I first met Dr. Cabrera in Peru in 1992, when a British friend living in Lima insisted that I go down to Ica with him to meet the man.  We spent 5 hours speeding through the barren desert on the Pan American highway, buying beers at the toll booths and paying off the policemen who stopped us along the way to check our documents.  On one side was the naked rock landscape of one of the driest environments in the world.  On the other was the cold sea.  We thundered onward to the oasis of Ica

 

Dr. Cabrera was the last scion of an ancient family that had come over during the conquest and had built a huge mansion that occupied nearly one entire side of the city’s Plaza de Armas.  He was in his seventies when I met him, thin-skinned and pale, with sparse, combed-over black hair and a low gravelly voice that commanded absolute attention.  A medical doctor by trade, head of the Preventive Medicine Department of the local hospital and founder of the Ica University Medical School, he was a man of some responsibility.  More than that, though,  he was famous in Peru, and renowned the world over, for what he called his Library of stones.

 

The Library of Stones was a collection of 11,000 petroglyphs that told an alternate history of the universe.  They ranged from the size of a fist to the size of a television, with the largest weighing hundreds of pounds.  The rounded black basalt boulders were crudely incised with strange pictures: people in headresses connected by tubes and performing what appeared to be strange medical procedures.  Others floated through the air, or brandished spears as they hunted what appeared to be dinosaurs.  Some of the stones held strange diagrams.  According to Dr. Cabrera, the pictures on these rocks were more than 345 million years old.

 

You read that correctly: 345 million years. 

 

With the flat, jack-hammer insistence of a man who had given the same speech a thousand times, Dr. Cabrera described a world that had escaped modern science.  These stones proved that all our theories about man’s origins were wrong, he said.  The world had actually been populated by visitors from outer space, who had transplanted their DNA into early humanoids billions of years ago.  They had performed heart and brain transplants, hunted and domesticated dinosaurs, and left this treasure trove of stones as a message to later generations.  What looked like crude scratchings to me were actually primitive markings showing the position of stars millions of years ago.  Another stone was a map of Pangaia, the continent that existed before continental drift.  A tourist poster of a 1900-year-old Paracas textile illustrated his theory of ancient gene-splicing

 

Naturally, I questioned Dr. Cabrera on the some of the logical issues with his theory.  Why would such an advanced civilization crudely etch their story on stones rather than writing it out on some indestructible alloy?  Because these were particularly hard stones, and were expressed in terms comprehensible to later, lesser men.  How could a Paracas weaving, dating from graves dug about two millenia ago, actually be millions of years old?  Ah!  Because they were discovered by the Paracas people and used by them, just as Nazca textiles are sometimes discovered in later Inca graves.  The map of Pangaea proved that it was extraterrestrials, because what simple primate would have had that knowledge?

 

For every question, Dr. Cabrera had an answer, as he cobbled his unorthodox theory together using the stones, wooden and clay sculptures he had “found” and numerous pictures from books and other archeological sites such as the Nazca Lines.  He backed this up with letters from various scientific institutions, such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, certifying the juxtapositions of comets tens of millions of years in the past, or from a scientist confirming the type and age of one of his stones.  He had written a book, translated into numerous languages, which I bought and eagerly read.

 

Dr. Cabrera has been widely debunked.  Uncharitable reporters from Lima have gone down to Ica and traced his stones back to the peasants who claimed to have made them.  They produced scientist who questioned both his theories and the fact that among all the archeologists of the world, he alone had discovered traces of such a widespread and earthshaking revelation.  In the face of what many people would regard as decisive evidence, Dr. Cabrera never backed down, He even devoted space in his book to debunking his debunkers.  He wrote his version of the world on 11,000 large heavy stones, and he stood behind them every step of the way.

 

To me, it’s irrelevant.  I see Dr. Cabrera as one of the great conceptual artists of our time.  He borrowed reality and re-shaped it as he saw fit in his own eyes, broadcasting it two or three visitors at a time with the crude images of his stones.   In a way, Dr. Cabrera is a much less venal and much less harmful version of the great propagandists of our age, using stones and story to rewrite history, instead of Rupert Murdoch’s actors and cameras, or hate radio’s half-baked facts and closed-circuit logic.  But where Dr. Cabrera was content to be seen as an eccentric, to lovingly house his “library” in his mansion and welcome travelers like me into his universe, Rupert Murdoch and his ilk aim to convert a much larger population to their crackpot beliefs.  In their world war for empire ennobles the nation, low taxes on the rich helps the poor, and the “Free Market” will solve all problems, until, of course, it needs to be rescued with the next generation’s borrowed dollars.