I first heard of the Missouri Mystery Mound at least ten to fifteen years ago on a now-defunct website. The website claimed the Mound was the Hall of Records, although it didn’t specifically say whose hall of records. The Atlanteans? The great mound building cultures of North America? Egyptian? Mayan? Or some race of peoples lost to time? I’m from Missouri, and if an ancient civilization’s hall of records sat under the soil of my state, I needed to know. Trouble is, I couldn’t find the man who said he had discovered it.

Until now.

I tracked down and interviewed Charles Teague, and found the answers to my questions were stranger than I’d ever hoped.

Teague grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and always had an interest in North American archeology; but it wasn’t until one night in the early 1990s listening to radio host Art Bell interview an American Indian shaman, that this interest became almost an obsession.

“(The shaman) was telling this story about how this Indian who had come to him while he was doing some exploring,” Teague said. “This Indian took him to this place back in the back woods to a hall of records under a mountain.”

The shaman told Bell this Indian guide showed him temples and 10,000-year-old artifacts under that mountain, but he didn’t know the location.

“They blindfolded him until they got there, then when he left so he couldn’t get back to it,” Teague said. “But he knew approximately where it was.”

At the time Teague was enrolled in a course on reverse speech technology and recorded this program to see if he could use reverse speech to find this hall of records. He was amazed at what he found.

“It’s just too weird for normal people to understand,” Teague said. “I recorded it, and said hell if this S.O.B. really went to a hall of records in Middle America, in reverse his mind was going to tell me where he went.”

After three hours of listening to that part of the program over and over in reverse, he pulled out words, some intriguing, others curious.

“He said ‘near the fault in America in the forest in the mountains’,” Teague said. “I said it was in the New Madrid fault. It couldn’t be anywhere else.” The New Madrid fault line runs through Mark Twain National Forest, which overlaps the Ozark Mountain range.

Then he caught words like “cactus,” “lake,” and “lizard,” which didn’t mean much. “I said, ‘Jesus, what’s the damn lizard?’ It didn’t make sense,” he said. “Most of it didn’t make sense. But here I was, 100 to 200 miles from it.”

Teague looked over maps, but got only headaches. “I was screwed, so I left it alone for a while.”

It wasn’t until he attended a presentation on historical American peacemakers that the Mound crept back into his thoughts. One peacemaker in particular caught his attention. Colonel George Morgan, who brokered a peace agreement between the revolutionaries and the American Indians during the War for Independence.

“After the Revolutionary War, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson gave him the job of mapping out the Spanish territories from the Mississippi River and Ohio Valley and all that,” Teague said. “He went to southeast Missouri and founded the city of New Madrid. Then he went back to New Jersey, built a fabulous estate, and lived like a millionaire the rest of his life.”

Something about that story bothered Teague, so he read a biography on Morgan. It only offered more questions. “He was a land speculator,” Teague said. “How did he become a millionaire? He didn’t get it from his family. He didn’t get it from the Continental Congress. I figured he must have gotten from the Indians.”

A picture of the Morgan coat of arms in the biography gave him a clue. “I looked at it and said, ‘damn, this ain’t right.’ I noticed in the lower left hand corner there was one box that didn’t make any damn sense. It was offset squares with Xs with something going through the middle. I started looking at it and thought, ‘son of a bitch. This was a grid map.’”

He saw hills, and a river. “I thought, ‘if this was a grid map, this was for one reason and one reason only – for his family. The only thing this could be is the location to where he got his fortune.’ I figured this must be the Hall of Records.”

After spending days pouring over topographical maps at the University of Memphis, he found a spot in hilly region of Mark Twain National Forest near a lake. Forest, fault, mountain, lake. But the hard part of his journey was just beginning.

“Finding something on a grid map and going into the forest and trying to find something are totally different,” he said.

Teague, his wife, and daughter drove to from Tennessee to Missouri and searched a small section of Mark Twain National Forest. “In 100 degrees we went into the backwoods and walked around to find it. We spent most of the day going back in the swamps and we found nothing.” After one fruitless day, they went home. But Teague wasn’t finished.

“I got my brother and a friend of mine and we made another trip up there.”

It took two more trips with his brother and local American Indians, but Teague believes he found it.

“We found a circular path, and as we were walking back along this long gulley, and my brother said, ‘hey look up at that rock formation, it looks like a lizard.’ Damn. That’s what I was looking for. A lizard.”

The ascended the hill and found caves – caves with ancient carvings, one Teague calls The Wall. He was certain he found the location of the Hall of Records. “The main thing was the Wall with the giant skull carved into it,” Teague said. “It has all the esoteric carving in it. An ancient god, (the planet) Saturn. There was an entrance there too, but we didn’t open it, or we’d be dead. Whoever’s watching it was there.”

As the group walked back to their vehicle, two truckloads of men cut them off from the front, and rear. “Everybody was carrying all kinds of guns,” Teague said. “They stopped and looked at us and wanted to know what we were doing. We said we had a Cherokee.” The men allowed Teague’s group to leave, but he got an impression as to who they were. “It’s meth labs and drugs. What else could it be? I don’t think they’re smart enough to know what’s going on back there.”

They didn’t scare off Teague. Much later, after attending a UFO convention in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, he detoured into the Mark Twain National Forest to take a friend to the Mound. “I took him there and showed him around,” he said. “He wouldn’t go now.”

As Teague showed his friend some of the anomalous stone works of the Mound, two men appeared from nowhere and invited them to follow them to explore a nearby cave. Teague agreed, but when the men left, Teague and his friend walked to their vehicle and drove away. He knew if he went to that cave, they would have killed him. “The thing about the Wall. I thought something was important about it. Whatever the Wall is they protect it for some reason. I think that’s where the entrance is.”

Teague says carved depictions of an ape, an elephant, and lion show an African influence at the site, but a carving of a humanoid reptilian points to something from other stars. “It’s a reptilian god. It’s the god they worship,” he said. “You’ve got lions, apes, dragons, aliens, you can’t make heads or tails of this place.”

But the reptilian isn’t the only extraterrestrial carving Teague found. He claims an aerial photograph of the Mound shows a gray alien pointing to a star is carved into the landscape. “That was a cave entrance,” he said. “If you go into that cave you’ll find out the secret of the star where (he) came from. The Corps of Engineers built a new road and the cave is no longer there. I think the other entrance is at the Shaft.”

The Shaft is a vertical stone well shrouded by trees. Once Teague went down into the Shaft fifteen feet, but it was blocked with debris. Unfortunately, the Shaft is no longer accessible. “The next time we went up, they’d built a block over it. Somebody knew we were back there.”

Fearing for his safety, he hasn’t been back. “Before my last trip I’d sent an email to the Army Corps of Engineers and told them of the giant skull and Wall and asked what they knew about it,” Teague said. The man he contacted seemed interested in Teague’s news – too interested. “He said, ‘this thing’s great. Get your family and all your friends and take us up through the forest and take us to this Wall. I said, ‘sure.’ I’ll never go back there again. I know exactly what was planned. I could see the headline now. ‘UFO cult comes into the backwoods of Missouri and commits suicide.’ You could see where that was going.”

Although Teague believes the man he contacted at the Army Corps of Engineers knows of the site, he stops short of claiming it is a government cover up. “Hell, if I know about it, somebody knows about it. I don’t think it’s the government,” he said. “I think the people in the backwoods have been protecting this place since people have been there. I think it may be a pagan cult from long ago.”

That cult may have ancient Christian roots. Teague has found symbols of an elephant, owl, a ram, and a man, in aerial photographs. “There’s a bearded man inside the ram’s head, like a king. It has to do with a lamb and a king and it would make him a shepherd king. The owl is the sign of wisdom,” he said.

Teague is convinced the bearded man is King David. “David, the shepherd king, allowed the Arc of the Covenant to be taken to Ethiopia. In ancient times they took it on a boat in Ethiopia, around the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi River, and buried it in the Hall of Records in the Missouri Mystery Mound. “I believe the Arc of the Covenant is buried at the Missouri Mystery Mound. That’s my theory. In antiquity someone carved out the mounds because that’s where the Arc of the Covenant was to be taken.”

But who carved the Mound? Teague thinks the identity is carved into the landscape of the Mound itself, the gray alien pointing to a star. “Not only did they built it and carve it 20,000 years ago, they go back and re-carve it over and over again,” he said. “Carve mountains and valleys? We couldn’t do that. It’s not natural; it’s alien formed. I’m convinced at that.”

However, the photographs of the Wall, depictions of peoples, animals, and beings carved into the stone of the Mound modern archeology would say are impossible, haven’t attracted the attention of academics.

“To me this is the most sacred mythological site in America that nobody knows about. There’s some sort of energy there that keeps it quiet,” he said. “You’d think there’d be archeologists all over the damn country wanting to investigate the place, but nobody wants to go up there and look at it.”

And they probably never will, even if they ask Teague. He doesn’t plan to go back. “This place is so fantastic, and I am not even seeing anything but the McDonald’s sign. We’re not even seeing the inside of McDonald’s, the inside of the mountain. Good lord. But if I went back in there, I’d be killed,” Teague said. “If you go up there you’d better go with a big-assed guns. You’d better be armed.”