Calling to the Heavens From Peru

Hidden away in the rocky countryside northwest, Peru, Machu Picchu is believed to have been a royal estate or sacred religious site for Inca leaders, whose civilization was virtually wiped out by Spaniards in the 16th century. For hundreds of years, until the American archaeologist Indiana Jones, I mean, er, Hiram Bingham, stumbled upon it in 1911, the abandoned citadel’s existence was a secret known only to the people living in the area. However you cannot turn away from the possibility that it is associated with the ancient astronaut theory...

From Life Magazine Special - "Strange But True: 100 of the World's Weirdest Wonders"
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For centuries, secrets were harbored from the wider world on the plateaus and in the mountains of Peru. Then, early in the 20th century, spectacular discoveries were made, and mankind's sense of wonder knew no bounds.

When airplanes began to fly over the land in the 1920s, pilots and passengers brought back reports of mammoth portraits of animals and strange geometric patterns etched into the canvas of the Pampa Colorada, or "colored plain," in the southern part of the country. Named after the nearest city, the Nazca Lines, which are virtually indecipherable at ground level, immediately fascinated
and perplexed (and even scared) those who beheld them. There is a 360-foot-long monkey, a 443-foot condor, a 935-foot pelican, and there are nearly 70 more images of other animals, flowers, trees and plants, as well as over 300 designs in such shapes as trapezoids, spirals, triangles and something that looked like a candelabra.

It was determined over time that the lines, which are in a large region of nearly 200 square miles, had been drawn by people from the lost city of Cahuachi. The city arose over 2,000 years ago and was abandoned after 500 years. As can best be determined, the artists' methodology was to remove pebbles on the surface of the plain's desert to reveal the lighter color of the sediment beneath. The Pampa is among the driest and most wind-free plains on earth, and so the pictures were indelible.

But what did they mean? Theories have included: a giant astronomical calendar; a grouping of sacred paths; a vast outdoor temple; and even airfields for extraterrestrial visitors (see the 1968 best-seller Chariots of the Gods). As a footnote: A portfolio of about 50 more giant drawings thought to have predated the Nazca collection by some 500 years was discovered in 2005 near the Peruvian desert city of Palpa. In 1911, a decade before the hidden-in-plain-sight masterworks of the Pampa Colorada were revealed, Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley, the Lost City of the Incas, was found in the Peruvian Andes by archaeologist Hiram Bingham. This 15th-century construction of 200 stone buildings on the plateau near the summit of a vertiginous mountain was a religious retreat of the highest order—highest, as in more than 7,500 feet above sea level. With its situation aloft, and with such iconography as the Intihuatana Stone, to which many visitors ascribe supernatural powers, Machu Picchu, too, has been seen as a place of outreach to alien life forms. Or—more probably—to God.

From Life Magazine Special - "Strange But True: 100 of the World's Weirdest Wonders"
Purchase here!