Customer Reviews

Mystery in Acambaro: Did Dinosaurs Survive Until Recently?

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We owe David Hatcher Childress a huge vote of thanks for reprinting Hapgood's long out of print study of one of the most curious archaeological mysteries of the last century. Sometime in the late 1940s, Waldemar Julsrud, a German living in the small Mexican town of Acambaro, stumbled upon a strange clay figurine protruding from the earth. Within days, a barrow-load of similar clay sculptures was delivered to him by a man who was recovering dozens of them from the excavation of his basement nearby. Subsequent testing suggests they were made between 3,500-6,400 years before the present but correspond to no known ancient culture. This heresy is made worse by the strangeness of the figures, many showing humans co-existing with huge lizards and Godzilla-like dinosaurs. The establishment has shunned the case, but it deserves to be better studied. The story might never have become known if the case had not been investigated by Hapgood (author of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings) and crime-writer Earle Stanley Gardner. The original pamphlet is only about 20 pages; half the rest are old (rather poor) photos of the enigmatic sculptures and half is a long essay by Childress reviewing evidence of dinosaur survival into the era of modern man.

Mystery In Acambaro is a detailed and illustrated account of an unusual collection of ceramic figures discovered and assembled by the late Waldemar Julsrud in Acambaro, Mexico. If authentic, some of the figures would seem to indicate that dinosaurs survived in that part of the world into fairly recent times. This clay figures depict bizarre animals and scenes that don't fit neatly into traditional archaeology and paleontology theory, and therefore have been sumarily dismissed by mainstream scholarship as an elaborate hoax. But both Hapgood and Earle Stanley Gardner were convinced that the Acambaro figures were authentic artifacts, with very important implications for our understanding of dinosaurs and Central American human history. Highly recommended, challenging, controversial, very thought provoking reading.

As mentioned in the title, this book was not quite what was expected. The introduction by Childress was equivalent in length to Hapgood's portion, and contained little new information. It also contained some misinformation about the Zuiyo-maru carcass.

As for Hapgood's portion, a more complete analysis of the mystery figures was expected. The presentation was quite generic with few specific examples of the reasoning behind his belief thst dinosaurs survived until recently.

I'm a fan of Hapgood's work ("Path of the Poles" and "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings") and was happy to see "Mystery in Acambaro" available in this edition, enhanced with material from David Hatcher Childress. Hapgood's assessment of the large collection of artifacts, which show humans interacting with dinosaur-type reptiles, is that the artifacts are genuine. He had carbon dating done on some of the samples (at the time, in the 1960s, this was a new technique) and came up with dates as old as 4530 BC, but with a wide range beginning about 1100 BC. Dating of a few atrifacts by thermoluminescence yielded a date of 2500 BC. Hapgood's theory is that they represent the work of a civilization that existed over time. That so many were found in one place is explained by their being carefully sequestered, apparently to protect them from some disaster that struck the society that produced them.

Hapgood researched these artifacts by visiting and spending time with their discoverer, Waldemar Julsrud, who found them on a hillside near Acambaro Mexico. Hapgood took Perry Mason author Earle Stanley Gardner with him, and together they inspected and photographed the collection, which literally filled Mr. Julsrud's home. Hapgood was well aware of the controversy surrounding these figures, which some "experts" has branded as fakes. It was easy to find reasons to dismiss representations of animals supposedly extinct millions of years ago interacting with humans. Hapgood suggests, as one theory, that these animals had survived in parts of the Americas, and had lived with humans. It is actually one of the more plausible theories, since many of the representations are accurate of known species that once existed. Unless they had great Paleontologists and equally great imaginations, it's hard to see how these ancient peoples came up with these figurines. Could these artifacts be proof of a very early civilization that we simply know nothing about? Could prehistoric reptilian animals have continued to exist long after they were supposed to be extinct?

The material from David Hatcher Childress is mostly a rehash of modern searches for unknown animals, with some interesting stories of sightings of creatures that don't match any known species. Particulary interesting is the search for the Thunderbird, a huge bird known to native Americans, and scattered modern sightings of huge flying creatures. There are credible reports of sightings that seemed to be pteradactyls, a flying reptile that is not supposed to still exist. These stories are readily available in other books and on the internet, and fascinating as these tales are, a better use of the space in this book would have been an update on what's happened to the Acambaro collection. I did a search on the internet and found high-quality color pictures of some of the artifacts at http://www.bible.ca/tracks/tracks-acambaro-dinos.htm. The color picures are wonderful, compared to the poorly reproduced black and white images in the book. It apears these figurines are in a museum in Acambaro today, preserved for visitors to see, but still controversial.

The creationists have latched on to these figures as proof that evolution is wrong. However, it seems to me to be no such thing. After all, there is the coelacanth, the prehistoric fish that was supposedly extinct milions of years ago but which has been found to be swimming around today, looking exactly like the fossile version from millions of years ago. So, why didn't it evolve? And yet, we know that other animals DID evolve. That is another question that does not tell us anything about the Acambaro collection.

I was glad to read that Hapgood learned of something similar in Peru - the Ica stones, a collection of stones with images of dinosaurs and humans found near Ica Peru. These are also controversial, but, like the Acambaro figures, have been shown to be old and the best evidence says they are not fakes. It seems worth serious consideration that these representations may show that humans and dinosaurs actually did exist together. I applaud Adventures Unlimited Press for making this material available again, but wish they would have provided updates on the artifacts and better quality pictures.

This is an outstanding scholarly book that bravely faces the facts. Evolution is the proverbial theory trashed by the facts. While evolutionists talk about missing links, in the absence of any fossil evidence (except maybe the Piltdown hoax), or talk about millions of years (even though there is no way of establishing such tremendous dates of existing dinosaur fossils), they refuse to examine the evidence that shows dinosaurs and humans co-existed.

Key to evolutionists assault on the truth is the claim dinosaurs pre-existed human civilization by millions of years. Yet, artwork in cultures all over the world, from Nasca, Peru, to Acambaro, Mexico, to depictions on Babylonian temples of Brontasaurus to depictions on Cambodian temples, to even European encounters, such artwork is tangible evidence that destroys the claim dinosaurs pre-existed humans.

In light of the fossil evidence from Alaska and the Belgium Congo, with T-Rex bones containing fresh blood cells, the notion such creatures existed 67 million (they change the date everytime they talk about dates, so "67 million" is probably unreliable) years ago is preposterous.

This book is a wonderful check on the blind faith of these left-wing extremist evolutionists. Science, not fanaticism, is allowed to take the stage in this wonderful book.

I think that to say that these images depict Dinosaurs is wrong.

There is alot of of writing out about "Reptilians" though. perhaps they did/do actually exist.

These images WERE carbon dated, so they are ancient, but I dont think that they depict DINOSAURS.

These arent the only figures of Reptilians found on the planet from ~4500BC. Im sure some here have seen the Ubaid Reptile figure from Iraq?

Not what I expected. I was able to finish it in 2 hours. I really thought that more evidence would be presented to build a strong case for modern day dinosaurs.

"Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings" is great but it's dragged down into the silt by other not-so-great books like these by Hapgood. Not much to say here other than there's a big pile of pottery (not terribly well-done pottery either) showing poorly delineated things that resemble dinosaurs of the 1950's era kid's plastic toy variety.

What bugs me about all the fringe and New Age baloney is this: why not combine interests? Couldn't these images of dinosaurs have been channeled to some ancient potter or maybe he or she saw them while remote viewing the past? Maybe aliens abducted and transported the maker to a planet where dinosaur-like things still rule? Perhaps dinosaurs were more intelligent than we imagine and they made these things themselves, millions of years before man appeared?

I'm not being ironic here. In this realm, once we've demonstrated to our satisfaction that time and space are illusions, that the universe is stuffed full with unworldly beings--magical and advanced-technical--that the past had insanely advanced civilizations that dabbled in the mystic arts, and so on, then why in hell's name hold to ANY sort of scientific method; why drag a kicking and screaming Lady Logic and Lord Reason into Fairyland? With this in mind there are 1000 different ways these objects could have materialized without having had dinosaurs live into historic times. I hate it when people don't work out the implications of their own sloppy theorizing.

The authors rely quite a bit on pictures drawn by an ancient culture, and not enough on physical evidence. If a future civilization were to discover a picture of the Flintstones, with both human and dinosaur characters, a similar book might be written claiming that dinosaurs lived in our time.