Nazca: Were the Giant Lines Signals for an Ancient Flying Civilisation?

On the desert of southern Peru, a monkey tens of metres long lies beside straight lines that run so far that a person on the ground cannot see them as a whole. The figures were made by moving dark surface stones aside and exposing the lighter ground beneath. There are no tall walls, stone statues, or inscriptions explaining them. There are lines, trapezoids, rectangles, birds, animals, and human forms spread across a vast landscape.

UNESCO dates the work of the Paracas and Nasca peoples to roughly 500 BCE–500 CE across about 450 square kilometres. The activity continued for close to a thousand years, long enough for UNESCO to describe the whole area as a highly symbolic cultural landscape of ritual and social life. In 2024, researchers from Yamagata University and IBM used artificial intelligence to find 303 additional geoglyphs, nearly doubling the number of known human and animal figures. Every new survey expands the network, but still does not produce one final explanation for why it exists.