Ancient Aliens s05e08 Episode Script
Beyond Nazca
Intricate diagrams carved into the surface of the Earth.
There are over 800 straight lines.
One has to wonder, what was it for? Massive depictions of animals and strange beings seen only from the sky.
There's enormous amount of mystery about the Nazca Lines.
Who could have done this, and why? And bizarre, elongated skulls found all over the world.
This is an unusual cranial, kind of elongated head.
And we don't know whether it's really natural or was some kind of deformation that they did.
Are the mysterious geoglyphs of Nazca really just artistic creations by ancient man? Or are they evidence of otherworldly visitors in the remote past? I am absolutely sure long time ago the extraterrestrials, they were seeking for raw material for energy of all kind.
They found Nazca.
Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings.
What if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history? And if so, might the proof be found when we explore the mystery Beyond Nazca? Southern Peru.
While hiking in the foothills of the arid Nazca Desert, archaeologist Toribio Mejia Xesspe discovers what appears to be a large network of ancient roads carved into the earth.
Years later, as airplane travel to the region becomes more frequent, aerial flyovers reveal nearly 100 other designs in the nearby landscape.
Known as geoglyphs, they depict animals, flowers, and even a mysterious, human-like being.
Scattered over a nearly lines and figures have become collectively known as the Nazca Lines.
The Nazca Lines consist of these massive drawings, or carvings, if you like, on the ground.
Everything from geometric symbols, lines, to animals fish, birds.
But the intriguing thing about them is, you know, number one, they're massive, and they can really only be seen properly from the sky.
There are over 800 straight lines.
There are over 70 animal figures.
There are over We have glyphs of different figurines on the ground.
We have these intricate lines and what appear to be runways spread all around the desert.
Some of these actually show mathematical diagrams built thousands of years ago, which really raises the question: Why? There's an enormous amount of unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions that arise from the phenomena.
The largest of the figures is nearly 1,000 feet, or the size of three football fields while the longest line extends almost nine miles.
According to mainstream archaeologists, these mysterious earth drawings were created by the Nazca, an ancient people that flourished in the region between the 1st and 8th century A.
D.
The lines were formed by the careful removal of the reddish iron oxide pebbles that make up the desert surface.
Once exposed, the underlying dirt, which contains high amounts of lime, hardened and was resistant to erosion.
The Nazca plain is made up of layers of light-colored kind of rock and dirt with dark-colored rock and dirt, just on top.
It's very simple.
And then you just remove the dark-colored stuff to reveal these kind of white looking lines over the landscape.
It's like a canvas that isn't being disturbed, that's maintained its integrity for hundreds or even thousands of years.
The reason why they have survived is because of the desert conditions.
Truly, if you make a geoglyph at the Nazca Desert environment today, it will be found hundreds of years from now.
There is hardly any rain, hardly any wind.
Anything you make here will last for eternity.
But why did the Nazca people feel it necessary to make these elaborate and massive drawings in the earth? What purpose were they intended to serve? And why were they designed in such a way that they could have only been seen and appreciated from the sky at a time when aircraft didn't even exist? The only place you can see them above is that somehow you're floating in midair.
It has been suggested that whoever inhabited the Nazca plateau, that they had access to some type of balloon flight, so that they could appreciate what they had created on the ground.
If the Nazca population had access to balloon flight, the Spanish chroniclers would have most certainly recorded that in their reports.
But there is not a single word that describes that the Nazcans had access to hot air balloons.
They would have written that down, but they didn't, so it didn't exist.
By default, we're in the bailiwick of highly advanced terrestrial technology, and that is really the anomaly of the Nazca Lines.
They really are easy to make, when you look at it, because it is only really removing the top layer of a surface.
But the magnitude of the figures is what makes this such a complex undertaking.
Many of the lines at Nazca go for miles, perfectly straight through the desert.
There are various trapezoids and spirals and other glyphs that are so large that the surveyors would need some direction from the sky.
And this is where aliens or some kind of people with flight had to be involved with the creation of the Nazca Lines.
I was in Peru for a month in 1987.
I went with a pilot over the plains of Nazca.
The first pattern that the pilot said, "Well, let's aim for that long six-mile triangle.
" And there have been laser surveys done, and it is remarkably accurate, this triangle.
And it looked like something had pressed the whole ground down at least 24 inches.
How would you press down a six-mile-long perfect triangle into the desert of Nazca? What kind of technology can do that? Not the feet of ancient people.
How could the ancient people of Nazca have created such massive geoglyphs without the capability of flight or the use of advanced tools? Might these mysterious lines have actually been created with the help of otherworldly beings, as ancient astronaut theorists believe? The fact that these designs can only be seen from above, from the sky, is an indication that they were to be used as navigational markers for the gods when they were actually here.
So the question then becomes, you know, were they drawn in this way as navigational markers for the gods to actually fly their vehicles in? Let's assume for a moment that extraterrestrials sent down some type of an unmanned craft, like a rover that we have on Mars right now, that is collecting samples, and is driving around a desert plateau.
It, of course, leaves behind some type of tracks.
And then the natives who just witnessed this would look at each other and say, "Wow! We were just visited by God.
" When in reality, no such thing happened.
Now, could it be the the case that the gods directed building of them to the people below? Could it be that there was some sort of teaching process involved? The fact that we're talking about geometric lines and things like this, was it a teaching process by somebody up there for the so-called "lesser perceived" people down below? We're still asking questions know, to this day they fascinate people and just provoke endless controversy.
Were the Nazca Lines really navigational markers for otherworldly beings visiting Earth? Or were they meant to commemorate an extraterrestrial encounter, one that happened tens of thousands of years ago? Modern-day historians and anthropologists believe the Nazca people were one of several ancestors of the Inca civilization, the largest empire in pre-Columbian America.
In the 13th century, the Inca Empire thrived in the Andes Mountain region of South America.
According to legend, the mysterious Incan creator god Viracocha, commissioned the Nazca Lines and glyphs in the remote past.
And these were said to be created by the Viracocha himself, who was the great teacher god of the Andes.
And so where he came from is still a mystery.
He could've been from Sumeria.
He could've been connected somehow with the Anunnaki.
No one really knows.
But the same legends and the same stories of these great gods appear throughout the world, especially all the way through the Americas.
We know that they are part of a creation mythology in which some of the figurines which are depicted here are said to be deities, are said to be part of the creation mythology as to how the people who lived in that area and who made these geoglyphs came about.
They are messages to be seen from above to basically say that the people on the ground still live in accordance with the rules established by the deities who came from above to teach the people on the ground about civilization and various other aspects of culture.
Could the lines and glyphs of Nazca really have been the work of the Inca god Viracocha, as their legends suggest? If so, what was the purpose of carving these strange geoglyphs into the Earth? Perhaps the answers can be found by taking a closer look at one of Nazca's most mysterious figures, one that has become known as El Astronauto.
Switzerland, 1968.
Researcher and writer Erich von Daniken publishes his first book, "Chariots of the Gods?" In it, he introduces the revolutionary notion that the Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca people after witnessing extraterrestrials using advanced technology and a sophisticated knowledge of mathematics.
Erich Von Daniken was one of the first to actually do aerial flyovers of the Nazca region, and was one of the first researchers to not only look at the diagrams on the plain floor, but also in the hills of Nazca.
We find intricate mathematical diagrams that have never been documented before.
When you fly over the desert, you see down gigantic lines.
Seen from the air, they give you the imagination of airstrips because they start abruptly, end abruptly; sometimes they cross.
They look like airstrips.
When Erich drew the comparison as to how this looks like a network of runways, it is to draw a visual comparison to what they look like from above.
They are not runways.
They would not support the weight of anything physically landing there.
Some theorize that they were runways.
I don't believe that for a moment.
Hell, I was in the Air Force for six years, and none of the aircraft that we had would be capable of landing on that as a runway.
I think it's more of a attention-getter.
You can see them from space.
So I think that it's a, uh a signal.
In the more than four decades since the publication of Chariots of the Gods?, Erich von Daniken's controversial theories concerning the Nazca Lines have continued to spark widespread study.
Some scholars, after discovering curious patterns in the numerous designs, suggest that the Nazca Lines might actually be one of the earliest known examples of applied geometry.
They were interesting geometric figures.
They could draw a figure, and then they could envision making it even bigger.
You're making angles; you're approximating distances, and that innate skill of us to deal with geometry, I think, translates to our earliest art forms.
It's interesting as you look at these designs on the plains of Nazca, some of them have very, very interesting relationships to the skies overhead.
There's a very famous glyph of a spider with one leg that extends way, way out, and if you take that and flip it into sort of a mirror situation, what you can plainly see is that the spider is meant to represent the constellation of Orion, and the spider's leg, the extension, is meant to represent the star Sirius.
So whoever put these designs on the plains of Nazca understood the same thing that all of the other ancient cultures before them understood, which is that there's some critical importance to understanding Orion and Sirius and their relationship to the Earth.
But could the Nazca figures really have had a more profound purpose? Some ancient astronaut theorists believe they were created as a means of communicating messages to the gods messages that may have also included a plea for them to return.
Ancient astronaut theorists believe the mysterious figure known as El Astronauto could hold a clue to the Nazca mystery.
They call him The Spaceman and he appears to have a space helmet or something on his head, and he's got one arm up and he's waving.
And it would seem this is one of the sky gods.
Or if he's not one of the sky gods himself, he's one of the Nazca people who's waving to the sky gods and saying, "Hi, we're here.
Come and land.
We know you came here before.
Come back.
" You have a figure that looks like E.
T.
, with the big eyes and the big head, and one hand is pointing to the sky and the other is pointing to Earth, as if it was some type of a message: "Hey, something happened here; we were visited by beings from above.
Is the mysterious figure known as El Astronauto evidence of an extraterrestrial visitation in the distant past, as some researchers believe? And if so, might this suggest a reason why extraterrestrial visitors may have landed at Nazca in the first place? We send scientists from the University of Dresden to Nazca.
They measured the magnetic field, and they found a change in the magnetic field under some of the lines.
And also, we measured the conduction, electricity along the lines, and right next to it, the ability to conduct currency was 8,000 time higher on the lines.
And they found that eight feet below one of these lines, the magnetic field definitely changes.
So we have the result.
There is something in the ground, but we don't know what it is.
Is it really possible that something in the earth might have attracted an otherworldly species to Nazca? Could it have been an outpost for a mining operation of precious metals? Or perhaps minerals needed for rocket fuel? It's been said that, if any extraterrestrial wanted to come to Earth, Nazca would be a great place for them to land.
Nitrates and various things that we use in our modern propulsion are found in abundance.
Maybe it's possible that extraterrestrials were aware of this location as an energy source, and ancient man left these depictions and runways as a way to entice those beings to come back.
We find that the Nazca civilization was placed in nitrate-rich environments.
They had no purpose for these nitrates.
The question might be, whether nitrate was indeed of importance to the people who came to this area, maybe in prehistoric times.
Maybe an extraterrestrial civilization somehow had a purpose for this nitrate.
Because nitrate is used in an awful lot of interesting technological applications today.
Such applications as space travel.
But might the extraterrestrial contact at Nazca have been designed to support an even greater presence that we have yet to recognize? And could Nazca have in time served its purpose, only to be abandoned? With any visit, or with any project, the time arrives when something is finished.
And that is why some of these contacts had ended, because the extraterrestrials went on to different places.
So why would extraterrestrials be coming to Nazca? Some of the lines at Nazca are going straight through the Andes.
The lines themselves directed you farther east.
But if Nazca was used as an ancient mining site by extraterrestrials, might there be evidence of other, similar sites around the globe? According to ancient astronaut theorists, there are.
And they can be found hundreds of miles away at the ruins of another lost civilization.
Western Bolivia.
plain, near Lake Titicaca, lay the ancient ruins of Tiahuanaco.
According to archaeologists, this ancient city was the capital of the Tihuanaco culture that thrived more than 1,000 years ago.
But ancient astronaut theorists believe that Tiahuanaco is also the place where the mysterious Nazca Lines seem to be pointing to.
But if so, why? When we consider the Nazca Lines in Peru, we have to consider them in their context.
They're not isolated phenomena.
There might not be other examples exactly like the Nazca Lines, but they would be embedded in a larger ritualized or ceremonial landscape that might include other famous places from ancient cultures, such as Tiahuanaco.
At Tiahuanaco, we can find hundreds of glyphs.
We can find faces.
We can find carvings of all sorts of different things.
According to legend, Tiahuanaco was created as a tribute to beings called Sky People, under the direction of Viracocha, the Inca god linked to Nazca.
But might these Sky People be the same extraterrestrials who helped create the Nazca Lines thousands of years ago? According to ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is yes.
Nazca, in a sense, is really a way station along the coast of Peru.
There's an indication there that once you arrived in Nazca with your airship, the lines themselves directed you into the Andes to the giant megalithic cities of Tiahuanaco and Pumapunku.
But is there other evidence of an extraterrestrial presence at Tiahuanaco? Evidence that may give us insight into the true nature of the ancient aliens who allegedly visited Nazca in the remote past? There are many connections between the Nazca culture along the west coast of Peru, and the inland cultures, the Andean cultures of Tihuanaco, Pumapunku and Cuzco.
All throughout this area, they found evidence of these unusual elongated skulls in all these different places, not just in one area.
And so, it seems like they were the builders of these sites.
Found in numerous gravesites in the region, these elongated skulls have a cranial capacity 25% larger than human skulls.
But where did they come from? You will find academic critics who will say it was because there were some Incas who wrapped their baby's heads in some kind of blankets or cloths to make them grow long.
A kind of cosmetic procedure.
There's a lot of argument on the other side that there is not one single piece of cultural evidence that the Incas ever bound the heads.
So, you've got a conflict there among archeologists, even looking at the Peruvian heads.
I suggest the extraterrestrials who were here thousands of years ago they had elongated heads, and our ancestors simply wanted to copy it.
They made it in the beginning.
They hoped that they would become similar to the extraterrestrials they have seen a long time ago.
They are physically changing the appearance of their children to resemble the physical appearance of the deities.
For the Nazca people to have done that, it means that these people somehow preserved the memory of such physical contact with a deity.
But if there is no evidence of the skulls being created by means of binding, or other man-made means, then how can they be explained? Could there be another, perhaps more extraterrestrial, explanation? Might they be evidence of some kind of human-alien hybrid race, a race that not only lived in western Peru but who may have also inhabited ancient Egypt? According to ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is a profound yes.
And they also cite a link between the people of Nazca and the god Viracocha.
What's most interesting is the fact that Viracocha was also said to be the builder of all these sites.
So was he part of the race of the elongated skull people that came to this land and built all these amazing megalithic temples as well as the Nazca Lines? What is perhaps as mysterious as the origin of the elongated skulls is the fate of the Nazca people.
According to most archaeologists, both Nazca and Tiahuanaco were suddenly abandoned at about the same time approximately 1,000 years ago.
Those civilizations, I think, are connected to what was going on in the Peruvian desert with the Nazca.
To what extent? I don't think we know.
There's not enough information that has been gleaned from those civilizations, but they both disappeared around the same time for whatever reasons.
But there was some shift in the earth right then, either some massive earthquake that even caused Lake Titicaca to flood the whole area or perhaps it was some kind of cosmic war between the extraterrestrials.
But once that mining center the, in a sense, the capital of this area was destroyed and no longer functioning, Nazca became this backwater where nothing was really happening anymore.
And it was during that period probably that many of the lines were drawn and the figures, trying to attract the extraterrestrials.
Might the elongated skulls found at sites surrounding Nazca really be evidence that extraterrestrial beings once visited Earth thousands of years ago? And, if so, is it also possible that these otherworldly beings came to mine precious minerals until they were mysteriously destroyed, as some ancient astronaut theorists contend? Perhaps further evidence can be found hidden in plain sight at mysterious mounds and crop circles found all over the world.
Pleasant Hill, Ohio, 1848.
The Smithsonian Institute surveys a 1,350-foot long, three-foot high effigy mound built in the shape of a coiling serpent.
Like the lines and geoglyphs of Nazca, this reptilian motif known as the Serpent Mound can only be seen from high above the Earth.
Similar to Nazca, what we have with these earth mounds is that they're put into easily recognizable symbols, but unless you're looking at them from some altitude, they don't look like anything.
In the Native American legend, we call it the plume serpent, which is probably the same as the Quetzalcoatl down in the tribes in Mexico.
The plume serpent theory is probably related to something that came from the sky.
It came from the extraterrestrial territory.
Serpent Mound and other places of what the Indians used to call places of worship are very important to study these things.
There are certain things that are connected for the well-being of the planet, whether it be the magnetic system, whether it be the ley lines, whether it be observance points from other worlds that existed here before.
According to historians and anthropologists, an indigenous Native American culture called the Fort Ancient people built the mounds nearly 1,000 years ago.
But, if so, why? Serpent Mound is an extraordinary site.
It is one of the most important sites in North America.
It's almost as if somebody is trying to point out, that for anybody passing from above, he or she or it is about to approach a site of importance.
Why would a so-called primitive people have constructed a massive earthwork that, like the geoglyphs and lines in Nazca, went unnoticed and undetected by those on the ground for hundreds of years? Perhaps a clue can be found in the fact that the Serpent Mound was constructed on the edge of a meteor crater that was formed approximately 300 million years ago.
Coincidence? Or was the mound's proximity to a meteor site intended to mark the presence of a very rare and precious element often found in meteors iridium? Iridium has great conductive abilities.
It's one of the rarest elements we have, and it tends to be concentrated in unique areas for two reasons: either a meteorite crashed at some point in the past or volcanic activity and lava flow.
Looking at locations like the Serpent Mound in Ohio and various other sites, we see some type of energy source that either was powering these locations or is still offering some type of energy source today, like iridium and other exotic elements.
And if extraterrestrials are aware of these locations, were they tapping into this energy? The concentration of iridium on that site is ten times higher than what would be expected.
Serpent Mound is some kind of memorial to the presence of another world involved in mining of this iridium at some point in the remote or maybe not-so-remote past.
There's even gravitational anomalies such as you get at the Serpent Mound in Ohio which has magnetic and gravitational effects.
And it can really affect your consciousness.
There's a whole preponderance of possibilities that these sites were built on these particular spots.
Could the Serpent Mound be a marker where extraterrestrial beings mined iridium as an energy source, as some ancient astronaut researchers believe? And, if so, might there be a connection between energy in the ground here and that found in the Nazca plain? Perhaps more clues can be found by examining the mysterious crop circles discovered throughout the world.
Wiltshire, England, 1978.
Here, in this tranquil countryside strange crop circles begin to appear overnight in fields of wheat and corn.
Like the geoglyphs found at Nazca, the designs are geometric shapes seen only from above.
Crop circles, they are described as some type of energy ball that whizzed through the field and all of a sudden there's this intricate diagram.
We also have to wonder if extraterrestrials potentially were involved in Nazca, maybe they're also trying to get us messages today through crop circles.
There is a correlation between the ancient glyphs and the modern crop circles in that they're both being presented to the Earth from what we would call star people using a higher technology.
Mainstream scientists have yet to acknowledge an extraterrestrial connection to crop circles.
But ancient astronaut theorists remain convinced that there is more here than what meets the skeptical eye.
While some crop circles are undoubtedly the work of farmers and others trying to pull off a hoax, many cannot be explained so easily.
They appear to be made too quickly, too perfectly.
Some magically appear within a few hours, accompanied by strange lights in the sky.
Could there be a connection between these unusual shapes and the mysterious designs found at Nazca? Now, people suggest that crop circles are made by either extraterrestrials or some sort of non-human intelligence, some sort of non-human entity that's possibly trying to give us a message.
If we draw the parallel between the crop circles and the Nazca Lines, one, yes, is made in, like, a sandy desert-type terrain; the other's made in corn, but the actual designs are somewhat similar, and maybe even the message is a similar one, but it's just been upgraded for a new era and a different country.
In the past, we set the communications in stone.
And what's happening now, today, in fields all over the world but especially in England, the crop circles are so much more complex than the designs at Nazca.
There definitely seems to be some sort of communication taking place.
Somebody is trying to communicate with us, and we are too stupid to understand the communication.
One morning, you have a simple circle in a crop field.
Now, the humans think, "Okay, circle, it happens by the wind or by animals overnight or whatever.
" We all are too arrogant, so we don't try at communication.
Is there really a profound connection between the Nazca lines and crop circles, as ancient astronaut theorists believe? And might they contain messages that we have yet to decode? If so, what are they trying to tell us? Perhaps answers can be found by examining other, equally strange geoglyphs, recently discovered after nearly 2,000 years.
Satellite and aerial photography reveals high numbers of mysterious stone wheels carved into the earth in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.
First discovered in 1927, these stone circles are believed to number in the thousands, and date back more than 2,000 years.
Ranging in size from 80 to more than 200 feet in width, ancient astronaut theorists believe these designs fit a global pattern.
Seems to me that there was high intelligence behind everything that has been constructed and built, and that it has all been built for a reason.
Somebody decided to make these amazing circles with spokes.
The same thing in Peru, and look at how far apart we are.
Peru is in one hemisphere, and Jordan and Syria and Saudi Arabia are in another hemisphere, and they're on two sides of the planet, but you're talking about a similar kind of, shall we say, communication.
Thanks to Google Earth, we now have a vehicle by which we can see some of these glyphs.
They're being called Nazca-like phenomena.
I think we are opening the first page of a chapter that deals with glyphs and structures which can be seen from the air.
It's not only at Nazca that ancient man was trying to communicate to the heavens, but around the world we are finding new monuments and glyphs that raise the question, "Was there a connected geodetic presence of sites that the extraterrestrials used to navigate around our planet?" What is the purpose of the strange shapes and geoglyphs found at Nazca and all over the world? Were they used as navigational markers, intended to guide space travelers? Or might they contain a more profound message for humanity? In 1972, cosmologist Carl Sagan stated that if an extraterrestrial intelligence exists in the universe, the means of contact would be mathematics.
If you think about this as communication, as Carl Sagan was quoted as saying, it is certainly true that this would be the way we'd probably have to start.
A circle is a circle, and that's just a universal feature of geometry.
And it would be the same no matter where you were in the universe.
Is it possible that otherworldly beings have been using basic mathematics and geometry in an effort to communicate with us? And might the proof of this be found in the many geoglyphs at Nazca and throughout the world? Could mankind have been receiving extraterrestrial messages for hundreds and even thousands of years messages that have gone unread and undeciphered right before our eyes? Imagine you wanted to reveal a truth about the higher world to humans.
You would lay down one card at a time.
Each of these cards would be a glyph or a crop circle image, and it would reveal something about the spiritual world.
Not just knowledge.
It would provide an experience of the actual reality it was describing.
What we have in the Nazca culture is something which our ancestors knew that what they were making was gonna have a lasting effect.
Hundreds of years afterwards, it is still there.
And it might be very ironic to realize that they were shouting out for the deities, saying, "Please come down and visit us.
" And that 100 years later, the Nazca Lines have become the billboard for the ancient alien theory, whereby they really are interpreted as, indeed, a landing place for the deities.
And so we might find that across time and space and culture, really the core of the message of the Nazca Lines is maintained, even though maybe slightly placed in a different context.
When you look at some of the glyphs at Nazca, they would seem to be just simple things animals and figures and things like that.
But then other of the figures and the lines seem to be so incredibly complicated.
Mathematical, and they're-they're following energy lines.
So, there seems to be a much deeper meaning in all of the figures and the lines, and where they're going and why they intersect.
But we can't figure it out.
Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, that the lines and geoglyphs of Nazca are part of a worldwide communications network a network that is directly connected to otherworldly visitors from the remote past? And if so, might this form of alien communication be intended for us or for something, or someone not of this world? Perhaps these strange shapes and symbols provide clues to mankind's not-so-distant future, or serve as an invitation for other alien visitors to return.
There are over 800 straight lines.
One has to wonder, what was it for? Massive depictions of animals and strange beings seen only from the sky.
There's enormous amount of mystery about the Nazca Lines.
Who could have done this, and why? And bizarre, elongated skulls found all over the world.
This is an unusual cranial, kind of elongated head.
And we don't know whether it's really natural or was some kind of deformation that they did.
Are the mysterious geoglyphs of Nazca really just artistic creations by ancient man? Or are they evidence of otherworldly visitors in the remote past? I am absolutely sure long time ago the extraterrestrials, they were seeking for raw material for energy of all kind.
They found Nazca.
Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings.
What if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history? And if so, might the proof be found when we explore the mystery Beyond Nazca? Southern Peru.
While hiking in the foothills of the arid Nazca Desert, archaeologist Toribio Mejia Xesspe discovers what appears to be a large network of ancient roads carved into the earth.
Years later, as airplane travel to the region becomes more frequent, aerial flyovers reveal nearly 100 other designs in the nearby landscape.
Known as geoglyphs, they depict animals, flowers, and even a mysterious, human-like being.
Scattered over a nearly lines and figures have become collectively known as the Nazca Lines.
The Nazca Lines consist of these massive drawings, or carvings, if you like, on the ground.
Everything from geometric symbols, lines, to animals fish, birds.
But the intriguing thing about them is, you know, number one, they're massive, and they can really only be seen properly from the sky.
There are over 800 straight lines.
There are over 70 animal figures.
There are over We have glyphs of different figurines on the ground.
We have these intricate lines and what appear to be runways spread all around the desert.
Some of these actually show mathematical diagrams built thousands of years ago, which really raises the question: Why? There's an enormous amount of unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions that arise from the phenomena.
The largest of the figures is nearly 1,000 feet, or the size of three football fields while the longest line extends almost nine miles.
According to mainstream archaeologists, these mysterious earth drawings were created by the Nazca, an ancient people that flourished in the region between the 1st and 8th century A.
D.
The lines were formed by the careful removal of the reddish iron oxide pebbles that make up the desert surface.
Once exposed, the underlying dirt, which contains high amounts of lime, hardened and was resistant to erosion.
The Nazca plain is made up of layers of light-colored kind of rock and dirt with dark-colored rock and dirt, just on top.
It's very simple.
And then you just remove the dark-colored stuff to reveal these kind of white looking lines over the landscape.
It's like a canvas that isn't being disturbed, that's maintained its integrity for hundreds or even thousands of years.
The reason why they have survived is because of the desert conditions.
Truly, if you make a geoglyph at the Nazca Desert environment today, it will be found hundreds of years from now.
There is hardly any rain, hardly any wind.
Anything you make here will last for eternity.
But why did the Nazca people feel it necessary to make these elaborate and massive drawings in the earth? What purpose were they intended to serve? And why were they designed in such a way that they could have only been seen and appreciated from the sky at a time when aircraft didn't even exist? The only place you can see them above is that somehow you're floating in midair.
It has been suggested that whoever inhabited the Nazca plateau, that they had access to some type of balloon flight, so that they could appreciate what they had created on the ground.
If the Nazca population had access to balloon flight, the Spanish chroniclers would have most certainly recorded that in their reports.
But there is not a single word that describes that the Nazcans had access to hot air balloons.
They would have written that down, but they didn't, so it didn't exist.
By default, we're in the bailiwick of highly advanced terrestrial technology, and that is really the anomaly of the Nazca Lines.
They really are easy to make, when you look at it, because it is only really removing the top layer of a surface.
But the magnitude of the figures is what makes this such a complex undertaking.
Many of the lines at Nazca go for miles, perfectly straight through the desert.
There are various trapezoids and spirals and other glyphs that are so large that the surveyors would need some direction from the sky.
And this is where aliens or some kind of people with flight had to be involved with the creation of the Nazca Lines.
I was in Peru for a month in 1987.
I went with a pilot over the plains of Nazca.
The first pattern that the pilot said, "Well, let's aim for that long six-mile triangle.
" And there have been laser surveys done, and it is remarkably accurate, this triangle.
And it looked like something had pressed the whole ground down at least 24 inches.
How would you press down a six-mile-long perfect triangle into the desert of Nazca? What kind of technology can do that? Not the feet of ancient people.
How could the ancient people of Nazca have created such massive geoglyphs without the capability of flight or the use of advanced tools? Might these mysterious lines have actually been created with the help of otherworldly beings, as ancient astronaut theorists believe? The fact that these designs can only be seen from above, from the sky, is an indication that they were to be used as navigational markers for the gods when they were actually here.
So the question then becomes, you know, were they drawn in this way as navigational markers for the gods to actually fly their vehicles in? Let's assume for a moment that extraterrestrials sent down some type of an unmanned craft, like a rover that we have on Mars right now, that is collecting samples, and is driving around a desert plateau.
It, of course, leaves behind some type of tracks.
And then the natives who just witnessed this would look at each other and say, "Wow! We were just visited by God.
" When in reality, no such thing happened.
Now, could it be the the case that the gods directed building of them to the people below? Could it be that there was some sort of teaching process involved? The fact that we're talking about geometric lines and things like this, was it a teaching process by somebody up there for the so-called "lesser perceived" people down below? We're still asking questions know, to this day they fascinate people and just provoke endless controversy.
Were the Nazca Lines really navigational markers for otherworldly beings visiting Earth? Or were they meant to commemorate an extraterrestrial encounter, one that happened tens of thousands of years ago? Modern-day historians and anthropologists believe the Nazca people were one of several ancestors of the Inca civilization, the largest empire in pre-Columbian America.
In the 13th century, the Inca Empire thrived in the Andes Mountain region of South America.
According to legend, the mysterious Incan creator god Viracocha, commissioned the Nazca Lines and glyphs in the remote past.
And these were said to be created by the Viracocha himself, who was the great teacher god of the Andes.
And so where he came from is still a mystery.
He could've been from Sumeria.
He could've been connected somehow with the Anunnaki.
No one really knows.
But the same legends and the same stories of these great gods appear throughout the world, especially all the way through the Americas.
We know that they are part of a creation mythology in which some of the figurines which are depicted here are said to be deities, are said to be part of the creation mythology as to how the people who lived in that area and who made these geoglyphs came about.
They are messages to be seen from above to basically say that the people on the ground still live in accordance with the rules established by the deities who came from above to teach the people on the ground about civilization and various other aspects of culture.
Could the lines and glyphs of Nazca really have been the work of the Inca god Viracocha, as their legends suggest? If so, what was the purpose of carving these strange geoglyphs into the Earth? Perhaps the answers can be found by taking a closer look at one of Nazca's most mysterious figures, one that has become known as El Astronauto.
Switzerland, 1968.
Researcher and writer Erich von Daniken publishes his first book, "Chariots of the Gods?" In it, he introduces the revolutionary notion that the Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca people after witnessing extraterrestrials using advanced technology and a sophisticated knowledge of mathematics.
Erich Von Daniken was one of the first to actually do aerial flyovers of the Nazca region, and was one of the first researchers to not only look at the diagrams on the plain floor, but also in the hills of Nazca.
We find intricate mathematical diagrams that have never been documented before.
When you fly over the desert, you see down gigantic lines.
Seen from the air, they give you the imagination of airstrips because they start abruptly, end abruptly; sometimes they cross.
They look like airstrips.
When Erich drew the comparison as to how this looks like a network of runways, it is to draw a visual comparison to what they look like from above.
They are not runways.
They would not support the weight of anything physically landing there.
Some theorize that they were runways.
I don't believe that for a moment.
Hell, I was in the Air Force for six years, and none of the aircraft that we had would be capable of landing on that as a runway.
I think it's more of a attention-getter.
You can see them from space.
So I think that it's a, uh a signal.
In the more than four decades since the publication of Chariots of the Gods?, Erich von Daniken's controversial theories concerning the Nazca Lines have continued to spark widespread study.
Some scholars, after discovering curious patterns in the numerous designs, suggest that the Nazca Lines might actually be one of the earliest known examples of applied geometry.
They were interesting geometric figures.
They could draw a figure, and then they could envision making it even bigger.
You're making angles; you're approximating distances, and that innate skill of us to deal with geometry, I think, translates to our earliest art forms.
It's interesting as you look at these designs on the plains of Nazca, some of them have very, very interesting relationships to the skies overhead.
There's a very famous glyph of a spider with one leg that extends way, way out, and if you take that and flip it into sort of a mirror situation, what you can plainly see is that the spider is meant to represent the constellation of Orion, and the spider's leg, the extension, is meant to represent the star Sirius.
So whoever put these designs on the plains of Nazca understood the same thing that all of the other ancient cultures before them understood, which is that there's some critical importance to understanding Orion and Sirius and their relationship to the Earth.
But could the Nazca figures really have had a more profound purpose? Some ancient astronaut theorists believe they were created as a means of communicating messages to the gods messages that may have also included a plea for them to return.
Ancient astronaut theorists believe the mysterious figure known as El Astronauto could hold a clue to the Nazca mystery.
They call him The Spaceman and he appears to have a space helmet or something on his head, and he's got one arm up and he's waving.
And it would seem this is one of the sky gods.
Or if he's not one of the sky gods himself, he's one of the Nazca people who's waving to the sky gods and saying, "Hi, we're here.
Come and land.
We know you came here before.
Come back.
" You have a figure that looks like E.
T.
, with the big eyes and the big head, and one hand is pointing to the sky and the other is pointing to Earth, as if it was some type of a message: "Hey, something happened here; we were visited by beings from above.
Is the mysterious figure known as El Astronauto evidence of an extraterrestrial visitation in the distant past, as some researchers believe? And if so, might this suggest a reason why extraterrestrial visitors may have landed at Nazca in the first place? We send scientists from the University of Dresden to Nazca.
They measured the magnetic field, and they found a change in the magnetic field under some of the lines.
And also, we measured the conduction, electricity along the lines, and right next to it, the ability to conduct currency was 8,000 time higher on the lines.
And they found that eight feet below one of these lines, the magnetic field definitely changes.
So we have the result.
There is something in the ground, but we don't know what it is.
Is it really possible that something in the earth might have attracted an otherworldly species to Nazca? Could it have been an outpost for a mining operation of precious metals? Or perhaps minerals needed for rocket fuel? It's been said that, if any extraterrestrial wanted to come to Earth, Nazca would be a great place for them to land.
Nitrates and various things that we use in our modern propulsion are found in abundance.
Maybe it's possible that extraterrestrials were aware of this location as an energy source, and ancient man left these depictions and runways as a way to entice those beings to come back.
We find that the Nazca civilization was placed in nitrate-rich environments.
They had no purpose for these nitrates.
The question might be, whether nitrate was indeed of importance to the people who came to this area, maybe in prehistoric times.
Maybe an extraterrestrial civilization somehow had a purpose for this nitrate.
Because nitrate is used in an awful lot of interesting technological applications today.
Such applications as space travel.
But might the extraterrestrial contact at Nazca have been designed to support an even greater presence that we have yet to recognize? And could Nazca have in time served its purpose, only to be abandoned? With any visit, or with any project, the time arrives when something is finished.
And that is why some of these contacts had ended, because the extraterrestrials went on to different places.
So why would extraterrestrials be coming to Nazca? Some of the lines at Nazca are going straight through the Andes.
The lines themselves directed you farther east.
But if Nazca was used as an ancient mining site by extraterrestrials, might there be evidence of other, similar sites around the globe? According to ancient astronaut theorists, there are.
And they can be found hundreds of miles away at the ruins of another lost civilization.
Western Bolivia.
plain, near Lake Titicaca, lay the ancient ruins of Tiahuanaco.
According to archaeologists, this ancient city was the capital of the Tihuanaco culture that thrived more than 1,000 years ago.
But ancient astronaut theorists believe that Tiahuanaco is also the place where the mysterious Nazca Lines seem to be pointing to.
But if so, why? When we consider the Nazca Lines in Peru, we have to consider them in their context.
They're not isolated phenomena.
There might not be other examples exactly like the Nazca Lines, but they would be embedded in a larger ritualized or ceremonial landscape that might include other famous places from ancient cultures, such as Tiahuanaco.
At Tiahuanaco, we can find hundreds of glyphs.
We can find faces.
We can find carvings of all sorts of different things.
According to legend, Tiahuanaco was created as a tribute to beings called Sky People, under the direction of Viracocha, the Inca god linked to Nazca.
But might these Sky People be the same extraterrestrials who helped create the Nazca Lines thousands of years ago? According to ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is yes.
Nazca, in a sense, is really a way station along the coast of Peru.
There's an indication there that once you arrived in Nazca with your airship, the lines themselves directed you into the Andes to the giant megalithic cities of Tiahuanaco and Pumapunku.
But is there other evidence of an extraterrestrial presence at Tiahuanaco? Evidence that may give us insight into the true nature of the ancient aliens who allegedly visited Nazca in the remote past? There are many connections between the Nazca culture along the west coast of Peru, and the inland cultures, the Andean cultures of Tihuanaco, Pumapunku and Cuzco.
All throughout this area, they found evidence of these unusual elongated skulls in all these different places, not just in one area.
And so, it seems like they were the builders of these sites.
Found in numerous gravesites in the region, these elongated skulls have a cranial capacity 25% larger than human skulls.
But where did they come from? You will find academic critics who will say it was because there were some Incas who wrapped their baby's heads in some kind of blankets or cloths to make them grow long.
A kind of cosmetic procedure.
There's a lot of argument on the other side that there is not one single piece of cultural evidence that the Incas ever bound the heads.
So, you've got a conflict there among archeologists, even looking at the Peruvian heads.
I suggest the extraterrestrials who were here thousands of years ago they had elongated heads, and our ancestors simply wanted to copy it.
They made it in the beginning.
They hoped that they would become similar to the extraterrestrials they have seen a long time ago.
They are physically changing the appearance of their children to resemble the physical appearance of the deities.
For the Nazca people to have done that, it means that these people somehow preserved the memory of such physical contact with a deity.
But if there is no evidence of the skulls being created by means of binding, or other man-made means, then how can they be explained? Could there be another, perhaps more extraterrestrial, explanation? Might they be evidence of some kind of human-alien hybrid race, a race that not only lived in western Peru but who may have also inhabited ancient Egypt? According to ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is a profound yes.
And they also cite a link between the people of Nazca and the god Viracocha.
What's most interesting is the fact that Viracocha was also said to be the builder of all these sites.
So was he part of the race of the elongated skull people that came to this land and built all these amazing megalithic temples as well as the Nazca Lines? What is perhaps as mysterious as the origin of the elongated skulls is the fate of the Nazca people.
According to most archaeologists, both Nazca and Tiahuanaco were suddenly abandoned at about the same time approximately 1,000 years ago.
Those civilizations, I think, are connected to what was going on in the Peruvian desert with the Nazca.
To what extent? I don't think we know.
There's not enough information that has been gleaned from those civilizations, but they both disappeared around the same time for whatever reasons.
But there was some shift in the earth right then, either some massive earthquake that even caused Lake Titicaca to flood the whole area or perhaps it was some kind of cosmic war between the extraterrestrials.
But once that mining center the, in a sense, the capital of this area was destroyed and no longer functioning, Nazca became this backwater where nothing was really happening anymore.
And it was during that period probably that many of the lines were drawn and the figures, trying to attract the extraterrestrials.
Might the elongated skulls found at sites surrounding Nazca really be evidence that extraterrestrial beings once visited Earth thousands of years ago? And, if so, is it also possible that these otherworldly beings came to mine precious minerals until they were mysteriously destroyed, as some ancient astronaut theorists contend? Perhaps further evidence can be found hidden in plain sight at mysterious mounds and crop circles found all over the world.
Pleasant Hill, Ohio, 1848.
The Smithsonian Institute surveys a 1,350-foot long, three-foot high effigy mound built in the shape of a coiling serpent.
Like the lines and geoglyphs of Nazca, this reptilian motif known as the Serpent Mound can only be seen from high above the Earth.
Similar to Nazca, what we have with these earth mounds is that they're put into easily recognizable symbols, but unless you're looking at them from some altitude, they don't look like anything.
In the Native American legend, we call it the plume serpent, which is probably the same as the Quetzalcoatl down in the tribes in Mexico.
The plume serpent theory is probably related to something that came from the sky.
It came from the extraterrestrial territory.
Serpent Mound and other places of what the Indians used to call places of worship are very important to study these things.
There are certain things that are connected for the well-being of the planet, whether it be the magnetic system, whether it be the ley lines, whether it be observance points from other worlds that existed here before.
According to historians and anthropologists, an indigenous Native American culture called the Fort Ancient people built the mounds nearly 1,000 years ago.
But, if so, why? Serpent Mound is an extraordinary site.
It is one of the most important sites in North America.
It's almost as if somebody is trying to point out, that for anybody passing from above, he or she or it is about to approach a site of importance.
Why would a so-called primitive people have constructed a massive earthwork that, like the geoglyphs and lines in Nazca, went unnoticed and undetected by those on the ground for hundreds of years? Perhaps a clue can be found in the fact that the Serpent Mound was constructed on the edge of a meteor crater that was formed approximately 300 million years ago.
Coincidence? Or was the mound's proximity to a meteor site intended to mark the presence of a very rare and precious element often found in meteors iridium? Iridium has great conductive abilities.
It's one of the rarest elements we have, and it tends to be concentrated in unique areas for two reasons: either a meteorite crashed at some point in the past or volcanic activity and lava flow.
Looking at locations like the Serpent Mound in Ohio and various other sites, we see some type of energy source that either was powering these locations or is still offering some type of energy source today, like iridium and other exotic elements.
And if extraterrestrials are aware of these locations, were they tapping into this energy? The concentration of iridium on that site is ten times higher than what would be expected.
Serpent Mound is some kind of memorial to the presence of another world involved in mining of this iridium at some point in the remote or maybe not-so-remote past.
There's even gravitational anomalies such as you get at the Serpent Mound in Ohio which has magnetic and gravitational effects.
And it can really affect your consciousness.
There's a whole preponderance of possibilities that these sites were built on these particular spots.
Could the Serpent Mound be a marker where extraterrestrial beings mined iridium as an energy source, as some ancient astronaut researchers believe? And, if so, might there be a connection between energy in the ground here and that found in the Nazca plain? Perhaps more clues can be found by examining the mysterious crop circles discovered throughout the world.
Wiltshire, England, 1978.
Here, in this tranquil countryside strange crop circles begin to appear overnight in fields of wheat and corn.
Like the geoglyphs found at Nazca, the designs are geometric shapes seen only from above.
Crop circles, they are described as some type of energy ball that whizzed through the field and all of a sudden there's this intricate diagram.
We also have to wonder if extraterrestrials potentially were involved in Nazca, maybe they're also trying to get us messages today through crop circles.
There is a correlation between the ancient glyphs and the modern crop circles in that they're both being presented to the Earth from what we would call star people using a higher technology.
Mainstream scientists have yet to acknowledge an extraterrestrial connection to crop circles.
But ancient astronaut theorists remain convinced that there is more here than what meets the skeptical eye.
While some crop circles are undoubtedly the work of farmers and others trying to pull off a hoax, many cannot be explained so easily.
They appear to be made too quickly, too perfectly.
Some magically appear within a few hours, accompanied by strange lights in the sky.
Could there be a connection between these unusual shapes and the mysterious designs found at Nazca? Now, people suggest that crop circles are made by either extraterrestrials or some sort of non-human intelligence, some sort of non-human entity that's possibly trying to give us a message.
If we draw the parallel between the crop circles and the Nazca Lines, one, yes, is made in, like, a sandy desert-type terrain; the other's made in corn, but the actual designs are somewhat similar, and maybe even the message is a similar one, but it's just been upgraded for a new era and a different country.
In the past, we set the communications in stone.
And what's happening now, today, in fields all over the world but especially in England, the crop circles are so much more complex than the designs at Nazca.
There definitely seems to be some sort of communication taking place.
Somebody is trying to communicate with us, and we are too stupid to understand the communication.
One morning, you have a simple circle in a crop field.
Now, the humans think, "Okay, circle, it happens by the wind or by animals overnight or whatever.
" We all are too arrogant, so we don't try at communication.
Is there really a profound connection between the Nazca lines and crop circles, as ancient astronaut theorists believe? And might they contain messages that we have yet to decode? If so, what are they trying to tell us? Perhaps answers can be found by examining other, equally strange geoglyphs, recently discovered after nearly 2,000 years.
Satellite and aerial photography reveals high numbers of mysterious stone wheels carved into the earth in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.
First discovered in 1927, these stone circles are believed to number in the thousands, and date back more than 2,000 years.
Ranging in size from 80 to more than 200 feet in width, ancient astronaut theorists believe these designs fit a global pattern.
Seems to me that there was high intelligence behind everything that has been constructed and built, and that it has all been built for a reason.
Somebody decided to make these amazing circles with spokes.
The same thing in Peru, and look at how far apart we are.
Peru is in one hemisphere, and Jordan and Syria and Saudi Arabia are in another hemisphere, and they're on two sides of the planet, but you're talking about a similar kind of, shall we say, communication.
Thanks to Google Earth, we now have a vehicle by which we can see some of these glyphs.
They're being called Nazca-like phenomena.
I think we are opening the first page of a chapter that deals with glyphs and structures which can be seen from the air.
It's not only at Nazca that ancient man was trying to communicate to the heavens, but around the world we are finding new monuments and glyphs that raise the question, "Was there a connected geodetic presence of sites that the extraterrestrials used to navigate around our planet?" What is the purpose of the strange shapes and geoglyphs found at Nazca and all over the world? Were they used as navigational markers, intended to guide space travelers? Or might they contain a more profound message for humanity? In 1972, cosmologist Carl Sagan stated that if an extraterrestrial intelligence exists in the universe, the means of contact would be mathematics.
If you think about this as communication, as Carl Sagan was quoted as saying, it is certainly true that this would be the way we'd probably have to start.
A circle is a circle, and that's just a universal feature of geometry.
And it would be the same no matter where you were in the universe.
Is it possible that otherworldly beings have been using basic mathematics and geometry in an effort to communicate with us? And might the proof of this be found in the many geoglyphs at Nazca and throughout the world? Could mankind have been receiving extraterrestrial messages for hundreds and even thousands of years messages that have gone unread and undeciphered right before our eyes? Imagine you wanted to reveal a truth about the higher world to humans.
You would lay down one card at a time.
Each of these cards would be a glyph or a crop circle image, and it would reveal something about the spiritual world.
Not just knowledge.
It would provide an experience of the actual reality it was describing.
What we have in the Nazca culture is something which our ancestors knew that what they were making was gonna have a lasting effect.
Hundreds of years afterwards, it is still there.
And it might be very ironic to realize that they were shouting out for the deities, saying, "Please come down and visit us.
" And that 100 years later, the Nazca Lines have become the billboard for the ancient alien theory, whereby they really are interpreted as, indeed, a landing place for the deities.
And so we might find that across time and space and culture, really the core of the message of the Nazca Lines is maintained, even though maybe slightly placed in a different context.
When you look at some of the glyphs at Nazca, they would seem to be just simple things animals and figures and things like that.
But then other of the figures and the lines seem to be so incredibly complicated.
Mathematical, and they're-they're following energy lines.
So, there seems to be a much deeper meaning in all of the figures and the lines, and where they're going and why they intersect.
But we can't figure it out.
Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, that the lines and geoglyphs of Nazca are part of a worldwide communications network a network that is directly connected to otherworldly visitors from the remote past? And if so, might this form of alien communication be intended for us or for something, or someone not of this world? Perhaps these strange shapes and symbols provide clues to mankind's not-so-distant future, or serve as an invitation for other alien visitors to return.