For many years it was believed that the North American continent is a land without history. White people from the very beginning treated the Indians who lived there with a certain arrogance. What could these "savages" show the stories?
The picture has changed over time. Today ethnologists possess thousands of drawings of Indians, many of their legends and myths.
Nevertheless, over the past forty years, something else was discovered that for thousands of years lay on the surface, forming part of the landscape, but for the time being did not attract attention. These are the so-called Indian mounds, rising in thousands from the Colorado River to Mexico, from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians in the northern United States.
Snake Hill in Ohio (west of the city of Portsmouth).
These hills are artificial and depict bison, birds, bears and people. Some of them served as tombs, but most of them were works of pure art. In Ohio, between its capital Columbus and Newark, there is a giant octagon, and not far from it, in Adams County, west of Portsmouth, a snake-shaped hill can be seen. This latter has a length of over four hundred meters and along its entire length bends along with the small river Bush Creek, along which it is located, and another forty meters above its source. The snake's head lies at the highest point of a hilly area. Its tail, ringed in several places, ends in a spiral.
We still do not know what purpose the Indians pursued, creating these majestic paintings on the surface of the earth. It is known that the ancient tribes were divided into clans and each had a generic animal - a totem - which they considered their progenitor, revered and never killed: a buffalo, an eagle, a coyote or even a snake. Could it be that these hills served as signals to heaven? But who were they for?
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One of the peaks of the Great Horny Mountains in Wyoming is crowned by the so-called Medical Wheel. By "medicine" the Indians, of course, meant magic.
The Medical Wheel, at a height of three thousand meters, is a large stone circle with a diameter of twenty-five meters. The circle has twenty-eight spokes, and on the outer rim are heaps of U-shaped stones of various sizes.
In the early 70s, Professor John Eddy of the High Latitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, determined that the Medical Wheel was pointing at certain stars. When viewed from one of the outer “U” points along a specific spoke through the center of the wheel in early spring, Sirius can be seen rising. Other lines, not passing through the center, but connecting the two "U" points to each other, allow you to observe the rise of the star Aldebaran or the star Rigel in early spring. If you look along the main axis and the corresponding spoke in early spring or fall, you can see the sunrise.
The Wyoming Medical Wheel is one of many, and they all have astronomical significance. What is behind this?
It is quite natural that already the people of the Stone Age were fascinated by the brilliant points in the sky. And it is quite obvious that Indian astronomers harbored certain ideas regarding the appearance and disappearance of certain stars and marked these stars with stones. Thanks to this, you can get the very data that allowed the priests to make fairly accurate predictions. For example, Sirius from the constellation Canis Major was the brightest star in the northern hemisphere. It immediately catches the eye, and, probably for this reason, the ancient Egyptians used the Sirius calendar. As for Aldebaran, this star with a diameter of forty-eight million kilometers, on the one hand, belongs to the constellation Taurus, and on the other, to a group of two hundred separate stars, less noticeable than the Pleiades.
Since the time when a person has learned to be surprised, he has been observing millions of luminous dots that light up over his head every evening. This grandiose picture inevitably awakens fantasy and prompts thought. Meteorites cutting through the sky, the majestic silence of the night, tiny lights that form the figures of the signs of the Zodiac … People did not just assume that the gods lived up there, they were sure of it. For the gods - the very teachers from the Universe - descended from heaven and taught the inhabitants of the Earth all kinds of sciences and crafts.
Diodorus Siculus, the author of forty books on history, wrote two thousand years ago that the gods descended from heaven to earth. In those days, people were in a wild, primitive state, and the first thing the gods forbade them to devour each other. The celestials taught the inhabitants of the Earth various arts, mining, making working tools, building houses, as well as language and writing.
And since these mysterious celestial teachers promised to return, people created landmarks for them. They made giant figures, symbols, and even erected structures that, collectively, could only be seen from above.
The Medical Wheel in the Great Horns of Wyoming.
In 1978, Father Portas, then dean of the archaeological faculty of the Catholic University in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, discovered a city unknown until then in a virgin forest. It is located about forty kilometers north of the city of Macas on the banks of the Upano River in Ecuador. Portas suggested that this city represents the center of the oldest culture in South America. In the center there is a rectangular hill almost one hundred and eighty meters high. Some of its slopes are eight hundred meters long. If you look at this complex from above, an amazing picture opens up, invisible from the ground: the image of a stylized jaguar with eyes, nose, mouth and torso. Why did the Indians need to create pictures that were distinguishable only from a certain height?
In southern Peru, starting from the city of Mollendo, and in the northern Chilean province of Antofagasta, similar upward-facing signs are found in abundance on desert plateaus and hillsides. These are huge rectangles, arrows, stairs with curved steps. Some researchers really want to see writing in some of these signs. But who could they be for?
In the Chilean desert of Tarapacar, a figure resembling a robot is depicted on a hillside one hundred and twenty-one meters high. Beams emanate from her head, and a small monkey hangs on her right hand. On its sides are quadrangles and circles or ovals with rays facing inward.
Southeast of Los Angeles, near the town of Blythe on the Colorado River, you can see images of people and animals from a bird's eye view.
Sangay Archaeological Site on the Upano River in Ecuador. Only from a height, you can distinguish between the stylized figures of a jaguar and a man.
Today the area around Sangay is completely overgrown.
In Saudi Arabia, two hundred miles south of Tabuk, near the Jordanian border, geometric shapes have been dug on the surface of the desert from one hundred to two hundred meters long. They are pyramidal triangles, the tops of which are crowned with large rings. They can also only be seen from above.
The Pintados geoglyphs are located about one hundred kilometers from Iquique, Chile. Incomprehensible signs are depicted on the dry slopes of the mountains.
Analyzing the photographs of the Aral Sea taken from the Earth satellite, Soviet geologists made an amazing discovery. From Cape Duan to the depths of the desert Ustyurt Peninsula, strange triangular formations are located for several hundred kilometers. It was initially suggested that these were giant cattle pens. However, their size exceeds every conceivable scale. One Russian archaeologist believes that there may be archaeological sites along the sides of these triangles.
On the Pacific coast of Peru is the fishing town of Pisco. In its bay, a rock sticks out of the water, marked with a strange sign. It is visible only from a certain distance from the ocean. It is a giant trident, two hundred and fifty meters high. The width of its base-column is 3.80 meters. Rock consists of a white substance saturated with salt crystals. From time to time the wind blows over the rock with the sand brought from the desert. Nobody knows whose authorship this image belongs to, when it appeared and what it means.
Quite unambiguously, it has nothing to do with shipping. There is a small island in the bay leaving only a few kilometers of the coast visible from the ocean.
This sign is inscribed on the steep coast of Pisco Bay, Peru. It is called "El Candelabra" ("Candlestick").
And just one hundred and sixty kilometers south of Pisco lies the world famous Nazca Plain, the world's largest picture book. Since 1968, when I first described this phenomenon, there has been a lot of controversy around her. Wherever I appear, it invariably comes to Nazca. And every time I am convinced that my dear opponents have not the slightest idea about her.
The figures and lines on the desert plateau, which is about sixty kilometers long, were discovered in 1939 by Dr. Paul Kosok of Long Island University, New York, when he flew over Nazca in a single-engine sports plane, following an ancient canal.
It was hypothesized that these are the remains of the Inca roads. But what is the point of parallel roads that start unexpectedly and just as unexpectedly end?
In 1946, Kosok met with the geographer Maria Reiche. The photographs of the American scientist fascinated the young German woman so much that she decided to devote her whole life to solving the mystery of Nazca. At first, Frau Reiche mistook the strange lines for the astronomical calendar, since some of them indicated the points of sunrise with compass accuracy on the days of the summer and winter solstices. Then the zealous researcher saw an astronomical atlas in these images, since some of the figures resembled certain constellations in their outlines. Today many people talk about magic lines.
These are really strange lines. Among them there are quite thin, forming all kinds of patterns, but there are also up to eighty meters wide, absolutely straight, which often stretch for two kilometers, and then suddenly break off. Between and next to them, as if drawn along a ruler, countless thin lines several kilometers long, which, like a beam of rays, emanate from images that resemble runways. Some lines go up the mountain slopes, others run parallel, sometimes five in a row. They intersect with each other at right angles or end with a trapezoid eight hundred meters long. And among these axes, comparatively small images of fish, birds, monkeys and people abound.
What versions about Nazca have not been expressed! An amateur archaeologist claimed that the entire complex was nothing more than a launch pad for a hot air balloon. After all, the rulers of the Incas were called "sons of the gods", and, most likely, their bodies were supposed to be sent to the sun on some similar aircraft.
I don't know anything about Inca balloons, but even if they had them - when were the balloons launched from runway-like strips?
One professor suggested that Nazca was a pre-Inca sports ground. This hypothesis can only be taken seriously by someone who has never been there. On the Nazca plain, it rains, at best, half an hour a year, and the soil there is very dry. Runners would disappear from sight over an area of about a thousand square kilometers, and they would be impossible to control, and drinking water would not be available to them for a long period of time. In addition, many figures are located on the mountain slopes. And in general, the idea of a sports ground does not fit at all with very wide lines several kilometers long.
A computer was involved in the search for a solution. Are there no astronomical landmarks? No, only individual narrow lines are directed towards the constellations. Anthropologist Professor Isbell of New York State University solved all Nazca problems in one fell swoop. The Indians, he says, did not have room to store food supplies, so there was a danger that during periods of good harvest the population would grow too much, and in lean years people would starve. What was to be done? Mr. Isbell believes that the inhabitants of the plateau were occupied with ceremonial works that required a certain expenditure of energy, which served as compensation for the excessive consumption of food. Nonsense!
One Berlin professor put forward a downright revolutionary theory. Once the Indians observed a colorful mirage in the sky, and they had the idea to reproduce the pictures of this mirage on the surface of the earth. Simple and beautiful. But what have - I beg your pardon - the lines in the form of runways?
Lines resembling runways on the Peruvian Nazca plateau.
The chief archaeologist of Peru, Professor Kauffmann-Doig, sees in the Nazca lines a symbol of the feline gods.
There are many more equally amusing hypotheses, and they all sin with the same thing: provincialism. Everyone considers it their duty to unravel the mystery of Nazca, but no one wants to look beyond their own nose. After all, giant, sky-directed symbols are not only found in Nazca. What motivated people in different parts of the world to create them?
Another solution was recently found - in the pottery of the Nazca Indians. Indeed, the drawings on pottery often resemble those on the surface of a desert plateau. But no one can confidently answer my question: what came first - an egg or a chicken, images on a plateau or ceramics? It is hard to believe that poor Indians dug giant figures on the surface of the earth just because they are depicted on ceramic vases. And besides, this version does not fit well with many kilometers of lines.
Until a convincing and, most importantly, evidence-based solution is found, I will remain with my opinion, which I expressed twenty-five years ago.
The rulers of the Incas called themselves "sons of the gods", the descendants of those same mysterious teachers from the universe. I can imagine a shuttle spacecraft, which the ancient Hindus called "vimana", is heading from the orbital station to the Nazca plateau. Of course, the alien astronauts did not need a runway - and no one could have built one. The ship could take off with the help of flywheels, propellers like a helicopter or an air cushion - leaving all kinds of traces on the surface of the earth. And if someone argues that the soil here is, they say, too soft for landing, I will answer: remember the American landing on the moon. They faced the same problem and solved it.
The Indians watched the incomprehensible manipulations of these gods from the nearby hills and mountains. They saw a spitting fire, a sparkling creature descending from heaven. Probably, the aliens, having made the necessary measurements and analyzes, created a base in the mountains.
It is possible that guests from the Universe eventually built the runway. Fortunately, there was no shortage of free labor. True, it was not intended for spacecraft, but for vehicles flying in the earth's atmosphere.
And if someone says that there is no runway on the Nazca plateau, I will ask the question: what is there? Study the relevant photograph carefully. What you see is the original image of the Nazca Plateau - one of those images that are hidden from the general public. People have to believe that the Nazca Plateau in Peru has only fine lines and nothing like a runway. How difficult it is to destroy the illusion!
Who says there are no runway-like lines in Nazca? What is it?
Computer calculations have shown that a large jet plane is capable of landing on a long and wide line, similar to those dug on Nazca, and taking off from it.
And what about the drawings on the surface of the Earth?
The departure of the aliens back home inspired people to create signs directed to heaven. They wanted their teachers to return and addressed them with their messages. And they began to sweat to dig giant figures on the surface of the Earth - pictures for the gods.
Will history repeat itself? Would archaeologists of the future smartly assert that there was once a giant calendar in the California desert where the American shuttles land? Sanctuary of Trigonometric Religion, Pre-Inca Olympia, Fata Morgana, Occupational Therapy Institution?
The American shuttle has landed in the California Moaver Desert. Would future generations take the network of brown lines that represent NASA's optical landmarks as a calendar?
It may sound ridiculous, but I admit such options. Until an unambiguous, reliable solution to this mystery appears.
Erich von Daniken.
Reprinted from the book "In the Footsteps of the Almighty"