Burdick’s early investigations in the 1940s put him in contact with local Paluxy character Al Berry. Berry was in possession of a number of individual slabs cut from the riverbed with the curious footprints on them.

He and local storekeeper, Jack Hill, signed an affidavit stating that they had gone to Glen Rose in the autumn of 1938 to retrieve some ‘human’ and ‘cat’ tracks that were in danger of being destroyed by the construction of a small dam on the Paluxy river. The slabs later came into Burdick’s possession, with one of them subsequently being named after the new owner; the ‘Burdick Print’ (right).

Burdick then published an article about the prints in the Seventh Day Adventist magazine, ‘Signs of the Times’ in which he stated that the Paluxy riverbed contained clear dinosaur and contemporary human footprints. Burdick’s interest wasn’t geological; as a creationist he considered the dinosaur and human footprints as irrefutable proof that evolution had not occurred, and that the fossil record was merely formed during Noah’s flood. This article generated a new wave of interest (5).

The years passed, and in the early 1960s the existence of the Paluxy mantracks became more widely known when photographs of the loose carvings previously owned by Al Berry and Jack Hill were published in the book ‘The Genesis Flood’ by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris (6).

A further creationist book, ‘Man’s Origin, Man’s Destiny’ followed in 1975 (7) and shortly after its publication, the tracks came to the attention of Stanley Taylor, a Baptist minister who owned a film company, ‘Films For Christ.’ Taylor made enquiries of the tracks, and his research led him to produce and narrate a 16mm film entitled ‘Footprints In Stone’ in 1972.

However even this was not the full extent of the actual number available, for the farmer who claimed he had perpetrated the hoax showed Cabrera a further 100,000 that remained in tunnels near the coastal mountains. It quickly became apparent that the farmer could not possibly have carved the stones himself, casting absolute doubt on the validity of his confession.

As Cabrera continued to befriend the farmer, he learned that he had only been released from prison after signing the confession that the stones had come from the hills but that he had been carving them himself. (It was either that or remain in prison for the remainder of his life for selling ‘government possessions.’)

Many of the stones now feature in Dr Cabrera’s own museum where they are divided into topical sections: Medicine, astronomy, astronautics, dinosaurs, ancient continents, flora, fauna, planetary races of people and mechanical airships with men leaving Earth.

Some claim, as does Cabrera himself, that the Ica Stones are an ancient library left by a forgotten culture, others continue to dismiss the entire collection of stones as an elaborate hoax. The hoax theory appears the most obvious solution, particularly as there is a signed confession to that effect, yet it is impossible to believe that one man could have hand engraved the hundreds of thousands of the stones known to exist.

That would mean the farmer had carved around seven stones a day for forty years without a break (and without any time left to sell them). It would also mean that this uneducated man had knowledge of all the areas of the carvings he had made and quite why he should have carved an extra 100,000 (many times more than he ever sold) has never been accounted for. For more information click here.

Then there is another fact that appears to dismiss the hoax theory, for the stones were first seen and recorded in 1525 by Jesuit missionary Father Simon who accompanied Francisco Pizarro (left), the sixteenth-century European explorer and conqueror of the Inca Empire. (Samples were later shipped to Spain in 1562.)

Why then would the farmer sign such a confession? Obviously he did not want to remain in custody and by signing the declaration, the Government allowed him to continue selling the stones from his cart in order to supplement his already meagre income. He would have been foolish to have decided otherwise.

The hoax theory has, however, stuck and no serious investigator has revisited the Ica Stones mystery although the stones themselves can be inspected at Cabrera’s museum.

If Cabrera’s views are correct, and on balance they appear to fit the known facts, then a comprehensive picture appears to be developing; carvings on stones in Peru, carvings of toxodons at Tiahuanaco, mantracks in Texas, pictures of dinosaurs in Oregon and elsewhere in America. Yet if our accepted view of history is to be revised, there would need to be considerable further evidence in support of such a revision. And there is.