rest are, and this is one of the main mysteries - it turns out that the natives settled on the island much later than the first statues were installed.
Although not everyone agrees with this opinion. So, the famous Russian theosophist of the XIX century, Helena Blavatskaya, in all seriousness asserted that the Maois are at least … 4 million years old, and they were created by the "witchcraft race of giants" that once inhabited the Earth.
“Personally, I am a skeptic and do not believe in stories about Atlantis,” says Kevin Leibach, an employee of the University of San Francisco, who has lived on the island for ten years.
“But we calculated that in 2000 years, the extremely small population of a tiny island could not have been cut out of stone, dragged to the ocean and installed on platforms even half of all Maoi. But if they didn’t do it, then who did it?
As for who was the first to land on the island, all the scientists "fought" for a long time.
For example, Thor Heyerdahl worked on a version that a lost Viking sea expedition was nearby: therefore, they say, later one tribe had a white skin color.
Many agree with him: indeed, some statues have a typical European face structure: a straight narrow nose and thin lips. Some of the idols' heads in the past were crowned with red hats - as Heyerdahl believed, they meant the red hair of the Scandinavians.
The mountain from which the “caps” were hewn is called in the local dialect Puna-Pao. Interestingly, in Finnish (that is, one of the Viking languages) “puna piao” means “red head”.
Another researcher, the Englishman Elliot Smith, suggested that the first settlers of Easter Island were … the Phoenician sailors, sent to explore the seas by the ancient Egyptians, were also fair-skinned and red-haired.
Both nations worshiped the sun god, whom the Rapanui called Ra, and the Egyptians called Amon Ra, erected stone statues, used hieroglyphs in writing, and buried the dead in grandiose buildings.
On one of the maoi, whose age dates back to two and a half thousand years, there is an image of an antique sailing ship with an anchor, which the natives did not even have a trace.
… The next day Martin and I were going to look into the caves.
- Are you sure you want to go there? - Martin said in an intermittent whisper. - Sometimes strange things happen there. People disappear, and then they are found in Africa or Australia. Only they are no longer in their minds and cannot explain how they got there and what happened to them.
- Oh well! - I remarked skeptically. - What could be there that I have not seen?
Oh, how wrong I was …
GEOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE. Easter Island (owned by Chile since 1888, before that - an independent kingdom) is considered the most remote island in the world: to the coast of Chile - 3500 km, to the island of Tahiti - 2000 km. There are no rivers or fresh streams on the island, there are 70 craters of extinct volcanoes on it, the area about. Easter - 165.5 km, population - 2500 people. The capital of the island and the only city is Anga Roa.
***
… "I wonder if there is at least some kind of land down there?" Throwing a heavy coin into my palm, I threw it into the crevice and listened … More than a minute passed, but the sound of falling was not heard - only water was dripping evenly.
We went down into the volcanic cave only about thirty meters, but we didn't really want to go further.
“At the most, people were making their way to somewhere on the fifth level of the catacombs,” a local resident Martin Rodriguez explained to me, climbing in the pitch darkness among stone wells. - And here. those who penetrated even lower were not found at all”.
Residents use the letters of molten civilization
Caves about. Easter is so ramified that it resembles a city in size.
There are underground gardens, where banana trees still grow (they are not on the surface), giant ovens for cooking and carefully laid out stone labyrinths, "hotel" rooms, where in ancient times hundreds of people could simultaneously live.
In the 18th century on about. On Easter, there was a system under the ground similar to the modern subway: a person could enter in the east and exit in the west of the island.
An expedition of archaeologists of the Norwegian traveler Thor Heyerdahl, having descended about 100 meters underground, discovered mysterious stone figurines in the narrow crevices of the labyrinths.
They have been studied for more than 50 years, but it is still not clear to which civilization they belonged.
The French explorer Francis Mazieres descended into the mouth of the volcano and found a bubble formed by solidified lava - there was a figurine of a woman giving birth. The analysis showed that the "woman in labor" was made in the 5th century from the rarest kind of basalt, which is found … only in Africa.
“It’s a pity that underground research is prohibited on the island,” says Victor Mendes, spokesman for the Chilean Association of Archaeologists. - It is estimated that there are about three hundred secret caves.
But only when new expeditions of scientists are allowed into the dungeon, we will be able to answer the question: did there exist on about. Easter is a kind of underground civilization and how could it arise?
Perhaps this will also help to find out why people with white skin disappeared from Rapanui (the local name for Easter Island). The most daring versions say that from the island there can generally be an underground passage to the coast of Chile, as well as to Asia. But, of course, such assumptions are too fantastic.
… The main street of the island's "capital" and the only settlement - the town of Anga Roa - is filled with locals making wooden rongo rongo plaques as tourist souvenirs.
Rongo rongo is the history of the island carved in wood, which has been passed down for thousands of years from generation to generation in the form of a huge "library" of tablets.
Hieroglyphs about. Easter (left) and the city of Mohenjo-Daro (right).
“Most of these plates are irretrievably lost,” said Easter Island governor Pedro Edmunds in an interview with AIF. - For many years, scientists from all over the world, including Russia, have tried to decipher them.
Only one person had the key to the cipher - the king of the island. And each new king encrypted the hieroglyphs in his own way so that the text could be understood by him alone.
In 1996, two tablets were read in Moscow, but this is not enough. Still - in the XVIII century on about. There were over ten thousand rongo rongos on Easter Sunday, and only a few survived."
But this is just a pity. The hieroglyphs in the form of birds, fish and arrows on the tablets of Easter Island inexplicably sensationally coincide (see illustration) with those used in … the ancient Indian metropolis of Mohenjo-Daro (now located in Pakistan) (see article "Hidden Civilization").
This city was destroyed in an incomprehensible disaster in 2000 BC.
Excavating the melted streets, British archaeologists have established that the force of the unknown object that fell on the city was equal to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Perhaps that is why not a single skeleton was found - the inhabitants seemed to have evaporated.
However, how did the hieroglyphs of the ancient city get to the remote island 12,500 kilometers away? Indeed, 4000 years ago, according to modern concepts, there were no ships, planes and other means of transportation …
The deity flew in in an airboat with propellers and beer
“Our legends have a couple of versions of how hieroglyphs appeared,” explains the deputy director of the local museum, Alfredo Jimenez.
- According to one of them, the king of the island was given writing by the leader of an unknown people who appeared from a cave near the volcano. According to the other, the plaques were brought by the bird-man, who is believed to be the first settler to arrive on the island. Easter several thousand years ago.
The bird-man is generally considered the main deity of the island: the largest Rapanui festival until the 20th century was a competition where warriors competed for the right to become the embodiment of God.
According to the myth, the deity flew to the deserted island. Easter "in a big air boat", where were his wife, relatives and slaves, as well as chickens, supplies of sweet potatoes and … palm beer.
The bird-man's skin was "white as an iceberg," but the slaves were dark-skinned.
Macmillan Brown, a New Zealand scientist who studied the legend, noted that the "air boat" has all the attributes of an airplane or a helicopter: "rotating arms" (that is, propellers), "fiery eyes", and the bird-man himself resembles a test pilot of the late thirties in " glasses-canned food ".
Fragments of fortresses on the island. Easter (left) and Peru (right). The similarities are striking.
By the way, in the same 1996, it turned out that flights for the Rapanui islanders, perhaps, were something self-evident - one of the hieroglyphs deciphered in Moscow translates as "movement in the air without the help of legs."
Soviet academician Obruchev did not share Brown's point of view regarding the plane: in his opinion, the means of flight was a balloon - with the help of it, it was possible that they dragged stone statues: according to the legends of the natives, no one manually moved the idols - "they went to the sea by themselves." …
… On the coast of Easter Island, the remains of the once mighty fortresses and … pyramids are striking.
Scientists no longer have enough time for them, although it turns out interesting: a tiny race built from a thousand giant sculptures, huge fortresses and large-scale pyramids, and then suddenly dropped to the level of the Stone Age.
Another shock awaited me at the fortresses - the remains of some walls were absolutely similar to … Machu Picchu, the Peruvian outpost of the Empire of the Sun - the Inca civilization that collapsed under the sabers of the Spanish conquistadors in 1533.
Exactly the same system - the stones are laid on top of each other without any solution, but at the same time they adhere so firmly that you can't even stick a razor through the gap between the stone blocks (see photo).
“We've experimented many times,” says Governor Pedro Edmunds with a grin. - We showed people photos of the fortress on Easter Island and Machu Picchu in Peru - no one could tell the difference.
Everyone counts differently. Thor Heyerdahl - that the South American leader Kon-Tiki sailed to us thousands of kilometers and founded these buildings here. Experts from the University of San Francisco - that Rapanui was a temple island sacred to many civilizations.
… In the evening, a car stopped at the hotel and a breathless assistant to the governor burst into my room.
"Go. A member of the expedition Jacques-Yves Cousteau wants to meet with you. He will tell you what they managed to see deep in the sea near the island. Although, in his opinion, you better not know it."
Read the ending in the next issue of "AIF": how did the statue from Easter Island get to Spain in the 3rd century AD? What was forbidden to say to Jacques-Yves Cousteau after the expedition to Rapanui? Why did the old people on about. Did you communicate in Russian during Easter?
***
The final part of a special report by the AIF observer who visited one of the most mysterious places on our planet … How did the statue from Easter Island end up in Spain in the 3rd century AD? What was forbidden to say to Jacques-Yves Cousteau after the expedition to Rapanui? Why did the old people on about. Did you communicate in Russian during Easter?
HAVING RETURNED from the volcanic catacombs of Easter Island, where, as scientists suspect, could be a mysterious underground civilization, our correspondent came to meet a former member of the underwater expedition Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who discovered inexplicable things at the bottom of the sea …
- In 1978 we examined the bottom around Fr. Easter, - says Australian Howard Tyrloren, who arrived with Cousteau on the island 27 years ago (and so he stayed there).
- Anyone who went down in the bathyscaphe will confirm to you that the mountains under water, even at shallow depths, are rather strange: some of them had holes that somewhat resembled windows.
One fine day, Jacques-Yves accidentally stumbled upon one of the deep-sea depressions in the neighborhood unknown to him, and he plunged there for three days in a row. When he returned, his eyes just burned.
He said we should tackle this depression more carefully. Cousteau did not manage to see the details particularly well, but he said that at the bottom the outlines of the walls were guessed, as if a quarter of a huge city.
A day after that, people from the DINA political police, which was supervised by Pinochet, came to us. We were ordered to sign papers on non-disclosure of information, and also ordered to stop research: we curtailed work.
What could be special about this depression? I dont know. It is difficult for me to understand why the Chilean state security was so scared: we received no explanation.
It may have been one of the "wandering islands" often seen near Rapanui. After Pinochet's resignation, I tried to raise this issue, but to no avail.
Pieces of Atlantis Float Around
"Wandering Islands" is another mystery of Fr. Easter.
The island in the picture - perhaps a bit of 'disappearing lands'. & hellip;"
In 1802, a certain captain Guin reported that he had stumbled upon some island 50 miles south of Rapanui (the name of the island in the language of the natives), but after that no one saw the land indicated by him.
In 1879, Gianni Pinocchio, captain of the Italian ship Podesta, also noted a rocky islet nearby (and named it after the ship). The existence of the island was also confirmed by the hydrographic service of Italy.
However, the same story followed - the found land disappears, although it was put on the maps until 1935.
And in 1912, the captain of the British steamer Gluelon, arriving in Santiago, announced that a giant stone plateau with rocks in which windows had been cut out had surfaced from the sea near Easter Island. All the officers of the ship confirmed what they saw.
The Chilean warship "Bakedano", which was urgently sent in search, did not find any land.
It turns out a strange thing: captains, who can be completely trusted, regularly report on the discovery of new lands near Fr. Easter, and then these very lands disappear without a trace!
“Easter Island itself disappeared once,” says Victor Mendes, spokesman for the Chilean Association of Archaeologists.
- In 1922, a message from the leading telegraph agencies spread around the world - Rapanui was completely destroyed and disappeared under water as a result of a grand tsunami caused by an earthquake in Chile. Airplanes sent for reconnaissance made an aerial survey in the indicated area - there were no signs of life there. However, just three days later, another airplane discovered that Easter Island … was in place! Nobody can understand what happened. Residents assured that there was a tsunami, but Fr. Easter survived. This gave food for other reasoning. The famous New Zealand ethnographer Macmillan Brown suggested that Fr. Easter is in a mysterious magnetic zone, where lands appear and disappear … from other dimensions, and sometimes the island itself disappears. According to the ethnographer, this proves that Atlantis did not disappear, but simply moved to another dimension,and its "parts" sometimes for a short time "float" in the Pacific Ocean. … In 1975 on about. Easter, a group of professional archaeologists arrived at the direct order of the Spanish government. The reason is the discovery in the provincial museum of Catalonia of an ancient statuette - a copy of the idols existing on the island and dated … III century AD.
The figurine was found at the site of an excavation camp of Greek mercenaries who fought on the side of the Roman Empire. Local scientists were shocked: how could a statuette from a remote island in the ocean get to Europe, and even in ancient times?
“This would be possible only if the islanders had an airplane. But the fact of the matter is that they did not have it! " - wrote the newspaper "El Pais".
The Spaniards very carefully climbed the accessible levels of the caves and studied the statues near the sea coast in detail. It was confirmed that the Catalan figurine was made of the same material as the statues themselves. However, further research reached a dead end.
Since then, the figurine has been in the Barcelona Museum, it is regularly subjected to analyzes (including by representatives of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1980), but how it ended up in Europe has not been found out.
In 1985, in an interview with Spanish television, deputy. Museum director Manuel Claros suggested that the giant statues on Easter Island were teleportation devices, thanks to which the islanders could move around the world.
Like, as a result of the almost complete extinction of the local population (in 1870, there were only 111 natives on the island) on the island. Easter killed all the shamans who were able to control the teleporting energy, and therefore at the moment it is absolutely impossible.
Senor Claros's colleagues did not support him in this controversial issue.
The old islanders spoke Russian
However, the most interesting thing awaited me at the end of the journey.
Fallen statues by the ocean & hellip;
Seeing a book in Russian in my hands, one of the islanders asked which country I came from. Hearing that I was from Russia, I was invited home and shown … a yellowed piece of a page from the 19th century Bible, published … also in Russian!
Emilio (that was the name of a local resident) explained that his great-grandfather, as well as several of his classmates, had read this Bible and spoke well among themselves in Russian.
As it turned out, in 1871, when the ship of the Russian scientist Miklouho-Maclay entered the bay of Easter Island, one of the team members expressed a desire to stay ashore.
And although Emilio does not remember his name, this man, together with the French bishop Jossan, founded a high school on the island, where he taught children mathematics and foreign languages, including Russian.
According to great-grandfather Emilio, back in the 30s on the island about twenty people spoke the "overseas" language, but now it is completely forgotten. Emilio himself remembers only one phrase in Russian: "God bless you."
The Russian sailor spent his free time from teaching children in the catacombs, constantly trying to “find something” there. In 1904 this man died, but his grave on Rapanui has not survived.
… Airliners crowded with tourists land at the airfield of Easter Island with a roar. But large-scale scientific expeditions almost stopped: the grandiose studies of the times of Heyerdahl and Cousteau have sunk into the past.
The distant Easter Island no longer captures the minds of scientists from all over the world, but is a means of extracting dollars from the pockets of vacationers. The revelations of the former member of the legendary Cousteau team are of little interest to anyone, and this is a pity.
After all, now there are the latest scanners that can “scan” the earth to a depth of 500 meters.
Search robots are able to work at sea at great depths, withstanding pressure. And laboratories stuffed with electronics can decompose island idols into molecules in order to find out their origin.
Given the further development of technology, there is still hope that we can solve all the puzzles and mysteries of Easter Island. But this will obviously not happen tomorrow …
By the way
In 1973-1977, seven leading American oceanographers explored the oceanic trenches near Easter Island (Sala-i-Gomez Ridge), as a result of which 65 underwater peaks were found and confirmed that an unknown archipelago had existed in this area for several thousand years, submerged in water.
Further work was curtailed at the direction of the Chilean government. The Soviet researcher N. Zhirov believed that stopping the underwater research was a mistake - scientists could detect the continuation of the island's paved roads at the bottom of the ocean.
Georgy Zotov