>>53546783>The fact that it... the same text appears on the Violet/Scarlet book).Well, here's the thing - the text DOESN'T appear in the Scarelt/Violet Book. Here's a slightly bigger pic; you can see that only the hourglass shape and the '00' are visible in Heath's picture, along with a (separate) smaller plate with a line of text on it that at first glance looks like whatever's written under the 'Area Zero' text but upon closer inspection is actually something entirely different. So there's supposed to be two plates instead of one, the original drawing doesn't actually show if there's a map or the words 'Area Zero' written on it in modern text, and then there's the placement of the plate itself - the drawing shows it was blocking off a tunnel entrance while the one we see is lying flat on the ground and mounted neatly on a block. Now, granted, it's possible the plate was moved from, say, the entrance tunnel to the crystal cave to its current position 80 years ago when the waystations were put in, but that doesn't explain the missing smaller plate written in a different language or confirm that the original one Heath saw actually said 'Area Zero' to begin with.
Personally, I think that when Heath went to the crater, he came up completely empty-handed - no Paradox Pokemon, no giant glyph in the ground, no metal plate. All he got was his weird encounter with Terapagos that he couldn't clearly remember. He made everything up, took a picture of one of his teammates' Donphan, as well as drew a big glyph in the ground as his 'proof', then published his hoax with an artist's help. The later expeditions also find nothing of note - they not only didn't see Paradox Pokemon, but they failed to find ANY evidence to corroborate Heath's story and made no mention of the plate. The plate and 'mons are suddenly there when the Professor shows up (and the plate is using modern Paldean script), which leads me to believe it's also a product of Terapagos' ability.
