The Dropa Stones
The account
Hundreds of stone discs with spiral writing supposedly tell of a spacecraft crash in the mountains of China.
What investigators found
There is no record of the discs, the archaeologists named or the translations; the case is considered a hoax.
The story
The story goes that in 1938 a Chinese expedition found hundreds of stone discs, each with a hole in the center and spiral grooves, in caves in the Bayan Har Mountains near Tibet. Years later, a professor supposedly deciphered the writing, revealing that a people called the Dropa had crashed there in their spacecraft thousands of years ago and were unable to return.
The tale appeared in Western magazines and books in the 1960s and was embellished over time. Researchers have never found the discs in any museum, nor any academic record of the scientists named, whose names appear to be invented. There is also no published work containing the alleged translation. For these reasons, the vast majority of scholars consider the Dropa stones a probable hoax, even though the legend remains popular.