Rock Formation Zion                                                    click to enlarge

Another mystery solved. That’s what we were able to write in the Journal of Mysteries Solved, kept in our celebrated “Explorers and Natural Scientists Guys” room here at The Institute. This legendary room is the headquarters of a bunch of little-known, but famous in their own mind, group of world-renown experts that make up our division of CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayology dedicated to solving the mysteries of the ages. Very much like that upstart organization, The National Geographic Society, which has its own fancy-schmancy headquarters building in Washington does. Only we’re not some Johnny Come Lately bunch that’s only been around for a few hundred years like they like to brag about. No, we’ve been doing this stuff for a long time now. Those NatGeo guys will often come around here trying to sneak in and find out about our newest most secret projects we’re trying to get funding for just so they can get the jump on us and get stuff in their magazine before we can publish. We had that story of the Super-Collider and the Dangers of Inter-specie Mutation in the bag until they butted in. We’re out of sorts with them at the moment so enough said. We run them off as soon as we see them now. Headline grabbers.

Some of you folks who have been busy with your lives may not have heard of this new offshoot of science called CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayology. We’re proud to be able to state that we have the very first department here at The Institute. It is made up primarily of experts that couldn’t make up their minds about what their majors were and so they dabbled in a little bit in everything. We have the fields of Cryptology, Botany, Paleontology, Archeology, Welding, School bus repair, Home Healthcare advocology, Dog Walker certification, BB Stacking 101 and 102, T-shirt design for the Hooters restaurant chain, I guess that would come under Designology, Cosmetology, Zoology and “Etiquette In Line” at your local fast food restaurant (which isn’t really a science but we thought it would benefit humanity if we taught those blivets some manners. We’re looking at you, McDonalds.) represented here. Our motto is “Our experts may not know a lot but they know everything about what they do know”.

If you’ve been to Zion National Park you may have noticed this rock formation on the road to the Temple of Sinawava. At first glance it looks just like any other incredible fascinating rock formation but that’s what has hidden it mystery for so long. Beneath its gorgeous natural beauty it hides a tale of danger, destruction, doom and despair. Our CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayologists have unlocked its secrets by a little know technique called Imagineering. That where you see something unusual and say “hmm I wonder what caused that”, sit around, have a few beers, talk about it with your fellow CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayologists and come up with a theory that can not be disapproved and write a paper. Whole religions have been started like that so there’s precedent.

This particular rock formation is actually a major construct created by the predecessors of the Anasazi, a people lost in time. The class of this type of construct is called an anti or reverse pictograph because as you know a pictograph is ‘picked’ into the surface of the rock it is on while reverse or anti pictographing is made up by applying layers of stone on the surface of the rock canvas building it up until the desired image is created. It is hard to do, really hard, they are still trying to discover what the composition of the adhesive was that has allowed that applique to remain in place over the eons, let alone how a race of people barely 4½ feet tall and weighing less than 86 lbs. and couldn’t even speak English, could have lifted pieces of stone weighing about the same as a greyhound bus.

After several cases of a very strong English Ale called the Bishop’s Finger, which had been smuggled into the National park by a British member of our team, the theory began to emerge. There was a tremendous storm the likes of which had never been seen before, it swirled and twirled and rotated at an incredible rate destroying everything in its path. It uprooted trees, pulled gigantic rocks out of the earth, sucked an entire river dry and spit it out in the canyon it had just formed and then relocated a good portion of the unconsenting tribe to the nearby Sonoran desert several hundred miles away. That’s what made this a true tragedy. The storm took men, women, children, liberals, conservatives, 32nd Degree Masons, Avon ladies, members of the DAR, and others that may have been undocumented. The storm didn’t discriminate. If you were near you were gone.

This was a calamitous event, a storm of this type and magnitude had never been seen before. The people named it xqjtornadolix, which is one, if not the only surviving word, from their language. We now call it tornado because their name was impossible to pronounce and we’re scared spitless of them too. A simple little EF5 (Enhanced Fujita Scale) tornado with winds of over 200 mph will send us scampering for the storm cellar as soon as we see it. The storm that created Zion canyon was like a really big bunch of those EF5’s all rolled together.

We  think we finally got the jump on those NatGeo guys on this one. We’ll be publishing in Nature and Science magazine just as soon as they accept our paper and if we don’t run into any problems during the peer review process we’ll be pocketing that fat $300.00 dollar advance and waiting for the royalties to come streaming in. And best of all we were able to give you, our loyal readers, an advance look, not to mention the knowledge gained by seeing it first right here on our pages. No, you don’t need to thank us, sending us those large donations is thanks enough. Remember the Institute is here for you.