The Palenque "astronaut"
The account
The lid of King Pakal's sarcophagus supposedly shows an astronaut piloting a spacecraft, hands on the controls.
What investigators found
To experts in Maya writing, the scene shows the king between death and rebirth, falling into the underworld beside the World Tree, surrounded by maize symbols.
The story
In 1952, archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier discovered, deep inside the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque, the tomb of K'inich Janaab' Pakal, a Maya king who ruled from 615 until his death in 683. The sarcophagus was covered by a stone lid weighing about 7 tons, carved over its entire surface.
In 1968, Erich von Däniken popularized the reading that the scene shows an astronaut in a spacecraft, with flames shooting out the back. Scholars of Maya iconography read something else: Pakal appears at the moment of death, between the jaws of the underworld and the World Tree, an image of rebirth common in Maya art. The lid is a masterpiece. The "astronaut" only works if you look at the stone sideways.