Original subtitles

[narrator] A team of truthseekers is on a mission.

Scientists. Historians. Archaeologists.

All on the trail of history's enigmas.

Searching for the truth

behind the greatest mysteries

known to humanity.

Carved into the Peruvian landscape.

Something unnatural.

Something otherworldly.

Monumental geoglyphs painted across the dark desert floor.

We know them today

as the Nazca Lines.

But how were such monumental images created?

Who was responsible?

And most importantly of all, why did they do it?

In London, our team assemble.

Our four truthseekers combine

decades of experience in different fields.

But they all have one goal.

To apply their knowledge, and reveal the truth.

There are mysteries, and then there are mysteries.

I have always loved uncovering the secrets of the past.

We need to go back and unpick the untruths from the truths.

Age-old problems that we've been asking ourselves

for over 100 years, really, can now be solved.

[narrator] They'll follow the clues left behind.

Unravel the secrets of the past.

Separate fact from fiction.

And together, they'll uncover the truth

behind the greatest mysteries ever.

[epic music playing]

[dramatic music playing softly]

[dramatic music builds]

[narrator] It was 1927.

An archaeologist was conducting a dig

at a burial site in Southern Peru.

One day, he took a walk among the hills

that surrounded his excavation.

As he climbed to the top of a high dune,

the windless rocky desert spread out before him.

Looking down over the arid landscape,

the archaeologist spotted something strange.

As he looked closer, he saw lines.

Some straight,

but others curled through the desert

with geometric precision.

Put together, they almost looked like a picture.

[epic music playing]

That day was the beginning of a mystery

that has intrigued and baffled scientists for generations.

[epic music continues]

Later flights over the Peruvian desert

revealed hundreds of ancient geoglyphs,

pictures carved into the earth.

[epic music continues]

[Fern] What I find so fascinating

about the Nazca Lines, it's not just

how they were created,

but all the mistakes that we have made

as modern-day experts

in trying to explain them.

[epic music continues]

[narrator] Why scratch these vast images into the earth

when they could only be seen properly from the sky?

[epic music crescendos, then fades]

[contemplative music playing]

[no audible dialog]

[Karen] As an anthropologist, one of the things

that most intrigues me about the Nazca Lines

is that they're actually not a unique phenomenon,

this idea of artwork created on the Earth's surface itself.

We see them across cultures and through time.

But I always want to know why an individual culture did it.

Why did the Nazca create these lines?

It's not just one monument,

but it's actually hundreds of monuments

that are built on massive scale.

And they stand out even on satellite imagery.

You can see it, you can effectively see

these lines from space.

We're going to naturally wonder,

what is this? What are they?

Why are they-- where were they built?

And who built them?

[Tony] These strange lines clearly tell some kind of story

with all those fascinating images,

but it's something we're still trying to decipher.

There are many theories about what these people

were actually trying to say or convey

in these very kind of alien images.

[narrator] Tony McMahon has been taking a closer look

at the site and its earliest explorers.

[pan flute music playing]

[engines rumbling]

[light, rhythmic percussion music playing]

The Nazca Lines are located in southern Peru,

about 400 kilometers south of the capital Lima.

They're located on a high-level desert plateau

between two rivers.

[light, rhythmic percussion music continues playing]

[narrator] Many of the lines are simple narrow paths

that radiate outwards for kilometers,

like spokes on a wheel,

connecting with each other in a giant web.

Elsewhere are vast geometric shapes,

triangles and trapezoids

hundreds of meters across.

But Nazca is most famous

for its smaller and more complex figures.

Animals, birds, and insects,

creatures both real

and imagined.

[Tony] The Geoglyphs include a hummingbird,

a spider, a monkey

with a very large, spiraling tail,

some of these creatures native to the area,

and some of them from much further away.

[narrator] Animals like the monkey are found

in rainforests far from Nazca.

How and why their pictures

came to be scraped into the desert floor

is a mystery.

Who were the travelers that brought knowledge

of these creatures?

Who were these geoglyphs actually for?

[Tony] None of the lines were hidden,

and there's the perfect conditions

for their preservation.

There's little rainfall,

it's dry,

40 kilometers from the coast.

So, the lines were there waiting to be discovered

when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the 16th century.

[wind gusting]

[foreboding music playing]

[narrator] These European soldier-explorers

crossed the Atlantic to expand the Spanish Empire

into the Americas.

But for the indigenous people, it quickly became a nightmare.

The conquistadors destroyed the Aztecs in Mexico

and the Inca further south.

[tense music playing]

- [cannons booming] - [shouting]

Among their newly-conquered lands

were the high plains in Southern Peru

where they found a desert marked with strange lines.

[Tony] In the accounts by the conquistadors,

they describe the Nazca Lines

as trail markers or roads.

Now, sadly, the invading Spanish

didn't just bring war and a new religion

and new technologies to this part of the world,

they also brought disease

with catastrophic effects.

[mournful flute music playing]

The indigenous population had no immunity

to illnesses like smallpox and typhus.

Devastating epidemics

ripped through the ancient communities.

Within a generation of the fall of the Inca Empire in 1572,

the Nazca valley was almost empty.

This human suffering

essentially wiped out the local people,

wiped out their culture,

their monuments, which were torn down,

and that knowledge of what these lines were about,

that was completely wiped out.

[narrator] It seemed that the Nazca

and the riddle of the lines in the desert

were doomed to be forgotten.

But then, in the 19th century,

an unseen style of pottery from South America

began to appear in European museums.

Where exactly they came from was a mystery,

but their complex motifs and startling, vivid colors

captured the imagination of scholars

working in a new field of science.

Archaeology.

Archaeology was still in its infancy

when, in the early 1900s, the German scholar Max Ula

came to the area investigating pots.

And he found them in the south of Peru.

[narrator] More archaeologists followed.

They began to piece together evidence of an ancient culture

that lived between the Andes Mountain range

and the Pacific Ocean.

They named them the Nazca.

It wasn't until the 1920s

that the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejia Xesspe

worked out what the lines were.

Initially, they just seemed to be paths to nowhere.

But it was while hiking in the hills

that he realized what the Nazca Lines actually were.

[anticipatory music builds]

[narrator] The true scale of the pictures

could only be seen from above.

Soon, planes were chartered

to fly over the desert with photographers on board.

Their pictures

and the mysterious carvings they revealed

became global news.

[Tony] The photographs showed a kind of confusing entanglement

of lines stretching in different directions

for many kilometers.

And in between and over those lines

were these strange geoglyphs of animals and birds.

[narrator] More archaeologists were soon journeying to Peru

to try to unravel the mystery of the lines.

They concluded that the people who once lived here

appeared to possess only rudimentary technology

and no written language.

How did they manage to construct such precise drawings?

[Tony] What the archaeologists began to figure out

was that these ancient Nazca had scraped away

the reddish-brown pebbles at ground level,

revealing the kind of yellowy undersurface.

And this was a painstaking process.

The creation of these long lines

over such huge distances

really wasn't that complex for an ancient civilization.

Essentially, you place two sticks in the ground

and somebody stands there and guides another person

on where to put the third stake.

And so it keeps going on and on.

There's even evidence of this been found at Nazca

with the remnants of stakes

at the ends of some of these lines.

[narrator] A modern experiment proved even complex shapes

could be made with such techniques.

A group of archaeologists in the 1980s

decided to test their own theory

about how these people could have created

these geoglyphs.

And they, within a period

of about an hour and a half,

managed to create a 35-meter spiral.

So, if you want, something similar

to the tail of that monkey.

[narrator] The experiment showed that the Nazca

didn't need to have great geometry or engineering skills

to create the lines in the desert.

[narrator] There are over 1,300 kilometers of lines

etched into the earth over an area of 50 square kilometers.

They are usually only a few centimeters deep,

and no more than half a meter wide.

They differ in placement and style,

with only 70 of the iconic zoomorphic designs

and hundreds more geometric.

It's clear that these weren't the focus of a given period

or a whim of a single ruling elite.

These geoglyphs were carved into the earth

over a period of 1,000 years

and held a key place in Nazca

and wider Andean Culture.

But there was no obvious answer

to the greatest question of all.

Why the lines had been made.

[Tony] The most curious aspect of the Nazca Lines

is that you have these lines

which are straight and intersect each other,

and then you have these geoglyphs overlaying them.

Now, does this all have one purpose,

or was there one reason for the straight lines

and another for the images of animals and birds?

[narrator] In the decades

since the first lines were rediscovered,

archaeologists have found hundreds of carvings

among the rocks and hills at Nazca.

In recent years, modern technology

such as drones and 3D scanning

have identified yet more,

some of them barely visible to the naked eye.

With each new discovery,

the mystery of the Nazca Lines deepens.

There's still a huge amount to be found.

After all, we have these enormous drawings

made by these ancient people over a vast period of time,

and we still don't understand,

why did they do it?

[narrator] The Nazca Lines have been measured

and cataloged with scientific precision.

We now know for sure how they were made.

But the bigger mystery,

what we don't know yet,

is why,

and who,

or what for?

[contemplative music playing]

[narrator] In South Peru,

between the Andes mountains

and the Pacific Ocean,

there once lived a people

we now know as the Nazca.

For centuries, they carved images and shapes

onto the parched hillsides and deserts of their homeland.

But by the modern age,

the Nazca civilization

had long since fallen.

Their secrets had been lost

and their great works of art forgotten.

In London, the team of archaeologists and historians

are gathering evidence

and examining the different theories

that might explain why this ancient people

built the Nazca Lines.

[no audible dialog]

Dr. Mark Altaweel is an expert in data analysis,

using the latest tools and technology to examine the past.

[Mark] What I find interesting about the Nazca Lines

is the fact that they can create such scale.

That they had such wonderful symbolism.

It's not just simple creatures, but they're,

in some ways, mythological.

[music continues]

So, it makes me really fascinated

in seeing such a diverse range of geoglyphs,

built at such large scale.

[narrator] Ever since the rediscovery

of the lines in the 1920s,

mapping and categorizing them has been the mission

of many archaeologists in the region.

One of the first major studies began in the early 1940s.

It was led by an American Professor

from Long Island University

named Paul Kosok.

He's a historian by background,

but he trains himself to be an archaeologist,

and one of the things he's really fascinated

is trying to bring new technologies,

new techniques to understand archaeological problems.

And at this time, aerial archaeology,

what we would call today "remote sensing,"

was just beginning.

And he wanted to have airplanes

help solve some of these mysteries.

[narrator] In June 1941, Kosok was in Peru

researching the irrigation systems of ancient cultures,

when he heard about the strange lines

carved into the desert further south.

He decided to investigate further.

[pensive music playing]

His first theory, really, was that

Nazca Lines somehow were ditches

that were used as a way to irrigate the landscape.

This is a very dry part of South America.

Irrigation would have been a key technology

that would be used for agriculture.

[narrator] With only four millimeters

of rainfall per year, the Nazca Valley

is one of the most arid regions on the planet,

with average temperatures in the high 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

With very little cloud cover, access to fresh water

would be critical to maintaining a healthy population

and avoiding annual drought, malnutrition, and starvation.

But this remote and seemingly hostile region

also had some natural advantages.

Caught between the cold Pacific Ocean and the high Andes,

any mountain rainfall would need to pass through this valley

on its journey to the sea.

Perhaps the water channels

would have taken water from the mountaintops, for instance,

down into the valley.

But, once you come close to these lines, practically,

you don't really see how they could have been water channels.

They're quite shallow, they're not very deep.

They're not really dug that deep, really,

into the landscape.

[music builds, then fades]

[dramatic music playing]

[narrator] Professor Kosok soon developed

another theory, however.

He happened to be on the site of the winter solstice,

the shortest day of the year.

That was when he noticed something.

He was standing by the hummingbird drawing.

He saw that as the sun dipped towards the horizon,

it aligned directly with the beak of the hummingbird.

It gave him an idea.

[Mark] And he looked at the beak area, and he noticed

that this line was quite straight.

That, potentially, it may actually align with the stars,

that there may be some kind of relationship,

not necessarily what's going on with irrigation on Earth,

but rather the night sky and the stars themselves

and other, sort of, astronomical

kinds of features or observations.

After some time, he put this idea together

that perhaps not just the hummingbird,

but rather all geoglyphs,

were basically trying to tell a story

of when to harvest, when to plant.

That they were effectively an instruction manual

communicating with the stars.

[narrator] Professor Kosok began mapping the Nazca Lines.

But when he left Peru after his final expedition in 1948,

his work was unfinished.

It was taken up by his assistant,

an adventurous woman from Germany

called Maria Reiche.

[Mark] She had come to Peru to be a tutor

for the children of diplomats from

the German Embassy, at the time.

She was highly educated.

Gifted in understanding

astronomy, mathematics,

and a number of different languages.

And because of World War II,

she had to, effectively, stay in Peru.

But there, she fell in love with the landscape,

and she also had a chance to meet with Paul Kusak.

She got to know the Nazca Lines

and the archaeology of the region,

and, eventually, she took over.

And then she carries on his legacy and his work.

[narrator] Maria Reiche continued her studies at Nazca

for the next 40 years,

measuring and documenting every geoglyph she could find.

She lived alone in a tiny house out in the desert.

She took flights over the lines by plane and helicopter.

If they weren't available,

she would just climb a ladder.

Anything for a better view.

[Mark] Maria Reich becomes really obsessed

with the Nazca Lines.

Now, Maria Reich was, of course,

a gifted archaeologist.

But she was also able to bring her skills and training

that she had learned as a young woman,

which were mathematics and astronomy.

So she brings all these skills together,

and after some time, she develops Paul Kosak's theory,

which is that, not only are these geoglyphs

really part of a vast astronomical book,

but rather, the geoglyphs are representing

entire constellations.

That they're basically groups of stars.

[narrator] She may have led a hermit's existence,

but Maria Reiche had an instinct for publicity.

Her story of a charismatic and eccentric loner

dedicating her life to these mysterious lines in the desert

captured the imagination of the public.

She wrote a book about her work called,

The Mystery on the Desert.

[no audible dialog]

The profits from the book

were put to good use.

Reiche hired security guards

to protect the Nazca Lines

and lobbied the Peruvian government

to ensure their preservation.

It was greatly through her work

that the Nazca Lines were recognized

as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.

Reiche's efforts catapulted her theories to global fame.

But there were those who had their doubts.

Were the Nazca Lines really a map of the stars?

In the 1960s,

Reiche's theories were put to the test.

The American astronomer Gerald Hawkins

analyzed the Nazca Lines

using what was then ground-breaking technology.

A computer.

His software included star positions

dating back thousands of years.

He was able to compare this data with the Nazca Lines.

According to Reiche's theories,

Hawkins should have found a match.

He determined that the stars had, obviously,

had moved significantly from where they are today,

but that the alignment with the Nazca Lines

doesn't really work out very well.

In fact, it's quite random.

Some lines sort of match the stars.

Other lines clearly do not.

So this representation the Nazca Lines gave

that they were aligned with the stars

doesn't really work out,

and it's just a kind of

random mix, really.

[dramatic violin music playing]

[music fades]

[pensive music playing]

[narrator] In 1996, Donald Proulx,

a Professor of Anthropology

from the University of Massachusetts,

traveled to South America.

He came to Nazca to conduct preliminary research

for an archaeological survey.

There, he met another American,

a man named David Johnson.

He was a teacher from New York.

He was in Peru helping local communities

find water in the dry desert.

[Mark] In fact, the villagers in Peru had asked him

to come help them find water in their villages.

So, Proulx gets quite excited when he meets him

because he begins to talk about the importance of water,

and perhaps that these geoglyphs

were associated with water in some way.

There seems to be a kind of correlation between

certain ancient water features with geoglyphs.

[narrator] Professor Proulx agreed

to help Johnson investigate.

Their work led to a new theory to explain the Nazca Lines.

One different to any suggested before.

[Mark] They become fascinated with these features

called "puquios," basically these kind of

spiraling-looking features on the landscape,

which are basically underground water channels

that were built by ancient people,

Nazca people and others,

to channel water across the landscape.

Now, there's an association of subterranean water

as well as the puquios, with geological fault lines.

So the idea is that the geoglyphs may have

actually acted as a kind of marker

or a feature in the landscape

that would indicate where

subterranean water could be found.

A kind of map, if you will, of where one should look.

[narrator] Johnson suggested that the large trapezoids

indicated channels under the earth

where groundwater could be found.

Zigzag patterns showed the boundaries

of the water flow.

And triangular geoglyphs

pointed to the sources of the water themselves.

[Mark] The idea that there's a kind of geological

or even physical map

of where underground water would lie

is not that unheard of.

In fact, we do the same thing.

The importance of water is really paramount,

so what we do is we often mark these areas

where underground water can be found.

So, why not expect ancient people to have a map

that would indicate where water sources were?

[pensive music playing]

[narrator] With funding from the National Geographic Society,

in 1998, Proulx and Johnson took a team to Nazca

to test the theory.

They investigated sites all over the Nazca region.

It was the first time in history

that such a survey had taken place there.

[Mark] Now, Proulx was quite intrigued by this hypothesis.

But thankfully, in many ways, he's a true scientist,

and that meant that he created these hypotheses

based on these ideas.

So, he got together a multidisciplinary team,

and he went to the field using multidisciplinary

kinds of methods to test out these ideas.

Not just accept them, but simply test them,

one by one, to see if they work.

[narrator] They worked long hours

in the searing heat of this barren land.

They had all the data they needed

and took it back to America for analysis.

But just like many archaeologists before them,

their theory wasn't scientifically provable.

Now, statistically at least,

there's no strong relationship

between the underground water and the geoglyphs.

However, it doesn't mean that relationship doesn't exist.

It's possible that the geoglyphs have multiple purposes,

and so some of the geoglyphs may have been, in fact,

markers for underground water.

[narrator] But if the Nazca Lines

were not a map to the heavens

or to fresh water,

then what were they?

One truthseeker believes the truth is to be found

in the Nazca people themselves.

Who were they?

Why did they carve these lines

in the desert?

Who were they trying to communicate with?

[pensive music playing]

Scraped into the deserts of Southern Peru,

the huge engravings

are one of the world's great unsolved mysteries.

There are countless theories about who made them,

and why.

[no audible dialog]

Anthropologist Dr. Karen Bellinger

has been investigating the ancient people

who may have carved the lines.

[Karen] When most people think about

pre-Columbian South America,

the Inca pop to mind immediately,

and for good reason.

They created these monumental sites

such as Machu Picchu

and their capital city of Cusco.

But it's really important to realize

that the Inca were a flash in the pan

compared to the people who constructed the Nazca Lines.

They were around for 1,000 years

before the Inca rose and fell,

and so if we want to understand the Nazca Lines,

we've got to examine that civilization.

[pensive music playing]

[narrator] Around 1,200 BC,

an ancient Peruvian people, now known as Paracas,

arose in a coastal region just north of Nazca.

They were farmers and artists,

famed for their colorful pottery

and intricately-embroidered textiles.

The Paracas left no written records.

But they did leave a wealth of archaeological evidence

in the form of subterranean burial chambers,

which housed mummy bundles and artifacts

that were preserved perfectly for 2,000 years,

because of the dryness of the desert environment.

From excavations, we know now that the Paracas

never built the kind of grand, monumental architecture

that we associate with the Incas.

But they had an incredibly sophisticated

artistic tradition,

which reached its pinnacle in incredible textiles

and ceramic production.

[gulls crying]

[narrator] But it wasn't just with pottery and textiles

that the ancient Paracas expressed themselves.

They also carved images into the earth.

It is during the Paracas period

that we see the emergence of geoglyphs in this area.

They tend to be on the smaller side,

often human topics,

and carved into hillsides.

[narrator] In around the 3rd century BC,

groups of Paracas migrated south.

In the valleys of Nazca,

they settled in tiny villages

on the banks of the Rio Grande.

There, they lived and flourished for the next 800 years.

[Karen] The Nazca were primarily farmers.

They grew corn, potatoes, peppers, beans, and cotton.

But they also were located near enough to the sea

that they could exploit those resources for easy protein.

[narrator] But they took their old Paracas traditions

with them as well.

The Nazca inherited

the Paracas artistic traditions,

and continued them in textiles and ceramics.

They also inherited the Paracas tradition

of etching drawings into the earth.

And here is where the Nazcas really outdid themselves.

By the 1st century AD,

the Nazca were their own distinct cultural group,

and that was reflected in the lines

they were drawing on the ground.

[narrator] Instead of digging into the hillside,

the Nazca began carving images

into the desert floor itself.

It was a vast blank canvas for the Nazca,

and it was in between the geographical

boundaries of their lives,

the mountain and the sea.

It is on this canvas that we see a shift

from smaller, more human forms

to larger, often animal forms.

Well, it seems to have coincided with

the emergence of a new, unified Nazca religion.

[narrator] Just south of the Nazca plains

lies the temple city of Cahuachi.

For centuries, it was the ceremonial heart

of Nazca life.

The site contains more than 40 mounds,

natural hills that the Nazca adapted to their needs.

Some were used for burials.

Others, for religious ceremonies.

They were topped with buildings

and surrounded by walls and passageways,

plazas, and platforms.

We don't know exactly how Nazca society was organized,

but what does seem clear is that

it was a group of individual tribes

that were unified not by a single political authority,

but rather by a shared belief system.

[narrator] The Nazca believed that supernatural forces

controlled the elements and the fates of humans.

[Karen] They believed that powerful mythical creatures

controlled the availability of water,

and thus the viability of agriculture.

[man chanting in foreign language]

[narrator] Shamans were the intermediaries

with the spirit world.

They used hallucinogenic drugs

to induce visions,

and they led the rituals

where offerings were presented

to the gods.

[unsettling music playing]

These included pottery.

Animal sacrifice.

Smashed panpipes,

and human heads.

Archaeologists have recovered dozens of severed heads

at the site of Cahuachi.

And they show evidence

for having been very deliberately processed

in a uniform way.

The soft tissue, the brains,

have all been removed,

and the lips are sewn shut

with cactus spines.

And holes have been drilled in the foreheads

to permit them to be strung along on a rope.

Headless skeletons have been found

which show clear cut marks

in the spinal column near the skull.

And that would have been done with obsidian knives,

it would have been slow-going and brutally hard work.

Contrary to early beliefs

that these victims must have been war enemies,

the DNA testing shows that they're Nazca people.

This is evidence for, likely, human sacrifice.

[men chanting in foreign language]

[narrator] Human sacrifice was common

among the ancient peoples of the Andes.

For the Nazca, the rituals of decapitation

appear to have been linked to renewal and fertility.

[Nazca chant continues]

[Karen] There's iconography showing plant life

growing out of the mouths of these trophy heads

depicted in textiles and ceramics.

These are farmers in a very harsh land.

They're caught on a desert between the mountains

and the sea,

and they've got to ensure,

however possible,

that water is available for their crops to grow.

So this becomes a clear way

in which they hoped to propitiate the gods

and beg for their blessing in the form of water.

[narrator] Many scholars today believe the Nazca Lines

were part of the same web of ritual and belief.

Given how close the Cahuachi complex is

to many of the Nazca Lines,

there's got to be a correlation between the two.

[narrator] Rituals that involve

walking along set lines to holy places

is still a feature of indigenous communities in Peru today.

Such pilgrimages were likely a part of Nazca life as well.

There's one amazing figural work of ceramics,

and it depicts what has been interpreted as a family

walking in procession

with dogs dancing around them,

and with birds perched on their shoulders.

Possible offerings to be made.

[narrator] The Nazca journeyed to Cahuachi

for ritual feasts and gatherings,

traveling from settlements in the mountains

and at the coast.

Many of those routes would have taken them

through the desert of the Nazca Lines.

[Karen] The lines depicting the hummingbird,

the monkey, the killer whale,

they correspond to ceramic motifs,

and they symbolize the powerful forces

of air, earth, and water.

[narrator] There is considerable evidence

of human activity among the Lines.

Broken pottery and panpipes,

animal offerings,

and even possible remains

of building structures.

[Karen] It's possible that the lines were sacred paths,

taken by the Nazca on their pilgrimage to Cahuachi.

They're about the width of a footpath,

and there are many in straight lines.

And, in fact, people looking at them

have identified compression in the soil

as opposed to the area outside the line.

And what could have created that?

People's feet.

[narrator] Were the Nazca Lines pathways to water,

or to ritual sites to bring water forth from the gods?

We know that their lives were precarious.

They lived at the mercy of the elements,

and the lines were a response to that.

But that hasn't stopped other theories taking hold.

Some that will take us away from Peru,

around the world,

and to planets beyond our imagination.

[pensive music playing]

The truthseekers are investigating

one of the world's most enduring conundrums.

Why did an ancient people in South America

move tons of earth and stone in the middle of a desert

to create vast drawings

that they themselves could barely see?

[pensive music continues]

The Nazca Lines were rediscovered by modern science

in the early 20th century.

Our team of truthseekers have learnt much

about the people who made them.

About their art.

And their religious rituals.

[man chanting in foreign language]

But despite their efforts,

the purpose of the Nazca Lines remains a mystery.

In the 1920s, when the lines were rediscovered,

this really was a period when we had very little ability

to acknowledge the agency of indigenous ancient peoples.

There was a real prejudice towards a belief

that the Nazca could have produced these lines themselves.

[narrator] Cultural historian Dr. Fern Riddell

has been researching the more unusual theories

about the Nazca Lines.

[Fern] We've tried to understand

how the Nazca could have created these lines,

without things like airplanes or helicopters.

Some of these theories have ranged from the idea

that perhaps the Nazca invented hot air balloons

and that allowed them to look down on the Earth.

Or even that there may have been

a shared ancient code

between, civilizations like the Babylonians,

the Romans, the Nazca,

that allowed them to construct

these incredible structures.

[narrator] The most famous and influential of these "theories"

belongs to the Swiss author, Erich von Daniken.

In 1968, he published a book

called "Chariots of the Gods."

It claimed that the technologies and religions

of many ancient civilizations

were given to them by ancient astronauts,

aliens who were welcomed on earth as gods.

[Fern] Daniken's theory of alien astronauts

is this belief that alien civilizations came to Earth

at moments when we were

really at the dawn of our civilizations.

That they landed and that they created ancient religions,

and kind of set the human race on its path.

So, from the Nazca Lines in South America

to Egypt, to Russia,

we can find, as he felt,

evidence of these alien civilization's impact on us.

[man talking indistinctly]

[narrator] Von Daniken's explanation

for the Nazca Lines

was that long ago,

aliens had landed

on the arid desert.

Their spaceships blasted away the stones,

exposing the lighter ground beneath,

creating these lines,

and once they left, the Nazca drew new lines

to encourage their return.

[Fern] Once the alien gods, or the alien astronauts had left,

the Nazca were desperate to try and call them back.

So they created their own markings

in, kind of, retaliation,

to draw the aliens back to Earth.

These wonderful spiders and fish

and images that could perhaps be seen from space.

[narrator] Nevertheless, von Daniken's book

became a bestseller.

It sold tens of millions of copies

and made its author a very wealthy man.

[Fern] When Daniken is publishing in the 1960s,

this is really the heyday

for our obsession with sci-fi and with space.

Combined with that, you've got the counter-cultural

revolution in the West.

Every aspect of life

was being questioned by New Age beliefs.

You've got a huge change taking place.

The moon landings, potential nuclear war,

Watergate, UFO sightings,

all of which told people

that the truth was being hidden.

That there were conspiracies out there.

You can understand why, in that climate,

Von Daniken's book was so successful.

It was both revolutionary and reassuring.

It tore down the pillars of society, history, and religion,

while offering a neat and comforting explanation

for the mysteries of the world

in a time of upheaval and change.

[light percussion music playing]

[narrator] Mainstream historians and scientists

have long pointed out the many errors

in von Daniken's work.

But it still finds new believers,

and it continues to inspire pop culture.

Hollywood films such as "Stargate"

and Ridley Scott's 2012 horror "Prometheus"

both owe much to von Daniken's ideas

of an extra-terrestrial origin for humanity.

The idea that aliens have had a hand in our civilization,

in the creation of our civilization,

is one we're still fascinated by.

We've really kind of pushed our own ideas

and our own understanding of ancient structures

onto the Nazca Lines.

And that hasn't allowed us to see them

for what they really were.

And that's really denied the Nazca

their own culture and their own agency.

[narrator] The Nazca were not the only ancient people

to etch images into the earth.

North along the Pacific Coast from Nazca,

among the foothills of the Andes Mountains,

what looks like a giant candelabra

is carved into a hillside.

It is visible for kilometers out to sea.

Further south, in Chile, can be found

the largest human geoglyph in the world.

Etched out of a mountain,

the Giant of Atacama is a thousand years old

and almost 120 meters long.

And in western Bolivia,

the Sajama Lines are a network

of thousands of crisscrossing straight paths

etched into the ground.

They cover an area 15 times larger

than the lines at Nazca.

These ancient geoglyphs have been found in Russia,

in Kazakhstan, Israel, India,

and even in England, we have the Huffington white horse.

And they are an incredible example

that in every culture,

humans have wanted to leave their marks on the earth.

[narrator] Like the Nazca Lines, however,

the purpose of these other carvings into the earth

has long been debated by scientists and historians.

[Fern] I think one of the problems

we have in our modern world

is we have to find a reason for everything.

We can't just allow the lines to exist for art's sake.

There has to be a specific construction.

A specific explanation.

And sometimes,

human beings just like to create.

These lines are clearly trying to tell us a story,

but we've only been able to decipher part of it.

It's a tale of human ingenuity,

human sacrifice,

life and death,

on one of the most alien landscapes on the planet.

[Mark] I wouldn't be surprised if there are multiple meanings.

Perhaps they're a way of storytelling.

Perhaps they're just pathways connecting sites.

Perhaps they are markers for things like water.

So, I'm happy to believe all these to some extent.

If we think about our own monuments,

there isn't just one meaning to them.

They often change over time.

So, I won't be surprised

if a lot of these ideas

that have been proposed about them

have some merit of truth.

[Karen] It's only really in the last century at most

that in-depth research has been done into the Nazca.

They demonstrated great sophistication in adapting,

not just to live, but to thrive

in these harsh desert conditions.

They were truly remarkable people.

[narrator] Although they left behind

no great pyramids or walled cities,

there remains a monument to these ingenious

and artistic people

in the lines they carved into the earth.

Lines which have fascinated us for generations.

Lines which will go on

sparking our curiosity and our wonder

for many years to come.

[light percussion music playing]