[link to otherworldmystery.com]

High in the Andes mountains there was once a fierce tribe of people that fought the Inca rule. They were known as the the Chachapoya or people of the clouds as the region they occupied was at such a high elevation that the clouds frequently covered the steep mountain slopes. Weakened by fighting with the Inca, by fighting in the Inca civil wars, and then by helping the Spanish against the Inca, the Chachapoya were wiped out by the diseases brought by the Spanish conquistadors.

There are some very curious things about the tribe that leave anthropologists, archeologists and everyone else interested in discovering more about their origins and history. First, Spanish accounts called them the tallest and lightest-skinned people of the region. Secondly, their culture – art, architecture, musical instruments, ceramics and clothes – seem to be very distinct when compared to other groups of the area. Third, this tribe mummified their dead, leaving hundreds of mummies and sarcophagi in the caves, nooks and crannies of the peaks of their former region of the Andes which are still being found and studied. These details have led some to speculate that the tribe could have perhaps come from a whole different wave of migration than the rest of the Amerindian people populating the Americas at that time. Could they have been descended from the people of the Indian legends such as Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl or Kulkulcan, the light-skinned gods, who arrived from across the ocean?