Why Easter Island Heads Are Standing in Victoria, Texas

Victoria, Texas has a moai problem. Not the kind Easter Island has, where the statues have been sitting still for 700 years while archaeologists argue about them. The opposite kind. Victoria’s statues won’t stop moving, and nobody will admit to moving them.

We first met them in July 2024 on the frontage road along Loop 463. Three concrete Easter Island heads standing shoulder to shoulder in the tall grass, staring across the highway like they were waiting for a bus.

Three Moai statues from Easter Island standing in a grassy field under a blue sky with clouds, representing Polynesian culture and history. — July 2024: all three, present and accounted for.

The Man Who Poured Them

Here’s the part that makes this story great. These aren’t some restaurant’s marketing gimmick. In 1996, a Victoria man named Alvin T. Dincans Jr., then around 60 years old, decided he was going to build five moai behind his boat sheds. Each one 13 feet tall and roughly 7 tons. He had never been to Easter Island. He had never sculpted anything more complicated than a house foundation. So he checked out every book the Victoria library had on the subject and got to work. His entire artistic statement, delivered to the Victoria Advocate in 1997: “Concrete I know pretty good.”

He called them his “concreations,” and I refuse to apologize for how much I love that. One was donated to the city and installed at Riverside Park on July 24, 1998, where it’s been photobombing disc golfers ever since. Three more eventually ended up on display along Loop 463, which is where we found them. Texas Highways ran a whole piece trying to figure out who moves these things around and why, and the answer from the city, the parks department, and everybody else was a collective shrug. The local news took a run at it too and came back with the same thing: nobody knows anything.

And Then There Were… Fewer

We came back through Victoria in December 2025 and swung by to say hi. Two of the three were gone.

Easter Island Moai statue standing on grassy terrain in Victoria, Texas, with clear sky overhead, showcasing the iconic monolithic sculpture. — One moai, two empty pads. The evidence.

Look at that picture. Those two bare concrete pads used to have 7-ton statues on them. Somebody showed up with serious equipment, plucked two giant concrete heads out of a field, and drove off, and as far as I can tell not one person in Victoria County saw a thing. The original moai on Easter Island at least have scientists publishing papers about how they were moved. These have a forklift and a conspiracy of silence.

Now, we did find a head at Riverside Park on that same trip, and for about a day I figured we’d solved a third of the mystery. Wrong. The Riverside head has been there since 1998; the date is engraved right on the base. It was never missing. So the actual score is this: Dincans made five. One stands at Riverside Park. One is still holding its ground on the Loop 463 frontage road. Two vanished sometime between our visits. And the fifth was supposedly headed for his bay house back in the 90s and has never been publicly seen since. That’s two confirmed missing, plus one that’s been gone so long nobody even counts it.

One detail worth appreciating before you go: the white ship painted on their chests isn’t something a bored teenager added later. Several real moai carry ship petroglyphs carved into their torsos, and Dincans put one on his, right down to the little turtle. The man did his homework.

Full disclosure by way of bragging: John loves these things so much he built his own 10-foot steel moai. His name is Oscar, and he has never once wandered off.

So here’s the deal. If you’re driving around South Texas and spot a 13-foot concrete head standing in a pasture where it has no business being, take a picture and tell me where. There are two missing moai on my list, and we’ve got a drone with nothing better to do.