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Visiting the Land of the Stone Giants
by Dr. Karl P.N. Shuker
FATE Magazine :: July-August 2008

The travel guides were not joking when they described it as the world’s most remote inhabited locality—a minute, triangular speck in the middle of the South Pacific, almost equidistant from Tahiti to the west and Chile to the east, and more than 2,200 miles away from both. It had already taken me well over a day and many thousands of miles of air travel just to reach Chile from my home in England. I had another five hours of flying time across a blue expanse of ocean before I would reach my intended destination. But at last, just before midday on April 5, 2008, after poring over countless books and perusing untold television documentaries detailing its unique history and mysteries for as long as I could remember, I finally arrived, stepping down from the plane into the extraordinary land of the stone giants—or, as it is better known, Easter Island.

Also called Rapa Nui, and with a population of roughly 3,500, Easter Island has been an overseas territory of Chile since 1888, and was first brought to the attention of the Western world on Easter Sunday 1722 (hence its name), when it was formally discovered by Dutch explorer Ad­miral Jacob Roggeveen. Today, it has a single town, Hanga Roa. With dirt roads and dusty stores amid leafy groves and luxuriant blooming flora, it called to mind a 19th-century American frontier town that had somehow been dropped headlong onto a tropical island.

However, it is the pre-European contact history of Easter Island that makes it so fascinating and mystifying. This tiny island, less than 20 miles across at its widest, was once ringed by hundreds of enormous monolithic statues. It was also home to a thriving birdman cult, archaic stone houses representing the human womb, a bleak and almost treeless vista formerly swathed in dense forests, and a hieroglyphic script that continues to defy all attempts to decipher it.

Thanks to modern archaeological research, we now have a basic idea of Easter Island’s early history, although there is still much dispute concerning the finer points. It seems to have been colonized during the fourth century a.d. (though some claim as late as the seventh or even the eighth century) by Polynesian seafarers, probably from the Marquesas Islands, who would have encountered an island very different from the one modern visitors experience. Back in those days, the entire island was clothed in subtropical, moist, broad-leaved forest, which included among its many botanical endemics the world’s largest species of palm tree, Paschalococos disperta.

The elders and leaders of the independent kin-groups that emerged following colonization were greatly respected and admired. A tradition began whereby each clan would carve a stone statue of its leader and erect it upon a platform near the coast, but facing inward, in order to look over the clan as a symbol of protection. These stone statues became known as moai and the platforms were called ahus. The earliest known examples date back to 690 A.D.

Originally, the statues were little larger than their human models, but over the centuries they became ever bigger. By the 15th century, when production reached its peak, the statues had become colossal, over 30 feet tall in some cases, and unlike anything to be seen anywhere else in the world.

The statues were hewn from tuff, an igneous rock ash present within a huge volcanic crater called Rano Raraku in the island’s eastern half. This became a moai quarry where the statues were fully carved before being moved to their locations elsewhere on the island. Some even bore red topknots (pukao) on their heads, carved from scoria rock hewn from a quarry called Puna Pau, and their faces featured eyes of white coral and black obsidian.

There has been much dispute as to how these stupendous statues were moved, bearing in mind their size and immense weight, averaging 14 tons but sometimes considerably more. Some of the more intriguing suggestions include air-lifting by aliens, levitation by the harnessing of electromagnetic forces, and the statues walking by themselves using a special life force called mana...read the rest of this article exclusively in the July-August 2008 issue of FATE! Click here to buy this issue now.

FATE Magazine: True Reports of the Strange and Unknown