Aliens!

By Khaled H Abdul Malak -

kamkam@omantel.net.om -

WHEN I was a child I used to watch science fiction movies featuring UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) but here in Oman I saw many UCOs! (Unidentified Carved Objects).

Late March this year I went with a friend of mine, Marc Pops Avery, near the village of Al Hamra in Al Dakhiliyah Governorate to check few carvings I saw many years ago on one boulder known locally as Hassa Bani Salt. We left our house in Al Mawaleh around 8 O’clock in the morning and drove direction Nizwa. After having passed Tanuf , at the round-about we turned right direction Al Hamra and we stopped to check the remains of a fort named Qalaat al Mahmood on the right side of the road. Pushed uphill by our curiosity we hiked up the mount behind the old castle to reach a plateau from where we had a nice view of the whole area.

We saw a small village (Al Dhabbaniyah) in the wadi that we could not see from the road as it is hidden behind the mountain and decided to go and meet the people there and ask if they encountered any inscriptions or carvings in the neighbourhood.

No need to tell that we were invited to have coffee and eat fruits and dates like anywhere else in this country. Matar al Hattali, a mid-age man from the village, told us that there are many carvings and drawings in many places around their hamlet. He insisted to drive us with his own car along with his brother Suleiman to show us the illustrations he mentioned.

First he took us to a place where we saw a drawing featuring a “humanoid”. The weird thing is that the design was very high on the cliff, that we wondered how the ‘Artist’ managed to reach the place to do his artwork!

The legend says that the people then were very tall which gives the explanation! Then Matar took us to another site in a wadi where we could see different kinds of drawings and carvings, some of them looking real old and others most probably recent representing hunters and different kinds of animals.

Without any doubt the most interesting ones are the ones we saw on the so-called Hassa Bani Salt, a huge boulder measuring perhaps 6m in height. The  ‘creatures’ figuring on the rock have a very funny shape with their triangular heads that reminded me of the film ET in 1982 (The Extraterrestrial). We saw seven of these ‘ETs’ carved on this boulder.

Once we finished our Paparazzi session our new friend drove us and showed us a fantastic falaj system called Al Mahmood in the area. In some places the water channel is built perhaps 2m below the ground level and covered with huge cuboid stones that we wondered how people managed to move them and place them so perfectly with the tools available in the old days.

It was almost two O’clock when we finished our archaeological visit and could not refuse to have lunch with Matar and Suleiman at their house in Al Dhabbaniyah.

A few days later and totally by coincidence I saw pictures on the Net taken in Armenia featuring creatures looking exactly like the ones we saw on the boulder near the village of Al Hamra. People in Armenia think that they represent Aliens who have visited our planet thousands of years ago!!!

Sunday 08th, June 2014 / 19:39 Written by Khaled H Abdul Malak in Features