What does a royal Mayan tomb in Palenque Mexico have to do with space aliens?
In 1949, Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruiz Lhullier discovered a staircase plunging into the heart of the pyramid supporting the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque in Mexico’s Chiapas state. After three years of excavating, he reached the burial chamber. It contained a 20-ton stone coffin with a wonderfully carved lid. Inside was the skeleton of a Mayan ruler, heaped with jade. In 1968, Swiss author Erich von Dniken published his bestseller Chariots of the Gods , which claimed that space aliens had visited the Earth in the remote past and helped create human civilizations. One of his pieces of evidence was the Palenque coffin lid. Von Dniken thought it showed an ancient astronaut, reclining in a couch, blasting off in a spaceship. Scholars began to get a handle on the meaning of Mayan hieroglyphics in the 1970s. They learned that the king buried in the pyramid was named Pacal , who reigned from A.D. 615 to 684. Today, most Maya experts believe the coffin lid shows a mythological scene
