Many experts tried to translate the hieroglyphs in the 20 years the disc languished in Peking. They all failed. It was not until another professor - Dr. Tsum Um Nui - broke the code and started to decipher the 'speaking grooves' that the extraordinary implications of the disc were realized. Realized, that is, only by only a select few. The outside world remained in ignorance. For the professor's conclusions on the meaning of the disc were so shattering that they were offically suppressed. The Peking Academy of Pre-History forbade him to publish his findings. Two years later, in 1965, the professor and four of his colleagues were finally given permission to reveal their theory. It appeared under the long- winded but intriguing title, "The Grooved Script concerning Space-ships which, as recorded on the Discs, landed on Earth 12,000 years ago". The 'records' - 716 of the grooved discs were later uncovered in the same caves - told an astonishing story of a 'space probe' by the inhabitants of another planet which came to grief in the Bayan-Kara-Ula mountain range. The strange, spiral script told how the peaceful intentions of the 'aliens' had been misunderstood and how many of them were hunted down and killed by members of the Ham tribe, who lived in the neighboring caves.

According to Tsum Um Nui, one of the lines of the hieroglyphs read, "The Dropas came down from the clouds in their aircraft. Our men, women and children hid in the caves ten times before sunrise. When at last they understood the sign language of the Dropas, they realized that the newcomers had peaceful intentions...". Another section expressed 'regret' by the Ham tribe that the aliens' spaceship had crash-landed in such a remote and inaccessible mountains and that there had been no way to building a new one to enable Dropas to return to their own planet. In the years since the discovery of the first disc, archeologists and anthropologists had learned more about the isolated Bayan-Kara-Ula area. And much of the information seemed to corroborate the bizarre story recorded on the discs. Legend still preserved in the area spoke of small, gaunt, yellow faced men who 'came from the clouds, long, long ago'. The men had huge, bulging heads and puny bodies and were so ugly and repellent that they were hounded down by local tribesmen on horseback. Strangely, the description of the 'invaders' tallied with the skeletons orginally discovered in the caves by Professor Chi Pu Tei. On the walls of the caves themselves archeologists had uncovered crude pictures of the rising Sun, the Moon, unidentifiable stars and the Earth... all joined together by lines of pea-sized dots. Along with the discs, the cave drawings had been dated around 12,000 years old.

The cave area was still inhabited by two semi-troglodyte tribes known as the Hams and the Dropas, themselves extremely odd in appearance. The frail and stunted tribesmen averaged only about five feet in height and were neither typically Chinese nor Tibetan. "Their racial back-ground," said one expert, "is a mystery." But even with the publications of Professor Tsum Um Nui's amazing trans- lation, the story of the 'space discs' was not over. Russian scientists asked to see the discs and several were sent to Moscow for examination. They were scraped free of rock particles which had stuck to them and then put through chemical analysis. To the suprise of the scientists, they we found to contain large amounts of cobalt and other metallic substances. That was not all. When placed on a special turntable - according to Dr. Vyatcheslav Saizev, who described the experiments in the Soviet magazine Sputnik - they vibrated or 'hummed' in an unusual rhythm as though an electic charge was passing through them. Or as one scientist suggested, "as if they formed some part of an electrical circuit." At some time, they had clearly been exposed to extraordinarily high votages.

Did the discs actually record an abortive space mission by alien astro- nauts 12,000 years ago? Nearly all the leading 'space speculators' - theorists like Erich von Daniken and Peter Kolosimo - believe so. For once one accepts the proposition that aliens may have already have visited earth, then it follows that some of their space-probes must have failed and the astronauts must have been destroyed.