There were, however, two very puzzling questions. All but one of the artifacts could be dated to the 8th century AD. The exception, known as the "compass" artifact, appeared to be an unusual form of technology, and was found among more typical artifacts like pottery and simple tools. The compass was covered in strange hieroglyphic symbols, some of which were also found on the pottery. Secondly, the pictographs that were found in the area had inexplicably appeared, and they were strikingly different than any of the other native petroglyphs or rock art found in the southwest or the entire continent for that matter.
Because of these two anomalies, the artifacts and the entire project quickly became the property of the US government, or more specifically, the National Security Agency. It was decided that these artifacts might suggest a pre-historical, extraterrestrial presence on earth, and that the NSA had the appropriate agenda and wherewithal to initiate a full-scale, scientific expedition to determine the nature and significance of the site.
The site was completely searched by a secret department of the NSA in 1973, but it only resulted in a few additional findings, and none of them were designated as technologies or evidence of an extraterrestrial presence. Additional pictographic symbols were found, but decoding them was a difficult and frustrating process. Experts were called in to help, but it was impossible to reach a consensus as to what the pictographs meant. As quickly as the project had risen as a priority investigation, it fell into the archives of the NSA under the code name, Ancient Arrow.
Twenty-one years later, in 1994, a series of rockslides opened up a section of the Ancient Arrow site. The canyon was in a naturally obscure section of park land held by the state of New Mexico. After its discovery in 1972, it had been officially sanctioned off-limits to hikers and campers and was to be left in its natural state. From time-to-time, scientists -- sponsored by the NSA -- would visit the site hoping to uncover new evidence, but were invariably disappointed. Shortly after the rockslide occurrence, a small team of operatives from the NSA visited Ancient Arrow canyon to do some follow-up research. They discovered the rockslide had exposed an entrance to a hidden cavern that led deep within the canyon walls."At the back of this cavern, the research team discovered a well-hidden entrance into the interior of the canyon wall or rock structure of the Ancient Arrow site.
There they found a system of tunnels and chambers that had been carved out from solid rock. There were a total of 23 chambers, all intricately connected to an interior corridor, and each chamber held a specific wall painting, series of pictographs, written hieroglyphs, and what seemed to be dormant, alien technologies.
Once this entrance to the cavern was found, a report was immediately filed with the Director responsible for the Ancient Arrow project. The project was then formally brought under the jurisdiction of the Advanced Contact Intelligence Organization (ACIO), which organized an inter-disciplinary research team to assess the exact nature of the site and attempt to discover additional artifacts or evidence of an extraterrestrial visitation. The ACIO is a secret or unacknowledged department of the NSA. It is headquartered in Virginia, but also have personnel in Belgium, India, and Indonesia. They are largely unknown, even to senior directors within the NSA. The ACIO is the lowest profile organization within the entire intelligence community.
Its agenda is to research, assimilate, and replicate any technologies or discoveries of extraterrestrial origin. Its personnel consist mainly of scientists who are completely anonymous, yet are paid salaries in excess of $400,000 per year because of their security clearance and IQ. This secret organization not only possesses enormous brain power, but it is also in possession of technologies that are far in advance of any other research facility on the planet. They are, in a word, privileged.
The artifacts found at the Ancient Arrow site were virtually incomprehensible to the research team. There were many mysteries. Why would an advanced culture leave their artifacts in such a precise and seemingly ordered manner? What was the message they were trying to leave behind? What were their technologies and why did they leave them behind? Did the creators of this site intermingle with the native tribes or remain an isolated culture? Who were they and why were they here in the 8th century? Were they planning to return? These were only some of the mysteries that challenged the research team.
Throughout the seven months of restoration, cataloguing, and analysis, the Ancient Arrow project was a complete enigma. More of the energy went into the safe preservation of the artifacts, rather than attempting to solve the puzzle of their existence, though speculations were a topic of every conversation. Gradually, a hypothesis was structured by the research team that an extraterrestrial culture established an earth colony in the 8th century and isolated itself within the Ancient Arrow canyon.
They brought with them a very precise mission to leave behind a massive "time capsule" that would prove to be discovered in the late 20th century. While the exact nature of the time capsule was unclear to the research team, it seemed probable that it was a cultural exchange of some kind and had no invasive intent to earth or its people.
It took a team of researchers nearly two years after the restoration was completed to decipher a partial meaning of the chamber artifacts. The 23 separate chambers seemed to be linked together to form some specific message or purposeful mission. In the 23rd and final chamber, they recovered a small optical disc that was presumed to hold digital information that could be the key to deciphering the artifacts. Scientists eagerly analyzed the disc, but they could not figure out how to access its content.
The ACIO's finest computer experts were called in to try and unlock the encoded disc, but to no avail. Several more months were spent trying every conceivable method to access the contents of the disc, but nothing worked. The Ancient Arrow project, for the first time in nearly a year, had hit a dead-end and funding for the project was rapidly weaned by the ACIO. After two more months of unsuccessful efforts, it was decided that the technology to access the disc was simply not available. The optical disc and all of the artifacts and findings would be carefully placed in secure storage until the technologies were available to unlock the disc and harvest its content. It was presumed that the disc held star charts, translation indexes, glossaries, and all the answers to the various mysteries of its creators and, perhaps more importantly, their intentions for earth.
While the optical disc was considered to be the key to unlocking the meaning of the time capsule, the ACIO had little choice, but to place the project into storage and await the arrival of technologies that would permit them to unlock the disc. However, there were two scientists from the research team who theorized that the disc could be unlocked by understanding the meaning of the wall paintings in each of the 23 chambers. In their minds it was not a complex, technological solution, but rather a language or translation solution that would unlock the disc.
After much persuasion, the ACIO agreed to allow the two researchers to assemble a replica of the time capsule's contents. The replica time capsule consisted of detailed drawings and photographs of all the artifacts from each of the 23 chambers, including detailed, high-resolution photographs of the wall paintings. The two scientists would be allowed to continue their research on their own time provided they maintained utmost secrecy and reported all of their findings directly to the ACIO division head and project director.
The optical disc was securely stored away in a vault within the ACIO. The project was officially put on indefinite hold, and all personnel associated with the project were reassigned (with promotions) to different projects. The Ancient Arrow project was not to be spoken of again until which time the technologies or some other means provided a way to unlock the optical disc and access its contents.
The scientists spent nearly five months in partnership, trying unsuccessfully to decode the Ancient Arrow artifacts and establish the means to unlock the optical disc. During this time, the ACIO regularly experimented with new technologies or methods, and they too, were unsuccessful in unlocking the content of the optical disc.
One day, late in the summer of 1996, one of the scientists (a linguistics expert) had an insight into how to unlock the optical disc by reducing the symbols of the wall paintings to their closest facsimile found in an ancient Sumerian text. While the Sumerian language is extinct, it was sufficiently comprehensible to this scientist that he was able to decode the symbols of the paintings, and, placing the 23 words in the same order as the Ancient Arrow chambers, he was able to finally unlock the optical disc.
The connection between the Sumerian language and the time capsule was the breakthrough the ACIO team had been waiting for. A simple set of 23 words elicited over 8,000 pages of data from the optical disc. Unfortunately, the data was incomprehensible because there was no character set in the computer that could emulate the hieroglyphics and unusual symbols of the language.
Thus, a translation index needed to be developed, which took an additional six months. Finally, once a translation index was programmed into the computer, the data, while it could be printed out or viewed on the monitor in its hieroglyphic form, still required translation to English. And this translation process was extremely tedious and could not be facilitated through computers, owing to the subtlety of the language and its intricate connection to the wall paintings and pictographic representations elsewhere within the Ancient Arrow site.
As partial translations began to be developed, it was determined that even within the optical disc there was a segmentation of the data into 23 units. Each unit appeared to correspond to a specific chamber. As the first two chambers began to be translated, it was further shown that each unit contained philosophical and scientific papers, poetry, music, and an introduction to the culture and identity of its creators ... read more ...
