Dropa stones

According to what may be the earliest version of the tale, which appeared in July 1962 on the German magazine Das vegetarische Universum, in 1937 an archeological expedition in the Bayan Har mountains led by Chi Pu Tei found 716 granite discs with tiny hieroglyph-like markings, dated to 12,000 years before present.

After more than two decades of work at the "Academy of Prehistory" in Beijing, Chinese archeologists and linguists allegedly managed to translate the markings and concluded that the discs had been carved by extraterrestrials in the aftermath of their crash in the Sino-Tibetan border region.

Zaitsev added that several discs had been shipped to Moscow on request of Soviet researchers, who discovered that they contained large amount of cobalt and other metals, that they behaved as electrical conductors, and that they produced a humming sound when placed on a special turntable.

[6] Outside of subsequent retellings of the tale of the Dropa stones no mention has been found of Chu Pu Tei or Tsum Um Nui, or of their academic work.

In the book Robin-Evans meets the Dropa, a dwarfish indigenous people of a few hundred members, and learns that their distant ancestors had come from a planet in the "Sirius constellation" and had settled in the region after being stranded by mechanical problems.