The Bone Labyrinth

NOTES FROM THE HISTORICAL RECORD

Two historical figures play prominent roles in this book: a pair of priests who lived centuries apart but who were tied together by fate.

During the seventeenth century, Father Athanasius Kircher was known as the Leonardo da Vinci of the Jesuit Order. Like his namesake, the priest was a master of a hundred disciplines. He studied medicine, geology, and Egyptology, and engineered intricate automatons, including a magnetic clock (a reconstruction of which can be found at the Green Library in Stanford University). This Renaissance man and his work would eventually influence figures throughout the ages, from Descartes to Newton, from Jules Verne to Edgar Allan Poe.

But also one other.

Father Carlos Crespi was born centuries later in 1891. Inspired by Kircher’s work, Crespi became a monk of many talents himself. He was a botanist, an anthropologist, a historian, and a musician. He eventually settled as a missionary in a small town in Ecuador, where he served for fifty years. It was there that a vast cache of ancient gold artifacts came into his possession, delivered to him by the Shuar natives of the region. Stories claimed the objects came from a cavern system that spanned the breadth of South America, one rumored to hold a lost library of ancient metal plates and crystal books. The relics bore strange depictions and were inscribed with indecipherable hieroglyphics.

Some archaeologists believed these artifacts were fakes; others came to trust the priest’s story of the objects’ origins. Either way, in 1962, a mysterious fire destroyed the museum that housed most of these artifacts, and the Ecuadorian government locked away the few that remained.

So how much of Father Crespi’s story was true and how much was pure fabrication? No one knows. Still, no one questions that this devout monk believed his story, or that the vast cache existed.

In fact, in 1976, a British military and scientific team sought to find this lost subterranean library, only to end up in the wrong cavern system. Oddly, this expedition was headed by an American — none other than Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.

What drew out such this solitary and reclusive American hero, one who seldom gave interviews? The answer connects to an even greater mystery, one that threatens the very foundation of our place in this world.