War of the Gods

by Erich von Daniken

Extraterrestrial mummy or fake?

  The picture that my acquaintance from Luxembourg sent did not matter. It showed a 32-centimeter figure with three fingers covered or sprayed with a white powder.

  Hidden beneath it might as well be an artificial toy doll, or perhaps also a glued-together skeleton. But who was this Thierry Jamin, the man who had contacted my acquaintance in Luxembourg?

  Thierry Jamin, born December 19, 1967, in Chartres, France, had searched for and found the pyramid of Pantiacolla in the Peruvian jungle in 2001. The pyramid turned out to be a natural hill, but Thierry Jamin found some ceramic pieces from the Inca era. He is the discoverer of several petroglyphs of unknown cultures. In 2009, he launched expeditions to various archaeological sites in Peru with the help of the French television station TF1, the city of Toulouse, and private donors. Thierry Jamin published several articles and the book A la recherche de Paititi. Paititi is considered the place in Inca mythology from which the last Inca ruler had been taken to heaven. In addition, Paititi is often associated with the fabled golden city of El Dorado, which is a mistake because El Dorado clearly has its origin in Colombia and not in Peru.

  Thierry Jamin is considered an adventurous, but absolutely honest, researcher who currently lives in Cusco, Peru. In 2009, he founded the Instituto Inkari (Instituto Inca de Investigacion y Valoracion de Indigena). He is the current president of this organization, which serves as the place of information and connection regarding enigmatic archaeological objects. This is also the reason why grave robbers often show up there with their finds. They hope to find names of possible buyers for their illegally obtained objects.

  With little information about the “alien mummies,” I was not ready to transfer US $100,000 anywhere. And the image of the “doll in white” did not help. Alien mummies with three fingers and three toes? Somewhat strange, but not impossible. I searched for more information, but did not come across anything really tangible. Then, at the mammoth conference Contact in the Desert, held in Palm Springs, California, in 2018, I listened to a talk by Steve Mera and Barry Fitzgerald. I knew Steve Mera as a serious researcher and fellow writer. Steve and Barry had heard of the alien mummies, like I had, and followed their tracks. In their lecture entitled “The Mysterious Bodies of Peru,” they described their search for these mummies. Steve and Barry had traveled to Cusco and met Thierry Jamin there. Again Thierry confirmed that the mummies had been discovered in Nazca. And that revived my doubts about the incredible story.

  Why does anyone find mummies in Nazca and transport them to Cuzco? Nazca, with the world-famous plain and grandiose lines and removed mountain peaks, lies in the lowlands. Cuzco with its famous Inca fortress, however, lies 3,500 meters high in the Andes. I have already travelled the route once by car, which was a tedious ride through gorges and over mountainsides—a total of 650 kilometers or a thirteen-hour drive. So why were the mummies found in Nazca transferred to Cuzco?

  In Cuzco, Steve and Barry were asked to get in a car and not to memorize the make or license number of the vehicle, let alone take a picture. The journey ended in a lousy storage shed, somewhere on the outskirts of Cusco. There they also met “Mario,” one of the grave robbers. He reaffirmed that the mummies were only found near one of the Nazca lines because “magnetic irregularities” had been measured in that area. That's true. Years ago, a team of scientists from the Dresden University of Applied Sciences had carried out various analyses in Nazca on behalf of the Erich von Däniken Foundation, and the team detected definite changes in the magnetic field. In the storage shed, Steve and Barry finally saw the white-powdered skeletons of small creatures with long-drawn skulls. Some actually had three fingers and three toes.

  But all in all, neither Barry nor Steve were convinced, and the secrecy surrounding the matter made them suspect they would be betrayed. Even more so now, since the real discoverers of the finds did not show themselves and it was unclear where the mummies were right now and who the negotiators would be. In addition, Cuzco's indigenous market offered not only deformed skulls but also small mummified embryos of indeterminate origin. In their presentation, Steve Mera and Barry Fitzgerald warned future researchers not to fall for a phenomenally staged fraud. Meanwhile, they have at least partially revised their opinion. And what about me? Should I continue to care about it, or forget the alleged mummies of aliens?

  Life went on. In the back of my mind I had not filed away the story completely. A few months earlier, my colleague Ramon Zürcher and I had led a group to Peru. The goal wasn't to see the “Inca mummies,” but to research other unresolved mysteries in the Andes. The evening before we left for Europe, we were invited to dinner by the commanders of the Peruvian Air Force, Air Force General Luis Spicer Wittembury and Commander Julio Chamorro Flores, whom I knew from previous visits. During dinner, the senior officers reported quite objectively on their experiences with UFOs at a young age. This would never happen in Europe! There I couldn't imagine a German or Swiss air force officer describing, without trepidation, his or her own UFO experiences from earlier years as an active pilot.

  At some point, one of the officers asked, “Herr von Däniken, have you ever researched the culture of Chincha?”

  “Chincha?” I inquired helplessly. “Who are they?”

  “The Chincha are an extinct tribe. They lived about 200 kilometers south of here. Pretty close to Paracas. The Chincha were the people with the three fingers.”

  Baffled, Ramon and I looked at each other. Our brain cells worked in parallel. The high military we were talking to knew nothing about my search for mummies with three fingers, and now there should be an extinct human tribe with three fingers?

  “In what area did these Chincha live?” I inquired, “what do you know about them?” The “Commandante” of the Air Force knew that the tribal area of the Chincha had been the land around Paracas. Today's city Chincha Alta is the sixteenth largest city of Peru and is located only 210 kilometers south of Lima. Did I want to go there?

  Ramon and I were scheduled to return to Switzerland the next day. Our flights were booked, but spontaneously we rescheduled. The hunting fever had caught us, and we followed the trail of the three-fingered people. Mr. Julio Chamorro Flores, the commander of the Air Force, made a few phone calls and said that Mr. Giorgio Piacenz, a good friend of his, would accompany us to Chincha Alta in the morning.

  After a three-hour drive, Giorgio Piacenz stopped in front of a posh hotel in Chincha Alta. Drinks and appetizers were served in a cooled room, and finally some of the ladies and gentlemen of the provincial government, all elegantly dressed, entered the small hall and greeted us with handshakes and nice words. What was the point of this? Then the lady running the tourist office read a document, which was then solemnly handed over to me. It was titled Resolucion Subperfectural N ° 002-2018-Mininter-Pre-ICA-Sub-Chi-B and dated February 14, 2018. A tribute to me. The province was pleased with my visit and my interest in the culture of the Chincha.

  The local archaeologist led us to the outskirts of the city to the ruins of the Chincha Baja. I learned that the culture of Chincha emerged around 800 BC. At first, it settled in what today is Paracas, and then later spread to the coast and down to Nazca. In fact, the Chincha only had three fingers and three toes. This would also be verified through textiles and petroglyphs (rock drawings). Amazingly, so the archaeologist said, was the fact that the Inca rulers had never subjugated the culture of the Chincha. All other peoples who lived in the territory of the later Inca were forced into serfdom, often in a very bloody way, but not the Chincha. The highest adviser of the highest Inca ruler, I learned, had always been a Chincha. In fact, the Inca palaces were located right next to the Huaca La Centinela, the royal seat of the Chincha.

  Official welcome document of the city of Chincha, Peru

  All ways lead to Rome, a 2,000-year old Roman proverb tells us. All the evidence leads to Nazca I could say today; or at least the evidence in search of the extraterrestrial mummies. The Chincha lived in the area of today's Par
acas or Nazca. There are also the famous Nazca lines, which are still not explained correctly in so-called scientific TV documentaries.1 In Nazca, a tomb with small-sized, possibly extraterrestrial beings is said to have been discovered only because grave robbers used modern equipment to follow magnetic changes. Right; such deviations of the magnetic field had already been published before the grave robbers in two scientific papers: The Nasca and Palpa geoglyphs: geophysical and geochemical Data2 and Geoscientific View at the Nazca Lines.3 The grave robbers did not just search indiscriminately. Presumably, they were familiar with the Spanish version of the treatises on the irregularities in the magnetic field at the Nazca plain. Magnetic changes on the Earth's surface can be easily located with modern magnetometers. In the same geographical area around Paracas lived the Chincha, and they must have been extraordinary people, not only because they had three fingers and three toes, but also because of their intellectual abilities. They were the chief advisors of the Inca rulers.

  In addition, countless tombs with deformed skulls have been discovered in the same geographical area. Some of them do not fit into the human line of evolution (see Chapter 1, “Alien Skulls”). There are also ceramics and petroglyphs of people with three fingers. And there is something else: in the Bay of Paracas on a hillside, we find—a 250-meter-high trident called Candelabro, about which I have already speculated.4 The structure is reminiscent of a gigantic candelabra with three arms. The individual columns of this trident are up to 3.80 meters wide. Nobody knows what the structure means, who created it and when it was created.

  Chincha textiles and paintings with three fingered beings

  The logical explanation would be that it is a marker for ships. But even this cannot be true. In front of the coast lies a small island, inhabited by roaring sea lions and other creatures. This island obstructs the view from the Pacific Ocean, and even from north to south the bay of Paracas is only visible for a few kilometers. In addition, the island out at sea would itself be the best marker for the sailors. It can be seen from afar, while the Candelabro appears only after passing the island. In the past, the trident was said to be pointing to the plain of Nazca, a hundred kilometers away. Not correct. The arms of Candelabro do not point to Nazca.

  After my new findings about the Chincha, I asked myself whether the Candelabro could have anything to do with the three alien fingers facing the sky looking like the trident of the god Poseidon?

  At home, a thick envelope awaited me, which was sent to me by Hans-Peter Jaun, a good friend and librarian. In it, I found a special edition of the journal Ikaris published in France.5 I was baffled. In a detailed fifty-page report, the entire affair of “the extraterrestrial mummies in Peru” was detailed, with many pictures and interviews of the persons involved up until the end of 2017. Thierry Jamin wrote that “Pandora's box was opened in 2016.” So I learned through the magazine Ikaris how the fantastic story had started. In October 2016, according to Thierry Jamin, an unknown person had come to speak with someone at the Instituto Inkari in Cusco. That was not uncommon, because again and again, amateurs would appear and ask for advice about objects.

  The “Candelabro” geoglyph of Paracas

  The stranger, later identified as “Paul R.,” showed him (Thierry Jamin) some dried-up organs, but also a hand with three long fingers, a deformed skull, and finally even a whole small body of almost 40 centimeters in length with three fingers on its hands and three toes on its feet. Thierry was shocked and very skeptical. Paul R. had confided to him that the enigmatic find had been made by tomb robbers (in Spanish: huaqueros) in Nazca, not far from one of the mysterious lines. Paul R. assured him that he knew the leader of the grave robbers personally, but that he wasn't at liberty to reveal his name. It was only later that Thierry Jamin learned that this Paul R. was a member of a cult in which aliens play the leading role. (To my knowledge, there are only two such communities worldwide: the Rael Movement or Rael Philosophy, headquartered in Canada, and the Church of the Scientology. More can be found on Wikipedia.) This realization did not make the already confusing issue more credible to Thierry Jamin, and he wondered if these unknown grave robbers had actually managed to make the most sensational find in millennia, or if it was a wacky scam. So he kept in contact with his informant Paul R. to learn as much as possible about the place of discovery.

  Thierry Jamin finally drove to Nazca and, thanks to the mediation of Paul R., met the as-always-nameless boss of the robbers. He said that the first find had been made in the fall of 2015. They discovered an anomaly in the ground that stood in front of the entrance to a grotto. After overcoming some obstacles, they found a staircase that led to a smaller hall. Two human mummies sat on the ground. (Incas were customarily mummified in sitting position.) From the hall, several paths led to other rooms and closed doors. Two large, sealed sarcophagi stood in a niche. In one of the sarcophagi were around a thousand small, stones carrying engravings, including UFO-like representations. The second sarcophagus contained 20 small, humanoid bodies, all coated with a white powder. For the first time in their life, the astonished grave robbers were speechless. Then they decided to close up the tomb again, for the time being, keep silent about it, and try to figure out whom they should talk to about this.

  In 2016 and 2017, the grave robbers were said to have discovered new spaces and objects in the mysterious tombs. Among these were objects that looked completely alien and made no sense to them, including metal spheres and thin glittering foils that always returned to their original shape when scratched, crumpled, or crushed. One of the grave robbers even confessed that he had been able to sell some of these foils to a Japanese man for good money. Throughout the dig, the robbers always had the feeling of being watched by invisible eyes. Two of the grave robbers died shortly afterward of mysterious diseases.

  They said they wrapped some of the mummies in cloths and took them to an apartment in Palpa (near Nazca). Finally, the leader of the grave robbers had instructed “Mario” to travel to Cusco and contact the Instituto Inkari. They couldn't do anything with their finds and needed help.

  Slowly Thierry Jamin understood the enormity of the find and got Mario to trust him. Thierry understood that the mummies needed professional protection. They could not be allowed to disintegrate in their new environment and be destroyed by bacteria. In addition, international laboratories had to examine the bodies and get answers to some questions. Which species did they belong to? Did the mummies contain bones stolen from various places? What was the white powder? What would age dating, DNS analysis, and forensic diagnoses determine? Thierry Jamin also knew that the Peruvian state had to be informed about the findings. So, in a detailed letter, he informed the Minister of Culture of Peru, Dr. Nieto Montesinos. He received no answer. Disappointed, he tried the president of the Peruvian Republic with the same result. The high officials did not believe a word of the fantastic story. Only now, after the state authorities had shown no interest did Thierry Jamin contact the Alien Project. Funds had to be secured to pay for an international team of scientists. The mummies should be preserved and examined according to all normal protocols.

  Only now, because he needed financial support, did Thierry Jamin notify some organizations, such as the National Geographic Society, the well-known Mexican journalist Jaime Maussan, the United States TV station Gaia, and, through my acquaintance in Luxembourg, me. Thierry Jamin did not want to become a useful pawn in a scam. He wanted to search for the true origin of these mummies, and if he was able to expose crooks who wanted to fool us all, he would gladly do that, too.

  Thanks to the help of broadcasting company Gaia, an unbelievable story was about to be told. Gaia probably paid tens of thousands of dollars or more for the story. I know the owner of Gaia, Mr. Jirka Rysavy, quite well, but I never asked him about his expenses. Gaia is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, USA, and is not a public television service. Gaia is Internet TV and therefore accessible to everyone. In 2017, I hosted a multi-part series for Gaia on alien visits millennia a
go. For weeks, my secretary Ramon Zürcher and I went in and out of the Gaia studio in Boulder. We know the “ambience” and some of the people in the executive suite. Gaia seeks truths, even if they are uncomfortable. Now Gaia was working for or against these Peruvian mummies. Was everything a huge scam or a scary fact?

  Gaia found a number of scientists from a variety of specialties and countries who volunteered to examine samples of the mummies and do it completely unbiased, following certain criteria. The silent TV observer and host was Mexican TV journalist Jaime Maussan, winner of the prize “El Sol de México” for investigative journalism. I know Jaime personally. He asserted several times, “I want to find out the truth about these damned mummies. And if a fraudulent gang is behind it, we'll expose it.” By mid-2018, Gaia had broadcast nine episodes, always including the latest research results.

  1. “The Discoveries”

  2. “The Excavations”

  3. “The Update”

  4. “The Evaluations Begin”

  5. “The Investigations”

  6. “The Little Bodies”

  7. “Press Conference with Jaime Maussan”

  8. “The Investigations Continue”

  9. “The Facts”

  All Gaia broadcasts were made with the assistance of Ms. Melissa Till, director of original content, and reviewed by Jay Weidner, senior director of content. Each sentence had to agree with the images shot by the camera. There were no anonymous statements. The pictures I show are based on the thorough research and generosity of Gaia.

  To distinguish the different mummies, they were given human names. There is a “Maria,” a “Victoria,” a “Josefina” and an “Alberto.” The first question for science was in regards to the white powder that covered all the mummies. The stuff turned out to be kieselguhr. What is that? Kieselguhr is a mixture of minerals from dead, microscopically small plants. It contains silicon, magnesium, and calcium and was produced by the pulverized fossil shells of extinct diatoms (rock algae).