Tired of reading the same old thing?

Tired of writing the same old thing?

Looking for new ideas?

Just look at the world around you.

See what it dumps in your lap.

You can’t make this stuff up.

It was in 1938, they say, when a band of archaeologists, exploring the caves that cobwebbed their way through the Baian Kara Ula Mountains in the Himalayas, discovered a strange array of mysterious graves.

Being good, honest archaeologists, they dug them up.

Being good, honest archaeologists, they figured, gave them the right to rob a grave or two.

Good, honest archaeologists had been doing it for years,

What they discovered were remains, remarkably preserved, that were definitely humanoid.

But were they human?

The creatures, regardless of their origin, were about four feet tall with extremely long arms and legs, and their heads were much larger than your normal, every-day man or woman walking the streets or the Himalayan mountainsides.

The good, honest archaeologists were puzzled. At first, they believed they had stumbled across a graveyard of apes. Just look at the size of the things, they said.

It certainly made sense.

No, it didn’t.

One of the good, honest archaeologists finally came to the realization that apes don’t bury their dead.

The drawings on the caves around the graves didn’t say a lot, but carbon dating would reveal that the little sketches had been rendered ten to twelve thousand years ago and probably made by the artistic flourishes of the Dropas.

Here, the mystery becomes a real riddle.

The Dropas were a secret race of people whose stature was no larger than the size of pigmies. Not much was known of them. But they were courteous enough to leave behind their Dropa stones: discs with perfect holes cut in the center, quite a feat of craftsmanship ten to twelve thousand years ago.

As many as 716 of the stones have been unearthed, and now the plot really thickens.

Examine them closely. The good, honest archaeologists did. And what they found was a thin spiral text that had been carved on the stones by a very tiny, very precise, and very sharp instrument. It looked more like strange, wavy grooves that anything else.

Novels in stone.

Short stories in stone.

Intriguing, perhaps, but unreadable.

No one was able to decipher the language, if it was indeed a language. But after studying the tiny text for twenty years, a Chinese researcher, Dr. Tsum Um Nui, claimed that he had at last been able to make sense of the mysterious grooves and assorted wavy lines etched in the stones.

The writings, he said, told of a group of aliens whose vessel had crashed into the rugged, hard rock terrain of the Himalayas.  The aliens survived and got along well with the Dropas, who rescued them, but time caught up with the space travelers, and then time ran out on them.

The aliens were small and looked, from the stone’s description, a lot like the bodies in the mysterious graves. They had come to the earth from the stars. That’s what the good, honest doctor said. And he was dead, solid serious.

But the aliens wouldn’t be going back.

They were marooned.

And no one came to get them.