Moon People: Real or Myth?

Going back to the 13th century you can find statues, two feet wide and three feet tall made of stone with large eyes called Moon People.  Back 200 years before Columbus set foot on American soil in the Bahamas, the Cherokee migrated from the Great Lakes to Southern Appalachia looking for something better. Better land, good weather, and good soil.  They built permanent wooden buildings around the area.

Soon they encountered strange beings in the area, unlike anything the Cherokee have seen before.  They had white skin and unusually large pale eyes.  They seemed to be from another planet.   They lived in a stone settlement on mounds surrounded by walls. As time went by the relationship between the two people became hostile and the two went into battle against each other with the Cherokee winning and the Moon People moving out.  To warn future generations about these bad people, the Cherokee carved rock creatures to remind them what they looked like.  As the centuries passed they came to be regarded as a myth.  They became something you tell the children to frighten them. Be good or the Moon People will get you.  But on a dark night, some people claimed they could still see them.

In the 1980s, in Indiana, historian Dana Olsen is interested in ancient stories and folklore.  He spends his time trying to understand where the stories come from--what the origins of the stories are.   One day while hiking he comes across a stone fort built on a mound with walls that looks like structures built in the 12th century in Wales. 

There is an old Welsh legend around 1170 of a Prince Madoc who sailed west with ten ships and hoped to find new territory to explore.  He never returned to Wales and it was believed that his ships wrecked in the Atlantic Ocean.  Olsen becomes convinced that the Welsh are the Moon People the Cherokee described so long ago.  The Welsh had round pale eyes and white skin and were very hairy causing them to look like something the Cherokee had never seen before.  You can find these forts across the South from North Carolina to Alabama which is where the Cherokee lived.  So are the Moon People figments of the Cherokee imagination or were they Welsh people who lived there from long ago and discovered America before Columbus.  You decide.