The Nazca Lines were discovered by a Peruvian archaeologist in 1927 and have bewildered the world ever since. Some say they reveal a shocking truth: humans were capable of manned flight 1,500 years ago…
The Nazca Lines are geoglyphs—aka drawings on the ground—spread across 168 square miles of the Nazca Desert in Peru and consisting of 13,000 lines. The drawings include depictions of a spider, hummingbird, lizard, monkey, pelican and various other creatures, as well as geometric patterns and straight lines stretching for miles. Carbon dating has estimated that they are at least 1,500 years old.
What do they mean? Scientists and archaeologists are still trying to work this out. Many believe that the ancient Nazca Indians created them to be seen by their gods from the sky, perhaps as some kind of worship or message. Others have looked for astronomical connections. To this day, nobody knows what the lines really mean or what their purpose was.
For me, though, it’s not about what or why. It’s about how. The Nazca Lines are a bit like Stonehenge. Nobody knows Stonehenge’s true purpose, but the big question is how on Earth ancient tribespeople were able to haul those enormous 50 ton stones up onto the Salisbury Plain and erect them. It’s a question that’s never been satisfactorily answered.
The Nazca Lines can only be truly appreciated from the air, which surely means they must’ve been coordinated from the air. And yet history’s pretty certain that the ancient Nazca Indians weren’t flying about in aeroplanes.
Or were they?
Does aviation have a secret history?
Dr Donald Chittick says:
“The fact that the designs in the Nazca Desert can only be viewed effectively from the air should at least suggest the possibility that the constructors of the Nazca designs may have possessed the capability for flight.”
Humans have dreamed of flying since ancient times. There are stories of kites that could carry a person through the air in ancient China and Japan, but these would’ve required careful and skilful manhandling on the ground and it’s likely the passenger would not have been in the air for long. Leonardo da Vinci studied bird flight and aerodynamics and tried unsuccessfully to build several flying machines in the 15th century. All other attempts at manned flying were unsuccessful until the invention of hot air balloons in the 18th century, followed by airships and aeroplanes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Jim Woodman argued that the Nazca Lines could not have been made without some form of manned flight to see the figures properly. He suggested that the Nazca Indians may have used hot air balloons built out of materials available to them at the time. But most scholars have rejected this hypothesis on the basis that there is no evidence that any such balloons existed.
So how did the Nazca Indians create them? Perhaps they possessed advanced technology that gave them the ability to fly. I’m not talking about man-carrying kites. They would not have been able to create the Nazca Lines with a bunch of those. They would’ve needed machines — and sophisticated ones at that.
More evidence of ancient aviation
Artefacts have been discovered which appear to be evidence of ancient manned flight. An object dating back 1,500 years was discovered in Columbia and, despite being dubbed a “stylised insect”, looks strangely like an aeroplane…
In Egypt, an artefact found in a tomb called the Saqqara Bird is said to be a model glider, evidence that the principles of aviation existed many centuries earlier than originally thought…
If the Nazca Indians could fly, we may never know what kind of machines they flew. But an even bigger question lies at the centre of this: where did they get the technology from?
Now there’s a can of worms just waiting to be opened…
Aliens? Time travellers?
Perhaps the Nazca Indians obtained flight technology from aliens. Lots of conspiracy theorists believe that our history is peppered with visits from ancient aliens. They contend that there is evidence of this in the Bible and various other historical records, and that extraterrestrial visitors were responsible for building the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, not the ancient Egyptians. So did aliens give the Nazca Indians the power of flight?
Some argue that aliens created the Nazca Lines themselves. Erich von Daniken proposed that the lines were in fact landing strips for alien spaceships.
Or could it be that time travellers are responsible? There’s a conspiracy theory that time travellers have been popping up throughout history, inadvertently leaving evidence of themselves (e.g. The Charlie Chaplin Time Traveller, Andrew Carlssin and the time travellers that landed in Rendlesham Forest). A number of “out-of-time artefacts” (such as microchips and footprints) are said to be things they’ve accidentally left behind. So perhaps time travellers gave future technology to the Indians, whether deliberately or not, and the Nazca Lines are further evidence of them screwing with our history…
I feel a short story coming on 🙂
Next week: the mysterious death of Superman
C.R. Berry 