The famous Gold Museum of Bogotà (Colombia) contains the richest collection of pre-Columbian golden objects.

Among the hundreds of precious figurines, ritual objects, and golden jewels, a small collection of mysterious jewelry items occupies a special place.

Religious decorations from the pre-Columbian era

These “religious decorations”, as the museum staff prefers to call jewelry, were found in the tombs of the ancient culture of Tayron Indians, in Quimbaya.

Tayrons were highly developed people: skilled weavers, wore cotton clothes and incredible feathers, displaying flashy jewels, many of which are kept at the Gold Museum of Bogota.

Their civilization reached its peak of splendor some 500 years before the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadores. Among all the decorations kept in the museum, about 2 inches long (5 centimeters), depicting in stylized way animals, birds, insects and fish, some stand out for their unusual shape.

The small Tayron golden aircraft

So far no one has been able to identify any real animal that may have been represented by these decorations, but some in them see the representation of a jet plane.

If you look at them in profile, the similarity of the artifacts of Quimbaya, as they are also known, with a modern aero is even greater and surprising.

The triangular wings while they seem perfectly horizontal, if you look at them in the profile you can see how they are slightly bent downwards.

The use of triangular wings has spread around the 50s for high-performance aircraft and from the '80s even for gliders and ultra-light aircraft.

Note that almost all high-performance wing aircraft with delta wing products, except for the Concorde, were military aircraft.

Some details are surprising

Looking at the Quimbaya's “models of golden aircraft” it is impossible not to notice, between the wings and the tail, some planes that resemble the surfaces located along the exit edge of the wing of a modern jet airplane performing and performing the functions of elevons and ailerons.

Slightly curved forward, in the models are not attached to the wings but the fuselage, slightly higher than the horizontal axis of the “plane” and have a well-defined geometric shape.

As for the tail, made of a triangular shape and strictly perpendicular to the wings, this appears the most “mechanical” part of the little jewel and has absolutely no analogs in nature, appearing directly copied from the tail of a jet plane.

It is difficult that it is pareidolia

I know what you're thinking: it could just be one of many cases of pareidolia.

It may be, but in 1969 the mysterious “aircrafts” of Tayron Indians were examined by the known zoologist Ivan Sanderson, from an employee of the New York Air Navigation Institute, Dr. B. Poisley, by the aircraft designer Arthur Young and from the aerodynamics teacher J. Aldridge.

All the experts agreed that these objects seemed more mechanical than biological. Not only: subsequent computer simulations and the actual testing of copies of the “golden planes” in the wind tunnel showed how these possessed good flying characteristics!

Of course, despite many characteristics of the jewels corresponds to the hypothesis that they represent an airplane, some contradict this version.

There's something wrong with small gold planes

For example, the wings are in the “wrong” point: it should be moved closer to the tip of the model so that the center of gravity of the aircraft is on 25% of the average aerodynamic rope.

Even today, as it is not possible to identify with certainty the model of reference, scholars think that these decorations in gold represent amulets associated with the cult of creatures such as insects, fish or birds.

After all, a thousand years ago the Tayrons had to live in contact with nature rather than technology. Perhaps the original image of an animal, which was a totem of the local tribes, was transfigured into Tayron mythology in the image of a winged deity.

And yet so far no scholar has been able to find the existence of a cult associated with insects, fish or birds in the Tayron culture.

So these gold jewelry are amulets and represent deities that remember birds or animals with which the Tayron could be familiar, or are they rather the representation of a vehicle with which the Tayron could not come into contact, at least according to the official story? A definitive answer does not yet exist.