February 18, 1977 Plain of Jars

Yonaguni Island, the westernmost inhabited island of the Japanese archipelago, lies about 60 miles across the straits of Taiwan. The place is a popular dive destination, due to (or possibly despite) a large population of hammerhead sharks.

In 1987, divers discovered an enormousstone formation,with angles and straight lines seemingly too perfect to have been formed by nature. If this “Yonaguni Monument”is in fact a prehistoric stone megalith, it would have to have been carved 8,000 to 10,000 years ago when the area was last dry, radically changing current ideas about prehistoric construction.

A map of the world is dottedwith such ancient stone megaliths, from Easter Island in the South Pacific to the Carnac Stones of France, and the stone spheres of Costa Rica.Among all of them, there is no story more mysterious, or more tragic, than the Plain of Jars.

Deep in the heart of the Indochinese peninsula of mainland…