Cuevas de los Tayos
Cuevas de los Tayos is a series of tunnels and large rooms situated in the Andes’ eastern foothills in Ecuador. One of the caves, simply referred to as the Tayos Cave, has been at the center of numerous controversial theories regarding ancient civilization relics, unusual sculptures, and especially a metallic library. The Indigenous Shuar tribe have had access to the caves and the area since around 4000 BCE (Before Common Era). They are recognized as fierce warriors and known for their practice of shrinking the heads of their deceased enemies—a practice now outlawed. Today, the culture struggles to build strength and community. They have functioned as guides to the caves beginning in the 1960s and 1970s and use some locations in their shamanic rituals. Their first contact with Europeans was in the 16th century when the Spanish pursued their lust for gold in the area. Since then, several names appear paramount in the cave’s discovery and exploration.
Petronio Jaramillo Abarca
Petronio Jaramillo Abarca grew up in Ecuador and in 1956 wrote about his experiences as shown to him by a local childhood friend. Many feel that his accounts were, if not made up, embellished to some degree. However, over the years, until his sudden death in 1998 at the hands of his son, he was interviewed repeatedly regarding the cave and what he saw there. His written account notes that in 1941 he was guided to the cave by a Shuar boyhood friend, who for a time lived with Jaramillo’s family. He was sworn to secrecy by the tribe and insisted that the time and place for the location would be revealed when it benefitted humanity as a whole. After a tedious trek into the jungle the three men entered several multi-level caverns. They explored several chambers containing, among other things, furniture, rock balls arranged for some game, and numerous carved stone animals: elephants, mastodons, reptiles, snakes, coyotes, jaguars, horses, and birds, all approximately three feet tall. In the center of the room, he describes a crystal coffin with a gold encased human skeleton. Another room housed numerous combination human/animal sculptures and an iron cauldron. Each room had multi-colored rock walls with white crystal center stones. More than anything else, what stood out the most was the library with floor to ceiling yellow metal shelves filled with engraved metal books. The writing on the thin pages was coded with a type of shorthand. It is this metal library that continues to be of paramount interest to modern day searchers.
Father Carlo Crespi
One name, Father Carlo Crespi is intertwined repeatedly throughout the story of the caves and its treasures. Born in Italy in 1891, he moved to Ecuador in 1923 as a Catholic missionary. He was considered a kind and spiritual man by the locals and was well educated in the studies of theology, philosophy, music, mathematics, and natural sciences. He had degrees in botany, natural sciences, and music. Yet there are many mysteries and stories surrounding his personal collection of both European, Egyptian, and Ecuadorian art and artifacts. There are rumors that Father Crespi had German connections and that some Nazi confiscated art was among his possessions. I’ll leave it to you to peruse all that is online regarding endless speculation. The bottom line is that what is left of his collection, still exists, and is held by the Central Bank of Ecuador, who’s curators agree that some artifacts are fake, others are original and authentic.
Juan Moricz
Juan Moricz, a Hungarian, born as Janos Moricz in 1923 also had German influences. He served in the Hungarian army and spent some time in Russian concentration camps, where it has been said that he encountered Nazi theorists who had plans to excavate subterranean worlds in South America. This information more than likely got him started in his quest for Cueva de los Tayos and his association with the Indigenous people, including the Schuar tribe. He studied the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day-Saints (the Mormons) which talked about a pre-historic, white-skinned race. Moricz began exploring the caves in the mid-1960s and insisted that he entered the Tayos Cave in Ecuador and exited in Peru. His theories dated back 250,000 years and some of what he believed included extra-terrestrials, from which he said he received messages. In an attempt to legitimatize his expeditions, and raise funds, he filed testimony with the Ecuadorian government documenting his discoveries, including, “Metal panels engraved with symbols and ideographic scripts. This is a genuine metal library which contains a summary of the history of humankind; the origin of man on Earth, as well as scientific knowledge about a lost civilization.” In 1967 Moricz published an essay, “The American Origin of European Civilization” which was translated and edited in English for Alex Chionetti’s 2019 book, “Mysteries of the Tayos Caves” which I recommend for a complete reporting. In 1968 Juan Moricz was contacted through his friend and fellow explorer Julio Goyen Aguado, by two prominent Mormons, and they financed an expedition that didn’t amount to much and it’s been suggested that he intentionally misled the expedition away from the main cave.
Erich von Däniken
Erich von Däniken, a Swiss author known for his theories about extraterrestrial influences on ancient human civilization, played a pivotal role in popularizing the mystique surrounding Cueva de los Tayos. In “The Gold of the Gods,” von Däniken wrote about a personal journey through parts of the cave system guided by an Argentine-Hungarian explorer named Juan Moricz. According to von Däniken, Moricz showed him the metallic library and other mysterious artifacts, which he posited as evidence of ancient alien visitations. Von Däniken’s book became a best-seller, and the claims within it gained significant public attention. His broader theories, part of the ancient astronaut hypothesis, suggested that much of human civilization’s achievements and myths could be attributed to extraterrestrial interactions. The alleged findings in Cueva de los Tayos fit neatly into this framework.
Stanley Hall
Stanley Hall, a Scottish engineer, became mesmerized by the theories of von Däniken and successfully obtained permission to explore the Tayos cave. He met Moricz in Ecuador in 1976, the two men hit it off and the expedition became one of the most extensive efforts to uncover the cave’s mysteries. Hall also managed to enlist astronaut Neil Armstrong’s participation in the search. It’s unclear if Armstrong realized that Hall had been convinced by Moricz that they were not only looking for a metal library, but also for ancient pre-historic civilizations and even UFOs. Regardless, Armstrong went along; as did over one hundred scientists, engineers, and military personnel. In spite of the grueling search, nothing other-worldly was discovered, but the trip was a success in that it discovered plants, animals, insects, and archaeological discoveries dating as far back as 3500 BCE.
Stanley Hall died in 2008 and since then several people, including Stanley Hall’s daughter Eileen and the before mentioned author/explorer Alex Chionetti have descended into the Tayos cave. In a 2018 episode of Discovery Channel’s Expedition Unknown, Josh Gates captured some excellent film footage of the explored areas of the cave, but the team saw nothing out of the ordinary and stopped where Stanley Hall’s map ends. Today Eileen’s focus remains on her father’s work and preservation of Ecuador’s land, culture, and history.
So, what does this all have to do with lost continents and pre-historic civilizations? Well, the Tayos Caves are one more underground location that was occupied by people that escaped similar catastrophic earth changes around the globe. According to the Greek philosopher Plato in his 360 BCE dialogues, Atlantis was an island continent, stretching from Portugal to the Bahamas that controlled most of the world. Plato describes the global war that happened when Atlantis made a final attempt to take world mastery to a new level. Some speculate that an atomic bomb or some equally destructive weapon broke a hole in the atmosphere causing floods, climate changes, earthquakes and devastation that sent humankind scrambling for safety, above and below ground.
Think about it. Here we are surrounded by technology and many of the creature comforts of life—food, clothing, tools, natural resources, schools, and universities. Meanwhile the rich and powerful take the gravy off the top, leaving the rest of us dependent on whatever government we have around—most of which doesn’t work well. Before our eyes, those powers are systematically forming military, political and financial allegiances to, in some way, elevate their influence and reap the benefits of world-domination. How long do you think the wars will last this time, until we’re once again thrown into survival mode? Will continents sink? Oceans rise? After such a catastrophe, could you build even the simplest machine from scratch, even if the materials were available? Would you follow your friends and family and start walking somewhere else, climb aboard a raft (remember Kon-Tiki?) build large canoes and attempt to find land? —not knowing if the previously charted places remain above water? Would you follow others into caves and start work on an underground city? (Think about Turkey’s hundreds of underground cities.)
What about the mainstream version of the Ice Age and European cave dwellers? Okay, so here’s a concept: There’s been a global nuclear war. Next comes a sudden ice age and we are thrown into instant winter. In Europe, we take shelter in caves, the snow is relentless, We can’t grow food, our livestock die because of lack of pasture, strange foreigners scour the land, some of them cannibalistic. Game animals perish under the snow and we rely on our dogs to locate the icy bodies, which we thaw and eat. We must start again at the most primitive levels, all over the globe. We had so much once, how did we lose it, how will we survive? Then when we do build again, what has happened to our psyches? Do we become savage, angry, opportunistic, forgetful of the past? Are we repeating pre-history? All these questions are valid today. But we can do it differently. It is not too late, YET.
