Gold Digging in Bali ~ the day trip that money cannot buy.

As 2017 wobbles and shimmers on our horizon, some say it’s the end of the world as we thought we knew it. But others sniff a gold rush on the Bali breeze.  Rumours of aliens, of lost ancient treasure and the keys to the secrets of the universe have brought a new breed of day tripper to the island of the Gods.

Another Goblin King prepares to take a a seat at the helm of cockpit Earth this quivering New Year. Ordinary earthlings fret over the big issues: whether to quit gluten once and for all, which of the Ten Ways to Become Awesome they can write a book about, what kind of app to invent, the outrageous price of eye-lash extensions, and whether it’s better to expatriate to Bali, Thailand, Canada or Ecuador before the rest of the rats flee the afflicted vessel HMS First World.   

But right here among us, in the lost towns of Bali, a treasure hunt of inter-galactic proportions is clumsily unfolding.

The man on the plane liked me because of my eyes.

He said I had the gaze of an angel.

We met on a Jetstar flight from Kuala Lumpur to the Denpasar tarmac on Bali which looked so pretty to me, being so much cleaner than anything I’d known living on a Permaculture farm in Malaysia the past month, I wanted to lie down on it and snuggle in.

By the time we got our visas (about an hour and a half in Bali’s unfortunate airport) it was all arranged. Klaus, an ex-Australian engineer, sheep farmer, marine cargo speculator, musician, archaeologist, alien botherer and mathematician was on a treasure hunt, and I was his side-kick.

The treasure?

Bodies. Dead ones.

No big deal for me, having already found four dead bodies in my time:

1. A suicide I found washed up on Manly Beach in Sydney late one night
2. A stabbing victim on the Great Western Highway near the remote town of Bathurst.
3. Sparkle, the flamboyant goldfish, who was always flirting with the cat.
4. Miss Kitty, a tragically abandoned hit and run kitten who was left to die in the dark by some Ubud yogis who ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Klaus fleshed out the facts of our quest over curry in Ubud that night and we set off early the next day to drive past strawberry farms, bean eating critters responsible for the world’s most expensive coffee, temples and cloud-swathed crater lakes, summiting Bali’s great volcano mother to investigate the rumour of old bones that lay on her far north flanks. Bones Klaus and a small armada of scientists have been seeking for decades.

This was top secret stuff. He had to pick a lovely assistant who knew nothing (that was me). Swift plans were made. We had to be first. We had to be fast. There  were spies, he said, smugglers, government agents, museum jackals and possibly all manner of extra-terrestrial freaks and villains on our heels.

Skeletons had been discovered in a remote village of  Bali. Ceremonial stone pods of bizarre design and unknown origin had been accidentally excavated by a local policeman and were rumoured to be ancient, possibly oriental, and to contain the perfectly preserved remains of bodies more than 9 foot tall.

If this was the case, these were anthropological gold! Nine foot skeletons of humanoid form are the Holy Grail for theorists who believe a history of Earth no text book will dare report. There are those who spend their lives and fortunes scouring the Earth for them; the definitive  and vital clue that would keep Klaus busy for the rest of his life – finding Atlantis!

Really?                 Yep!

Klaus is an adventury-looking type. Tall and lean, he has opted for a man-of-the-world image in his middle years, which he maxes out with cool linen shirts, tailored travel pants, flinty grey hair left to grow an inch too long, and dazzling blue eyes which he knows exactly how to drive. He is extremely confident about the effect of these looks on women, and has lots of other strange ideas.

For example: Klaus believes that the lost city of Atlantis was an alien nation drowned in the Indonesian ocean after having been blasted out of commission by a wiser earth-bound extra-terrestrial civilisation, Lemuria, for becoming cruel and dangerous through over-use of technology. He argues that all of humanity is a hybrid slave race made from the spliced DNA of a reptilian space race (the Lizzies) and a hijacked Earth species, Homo Sapiens, who were genetically down-graded into slaves to mine their own planet. He is convinced that the great city of legend rests under Indonesian waters, and that stashes of extra-ordinary technology, holographic codes, buried treasure, portals and alien gateways are hidden in plain sight, all over Bali.

Little Earth, he says, has seen many sophisticated cultures based on alien technology that have failed or been sabotaged through inter-galactic rivalries for the rights to exploit our natural and human resources.

There’s a lot more to it. There are good aliens and bad ones, of course.

The good ones are here to support peace and diversity on Earth; the bad ones are after gold and other energies including fear and anxiety, which they harvest like we reap petrochemical products at Kmart.

They’re out to create an enslaved human race that digs up the earth and pumps out lots of valuable stress aliens use to fuel their space ships. Some of the bad aliens are working in Earth as news readers, politicians, magazine publishers and real estate agents. The good ones were probably behind Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Che Guevara, Kate Bush and other revolutionaries who tried to remind humanity that on Earth it’s a crisis for love over war. And to just STOP digging everything up all the time.

“In short”, says Klaus, “Planet Earth is in trouble, and it’s nothing to do with the banks. The problem is much more serious than that, and the evidence of who we really are lies buried in Atlantis. And here on Bali.

Humans have lost their divinity and all kinds of hideous deals have been done by a kind of cosmic Monsanto that has, to put it briefly, made a mess of things around here.”

If you feel, for example, a sort of frustrated diss-ease, a sense that there’s just no way out of a loop of meaninglessness and that you were put on Earth for something a little different to what you’re currently enduring – you’re right. According to Klaus.

It’s all because you’ve had your double helixes short-fused and are on the brink of an evolutionary crisis whereby your very genes, each cell and even finer energies are finally tired of being hog-tied and exploited by aliens – and are about to overcome their engineering. It’s the tiniest revolution we’ve experienced and it’s likely to be messy.

But, the good news, he says, is all this could be the reclamation of our divinity on Earth as we, one by one and suddenly, realise that we are truly free and wonderful, and were never made to be slaves to anybody – including governments, desks, phones (yes, even iphones) and mortgages. It will be Heaven back on Earth. As it was supposed to have been. After a bit of a shakeup (think err….,  volcanic ash, oil spills, GFC, Pope shaming, epidemics of depression, violence and kids going mental and dying of peanut allergies).

The revolution will come not because of any one change around us – there will be a cataclysmic metamorphosis inside the cocoon of each human body.

And we will come out of our chains. And be transformed.  (and learn to keep bees, grow roses and coriander, attract musical frogs and listen to trees)… this is how the theories go and 2012 was the tipping point, according to Klaus.

He is convinced that ancient records, technologies and wisdom have been deliberately hidden all over the Earth, and the motherload lies buried on Atlantis while the great secrets of our alien lineage and the nasty secret intergalactic deals that keep us weak and confused and addicted to sugar are concealed in her legend.

As we’re driving along in chilly air conditioning headed for the grave site, I am listening to all of this and thinking, “Hmmm, now that is a funny thing”.

Klaus’s story is a version of the same theory I’ve heard again and again around the world – and not just from the mouths of hiphop poets, road dwellers, acid casualties and stoners. I’ve heard it from Park Rangers in Australia, from Aboriginal guides and teachers, from scientists, ethnobotanists, psychologists, neurologists, yoga teachers, shaman, musicians, biologists and a guy who makes felt slippers in Cusco, Peru. I’ve met teams with the finest of scientific minds from around the world actually studying the ground, the stars, the ancient books, the mind, the human cell, the brain, the skeleton, the Mayan calendar and the gene code who pretty much come up with the same sort of conclusion: a part of the puzzle is missing. There’s definitely more going on here than we know.

In the minds of consumers  big change came with September 11 and the GFC . But in the minds of those who watch the longer patterns even the GFC is one-part deliberate engineering of the system to keep people stressed and anxious, delaying a mass flowering of consciousness that has already begun to stir (see Eckhart Tolle and everybody else at Sounds True, rushing to make a fortune from this nudge in mass consciousness) and one-part massive clunk! event in the fabricated reality we’ve all been deceived into (see Matrix, Zeitgeist, Baraka, The Truman Show, Deepak Chopra, Doreen Virtue, and  just about every issue of New Scientist).

People whose job it has been to prove and embellish the standard world view of a lonely Earth on which human beings are designed to eat burgers and dig up all sorts of flammable stuff to trade with each other for flatscreen TVs and alliances of war are not all sitting in public service jobs on cushy pension rackets. Some of them are out in the field. And what they’re digging up out there sits very uncomfortably on the desks of their career mates in safe government jobs.

For example, the Inca ruins around Cusco, in Peru. You’ve heard of Machu Piccu? And perhaps of other Peruvian ruins, shaped like massive amphitheaters, precisely shaped stone doorways and underground hollows,  shadow catchers aligned precisely to the northern star and Pleiades at solstice, secret codes woven into walls, into fabrics, on carved boulders too massive for even today’s machinery to cut and move, the Nasca Lines?

All of these are evidence of pagan art and crop experimentation according to the official view – but according to the scientists I was with in Peru – sent there by French, American and other governments, on actual paid jobs – there’s not a shred of evidence to prove it.

The world’s leading ancient pollen analyst, who I met in Cusco, can say for a fact that around all of the massive ancient Inca formations, excavated in the Sacred Valley supposedly to test corn hybrids, there is not a single mote of pollen evidence in any of the soil to say a cob was ever grown there. “I can tell you one thing for sure,” he said.

“These places are more likely to have been used for ping pong tournaments than cultivation.

“What we’re looking at has more to do with space than corn.” And then he was whisked off somewhere by European geneticists to test for pollen traces in a mummy they’d dug up in Ecuador.

Here with Klaus the potential of the human experience on Earth, the magic of it, the mystery and drama all came rushing back to life for me and those urban worries about mortgage payments, whether my tv is sexy enough, pine-o-cleaning the bathroom were eclipsed by problems far more satisfying to the soul.

Safely back in the company of alien-fanciers and gene-splicers and grave diggers and gaze appreciators, I knew I was back on My Way and reconnected to my role in the world. Expedition member. Blonde side-kick of ageing eccentric. Listener and marveller of all the wonderful tales of the world.

We arrived at the alien-burial site under a heavy swathe of mountain cloud at midday. The Balinese policeman was thrilled to see us, decked out in full uniform as he guided us helpfully to three massive stone burial pods his workers had excavated and laid out under a thatched cabana.

The sarcophagi were gorgeous and spooky. While Klaus leaped straight to work staring closely, rapping on the walls in strategic places, pacing and looking very important, the Balinese were gently tending to ceremonial flowers laid out around the coffins, and keeping a respectful quiet near the remains of the dead.

Klaus played it cool but I knew he only had eyes for scraps of evidence of an alien master race. What he wanted were 9-foot-tall skeletons and a DNA sample: a bone, a tooth, a nail even, that he could send overseas to genetically screen and carbon-date the remains….

But it turned out he’d settle for  gold.

Things did not look good on the alien front. The coffins were clearly too short and Klaus, abandoning this great hope with as much moral torture as he was swatting the mosquitoes, made a request to see the booty. He’d told me our quarry nestled in these graves were likely not just alien standard issue, but alien royalty, because of word of the artifacts laid out among the bones. Klaus demanded a viewing and his blue eyes went sort of icebergish.

The sweet Balinese grave diggers lead us to a simple cement room in which the contents of the coffins had been respectfully laid out and were being repeatedly blessed by the local priests.

There in the simple light of afternoon was Klaus’ splendid second prize: ornately worked, dazzlingly bright, thousands-of-years-old gold. There were carved gems and ornate beads, incredible carved mandalas, spectacular ancient jewellery and ceremonial objects.

Among the treasures were gold bangles, gorgeously worked golden earrings, daggers and mysterious symbols on discs.

The bones were smashed to smithereens and kept protected together in red ritual cloth in respect and protection of the spirit of each body. So fierce was the Balinese dedication to protection of the ancestors attending those bones that they would not allow a pinch of DNA – not a tooth, nor a scrap of fabric, a splintered bone or earth fragment from the carefully wrapped remains of each of the ancient bodies – not even for hard cash.

We could see, from a jaw and several teeth in among the bones that the skeletons described mortal frames no larger than mine, but Klaus was alarmingly quick to make the most of his disappointment by making the landowner an offer too good to refuse for his entire property. Which his mysterious Chinese benefactors would take care of forthwith, he said.

I began to grow alarmed. I wondered if he was up to no good. But what can you do?

I whispered to the Balinese cop, now custodian for an entire graveyard of be-jewelled ancient Asiatic sea-faring royalty, by the look of the gold and ornaments, that he might think about guarding against smugglers.

He beamed at me radiantly, dismissed the thought, and lit more incense. I tried to imagine what was truly worth more to Klaus: the evidence of a spiritual politic between secret sects on Earth and an interplanetary master-race – or the prospect of mining his dead ends into the black-market. Which is a question I ask myself quite a lot lately, on the brink of the New Earth.