This article was first published August 20, 2026 at expeditionsocietycoffee.substack.com.
No matter how tightly he hugged the base of the mountain, Waldemar Julsrud just couldn’t escape the noonday sun. He couldn’t remember it ever being this hot in his native Germany, but he reminded himself that he wasn’t in the fatherland anymore. He was in Mexico. Guanajuato, Mexico, to be precise. And the middle of Mexico in the middle of July was a different experience altogether. The nearly 70 year old amateur archaeologist adjusted the collar on his shirt and pulled the brim of his sweat soaked hat an inch lower to shade his eyes. When he did, he spotted something half buried at his horse’s feet, its shape distinctive enough to earn his attention. Julsrud immediately dismounted and started digging. One ceramic figurine after another came out of the clay that day, a startling discovery to be sure, and one that has confounded every archeologist and anthropologist that has examined the exhumed collection since.
The German had every reason to be excited. Years before and in the same general vicinity, a trove of Indian artifacts had been discovered. That collection of ceramics, believed to be crafted by an as yet unidentified tribe of natives, was thousands of years old and is known today as the Chupicuaro collection.
Old Waldemar didn’t dig for long under that sun before he decided to enlist the help of a local farmer. The two men quickly struck a deal. Each figurine resurrected from its resting place would be purchased for a peso apiece. For his part, the farmer recognized a golden goose deal when he heard one because over the next seven years, he produced nearly 33,000 of the ceramic figurines, each one sold to the German immigrant for a single peso. That sounds like pocket change, I know, but 33,000 pesos in the mid 1940s works out to be about $35,000 in today’s money. Divided by seven, that’s $5,000 a year. Again, pocket change, right? But when you understand that the average yearly salary in mid 1940s America was only $2,500, $5,000 a year in the middle of Nowhere, Mexico, would have looked like a king’s ransom. The humble farmer was suddenly the wealthiest jefe in Guanajuato. A peso apiece might have been a steep price to pay for ceramic figurines, but from where Waldemar Julsrud stood it was an absolute bargain considering the figurines’ historical value. The ceramic figurines, you see, had been molded into the shapes of people and dinosaurs and best of all, people riding dinosaurs. There were aliens and what looked to be flying saucers in the collection, too.
Suspicious, yet? Skeptical, even? Yeah, you’re not the only one. The minute the figurines were revealed to the general public, they were written off as a hoax. There were just too many questions concerning their authenticity. Among them was the fact that the figurines had been found in a series of shallow pits and that no dirt or debris had been packed into their cracks and cervices. Bits were broken but not worn. And then of course, there was the subject matter. The figurines were just too fantastical. Many of them, in fact, looked suspiciously similar to characters and creatures that were popular in local comic strips at the time.
And so most dismissed the Acambaro figurines as fakes. But that never deterred Waldemar Julsrud. He maintained until the day he died that his collection of figurines was the real deal. And he wasn’t alone, either. To this day, there are plenty of young earthers that view the Acambaro figurines as unassailable proof that man once walked the earth with dinosaurs. Still others see them as ironclad evidence that we’re not alone in the universe, that the spaceships and extraterrestrials in the collection were patterned after the genuine article.
And then there was one man who saw the Acambaro figurines from an entirely different perspective. The old Mexican farmer that had partnered with Waldemar Julsrud regarded the figurines neither as historical artifacts nor as props in some elaborate hoax. He simply saw them as his own personal retirement plan.
