Ancient Aliens – A Spaceship Made of Stone: Japan’s legends about the gods or Kami as they call them are being told all over Japan. Many places all over the country feature extraordinary large memorials for these “Gods” which have uncommon architecture and stories.
“A Spaceship Made of Stone,” focuses on the Ishi-no-Hōden (“Stone Treasure-House”) megalith in Japan, a large roughly cubic rock carved out of the side of a hill between 500 and 700 CE, and it is said to hold the spirit of the deity of the Jinja Shinto shrine in which it sits.
It weighs about 500 tons, and its most impressive feature is the clever way its base was carved into a narrow pedestal to give the illusion that it floats above the water atop which it sits. The monument has been known to the West since at least 1832, when Philipp Franz von Siebold, a German who disguised himself as a Dutchman in order to sneak into an isolationist Japan, published a picture of it in the first volume of his Nippon.
Ancient Aliens is an American television series that premiered on April 20, 2010, on the History channel. Produced by Prometheus Entertainment in a documentary style, the program presents hypotheses of ancient astronauts and proposes that historical texts, archaeology, and legends contain evidence of past human-extraterrestrial contact. The show has been widely criticized by historians, cosmologists, archaeologists and other scientific circles for presenting and promoting pseudoscience, pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology.
Ancient Aliens – A Spaceship Made of Stone
The Ishi-no-Hoden is a huge megalithic stone which is located in the town of Takasago in Hyogo prefecture (near Himeji).
The stone’s creation is attributed to the Jomon civilization (the earliest known pre-historic human civilization, which is also connected to the oldest discovered pottery).
The stone is 5.6 meters high, 6.5 meters wide and 7.5 meters deep with a weight of 500 tons. This makes the stone larger than any of the stones used in the Great Pyramid of Giza; the largest of which was 80 tons while the typical large base stones of that pyramid were 6-10 tons.
The Hoden stone (“hoden”, literally means “treasure mansion”) was carved out of the surrounding mountainside (the mountain is called “Hodenyama”). The stone exists while the surroundings were quarried away, which is different from other famous megaliths (such as Stonehenge, the Easter Island Moai statues, or the Aswan granite of the Giza pyramid) which were are mysterious before of the logistical challenges of transporting the stones.
Later Japanese civilization developed in the Kansai area and a Shinto shrine, Ooshiki, was built to venerate the stone. Oshiki shrine has been built around the stone and honors the god Onamuchi-no-kami (better known as “Okuninushi”), the god of nation-building, farming, medicine and ruler of the unseen world of magic. According to the shrines Shinto mythology, the god Okuninushi set out on a challenge to build a castle but during the first night some local spirits used the distraction to rebel, so Okuninushi left the project unfinished as it is seen today.
