By Robert Scheer
Marca Huasi is an enigmatic site about 90 kilometers northeast of Lima, Peru that has been described as an ancient mystery school, an inter-dimensional portal, and a gathering site for UFOs. Alternative spellings are Marcahuasi, Marca Wasi and Marcawasi.
In 1997, I visited numerous sacred sites in Peru with Mark Amaru Pinkham, author of Return of the Serpents of Wisdom
You won’t find Marca Huasi in most travel guidebooks, or even on maps of Peru. The local villagers are afraid of it, and the archaeological establishment cannot explain the bizarre, seemingly impossible creations on this high plateau in the Andes. There are stone carvings of human heads of all the different races. There are 25-foot tall carvings of animals, many of which are not native to the area, including a polar bear, African lion, walrus, alligator, camel, and stegosaurus, dated by a geologist at more than 10,000 years old. Even more incredible are reports of UFOs and strange beings who, some of the locals believe, come from inside the earth or are materializing from other dimensions.
When Jerry Wills first heard about Marca Huasi he knew it was a place he had to investigate, but it took nearly five years of leading tour groups to Peru before he finally took an expedition there in September, 1997. It was Jerry’s Peruvian associate, Eric, who first tantalized him with amazing stories. Eric and his partner Edith live in Lima, where Eric is well known for his work in paranormal research. They have taken several individuals and small groups to Marca Huasi, and from some of these journeys they came home frightened and puzzled. Jerry vividly remembers three remarkable incidents Eric and Edith described to him.
It’s hard to get to Marca Huasi. The road from Lima ends at the village of San Pedro de Costa, 10,000 feet high in the Andes. From there it’s a vertical rise of a further 3,000 feet along a steep, rocky trail. By horseback the trek takes at least three hours, if you can get someone from the village to help you. Only two old men, called CB and Pedro, seem willing to go up to the Marca Huasi plateau, and they don’t make the arduous climb on horseback but walk it in leather sandals. CB and Pedro are shamans, and it’s likely they know much more about Marca Huasi than they’ll ever reveal to outsiders. Over the years, CB and Pedro have gotten to know and trust Eric and Edith.
Eric’s first frightening incident involved a tourist from Austria who somehow felt he had to go to Marca Huasi and stay for six months. Eric agreed to bring him supplies and check in on him during his six-month stay. When he went up the last time to retrieve the man, Eric saw him in the distance waving. Eric motioned for him to come on and, as he waited on the plain, it seemed like the man was moving toward him rapidly. It wasn’t until the Austrian had gotten closer that Eric realized the man’s feet were not touching the ground. He was levitating through the air a few inches above the surface! This scared Eric, who went back to camp and waited with CB and the others. When the Austrian arrived he was acting like nothing had happened, although his eyes seemed different. They all walked (nobody levitated) down the mountain and back to the village.
As Jerry relates the story, Edith said she didn’t believe Eric when he told her what he had seen. At least she hoped he was pulling her leg. Even though she had heard of strange forces at work on the mountain, Edith is the kind of person who has to see something to believe it. It was perhaps a year later when she became a believer. Another tourist had been staying at Marca Huasi for three months, and it was Edith’s turn to retrieve him. When she saw him, he was on the far side of a deep ravine, standing on top of a carving of a giant sea turtle. When Edith waved, he stepped off the turtle’s head and floated across the ravine toward her! Edith burst into frightened tears. Even today, Jerry says, if you talk to her about the incident, her face goes pale, she shakes her head and says, “I just don’t know how this could be.”
An even more frightening incident happened when Edith was at Marca Huasi with a small group of people. One of the men was off exploring when he thought he saw a woman from the group walking among the rocks, so he went to meet her. As he turned a corner, he suddenly saw the legless torso of a woman floating in the air. She had long, dark hair and the face of a cat!
“The guy just about went nuts,” Jerry said. “He was scared to death. They had to take him and everybody else down the mountain right then and there. He was so terrified that he scared everybody else including Edith. I don’t know for sure, but from what Edith was telling me it seemed like this thing with the face of a feline either snarled at him or talked to him or something that really frightened the man. He just couldn’t handle it.”
Expedition to Marca Huasi
Jerry finally decided to offer a trip to Marca Huasi as an extension to his Great Expeditions tour of the Amazon jungle, Machu Picchu, Cuzco and other more mainstream sites of Peru in August 1997. Unlike most of his tours that are fully planned, this would be a “fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants” expedition. Jerry wasn’t sure what they might encounter. With Jerry would be six companions plus some Peruvian helpers.
They departed from Lima on a morning in early September in a private bus loaded with gear and camping supplies. At San Pedro de Costa, they left the bus, loaded the equipment onto horses and rode up into the mountains. It was a bright, sunny, late afternoon when they arrived at Marca Huasi. While the porters set up camp, Jerry and his group marveled at a stone formation known as The Face of Humanity. It’s a thumb-shaped rock about the height of a three-story building, sticking up in front of a cliff. It looks like the face of a young European man, about 20, gazing up towards the eastern sky. As the sun moves from east to west, his face changes unmistakably. Over the course of the day, he ages in about ten-year increments until, at the end of the day, he has become an 80-year old man looking at the setting sun in the west. “It is the damnedest thing you ever saw,” Jerry says.
The group would be at Marca Huasi for three days and two nights. Because of the 13,000-foot altitude, the cloudless skies and the dry mountain air, it was easy to get too much sun. People had to be reminded to put on hats, sunscreen and lip balm to avoid serious burns.
The Mysteries Begin
Their campsite was between the Face of Humanity and a cliff. When you stand with your back to the cliff and look towards the Face of Humanity, beyond it, across a ravine, is the giant sea turtle. This and the other giant rock carvings are not simply rocks that vaguely resemble animals and faces. They have obviously been deliberately carved, though they are now very weathered. Although the plateau gets little rain, they seem eroded by water. Their age is a mystery, which deepens when you consider the puzzle of the stegosaurus. The triangular plates on the back of this sculpture are not the same stone from which the rest of the prehistoric dinosaur has been carved. Testing has revealed they had been “glued” into place by some unknown cement. Furthermore, how could pre-Incan Peruvians even know what a stegosaurus looked like? There is a carving of a double Sphinx, a hippo-like creature which resembles an Egyptian god, a gathering of penguins and walruses and a mummy whose features bear a startling resemblance to the face on Mars!
As their first day at Marca Huasi was ending, the clear mountain sky began to reveal the most amazing display of Southern hemisphere stars anyone had ever seen. Sitting around the campfire on that cold night, some of the group got the feeling they were being watched. “We knew there was nobody up there but us,” Jerry said. “I did scout the surrounding area at one point. I went on top of the cliff and looked around the camp just to prove to myself there was no one else there. If I’m being watched I have a very keen sense of it, but I didn’t see anyone.”
Because the stars were so beautiful one woman decided to sleep with her head outside her tent. At about 2:00 am, she saw a brilliant white light, like an enormous searchlight, illuminating an area just be-yond their camp. She said it was “lit up like Las Vegas.” The light was on for just a little while, then it went off, so she went back into her tent and zipped it up against the cold. About 30 minutes later, footsteps were heard walking on the gravel, as if at least two people were walking among the tents. Everyone assumed it was one of the group getting up to use the “porta-potty”, but when they talked about it at breakfast the next morning, it seemed that none of them had left their tents all night!
An even stranger series of events had happened during that same night. It started at a little after 2:30 am with Jerry’s CD player. The unit includes a pair of portable speakers and has a locking function so you can’t bump it on and accidentally run down the batteries. Before going to bed Jerry had put in a CD he wanted to play the next morning (Enigma Two) and he is sure he then locked it securely. But as he was asleep in his tent, the stereo suddenly came on. Everyone in camp heard Enigma Two playing at full volume.
As Jerry was jolted awake by the music, his surprise turned into shock when selections from another disk, Enigma Three, started to play interspersed with Enigma Two. Jerry’s stereo only holds one compact disk! Shocked, Jerry lay motionless listening to the music. “As odd as it sounds now,” he said “I felt there might be some other force at work. Perhaps this was happening to deliver a message to us. Then, as the last song was near its end, the music moved from inside my tent to outside. It proceeded across camp, up over the cliff and then it was gone. When I checked my CD player it was still locked and hadn’t been on. And the disk inside was Enigma Two, even though we had all heard cuts from Enigma Three playing.
“The next thing that happened, it’s now roughly 2:45 in the morning and I’m laying there with my eyes closed, tired and ready to sleep. It’s as if I went into a dream. Suddenly, there was a brilliant amber light in my eyes. Then proceeding outside, I’m looking around and I can see the camp and the people and I see the tents are all open. My next view is from above, looking down at Marca Huasi and I’m being told by someone about this feature called ‘The Finger of God’. All of Marca Huasi is bathed in this amber light. Then it was over.
“The next morning I wake up thinking, ‘What a dream that was!’ It wasn’t until breakfast, when I was checking my watch, that I saw my altimeter had recorded, at about 2:48 in the morning, my altitude had gone up from 13,000 feet to 14,000 feet, and then back down to 13,000 feet again about ten minutes later.” Jerry explained that his Casio watch has an altimeter on it, along with a thermometer and a barometer, so he can maintain a daily record of the altitude and the weather.
Weird Dreams
At breakfast the next morning, everyone was talking about their weird “dreams” in which they had seen the amber light and were shown features of the Marca Huasi area. It was as if everyone had the same dream but each remembered different parts of it. Two women had “dreamed” about the entrance to a cave and underground temples, so they asked Eric to accompany interested group members to look for it while Jerry and another member of the expedition explored in another direction.
“Actually, CB had told us about the cave,” Jerry said, “but I wasn’t sure where it was located. It’s a burial chamber from about 1,000 years ago. CB said there were pre-Inca human bones at the entrance.
“As we were walking, a large Andean hawk came down out of the sky and lit on a stone near us, called out to us, and then flew off to the next rock and waited till we got close. Then it flew off to another rock and another, continually leading us around the side of the plateau, until we saw the Finger of God. When we saw the Finger of God and realized we were being led to it, the hawk flew off. We looked up and overhead were a male and female condor circling. That, in itself, is a remarkable sight as their wingspan is nearly twelve-feet. Just then we saw the others who were hiking, so we went over and met met up with them. We never did explore the Finger of God.
“Eric had described it as an unusual vertical outcropping of white rock about thirty feet tall, pointing straight up to the sky. He had told me that it’s hollow inside and that you can stand in the center. Apparently when you do, you feel an energy pouring through you that connects you with the sky. If you stand there long enough, I was told, something remarkable would happen, although Eric was uncertain exactly what I should expect. But by the time we got close we had been climbing up and down the mountain all morning and we were pretty tired. It was getting late and we didn’t have enough water with us, so we didn’t go any further.”
The Secret Cavern
Later that afternoon, CB revealed some of the secrets of Marca Huasi. He had intended only to tell Jerry, who insisted that the entire group should know. This knowledge involved the mysterious stone figures and passageways to the inner earth. Inside Marca Huasi is a temple complex, a large underground cavern where CB and his people would perform rituals, after which beings from other dimensions would materialize and instruct them. “In fact,” Jerry said, “these beings had been there as recently as a few weeks before my arrival, and told them that I was going to arrive!”
Jerry seriously considered going into the cavern, but reluctantly decided not to. “I really wasn’t prepared. I’ve done cave explorations with the Cave Research Foundation and I know that to go into any cave you’re not familiar with you should at least take rope and high-powered flashlights. Although CB and Pedro told me it was safe, I didn’t want to take my tour group members in there, and they would have felt slighted it I’d gone in without them.” Jerry had a good reason to be wary. He knew of another group who had been lost in the legendary tunnel system which supposedly runs throughout South America. It was in 1954 when a group of 14 men from Europe went into a cave in the mountains above Cuzco and never came out. The Peruvian government sent in a team of 20 fully equipped men to find them. They never returned. So they sent in another team of ten men to look for everyone else and they never came out either!
Fortress in the Clouds
Toward the end of the second day at Marca Huasi, CB took the group to an odd place at the far end of the plateau called the Fortress. It’s a complex made of granite stones, carefully stacked and interlaced to form rooms. There are tunnels that connect one area to another. The construction is not as solid as Machu Picchu and is much older. The Fortress is where you go, according to the locals, when you want to have contact with ETs. “Their legends tell us,” Jerry says, “this is one of several places the visiting gods would live after returning from the stars. It is somewhat similar to the cliff-dwellings in the American southwest, only built for very short people – or perhaps other beings.” The view from the Fortress is to the west, and when you look down you see a dramatic vista, a mile below you, the peaks of mountains poking up through clouds.
On the way back to camp, Jerry and his group were shown an area known both in Quechua and Spanish as the Star Gate. “It’s basically an outcropping of stone that looks like sort of a cross between a pyramid and a bell,” Jerry said. “All around in a horseshoe formation are smooth stone walls that resemble melted candle wax. They’re curved inward very similar to the Stonehenge stones, except these are natural outcroppings. They surround the central pyramid or bell-shaped structure, which is large enough so you could camp on it. The top half of the surrounding cliff wall looks as though it’s been burned. According to CB, Pedro, Eric and Edith, large flying saucers appear here. Their energy scorches the stone. They see them quite frequently!” As the group was returning to camp, they realized that the Star Gate area was the same place where they had seen the brilliant white light on the first night. Had that light come from a UFO or some traveler from another dimension?
Their last night at Marca Huasi was uneventful, and on the morning of the third day it was time to pack up and go back to San Pedro de Costa. Jerry said, “They were all ready to leave. At the same time, they were also anxious to come back, because their field of vision had widened to a degree that they finally saw what was there. I did too.”
Great Ancient Mystery School
Jerry believes Marca Huasi was one of the great Ancient Mystery Schools of the Earth. It might be a place where the Veracocha used to teach ancient mysteries to initiates, or it could be a place that only those who were guided there could ever find. “It’s kind of like Shangri-La in some ways,” he said. “When you first arrive, it seems to be nothing more than a strange-feeling, high mountain plateau, but the longer you stay the more you see. It’s really desolate and strewn with huge stones, but at one time, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago, it must have resembled a museum of different species found on this planet. Now it is aged and worn by the forces of time and we are left with an enigma. The longer you remain the more aware you become that not only was this place designed intentionally but that the forces responsible are still present. You begin to understand the possible connection we must all have to those ancient legends of Gods from the stars and you realize suddenly what is really there. In the time we were at Marca Huasi, our perceptions of the place and ourselves changed dramatically.”
“I think there’s something really, really odd and wonderful going on there,” Jerry said. “I know I’ll never have all the answers, but I’d sure like to have more answers than I do now.”
About Jerry Wills
An internationally known lecturer, humanitarian and healer, Jerry Wills has traveled through North, Central and South America in search of lost cities, forgotten civilizations, paranormal phenomena and the connection between Earth and the stars. Marca Huasi is located near Marca Pomacocha, approximately 90 kms northeast of Lima, but Jerry will not reveal precisely how to get to the plateau, because the site is unprotected. The cave, with its pre-Incan human remains, mummies and skeletons, is vulnerable and must remain safe from looting. For more information visit www.jerrywills.com.
Credits:
Marcahuasi Face of Humanity photo by Arístides Herrera Cuntti licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Marcahuasi camping photo by By Martintoy – shot by myself, CC BY 3.0, Link
Marcahuasi Fortress photo by Yurileveratto licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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