The Ancient Alien Question (22 page)

The Nazca lines in Peru are one of the billboards for Ancient Alien theories. Their patterns are reminiscent of modern airport layouts, and many tourists are doing aborted approaches via airplane so they can experience the full excitement.

These lines appear in an area that covers more than 300 square miles and come in various forms and shapes; apart from long lines, there are also depictions of animals, including an ape, a whale, a snake, and a llama, a human being, a flower, and many more. But the most prominent features are the lines, etched here throughout a period of one millennium, from 500
BC
to
AD
500.

The designs are so vast that little can be seen from ground level. Small portions are visible, but the entire scope of the Nazca lines is only visible from the air. The logical question is therefore why this complex was constructed when it was to all intents and purposes invisible from the ground—and the people who created it had not yet discovered flight. It was this quagmire that Erich von Däniken stirred up, suggesting that those who had constructed the complex
did
know the secret of flight. He also pointed to the straightness of the lines: Throughout a
distance of 1,500 meters (4,921 feet), the lines never deviate more than 4 meters (about 13 feet). He also observed that the complex looked similar to the design of modern airports. Could the Nazca lines have been an airport for extraterrestrial deities who came to visit the civilizations of Southern America?

Rather than answer the question with a stern
no
, scientists preferred to laugh at von Däniken’s suggestion. As a point in their favor, they were aware that the ground itself was very uneven and rough, which would mean that any plane would immediately have a severe accident during landing. So, though it looked like an airport, it was not. The question remains whether it could be part of an indigenous cargo cult, the Nazca culture having created the lines because they had seen their gods build genuine airports.

Today, owners of local airplanes offer tourists the experience of making an “aborted landing” on the lines: The pilots prepare for a landing as if the lines are an airport, and just before the landing, the plane pulls up again. The attraction exists because of the fame that von Däniken’s best-selling books bestowed on the lines.

Though von Däniken popularized the lines, they were not unknown before his arrival. Maria Reiche was a German mathematician with an interest in the lines since shortly after World War II; since the 1950s, she had lived near the lines in an effort to understand what they meant. For many years, she tried to bring the lines to the attention of the scientific community. Though she largely failed where von Däniken succeeded, in retrospect, both Reiche and von Däniken are now considered to have been pivotal in bringing the lines to public awareness.

Reiche believed that the lines had an astronomical function: They were there to determine the position of the stars. Unfortunately, a subsequent scientific analysis of her theory proved it incorrect; though some lines were indeed marking astronomical features, the correspondence was nothing outside of
the normal odds: There are a large number of stars and a large number of lines, so some should be aligned to some stars—by accident. Until her death in 1998, Reiche nevertheless continued to defend her theory.

Reiche’s biggest preoccupation was the conservation of the lines. She knew that every touch to the ground, even a normal stroll through the area, left marks in the surface that remained visible for many years afterwards. Reiche was therefore appalled to find that the lines had become a tourist destination—in sharp contrast with the local people, who looked to the tourists as a new source of desperately needed income. The “aborted landings” of the pilots made her shiver, fearing one day a plane would crash and destroy some of the lines. For most of her life, she also found that the local authorities were not interested in the lines, and she fought to make the lines a listed national monument. In the end, her struggle proved successful. But her theory as to what the lines were was incorrect. Von Däniken’s theory of an airstrip was equally impossible. So where does this leave the Nazca lines?

The problem is simple: If a plane ever did manage to land on the lines, on the rough terrain, the sheer displacement of air would result in the lines being blown off. The top soil would once again cover the scraped-off areas, and the white lines of the soil underneath would disappear. As extraordinary as they are, and as much work has gone into them, in the end, the Nazca lines are “just” a bit of sand that was dusted off to reveal the ground below. It is the extraordinary meteorological conditions that reign in this part of Peru that have preserved the lines for millennia.

Von Däniken’s idea that the lines should be viewed from the air inspired travel writer Jim Woodman and balloonist Julian Nott, who theorized that though an aircraft was unlikely, perhaps a hot air balloon would do. Remarkably, rock paintings near the lines do show a balloon. Also, at the ends of several straight lines
are blackened rocks, suggesting they had been fired—perhaps repeatedly. Perhaps they were sites of sacred fires, or perhaps they were sites where hot air was created to fill a balloon in order to get liftoff? To test their theory, Woodman and Nott built a primitive balloon, based on the depictions on an ancient vase. They also used material that would have been available to the local people. In 1975, their “Condor I” became airborne. The balloon flew for approximately 20 minutes and covered a distance of three miles. It was practical proof that the Nazca people could have used a balloon from which they would be able to see the lines. But “could” does not mean they did...

British explorer Tony Morrison, who has made extensive expeditions in the region and knew the theories of von Däniken, Reiche, and many others, realized that most Nazca enthusiasts were too focused on their own research and paid too much attention to the lines themselves, and not the features that were on, along, and near them. Morrison spoke to the local people, who had retained stories of how their distant ancestors had constructed the lines. He learned that certain sections of the network continued to be used by the local people for religious purposes. Perhaps this was the key to unlocking the mystery of the Nazca lines?

Morrison’s research revealed that the network was a type of cemetery. The desert area, where nothing could live, where no rain fell, was an area delineated by the local people for use in contacting their ancestors. This should not have come as a surprise, if we also know that the local cultures were in origin shamanic, because contacting one’s ancestors is of primary importance in shamanic tradition. For the Nazca people the land of the dead was similar to Earth, but was found in another dimension, contactable by those equipped with the right techniques, yet invisible to our eyes. The lines were an ingenious system that aided the shaman in his voyages to the Otherworld, where he established contact with the gods. And so, it seems, von Däniken was at least partially right.

Morrison argued that the lines often converged in certain nodes, from which they continued. On these nodes and at regular intervals along the lines, small altars could be found, sometimes little more than a small heap of stones and earth. Morrison, and later British researcher Paul Devereux, remarked that the most important aspect of the lines had not been sufficiently focused upon: The lines were
straight
. Straight lines were specifically and uniformly linked with the voyage of the shaman in the Otherworld. Souls were said to only be able to travel in straight lines. (Similarly, in the Christian tradition, roads termed “dead straight roads” often linked the church with the cemetery, in those cases where the cemetery was not immediately next to the church.) That this road was “dead straight” was no accident; it was because of the popular belief, found in so many cultures across the world, that the dead could only travel in straight lines.

When Tomasz Gorka of Munich University in Germany analyzed five geoglyphs near the city of Palpa, a lesser-known neighbor of the Nazca lines, he found other lines, in the interior of the trapezoid structures, that were not visible from the air. He argued that the geoglyphs visible today are only the most recent stage of a prolonged construction process, during which the whole complex of drawings was constantly added to, remodeled, obliterated, or changed by use. As some of the lines produced stronger magnetic anomalies than others, Gorka and Karsten Lambers of the University of Konstanz in Germany argued that the soil beneath was compacted by people walking back and forth during prayer rituals, which would tie in with the known practice of placing ceramic vessels at key shrines along the lines. The prayer rituals, of course, were linked with the worship of the dead: The living walked this sacred landscape to contact their ancestors.

Though this theory seems to explain the straight lines, what to make of the accompanying figures of animals and other forms and shapes? It is currently believed that the animals predate the
lines. Their size is often massive; one figure measures 100 feet. Remains of animal sacrifices have occasionally been found next to these animal images.

Research into this area had been carried out by anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios, who published a scientific thesis in 1977 on three areas in the New World where she had found drug-using cultures that had created designs on the landscape: the Hopewell Indians of Northern America, the Olmecs of Mexico, and the Nazca culture of Peru. She argued that the animal depictions were magical protectors—charms—for the shamans. They also acted as tribal boundaries, so that shamans of other tribes would not enter a certain territory. Archaeologist Evan Haddingham built upon this research and learned that similar practices continue to be observed by the local people in and around Nazca to this very day.

Dobkin de Rios notes that the design of the Nazca lines is also found on pottery and other objects of the Nazca civilization; they often depicted the return of a god. But rather than an extraterrestrial being, she argues that it is the return of the shaman from his sacred duty, the soul voyage. She also identified the cactus “San Pedro” (
Trichocereus pachanoi
) as the plant that induced the shaman’s vision. This plant was also depicted on various pots and even on ancient temples.

So von Däniken was right when he suggested that the animals and lines had to be seen from the sky: They were seen during the shaman’s flight, on his voyage to the Otherworld. Shamanic theory states that the shaman leaves his body and “floats” or “soars” through the sky, where often the eagle or another animal is his totem animal—the animal mimics or symbolizes the flight of the soul. He was right that these lines were an airstrip; they were an airstrip for the soul to take off to and return from the Otherworld.

The Sacred Valley: The Footsteps of Viracocha

Peru is known as the cradle of the Inca civilization, a culture that the Spanish called “diabolical,” and, until recently, was deemed to have been primitive. (The Inca civilization was not often included in school curricula in Western Europe.) Von Däniken posed this central question in the 1960s: If the Inca were primitive or stupid, how had they been able to create their often complex buildings, such as Sacsayhuaman or Ollantaytambo, the former of which has stones weighing as much as 361 tons? These two complexes stand at altitudes where today the modern tourist has difficulty breathing when walking, let alone hauling large stone blocks that weigh tons.

The site of Sacsayhuaman, located just above Cuzco, displays some of the largest and most extraordinary stones. The stones have several differently shaped sides, which somehow all fit perfectly together. This techniqe was necessary because of the severe earthquakes prevalent in the region. The Inca’s construction technique has proven to withstand these quakes when no other buildings did.

Four decades later, it is now clear that the Inca were not stupid. It has also become clear that the Inca built upon centuries of knowledge available to their predecessors all across the continent. They were the last indigenous group of rulers who had toiled on the land for hundreds of generations, if not thousands of years. Nevertheless, the question of
what
their civilization represented is still largely unanswered. The main work of answering this question has been carried out by a small number of Peruvian archaeologists, as well as a certain amount of visiting scientists, but their conclusions have not yet become common knowledge.

Two key people in this quest to understand the Inca civilization are Fernando and Edgar Elorrieta Salazar. They have straightforwardly identified that the Inca civilization considered an area known as the “Sacred Valley” to be the heart of their civilization. It was sacred because it was linked with the gods.