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5 Most Mysteriously Out of Place Ancient People in History

In the spring of 1519, strange sails appeared on the horizon off the coast of Mexico. Rising from the sea like the very gods of legend, they carried men clad in metal, riding beasts no one in the Aztec Empire had ever seen before. Among them was a pale-skinned, bearded figure named Hernán Cortés—a man whose arrival would unravel an empire. But had Europeans already made contact with these lands centuries before Cortés? To the Aztecs, this moment had long been foretold. According to legend, the god Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, had once departed east across the seas, vowing to return. He was a god of wisdom and creation, a deity tied to cycles of renewal and destruction. As the Spaniards marched inland, news of their arrival spread. The Aztec Emperor Montezuma received reports of these foreign men, their weapons of thunder, their great towers of sail. He hesitated, torn between fear and reverence. When the two leaders finally met in the grand city of Tenochtitlán, some historians claim Montezuma did the unthinkable—he welcomed Cortés as a god. One account records Montezuma’s words: "You have graciously come on earth, you have graciously approached your water, your high place of Mexico, you have come down to your mat, your throne, which I have briefly kept for you, I who used to keep it for you." With this, the vast wealth and power of the Aztec Empire was handed over without a fight. Within two years, the empire would fall. In modern times, this moment is often cited as part of the so-called White God phenomenon—the idea that indigenous cultures mistook European arrivals for deities. But some historians question whether the Aztecs truly believed Cortés was Quetzalcoatl or whether Montezuma’s words were more political than divine. Some argue that Spanish chroniclers exaggerated the story, reframing Aztec myths to fit a narrative of European superiority. Others, however, suggest that Quetzalcoatl himself may have had an Old World origin. During the Spanish conquest, reports emerged of strange artifacts and symbols in Mesoamerican culture that some believed pointed to earlier European contact...