The Cortez Runes – SciFi anyone?

The Cortez Runes
A Short Story By
Tony Killinger

Do you ever wonder what happens to the genuine mysteries of our world? There has to be at lease some of them; so what do they do with them? Now, I’m not talking about things where they have little or no concrete evidence that are relegated into a kind of a purgatory category awaiting further developments. No, I’m talking about stuff they can hold in their hands, measure, poke and prod, test and retest and when they get all done, they still don’t know much more than they did when they started.

On the meticulously maintained grounds of the CIA building, in Langley Virginia, there is a sculpture; it is called the Kryptos. There isn’t anything mysterious about it, but it is one of the genuine puzzles of our time. The name of the artist escapes me, at the moment, but you can look it and him up on Google; even get a picture of the Kryptos and read of some of the fantastic minds who have tried to solve the puzzle, read the message and make the whole thing obsolete. You can even join a society of code breakers who have been working on this thing for decades now.

The piece appears to be a large paper, or parchment, covered with symbols, letter and numbers. There are four parts to it, and the artist said that the segments must be solved in order or the final section will not make sense. At this point in time, three of the four parts have supposedly been solved, but the fourth remains unbroken – so it possible there was a mistake made in the other sections. Strange, but understandable. One day it will all make sense.

And of course we have the myriad UFO mysteries and their crowning glory, the Roswell incident. A lot of speculation accompanied by a whole sub-culture of people who believe there was an interplanetary spacecraft that crashed in the area over a half century ago. It is a mystery only to those who believe there is evidence that has been kept from the public view. If there was evidence, probably those who have seen it and evaluated it, there is no mystery at all.

The Ute Mountain Indian Reservation in southwest Colorado and northeast New Mexico covers some 555,000 acres and has a population of roughly 1,700 people. It is the traditional land of the Ute people, but it also falls within the boundaries of the 4 sacred mountains, the homeland of the Navajo. Although portions of the reservation enjoy the lushness of the Colorado Plateau, some of the land is arid, desolate and terribly remote.

The ancient ones, as the Navajo call them, tell a story about an arroyo in the area that has always been known for its bad Chee, or spirit. In the arroyo is a large rock shaped like a short loaf of bread, made of red limestone. It sits on an incline and the rock had a crack that ran all the way around its circumference. During storms, it is said that the rock had been struck by lightning many, many times. It was not a good place for one seeking shelter.

Right around the turn of the century, the 2oth century, not the 21st, an earthquake of some magnitude struck the area and the tail end of the rock separated and slid down the slope about a yard. The separation revealed a hewn out void in the rock; half in the upper end of the stone, the remainder in the lower half. The cavity was approximately a foot high, a foot wide and 18” deep, on both sides. It was as though someone had separated the rock, chipped out this cavity, put an item in the crypt and pushed the rock back together. That would have been next to impossible, of course; the rock weighed many tons.

Nevertheless, an item, a very strange item was found inside the rock. It appeared to be a scroll of some kind. A rod of fine, carved wood held the top and bottom of a sheet of material that was made of tanned leather. Engraved, imprinted or impressed into this leather were 888 characters in an unidentified calligraphy. Over the years, the scroll became known as the Cortez runes.

Runes, as you may know, is a term given to ancient writings. All samples of rune writing have been deciphered, to my knowledge. They were usually simple, attempts to record oral language. Generally there are few characters with many of those characters representing words or even phrases. Runes were followed by hieroglyphics, cuneiform and eventually by the Roman, Arabian and Cyrillic alphabets.

The Cortez Runes were sold to an Indian Trader about 1910 and have changed hands many times since. It was not until the war years of 1940 and later that the runes ever attracted any significant attention, but a geologist, searching for uranium deposits heard of them and bought them from a curio shop in Cortez Colorado.

This geologist studied the runes for several years but was never able to make any sense of them. In desperation, he made a rubbing of the characters and sent it to the War Department in Washington DC, hoping it would make it into the hands of the code-breakers.

The Defense Department Reorganization Act of 1947 created the structure of the Central Intelligence Agency and eventually the National Security Agency at Fort Meade Maryland. Our geologist, who now denies he ever had the scroll, was told that computers had determined that the runes represented 66 alphabetical characters and 8 numeric figures.

Most computers of the time, and yet today, use a base 8 number system. Counting sequentially from zero to eight would be represented as, 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,10. Zero, as in all number systems, is only a space keeper and indicates no numeric value.

Some years later, probably in the 1960’s, the scroll was sent to Washington for testing. The wood of the spindles was determined to be bamboo and carbon dated to the first century AD. The leather was determined to be horsehide and from the same period. Horses at that time had died out on the North American Continent and were not reintroduced until the 1,500’s.

You will find no records of the Cortez Runes anywhere in any Government file.
If you are pondering the unanswered questions, I would hope they contain the following.

How did the scrolls get into the rock?

Who put them there?

How was the rock split and manipulated?

Was the writing ever deciphered?

How did material, so old, find its way to the desert of Colorado?

Where are the runes today and why have we never heard of them again?

Or is it possible the message of the scroll was so destructive to civilization that it is forever sealed away, perhaps in some rock on the Gobi Desert?

End