Image by Elmar Buchner.
Call Steven Spielberg! We have the perfect pitch for him. OK, so there’s a meteorite. It falls to Earth in the desert sometime, oh, 10 or 20,000 years ago. Later, locals use the rock to carve it into a Buddha statue. THEN THE NAZIS TAKE IT. But Indiana Jones finds it! And the descendants of the aliens who rode in on it use it to finally connect to the internet on their home planet, and everyone lives happily ever after with Abraham Lincoln.
Here is the best part: It is based on a true story. There is an iron Buddha statue, just under 10 inches high, that has now been confirmed to be made from a meteorite.
It’s unclear if the Nazis knew that this Buddha was a SPACE BUDDHA was when they took it home to Germany. Maybe they just took it because it had a swastika on it (the good kind). Maybe they just liked taking things from people. But the people they stole it from likely had some idea of how cool it was:
In Tibet, meteoritic iron was long known as namchag, or “sky iron”, says Buchner’s team, suggesting the locals were aware of the origins of the unusual material.
Westerners, of course, had to steal it, unsteal it, wait a few decades, and use science on it to prove what the Tibetans knew all along. Science says: It’s a meteorite! Cool, right? Steven, call us.
