Page 48 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

landing strips at all. Surely such beings would have mastered the
technology of setting their flying saucers down vertically?
Besides, there is really no question of the Nazca lines ever having been
used as runways—by flying saucers or anything else—although some of
them look like that from above. Viewed at ground-level they are little
more than grazes on the surface made by scraping away thousands of
tons of black volcanic pebbles to expose the desert’s paler base of yellow
sand and clay. None of the cleared areas is more than a few inches deep
and all are much too soft to have permitted the landing of wheeled flying
vehicles. The German mathematician Maria Reiche, who devoted half a
century to the study of the lines, was only being logical when she
dismissed the extraterrestrial theory with a single pithy sentence a few
years ago: ‘I’m afraid the spacemen would have gotten stuck.’
If not runways for the chariots of alien ‘gods’, therefore, what else
might the Nazca lines be? The truth is that no one knows their purpose,
just as no one really knows their age; they are a genuine mystery of the
past. And the closer you look at them the more baffling they become.
It’s clear, for example, that the animals and birds antedate the
geometry of the ‘runways’, because many of the trapezoids, rectangles
and straight lines bisect (and thus partly obliterate) the more complex
figures. The obvious deduction is that the final artwork of the desert as
we view it today must have been produced in two phases. Moreover,
though it seems contrary to the normal laws of technical progress, we
must concede that the earlier of the two phases was the more advanced.
The execution of the zoomorphic figures called for far higher levels of
skill and technology than the etching of the straight lines. But how widely
separated in time were the earlier and later artists?
Scholars do not address themselves to this question. Instead they lump
both cultures together as ‘the Nazcans’ and depict them as primitive
tribesmen who unaccountably developed sophisticated techniques of
artistic self-expression, and then vanished from the Peruvian scene, many
hundreds of years before the appearance of their better-known
successors, the Incas.
How sophisticated were these Nazcan ‘primitives’? What kind of
knowledge must they have possessed to inscribe their gigantic signatures
on the plateau? It seems, for a start, that they were pretty good
observational astronomers—at least according to Dr Phillis Pitluga, an
astronomer with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. After making an
intensive computer-aided study of stellar alignments at Nazca, she has
concluded that the famous spider figure was devised as a terrestrial
diagram of the giant constellation of Orion, and that the arrow-straight
lines linked to the figure appear to have been set out to track through the
ages the changing declinations of the three stars of Orion’s Belt.
3
The real significance of Dr Pitluga’s discovery will become apparent in

3 Personal communications with Dr Pitluga.

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