Who and why drew lines and figures on the deserted Nazca plateau that can only be seen from a bird's eye view?
Vsevolod Ovchinnikov's journey
A battered four-seater airplane of the tourist airline "Condor" - a kind of flying "Zaporozhets" - hit the ground, jumped twice and finally ran along the dusty landing strip.
I flung open the open cockpit door, carefully put my foot on the wheel of the landing gear and stepped onto the brownish-gray ground.
Sandpaper sheet
Was it really all this? Did I just fly over the mysterious Nazca plateau, where no one knows who and no one knows why drew mysterious lines, figures and drawings?
During the forty minutes of the flight, I must confess, I endured fear. We fell into air pockets every minute. The airplane, like a restive horse, tried to shake us out of the cockpit. Every now and then I frantically grabbed the armrests.
A brownish-gray uneven space stretched out below us. The Rio Ingeño and its tributaries, flowing from the Andes, here and there left their winding traces here. And among these wrinkles left by time on the face of the earth, I suddenly saw perfectly straight lines drawn from horizon to horizon. They converged, sometimes crossed. It was as if someone was teaching a geometry lesson on this giant 700 square kilometers blackboard.
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Sometimes these were not even lines, but stripes with diverging edges. It was as if the dark gray surface of the plateau had been illuminated by a spotlight. Rectangular platforms looked the same light gray against a dark gray background. There was a complete impression that we were flying over a modern airfield. Or maybe a cosmodrome? As soon as you thought about it, the mysterious geometric shapes on the earth acquired some meaning, some explanation.
- And now I'll show you the drawings! - shouted, turning to us, the pilot. - He put the plane into a turn. We flew now, raising one wing to the sky, and the other tilting steeply to the ground. And then the soul that had gone somewhere in the heels suddenly trembled with delight.
Near the end of the ground-facing wing, I distinctly saw a slightly stylized but quite realistic figure of a whale. Having described a ring around it with the end of the wing, the pilot leveled the plane and then immediately flunked it into a reverse turn.
Now there was a monkey below. It has been much more stylized. One of her upper limbs had five fingers, the other had four. And the gigantic tail was twisted in a geometrically correct spiral. Then there was the condor with its beak extended forward, with spread wings and paws, and with a wide tail. There was a hummingbird painted on a flat hilltop. There was a giant, sinister tarantula, four legs forward and four legs back.
The enigmatic images of the Nazca plateau can be divided into three categories. Firstly, these are the lines that, as if along a ruler, draw the pump from end to end. They cross dry riverbeds, climb hillsides and descend from them again. The second category of images includes various geometric shapes. These are rectangles, trapezoids, spirals. These are rectangular light areas, nicknamed "football fields". These are long light ribbons, the sides of which diverge at a slight angle. Such figures outwardly very much resemble runways.
Finally, the third category is drawings. They are most clearly visible in the valley of the dry Rio Ingenio River. It is noteworthy that the creators of the drawings gave a clear preference for birds. There are eighteen of them here. Among them are the well-known condor and goiter sea hawk. But there is also a picture of a hummingbird, which is found only in tropical forests on the other side of the Andes. Among the drawings, there are obviously fantastic creatures. Such is the bird with an exorbitantly long neck that wriggles in zigzags like a crawling snake.
Each drawing is made with one continuous line. After making many turns, it ends where it started. Scientists have established that the images on the Nazca plateau were made in the 6th-10th centuries AD.
Who, when, and most importantly - why?
The question is inevitable: why did people do this titanic work a thousand years ago? For what purpose were these images created? Many believe that, like most ancient monuments, the lines, figures and drawings were of cult significance.
However, this assumption is highly doubtful. Any ritual objects - temples and tombs, bells and drums, bonfires and torches - must first of all affect the feelings of people. But the mysterious images of the Nazca plateau are not perceived from the ground. It remains to be assumed that they are intended for the inhabitants of heaven. In addition, the authors of the drawings were clearly addicted to flying creatures …
Since the pre-war years, a German woman named Maria Reiche lived in the city of Nazca. She was the first assistant and companion of the American historian Paul Kosok, who is considered to be the discoverer of the patterns of the Nazca plateau.
“Centuries before the Incas, a historic monument was created on the southern coast of Peru, unparalleled in the world and intended for posterity. In terms of scale and accuracy of execution, it is not inferior to the Egyptian pyramids. But if there we look, lifting our heads, at the monumental three-dimensional structures of a simple geometric shape, then here we have to look from a great height at wide open spaces covered with mysterious lines and images that seem to be drawn on the plain by a giant hand "- this is how Reiche begins his book" The Secret desert ".
Kosok studied Mesopotamia, and in particular the role that irrigation played in the life of ancient peoples. This is how he developed an interest in irrigation systems in South America, especially on the arid Pacific coast of Peru. Kosok decided to survey the area from a low-flying aircraft. It dawned on him that the pilots saw lines on the coastal plateaus, similar to the Martian channels.
Cosmodrome
for aliens?
When Paul Kosok first spoke about his discovery on the eve of the 40s, it did not attract much attention - the Second World War began. But even after its end no one returned to the Nazca mystery for a long time. The Swiss Erich von Daniken, author of the book and film "Memories of the Future", spoke about it again, already for the general public. Daniken put forward a hypothesis: are the images of Nazca connected with extraterrestrial civilizations?
In his opinion, Pampa de Nazca could serve as a cosmodrome. Lines, figures and drawings of Nazca are oriented relative to some interplanetary routes, they should give signs to cosmonauts from the Earth.
Proponents of the space hypothesis remind of another ancient rock carvings. On the Pacific coast of Peru, there is the village of Paracas. On the slope of the mountain, descending to the sea, there has long been a gigantic image of either a trident or a candelabrum. Was the gigantic trident on the rock a signpost for those heading to the Nazca plateau by air?