Nasca Lines
Yesterday I checked off an activity that has been on my list of to-dos for over thirty years! I took a flight over the Nasca Lines. By the way, I’m going with “Nasca” over “Nazca” after learning that this is the Quechua spelling which in my opinion trumps any Spanish derivation. In Quechua, it means pain and suffering which I guess is a good description of a farming area in one of the driest places on earth and it is also known for earthquakes (as is all of Peru). In the mid-70s I did a lot of studying of UFOs, Bermuda Triangle and the like. The topics fit in with the quantities of Science Fiction books that I consumed and I was at first a believer in these phenomenon. Eric Von Daniken’s book and movie called Chariots of the Gods fascinated me and a part of his take on past visits by UFOs was the lines and other geoglyphs discovered at Nasca and Palpa, Peru. By time I reached my twelfth birthday, though, I had become convinced that humans come up with the craziest ideas in the cosmos and I stopped believing any tales of ETs visiting earth. I remember playing telephone in school where the teacher whispered a short tale to a student at the front of the class and they repeated it to the next who repeated it to the next continuing until it was told to the last student. The utter crap of a story that came out of the last student’s mouth compared to the original started me on the road to severe skepticism.
It wasn’t long thereafter that I determined that Von Daniken’s story was crap science (not science fiction and therefore fairly dangerous especially when conjoined with modern day media) and the same was true for just about every tale about UFOs and mysteriously missing sailors in tranquil seas. I am a believer in the likelihood of intelligent life beyond the gorillas, chimps, dolphins and whales… and humans, I guess… on our planet. Carl Sagan did a great mathematical analysis of the possibility in his book Contact which makes it conservatively clear that such a possibility is mathematically impossible not to exist – Sagan would not be surprised by the latest possible life-bearing planet discoveries in distant solar systems. But I really do not believe that they have come to our planet and once-in-a-while allowed themselves to be seen. Nor do I believe that they need lines in a desert for landing their crafts if they traveled that far to begin with. Nasca is not an ET airport! Nor was it 2000-2500 years ago when the first lines and geoglyphs were constructed by the Paracas and Nasca peoples.
Two theories about why the lines and giant drawngs of monkeys, hummingbirds, trees and other living objects were created seem to make the most sense. First, the lines seem to point to natural aquifers which would obviously be a very essential part of life for people living in a desert where it currently only rains briefly once or twice a year. The Nasca people built an amazing aqueduct system including underground canals which are still used today to irrigate surrounding farmland. Second, Maria Reiche, a German woman who is a national heroine in Peru and studied the lines for most of her 95 years, concluded that the drawings are open air temples and mimic astronomical constellations revered by the Nasca people. Apparently, according to her theories they were tied to a cosmic calendar and people would have processions on the drawings. It is impossible to know if these theories are correct, but they certainly make more sense than anything to do with ET. It was just humans with their crazy imaginations and know-how.
My flight in a Cessna took off a little after 7:00 AM. The sun was up in the sky, it wasn’t too hot yet and there were no winds. I was videotaping the takeoff and it went so smoothly that I did not realize we were off the ground until I looked out the side window. The forty-five minute flight over Nasca and Palpa lines and drawings as well as the aqueduct system was amazingly smooth and fun. The pilot put the plane at amazing angles so we could see things clearly and he made two passes over each so that we could see them from both sides of the plane. I loved the flight over the beautiful desert once again reminding me of the similarities between Peru and Namibia coastal areas. But I really loved each swoop over the geoglyphs. The pilot’s voice would crackle over the intercom about something and while I was working on figuring out which object he had said (problem with my hearing, listening and the overall noise of a prop plane) I was staring intently and all of a sudden a hummingbird or condor or dog or other drawing would come to life. I giggled each time my eyes locked in and I got it.
The dumbest one of all is the “astronaut”. It is a human-looking drawing which is the only one of the Nasca drawings on a side of a hill. The only resembles an astronaut or ET is due to all of the drawings done by people who say they were picked up by ETs. You know the ones with the big bald heads, big eyes and little bodies. You know the ones with so much brain that they only need big heads and large sensory receptors because they are so advanced. I think I like the two local theories more than ET. First, they say it resembles other pre-Incan drawings of people with owl eyes and second it is near the whale drawing and it makes sense that it is a fisherman due to this proximity. Maybe a fisherman with his eyes bugged out because he caught a whale!
The forty-five minute flight went too fast. I was ready to stay up there all day. We only saw a fraction of the total number of drawings (300? or so). But I was also deeply satisfied to see the largest and in some respects the greatest art exhibit in the world. Christo has nothing on the Nasca people and thankfully he has never come up with any ideas that I know of to adorn their work with pink fabric. I never lose my sense of how fortunate I am to live some of the dreams I have had for much of my life and this was certainly one of them.
Tags: peru, south america, Travel
vagabondrick
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