Skeptoid #1056: The Mystery of the Nazca Lines

Discovery of the Nazca lines

0:00In the desert on the eastern coast of Peru and northern Chile, the terrain is etched with lines—some in geometric shapes, some that look like animals, some that run straight across the land for kilometers. For at least a century, outsiders have wondered about their purpose. Are they an astronomical calendar? A map for water rituals? A landing zone for extraterrestrial spacecraft? We'll examine the possibilities one by one, and uncover brand new research that only deepens the mystery.

0:35And in our extended content for Premium members, how Maria Reich, the Lady of the Lines, spent her life investigating and protecting the Nazca Lines. That's up next on Skeptoid. Hey everyone, Brian here. Before we get started, a quick word about how you can support Skeptoid directly. If you've ever wanted your name permanently attached to an episode of this show—for example, one you might suggest—now you can.

1:07For a one-time fee, I'll read your name at the top of an episode of your choice, burned into the recording forever. It's a personal sponsorship, and honestly, one of my favorite ways listeners can connect with the show they love. And if you have a business, product, or service you'd like to reach our audience with, we offer commercial sponsorships, too—up to 60 seconds of copy, with options for impressions, dates, and even geo-targeting. Skeptoid surpassed 100 million downloads in 2017, making it one of the largest independent podcasts ever.

1:44That's a passionate, science-literate audience that actively supports the brands that support their programming. To learn more about either option, come to Skeptoid.com slash sponsor. That's Skeptoid.com slash sponsor.

2:06This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O-D-O-O dot com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

2:36You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Ashley Hamer-Pritchard from Skeptoid.com. The mystery of the NASCA lines. Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not. On June 22, 1941, German mathematician Maria Reich and American historian Paul Kosock stood on a massive plateau in the Peruvian desert, some 400 kilometers or about 250 miles south of Lima, as they watched the sun set over the horizon and saw something that would change the trajectory of their lives.

3:18They were here to study the NASCA lines, mysterious designs etched into the ground in an arid stretch of desert, undisturbed from the kind of rain and wind that might erase them from history. The lines date back to between 100 BCE and 800 CE, but weren't discovered by modern scholars until the 20th century. Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejia Hespe was the first to stumble upon the lines in the mid-1920s, but it wasn't until the advent of commercial flight that the lines were appreciated in all their glory.

3:53That's how Paul Kosock first saw them, from a plane, after coming to Peru to study the irrigation systems of the NASCA region. A year later, he brought along his protege, Maria Reich, a German national with a mathematics degree who spoke five languages and had moved to Peru to be a tutor. On that plateau the evening of the winter solstice, the two watched as the kilometers-long line etched in the desert before them perfectly intersected with the setting sun.

4:23A theory was born. These mysterious lines weren't art or roads or irrigation ditches. They were an astronomical calendar, a giant chart designed to track the sun, moon, and stars.

4:38Kosock and especially Reich would spend the rest of their lives expanding this theory, and defending it, as new evidence continuously arrived to knock it down, and alien theories popped up to distract from the science. We still don't have a single, tidy answer for why the lines exist. But the evidence we do have points to a purpose much more grounded than a star calendar or an alien landing strip.

5:06The NASCA Lines. Their place, culture, and scale. The UNESCO protected zone here covers 750 square kilometers of desert, nearly the size of New York City. Officially, the site isn't even called the NASCA Lines. Its formal designation is the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nazca and Palpa, since it spans two separate Peruvian provinces. The designs, known as geoglyphs, come in two main forms.

5:37The first is representational. Depictions of animals, plants, people, and objects. Some hundreds of meters wide, others much smaller. The second encompasses the lines. Straight, unbroken grooves that run for kilometers in all directions, or large geometric figures, or lines that circle or radiate from a central location. A 2021 study counted 2,308 straight lines alone.

6:06Considering the size of the site, you might understand why someone would invoke extraterrestrial influences. How exactly could a culture thousands of years in the past, without the benefit of air travel or satellite imagery, build such a thing?

The extraterrestrial theory

6:22The Extraterrestrial Theory.

6:27The man responsible for the idea that the NASCA Lines were associated with extraterrestrial visitors may ring a bell to regular skeptoid listeners. Erich von Daniken, father of the ancient aliens theory, who has appeared in 10 separate episodes by my count. He wrote the book Chariots of the Gods, first published in Germany in 1968, which laid out his theories about extraterrestrials assisting Earth civilizations, from the Maya to the Egyptians, in the construction of their monuments.

6:59In the book, he writes, Seen from the air, the clear-cut impression that the 37-mile-long plane of NASCA made on me was that of an airfield. What is wrong with the idea that the lines were laid out to say to the gods, Land here! Everything has been prepared as you ordered. The builders of the geometrical figures may have had no idea what they were doing, but perhaps they knew perfectly well what the gods needed in order to land. He goes on to say that the lines would have taken decades without modern technology,

7:30suggesting that instructions from an aircraft might have been necessary, and no one in their right mind would put in that much effort unless something as big as extraterrestrials visiting was at stake. So, how did they do all this without an aircraft? And did each image take decades? Hey, everyone, Brian here. Quick news, I'm teaming up with guest expert Curly Tlapoyawa this December for Mysteries of the Maya,

8:03an on-site educational adventure running December 6th through the 13th. And we don't want finances to be the reason someone misses out. We're offering a limited number of scholarships, and we're strongly encouraging students and educators to apply. Here is what you'll need. Get yourself to New Orleans. Be at the port ready to board by 1 p.m. on Sunday, December 6th. Share a double occupancy cabin, and cover 10 or 50% of the standard ticket price.

8:34Applications are reviewed in the order we receive them, so don't wait. Apply now at Skeptoid.com slash events. That's Skeptoid.com slash events. Now, back to the show.

How the lines were made

8:51How the Lines Were Really Made The production of the lines themselves is simple. The desert surface is oxidized to a dark rust color, and just by removing surface rocks, or even running a finger through the sand, it'll reveal the lighter colored sand below. Millennia of sunshine has darkened the uncovered sand over time, but not enough to fully erase the images. Maria Reich, the German mathematician who pioneered the astronomy theory for the lines,

9:22found that NASCA artists prepared their preliminary drawings on a smaller plot around 2 meters or 6 feet square. Many of these smaller draft drawings are still visible near larger images. From there, they plotted the lines with ropes stretched between stakes in the ground. Straight lines were made with a rope stretched between two stakes, circles were traced by anchoring a rope to one stake, and more complex curves were drawn by linking partial circles together. There's evidence of this, too.

9:52You can still see stones or holes in the centers of many circles. But then what? How did they turn the small sketch into a massive drawing? Reich couldn't figure it out, writing that they must have used some sort of instruments and equipment we don't know about. Some scholars saw the NASCA's history with weaving and assumed they used a similar grid system. Mark a grid on the smaller image, mark off a grid many times larger where you want to create the full image, then copy the lines within each square exactly until you've filled in the grid.

10:24In 1983, renowned skeptic investigator Joe Nickel published an essay in the Skeptical Enquirer that demonstrated the answer. He wrote, I decided to attempt to reproduce one of the larger NASCA figures, the 440-foot-long condor, using a means I thought the NASCAs might actually have employed. I was joined in the project by two of my cousins, John May and Sid Haney. The method we chose was quite simple. We would establish a center line

10:54and locate points on the drawing by plotting their coordinates. That is, on the small drawing, we would measure along the center line from one end, the bird's beak, to a point on the line directly opposite the point to be plotted, say, a wingtip. Then we would measure the distance from the center line to the desired point. A given number of units on a small drawing would require the same number of units, larger units, on the large drawing. And instead of clearing gravel and sand, he marked the lines with white lime,

11:25the way you'd mark a football field. It took six of them nine hours to plot the large image. And after a week-long hiatus due to a challenge the NASCAs never faced, rainstorms, Nickel and his father spent most of a day marking out the final lines. The work was a success, and Nickel concluded that the NASCAs almost certainly used this method. Considering it took six people two days to complete the drawing, there's no reason to think that an otherworldly event would be necessary motivation.

11:58Maria Reich, the lady of the lines herself, gave another reason to doubt the alien airfield idea. She said, Once you remove the stones, the ground is quite soft. I'm afraid the spacemen would have gotten stuck. Are the lines an astronomical calendar?

Testing the astronomical calendar

12:19Assuming the lines didn't have an extraterrestrial explanation, we can now examine the first theory mentioned for the lines' purpose, as an astronomical calendar that charted the movement of the sun, moon, and stars. This was the theory put forward by Reich and Kosak. The lines recorded the passage of the seasons and tracked celestial cycles, and the images aligned with particular constellations. For example, an image of a spider was associated with Orion, and one of a monkey was associated with the Pleiades.

12:49But more recent surveys have cross-referenced the positions of the lines with the movement of the stars and come up short. Most recently, a 2021 study published in the journal Applied Sciences ran all 2,308 lines against solstices, equinoxes, zenith passages, and star positions across the roughly 1,000-year NASCA period. It found that only 4% lined up with solar events, and star correlations were no better than chance. Sirius, the brightest star in the sky,

13:20had fewer hits than dimmer stars, which suggests these lines existed for a different reason than following the stars.

The water and pilgrimage theory

13:29Water.

The water and pilgrimage theory

13:30The Leading Theory If the lines weren't a calendar, what were they? The leading answer today points to something a desert civilization would have been utterly obsessed with, finding water.

13:44NASCA is in one of the driest places on Earth, and that early civilization relied entirely on runoff from the Andes Mountains and a network of underground aqueducts they built by hand. The supply of water was less than reliable, and a particularly dry season could force them to find other sources. Which is one reason anthropologist Johann Reinhardt, who spent decades studying mountain worship across the Andes, argues that the lines were ritual pathways that led toward water sources in the mountains. Mountains that the NASCA

14:15likely worshipped as living deities like other Andean cultures. Reinhardt argued the straight lines pointed to water, and the images served as pilgrimage route markers. It's also worth mentioning that mountains are a great vantage point for seeing the NASCA lines from above. Physical evidence backs this water theory. Worshippers regularly left ornaments crafted from seashells as offerings on mountain peaks, and these same ornaments have been found on and near

14:46the lines themselves. And archaeological surveys have found that many of the lines were constructed near sources of groundwater, which may have provided better quality water than rivers did.

14:59New research in a millennia-old mystery.

15:04There's still no smoking gun for the true purpose of the NASCA lines, and researchers are still actively exploring the site. The latest study of the NASCA lines, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2024, used AI to find 303 new representational geoglyphs. A huge find, considering that it took nearly 100 years to find the last 430. Earlier, I mentioned there were two types of geoglyphs at the site. Straight lines

15:35and representational images that look like animals, plants, and objects. This study found that the representational images come in two forms themselves, line type and relief type. Line type geoglyphs are made the way we've already discussed, by clearing a continuous narrow path like a line drawing. Relief type geoglyphs were the new discovery. They're smaller and made by clearing stones across the whole figure and its surroundings to create a shaded, filled silhouette. They average about 9 meters

16:06or 30 feet across and are found mostly near walking trails, which the study argues means they were meant to be seen up close by people walking by. Another point for the water pilgrimage idea. Conclusion The Nazca Lines are an example of science done right. People examined the mystery, preserved the site, took the environment, culture, and human behavior into account, informed theories that could be backed

16:36or dismissed by hard evidence. While there's no definitive answer, the evidence points to a culture that understood geometry, organized labor at scale, and knew exactly what their survival depended on. Invoking extraterrestrial influence sells the Nazca culture short. Whatever the line's actual message, one thing seems clear. They weren't built for an audience in the sky. The rest is something we're still learning to read.

17:10We continue with more on Maria Reich's decades-long obsession with the Nazca Lines in the ad-free and extended premium feed. To access it, become a supporter at skeptoid.com slash go premium.

17:25A great big Skeptoid shout-out to our premium supporters, including Mark Allen Kagan, Sean Marshall from Ontario, Canada, Terry Farmer, and Richard Tillman. Becoming a premium member is the best way to enjoy Skeptoid. Not only do you get a special sponsor-free and extended podcast feed, you can also get the nifty Skeptoid USB 3.0 flash drive preloaded with all the podcasts and movies we've ever produced. It's easy to get, just come to

17:55Skeptoid.com and click go premium. Get the Skeptoid books. They make great bathroom reading and they're awesome gifts for people who don't listen to podcasts. Get them in our online store at Skeptoid.com slash store. Skeptoid is a production of Skeptoid Media. Executive producer and chief typist is Brian Dunning. Our executive director and tinfoil hat counter is Kathy Reitmeyer. Marketing guru and Illuminati liaison is Jake Young. Director of production and Martian outreach coordinator is Will McCandless.

18:26Theme music is by Lee Sanders. Researched and written by me, Ashley Hamer-Pritchard. Listen to Skeptoid for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or iHeart.

18:40You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program. I'm Ashley Hamer-Pritchard from Skeptoid.com. Hi, this is David Hewitt from California. If memory serves, Skeptoid was the first podcast that I encountered nearly 20 years ago. I don't remember what led me to it, but I'm so glad that I found it. Listening to Skeptoid episodes provides a critical thinking anchor

19:10in today's rather lunacy-filled world, and the Skeptoid model is a great learning tool for those who want to escape the trap of the echo-chamber mentality. It's very comforting to know that Brian recognizes his mistakes, uncommon though they are, and corrects them for all to hear. The podcast episodes, books, and movies are prime examples of the way that we should be approaching common claims and beliefs. I'm very pleased to be able to support

19:40Skeptoid Media, and I hope that all who are able to do so will do likewise. Best to all from California.

19:56From PRX.