During the 50 plus years he spent serving as a missionary in the village of Cuenca, Ecuador, Father Carlos Crespi made a huge impact on the lives he touched.

Unlike many missionaries who travel to distant lands this Italian monk wasn’t a fire-and-brimstone preacher or a pious martinet determined to browbeat the “natives” into adopting Christianity. Father Crespi he was a kind and considerate soul who embodied the best aspects of the Salesian Roman Catholic spiritual tradition that he represented. It was his gentle spirit and non-judgmental personality that made such a positive impression on the Ecuadorians, including the local indigenous groups he befriended.  

In gratitude for his selfless service the latter lavished him with an astounding haul of treasure, in the form of more than 70,000(!) ancient artifacts recovered from secret underground tunnels hidden beneath Ecuador’s interior jungle. The amazing gifts Father Crespi received included stone tablets and metal plates engraved with ethereal images of stars, pyramids, the Sun, the Moon, ascending stairways, spiraling serpents, fierce-looking spirit animals and a variety of fantastic chimeras (animal/human hybrids) depicted in officious garb that suggested they were part of their society’s ruling class. It also included an indecipherable hieroglyphic script featuring an alphabet of 56 “letters.”

Father Crespi was an educated man with a broad variety of knowledge and interests, and he noticed significant parallels between the engravings on these artifacts and the imagery of ancient Egypt, Sumer and Babylon. Some of this imagery, including that of the man/animal hybrids, also matches the bizarre manifestations described by psychedelic explorers of the shamanic realms, where inter-dimensional contacts with spirit animals and other exotic and mysterious creatures are common.

Unfortunately most of the artifacts in the Crespi collection were destroyed in a fire in 1962. The few objects he saved disappeared without a trace following his death, and many claim the Vatican seized them and hid them away from public view. Because they are not available for study we have no idea how old they actually were, although there is no doubt they were quite ancient.

Traditional history dismisses the possibility of any contact between the lost civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and the New World (a.k.a the Western hemisphere). Establishment archaeologists also put no stock in the myth of Atlantis or the belief in a lost Golden Age dominated by a worldwide seafaring civilization.

Father Crespi’s collection could, conceivable, have made a mockery of all that. The ancient gifts he received from his indigenous friends weren’t religiously heretical but their mere existence seemed to contradict conventional archaeological theory. That may have motivated the decision to remove them from public display following Father Crespi’s death in 1982.

For now all we have left of Father Crespi’s collection of anomalous ancient artifacts are a few pictures. Even these seem to provide some evidence that global civilization, or at least active trading networks, once connected the Near East to the Western hemisphere, which would blow the whole Columbus “discovery” story to smithereens.

Our true history is far more of a mystery than academia has ever been willing to admit, that much is clear. It is a pity the beautiful artifacts that Father Crespi collected were not preserved for further study; they could have deepened our understanding of our collective past while giving us a chance to learn a lot more about the amazing talents of the ancient peoples who created them.

An Exclusive You Have To See: The Last Frontier of Free Press Is Here! No More Censorship, Unlike YouTube and Others!

Read more on Father Crespi and related stories.