The Nazca Lines

Before 1939, Nazca was just a small town in the one of the driest deserts of the world. But that desert turned out to be a sketch-pad for ancient Indians and one of the greatest scientific mysteries in the New World. The Nazca Lines are a series of drawings of animals, geometric figures and birds ranging up to 300 metres (1000 feet) in size, etched into the arid crust of the pampa and preserved for about 2000 years thanks to a complete lack of rain and special winds that cleaned - but not erased - the desert.

The hummingbird. Image © Damian A. Isla

In 1939 a North American scientist, Paul Kosok, flew over the pampa in a small plane, and he noticed the lines, which were hardly visible from the ground. He first thought the lines were part of a pre-Inca irrigation system, but he quickly concluded it had nothing to do with irrigation. Kosok discovered that the lines of the sunset ran tandem to the direction of one of the bird drawings. He saw the Nazca Lines as the biggest astronomy book in the world.

Another giant bird

A young German mathematician, Maria Reiche, was 35 when she met Kosok, not long after his discovery. The next 50 years she became an expert on the lines. Although it must have been very difficult to draw such lines on the ground, lines that can only be seen from the sky, many "scientists" think it has something to do with alien navigation systems, made by creatures from other planets. Reiche firmly rejected this kind of popular space-theories. Maria Reiche died in June 1998 at the age of 95.