Who was Pakal, and what is really in his tomb at Palenque?

Pakal was a king of the Maya city-state of Palenque who reigned for 68 years, and his tomb, found in 1952, holds a jade-masked skeleton in a sarcophagus whose lid shows a king dressed as the maize god, probably being reborn, not a spaceship. Pakal took the throne at age 12, after Calakmul had sacked Palenque, and reigned 68 years, among the longest reigns in history. He died in August 683 at the age of 80.

The city he inherited was in trouble. Palenque had been sacked by Calakmul, with another catastrophic attack in 611 during his early childhood, and the deaths of the ruling king and his heir caused a crisis of succession. Pakal became ruler at twelve, after a regency by his mother. As an adult he expanded Palenque's power and began a building program that produced some of the Maya's finest art and architecture. Palenque is smaller than Tikal, Chichen Itza or Copán, but has some of the finest carving the Maya produced.

The tomb is the star. Pakal was buried in a colossal sarcophagus inside the largest of Palenque's stepped pyramids, now known as the Temple of the Inscriptions. Alberto Ruz Lhuillier worked out how to open it in 1948, and it took four years to clear the stairway, so the tomb was uncovered in 1952. Inside, Pakal's remains lay wearing a jade mask and bead necklaces, surrounded by reliefs showing his transition to divinity. On the lid, the king wears the attributes of the Tonsured Maize God, with a turtle ornament, in a posture that may denote rebirth.

Since Erich von Däniken's 1968 best-seller Chariots of the Gods?, the lid has been used to claim visits from astronauts. Archaeologists, epigraphers and art historians almost universally reject this: it relies only on visual inspection and ignores everything we know about Maya art.