Imagine, if you will, that you are exploring the high desert country west of Los Lunas in the 1930s and you stumble across the inscription above carved in a 60-ton boulder in an arroyo near an extinct volcano. You’ve discovered the “New Mexico Mystery Stone” and triggered almost 100 years of debate about whether it’s something left behind by a really early Greek explorer, Mormons or a lost tribe of Israel — but could be something completely fake.
I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable about New Mexico history, but when I ran across a story about the Mystery Stone — also called the “Los Lunas Decalogue Stone” — I was very surprised. The article was contained in a book I’m reading that is a collection of classic writing from the American West that was edited by famous New Mexico author Tony Hillerman. My wife had given me the book because she knows that Hillerman is a favorite author of mine, was one of my college professors and someone I considered a friend.
I was intrigued by this bit of New Mexico history that I had never heard about, so I looked it up online and found several sources about the mystery rock. If you enter “mystery stone Los Lunas” on your browser, you’ll find several entries about the strange pink/gray basalt rock. You can pick which want you choose to believe.
The article says people knew about the stone as early as the 1850s — more than 60 years before New Mexico statehood — but that no one could translate the inscription. In the 1950s, one researcher concluded that the writing was an example of Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, Cyrillic or Etruscan. The first recorded mention of the rock was in the 1930s.
In the 1950s, A Harvard professor named Robert H. Pfeiffer concluded that the inscriptions were the 10 commandments — hence the name of “Decalogue Stone” that some have proffered.
In the 1950s, a writer named Dixie L. Perkins offered another explanation, saying it was the work of a Greek sailor who was somehow wandering around central New Mexico about 500 years before the birth of Christ. That translation read:
“I have come up to this point… to stay. The other one met with an untimely death a year ago… I remain a hair of rabbit. I, Zakyneros… out of reach of mortal man, am fleeing and am very much afraid… I become hollow or gaunt from hunger.”
Another theory was that it was the work of one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Further complicating the story was the visit to the stone by noted New Mexico archaeologist Dr. Frank Hibben of the University of New Mexico in 1936. He concluded that it might have been inscribed by Mormons when they were migrating through the region, even though New Mexico was not exactly on the way from Illinois to Utah.
Hibben’s take is often discounted because the archaeologist had a somewhat checkered background, having been accused of “salting” archaeological sites in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico and in Alaska. Hibben denied those allegations up until his death.
The best description of all the theories was found in an article called “Archaeological Fraud of the Month: Los Lunas Stone” in a site called “Archaeological Review.”
Here’s the website:
Archaeological Fraud of the Month: Los Lunas Stone – Archaeology Review
So it’s time for my opinion on the subject. I want to believe that the writing on the rock was identical to the strange writings on what was left of the UFO that crashed near Roswell in 1947. My theory is that the rock was left by an advance team to guide the UFO to the that specific location so they could watch the first atomic bomb blast at nearby Trinity Site in 1945. But because interstellar road maps were somewhat inaccurate back then, the UFO crew got lost somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wandered around the asteroid belt for a couple of years, then finally got to earth, took a left turn at Albuquerque and crashed on a ranch near Roswell. They completely missed the big bang at Trinity site southeast of Los Lunas, were captured by the U.S. Air Force, were probed and then sent to Area 51 in Nevada to live out the rest of their lives. Like he plans to do with the JFK assassination files, perhaps our new president will release the Roswell UFO incident files and we can finally interview these guys about what the Mystery Rock of Los Lunas says.
aero-cordero.com 