What did Neil Armstrong see in the Cueva de los Tayos?

The Cueva de los Tayos, in Ecuador, was to the expedition members "the cave of the oilbirds," the nocturnal birds whose screeches echo inside it. Its fame came from a book: in "The Gold of the Gods," Erich von Däniken claimed that these caves were artificial, that they ran through the entire Andes mountain range, and that they had been made by a race, probably extraterrestrial, equipped with thermal lances and nuclear weapons. The expedition was a Scottish-Ecuadorian venture, conceived by Stanley Hall, an amateur archaeologist from Dollar, Scotland, and led by Major Chris Browne. The army was responsible for transporting the scientists there, mostly zoologists and botanists: more than twenty, with an equivalent contingent of Ecuadorians.

Professor Neil Armstrong was invited as the expedition's guest of honor, partly because his family roots were in Dollar, Hall's hometown. The 1,000 feet of climbing rope used by the cavers had been donated by him. J. C. Whalley, one of them, describes him as a quiet man, capable, observant and self-possessed, and recounts that he and Pete Holden, from the army, accompanied him to the sump. One night, with the moon high overhead, the group heard him talk about his journey to it aboard the Apollo spacecraft.

The entrance was a vertical shaft about 150 feet deep. Below it opened a square-sectioned gallery and an enormous chamber, and the downward exploration stopped at a sump about 600 feet below the entrance. At the foot of the second light shaft came the main archaeological find: pottery fragments and seashells that the resident archaeologist, Father Porras, estimated to be thousands of years old. There was also a python near the entrance, rats, and beds of spindly seedlings sprung from seeds dropped by the birds. What Armstrong saw was, in short, an enormous, living cave; the galleries of an extraterrestrial race exist only in the book.