The Nazca Lines

OVERVIEW

The Nazca lines are geoglyphs made by removing the reddish surface pebbles of the Nazca Desert to expose lighter ground, in two phases (Paracas, 400–200 BC; Nazca, 200 BC – AD 500). Several hundred new figures have been found by drone, and in 2024 a Yamagata University team working with IBM used AI to identify 303 more.

HISTORY

Pedro Cieza de León mentioned them in 1553 as trail markers. Peruvian pilots reported them in the twentieth century, and the archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe spoke on them in Lima in 1939. Paul Kosok, flying over them in 1940–41, saw that one was a bird and that lines converged on the winter-solstice sunset. Scholars have linked them to shamanistic ritual.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

In Chariots of the Gods? (1968) Erich von Däniken claimed the lines were landing tracks for extraterrestrial astronauts. Maria Reiche and others called the idea absurd and showed the lines could be made with simple tools; the investigator Joe Nickell reproduced the large figures with the tools and technology of the time, from the ground, in days — work Scientific American called remarkable in its exactness. The entry is vetted as a real and extraordinary site; the ancient-astronaut claim attached to it is recorded as refuted.

VISITING

Seen from the roadside observation tower on the Pan-American Highway or by overflight from Nazca or Pisco. Walking on the pampa is prohibited — the figures are fragile and footprints last.