NASCA LINES

“Hello, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to this lecture on one of the most fascinating mysteries on Earth - the Nasca lines.
The Nasca desert of south-western Peru is one of the driest places on Earth.
Very little rain has fallen on the light, yellow soil in the last 10,000 years. 

It is certainly a surprise that anyone would choose this isolated desert as the place to draw hundreds of perfectly straight lines, geometric patterns and huge animal shapes. But somebody did.
These gigantic drawings cover a huge area - about 520 square kilometres.
Many of the straight lines are over 8 kilometres long; one of them is even as long as 65km.
There are also huge rectangles, triangles and other shapes.
They seem to suggest an enormous airport and its runways. Strangest of all are the giant animal shapes,
including at least eighteen different birds, a spider, a monkey, a snake and a lizard.
In order to draw these patterns and figures,
thousands of tons of rock had to be removed from the desert - probably by hand. 

Although Spanish explorers reached the area in the sixteenth century,
western scientists and archaeologists only became interested in the patterns after the 1930s,
when air travel became more common.
One of the reasons is that the figures are so large you can only appreciate the drawings from high above the ground. 

Experts now believe that the drawings were done in two stages.
Most of the animal drawings were created first, probably by Nasca Indians between 500BC and 500AD.
The straight fines were drawn later. But how were the Indians able to draw such straight fines over long distances?
A recent theory is that the Nasca Indians might have known how to fly and this is how they were able to produce such large works of art. Indeed, paintings have been found in the area that seem to show a type of primitive hot-air balloon. 

But the biggest mystery remains - what do the lines mean and why were they drawn?
One theory is that the lines were a network of roads.
However, this seems unlikely as some of the lines end suddenly or lead nowhere.
A more recent theory is that the lines predict the positions of the stars.
The Indians could have used this information to know when to plant or harvest crops. However,
astronomers using computer models have not yet found a way to make the fines match with any constellations.

Another popular theory is that the fines have a religious purpose.
Some researchers have suggested that each line may have belonged to an individual family or clan,
who were responsible for looking after the line. The animal drawings might have been religious symbols,
and the families met to pray to them.

Perhaps the strangest theory is that the drawings were actually created by aliens.
In the late 1960s the writer Erich Von Daniken wrote a bestseller, Chariots of the Gods,
which suggested that many of the greatest historic monuments, like the Pyramids and the Nasca lines,
were not built by people. Although very few people took Von Daniken’s eccentric ideas seriously,
it did encourage thousands of people to come and see the lines for themselves.”