PROLOGUE

To Believe or Not to Believe

What lies behind the word tayos? Tayos are nocturnal birds long known by indigenous populations of South America for their many practical uses. The birds dwell in caves, and their name has been given to the caves of Peru and Ecuador that they populate. They are also known as oilbirds or aves guaneras. Since they are blind, they use sonar for flying inside or outside the caves that are their home. These caves are more than just mysterious caverns hidden deep in the Amazon jungle. In only half a century, countless enigmas have surfaced around them, all told by bizarre characters that could be described as crazy, holy, intrepid, or pathological criminals.

The author of this book holding a tayo bird

Are their stories all true, or are they a plethora of lies? Are the stories of the explorations of the Oilbird or Tayos Caves one of the biggest archaeological frauds or one of the greatest stories ever told?

The stories told about the Tayos Caves rely on the narratives of individuals rather than on hard evidence. The stories hold that all manner of objects have been spotted in the caves—golden plates, a metallic library, statues, a crystal and gold skeleton, ashlars of reddish stone colored with stony inscriptions, and petroglyphs of a hieroglyphic nature. A recent finding on one of the walls could be a natural formation, but it looks similar to Phoenician symbols. Perhaps it is nature imitating traces of a lost humanity.

This story of the Tayos Caves is a self-perpetuating story, maybe because through the years those of us who are involved have been witnesses of the original narrative, because we didn’t want to be let down, because we wanted to know, to come close. To find the truth has been a part of each of our lives. A half-truth, a lie believed even by those who have told it over and over again. Every legend can originate from real facts, and this is something I have come to believe, as an explorer, in the last decade. In the midst of all this, it might just be the story of the people who live within the illusion of the mist that covers the pale green tops of the jungle trees.

Throughout these years, I became one of those characters, a desperate explorer who tried to continue what my colleagues could not finish; some of them became friends, others competitors, and some even enemies. I was an explorer who was going to have to face possible death for believing in his dreams and in the nightmares of others. At one point, I started to wonder who had lied, why I had let them lie to me, and why I lied to myself for so long.

For years I was a blind believer, but then I witnessed it with my own eyes, and I couldn’t believe what I had once believed. Being there was proof of what could be, but also irrevocable evidence of what could not be. Things were not black-and-white, but they weren’t gray either. I could see what I was looking for in an altered state of awareness.

The story had been deformed by those of us investigating it. I remember I asked Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, if he thought a person observing too much, or concentrating on a particular object of study for too long, could modify the observed object. He answered, with a straight face, that yes, it was very possible.

This is what has happened with the Tayos Caverns: the story has focused on only two points, which are in the periphery, but not on the other places that could have been or that could be.

But what is the magic around the Tayos Caves? What is the fatal curiosity bug, the mortal hook that has lured certain individuals to try to find what apparently doesn’t exist? A sort of chimera? A new El Dorado? What lies behind this force, this allure, this desire to find the treasure of the Tayos Caves? If we can even call it treasure, if it actually exists as such.

What is the physical and metaphysical force that has pulled some of us, whether we are a part of “the circle of the Tayos” or not, to stand firm and try to unravel such a tortuous and disregarded topic that seems to be a scam, a lie, or an illusion that we do not dare challenge, because we cannot answer it.

This book has taken more than thirty years of my life, years of searching, waiting, and hoping.

The obsession with solving the great mystery of the Tayos has been compared to that of the Marcahuasi Ruins, another site in the Peruvian Andes of archaeological, anthropological, and human interest that has kept me awake for many nights throughout my life. There is no doubt that the two places are connected by a number of elements and forms, as I could see for myself, and as others before me had confirmed when they ventured into these places.

During these decades, the time invested has been the best way to measure these countless secrets. They have multiplied largely because of the very passing of time, which sometimes enhances mysteries, especially those of an archetypal nature. Time is the best judge and executioner for every truth, for every half lie.

People asked me, and still ask, why, after so long, I risked everything to get to the Tayos Caves, and I sometimes answer with a little humor, paraphrasing mountaineer colleagues who climb Everest: because it has been there for a long, long time, and no one has dared go back to discover it. The Tayos Caves are like the Everest of speleology and sacred sites.

Fortunately or not, several individuals, who were characters in every sense of the word, came before me. If I had to reconstruct the story without their experiences, it would not exist, or it would be completely different. One thing is true: the Tayos Caves, aside from being a speleological wonder, have archaeological and architectonic shapes within them. These artifacts are found not only in this cavern, but also in other caves of the Tayos system located in several rivers that flow to the deltas of the Morona-Santiago and Pastaza provinces.

The official discovery of the caves is generally credited to Janos “Juan” Moricz, whose testimony regarding his discovery can be read here. Following his announcement, Petronio Jaramillo Abarca would recount his experience exploring the caves as a young boy. The Scottish explorer Stanley Hall would get involved in explorations in the 1970s (and would famously invite astronaut Neil Armstrong to the caves), Erich von Däniken would publish a book about the caves in 1972, and Andreas Faber-Kaiser would try his luck in the 1980s. I would come onto the scene in the 1980s, and I have been exploring Ecuador and Peru ever since. My first visits to the alleged Tayos Caves occurred in the early 2000s.

The main story behind the golden plates is connected to what we know (and don’t know) of the Father Crespi Museum. My hypothesis is that all the plates attributed to the Tayos actually come from the Azuay and Cañar Provinces. This will remain my theory until a more in-depth analysis of the plates is made.

I don’t know if I have solved the mystery, but the good news is that the millennia-old enigma of the Tayos is still alive, untouched, and hidden within us as an archetype in the darkest and clearest parts of our hearts and minds. In the end, human beings are still the last and greatest mystery. They are the measure of all things, and they can be seen documented in the millennia-old ceramics and artistic records of extinct tribes or civilizations.

I have to give thanks to the people who helped me as I took that long and remote path through the Amazon jungle and the northern Andes. I especially have to thank the shaman of La Esperanza, “Lucho” Chamin. He was in a dream I had the night before I started that last crusade into the caves. I saw him as a child innocently asking me to take him to see the birds in the cave. Without his unconditional support and his belief in the access permits granted to me by the Shuar authorities—after a bureaucratic hell of rejections that took five months of waiting and hopelessness, capping three decades of unbelievable delays—my dream would have never been fulfilled.

A second, “Masma” dream had been keeping me up at night since the late 1970s, when I came across an ancient advanced civilization that might have come from the stars. Why “Masma”? Daniel Ruzo, one of my teachers, and also a great influence and inspiration for me, coined this word to express the mystery of the advanced builders who left their colossal works on the highest peaks and under the Earth’s surface.

Solving this mystery was my first objective. The second one was finding the metallic library, something I had always believed existed, thanks to my friendship with one of the first figures in the discovery of the caves. Tangential evidence was there for everyone to see in my notebooks and camera recordings before the astonished eyes of my expedition colleagues. We had gone down and come back out with some minor bruises and scratches, and we survived many threats and attempts against our lives after we left the sacred caves.

All this and more is in the past and will not happen again. Other explorers will come and go, but I will still wonder about the “treasure,” at least in its physical form. I wonder if it will ever be found, if all these years of searching could help other explorers who will follow me, or who are brave enough to enter the circles of hell that this topic can be.

I don’t know if there is still something down there, as Erich von Däniken still believes and claims (maybe to atone for guilt for an unethical past that can’t be changed and has started to be revealed). If we talk about morals in regard to exploration, it is clear that the one who has a claim to the discovery is the person who gets there first, or who achieves something unprecedented by recording what others have not been able to do before him. Maybe if we continue looking with innocent eyes, similar to those of the Little Prince of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, lost in the desert—or jungle—of the soul, we might be able to discern them and get a glimpse of them at the time of our sacred death.

Maybe the mystery is not what we think, and we don’t deserve to unravel it in these changing times, or maybe it disappeared before our eyes without our even realizing it.

However, there is no doubt that the Tayos Caves have been, and will continue being, a challenge for those who remember, or at least for those with a spirit thirsty for knowledge and for solving our planet’s mysteries. To believe or not to believe—that is the question.