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The War between Researchers of the Tayos

Our colleague Javier Stagnaro said, “When, after many years living in Ecuador, Moricz returned to Argentina in 1977 with the idea of finding financing for an expedition, he feared for his life because of all the information that had been revealed about his discoveries in the Tayos Caves, in the region of Morona Santiago, eastern Ecuador.”

I had in my hands a letter written by Aguado proving that in 1967 he and Moricz had asked the then-president of Argentina, General Juan Carlos Onganía, for support to create a sociocultural entity to help with Moricz’s research and to “enable him to finish an expedition to the mountain range of Ecuador.”

We also analyzed documents written by Guillermo Aguirre, who wrote a unique but partial biography of Aguado and believed that in Buenos Aires they were planning to extract the treasure from the caves and take it to Argentina, from what I could make out from his letters. I have seen these letters personally, and there is no doubt that this topic should also be discussed, because it contradicts Moricz’s claim that he had not moved the artifacts from the caves.

In the region of the Morona and Santiago Rivers, Juan Moricz had discovered networks of tunnels and caves that he said held “important objects of great cultural and historic value to mankind, like metal plates created by men that told the story of a lost civilization that mankind doesn’t remember or know about. These artifacts were grouped in several different caves, and there are different kinds of artifacts in each one of them.”

Moricz’s idea was to build an on-site museum. This would have been hard to carry out and maintain through the years, and it certainly would have been looted with all the political changes in that region. He needed to find funds and logistical support from a neutral nation in order to have access to a satellite for his live announcement to the whole planet. So he considered making an agreement with an Arab country or getting money from the discovery of the gold and emerald deposits he had found during his explorations.

It is said Moricz became a licensee for almost ninety mining companies, so if his business was well managed, he could have come by an incalculable fortune. This fact, plus the information he knew about the caves, made him fear for his life. He was also afraid he would share important information with an inadequate media company, or that they would intercept and censor his announcement.

Andreas Faber-Kaiser explored the area of the caves but never went down. When he asked Moricz what would happen if he died before sending his message to the world, he said, “Nothing would happen. It would only mean I was not the chosen one to give the message.”

An obituary of Moricz published in an Argentinian newspaper in 1991 said:

The Tayos Caves, a central point in the conflict between Peru and Ecuador, were discovered by the Hungarian-Argentinian explorer, a man with a brilliant personality, Juan Moricz.

On July 21, 1969 he gave a public statement where he said the caves were inhabited by the Belas people some 250,000 years ago. The tayos are nightbirds the size of a falcon; they live in those caves and were sacred to ancient religions.

With his death, Juan Moricz took with him the secrets of the subterranean worlds he claimed to have discovered. The whole territory of the Andes has countless caves.

Moricz always tried to prove that ancient Magyar traditions believed that the astronaut gods came from the Ursa Major constellation because in Hungary, when an important person is going to be buried, they say the following funeral address: “From now on, the seven stars of Ursa Major shine brighter because our hero has returned to his ancestral home in the skies.”

In Hungary and Ecuador, as well as in Scandinavian and Basque countries, Scotland, Ireland, and others, there are many tolas placed in groups of seven, like the seven main stars of the Ursa Major constellation. In reality, if we look at the tombs from the sky, we would find the image of the starry sky, which tells us these constellations are linked to the Earth.

ZOLTAN CZELLAR

In the last few years, Moricz’s closest friends were another Hungarian, Zoltan Czellar, and an Argentinian named Felix Blasco, who lived Moricz’s last chapter with him: the battles to explore and defend Cumbaratza.

Czellar fought against the Russian invasion of Hungary at the end of World War II. Years later he joined an expedition to Ecuador to find the treasure of Francis Drake. This is where he met Moricz; they shared their theories of human origins and of the search for evidence of giants in South America, like the remains of the giant that was twenty-two feet nine inches tall, found in Vilcabamba.

Czellar befriended a Father Vaca, who had originally met the family that had the remains of the giant in their vegetable garden. Czellar continued researching the giants—one had a head that was three feet long. Father Vaca showed Czellar some photographs, and Czellar wrote a letter to National Geographic, but they never wrote back. As with many of the enigmas of this area, the mysteries in this chapter remain just that: mysteries. Following Czellar’s trail, in 2009 I would head southwest from Vilcabamba in search of a site where giants were alleged to be buried, but the address I had was fake, and it was obvious the people who gave me the address didn’t want me to find the bones. I crossed spectacular valleys with my guide, who knew the region, and we roamed around for a whole day, following false references and dead ends, but later that night we got to the place where the rest of the “Giant” family researched by Father Vaca was supposed to be buried.^*9

Czellar shared his knowledge of giants with Moricz, and Moricz told Czellar he had found artifacts in the tunnels where he would take him, such as the metallic library and a table made of unknown materials. In 1997 Czellar died of a heart attack when he was driving a truck and fell into a ravine in the mining zone of Cumbaratza. Blasco wouldn’t live much longer after him.

Among Czellar’s belongings there was a key for a bank safety-deposit box in Argentina, which was supposed to have some of Moricz’s objects in it. The Peña Matheus brothers came upon it, and they had different opinions. Carlos said there was nothing of importance in the box, because Moricz never left any trace behind, and especially not written documents. But Gerardo believed the key had to lead to something, and Joseph Czellar, Zoltan Czellar’s son, agreed.

So at the end of the winter of 1996, Czellar’s son arrived in Buenos Aires to meet Aguado, who was flying in from California. I remember he unsuccessfully tried to call me on the phone as I was interviewing Placido Domingo for the presentation of Aguado’s grand book on the life of Constantino, which would come out later that year. Aguado brought the key that would open the safe-deposit box. Stan Grist and a TV team were with him; they were doing a documentary and a CD-ROM on the Tayos. In the box were some precious jewels, some archaeological pieces in the shape of lentils, more keys, old coins, and some copper sheets, the size of a bookmark, with inscriptions.

Aguado had held those metal plates in his hands during the first expedition to caves with Moricz, who asked him if he could take them to the United States to be studied. But later Aguado denied it all, first in a letter from 1969 addressed to Jesperson and later when I interviewed him in 1997, after Czellar visited him.

THE LAST PERIOD: CUMBARATZA

In September 1982, years after Stanley Hall and Juan Moricz had explored these caves for the first time, a psychic friend told Hall to urgently call Moricz and Peña Matheus. When he got Peña Matheus on the phone he told him, “Juan has found a mountain of gold.”

He had rediscovered a seam or deposit in the ancient mines of Nambija and Yacuambi, one of the most important goldfields of the twentieth century. So Hall searched for possible investors among many firms in England, showing geological proof sent from Ecuador.

The foreign companies didn’t take long to get to Guayaquil, but the documents show that Moricz rejected the business out of the blue when he discovered that the intermediary companies would not recognize Hall’s commission. Mining companies came to take samples from the alluvial rocks in Cumbaratza.

When I studied the last five years of his life, it became clear to me that Moricz always refused to make money from his story; he believed it wasn’t ethical. Aguado said, “He couldn’t be bought and even less if you didn’t comply with his demands to the letter.”

The curse of the ghost of Atahualpa had alerted Moricz to the consequences of researching these topics. He had placed a cloak of protection around himself. The search for El Dorado, the wonderful land in South America, was done from the Llanganates to northern Peru. These were the areas he explored, focusing and remaining in the Tayos: his dream was so close, yet so far. He had a desire, or an obsession, to find a place where all the knowledge converges—an innate and primitive impulse to have access to lost knowledge.

In 1984, Hall visited Moricz, hoping to show him one of the books he had written on the topic. When Moricz eyed it, he grew flustered and accused Hall of using information from his personal library, as well as the knowledge he had shared, invading his intellectual property: in simple words, the typical claim of plagiarism we so often see in these cases. But Hall believes Moricz’s anger was caused by the paragraphs in which Hall talks about the initial meeting between Andrés Fernández Salvador Zaldumbide and Petronio Jaramillo Abarca. Moricz always denied that he knew the story of the caves from Jaramillo instead of from his own explorations and clues he got through his contact with the Indios Colorados, natives of Ecuador, who supposedly gave some hints.

Moricz’s “golden dream” had taken the corporeal form of subterranean archives and treasures that would dramatically change the way we interpret the human origins of mankind. How is it possible that there is a large metallic library in a continent where no developed writing has ever been discovered, aside from uncorroborated petroglyphs and ceramics of dubious origin?

Despite many years of research in the depths of the Ecuadorian jungles, the key characters in the mystery of the Tayos never succeeded in producing tangible evidence. Their narratives are tantalizing, but without physical evidence, what, or who, are we to believe? Though they created alliances to further the cause, the alliances were not without conflict, and each man had a reason to take his secrets to the grave. I had to keep searching to unearth the truth for myself.