Scratched into a hyperarid Peruvian plateau between roughly 500 BCE and 500 CE, the Nazca Lines include hundreds of feet of straight geometric trenches and giant animal figures — a hummingbird, a monkey, a spider — visible whole only from the air. The Nazca made them by scraping dark surface stones to expose pale earth below, a simple technique that experiments have reproduced. The alien-runway theory is rejected outright. What scholars still debate is purpose: water and fertility ritual leads the field, with ceremonial pathways walked in procession a close second. Climate and development now threaten the lines' survival.
On a dry plateau in southern Peru, someone scratched a hummingbird into the ground that is longer than a football field. Nearby lie a monkey with a curled tail, a spider, a condor, and straight lines that run arrow-true for kilometres. They are so large that no one standing among them can take in a single figure whole. The people who made them, the Nazca, two thousand years ago, would never see them from above. They had no way to fly. For a while popular books and television insisted this proved that aliens drew them, or that the lines were landing strips for spacecraft. That is false, and it robs the Nazca of their own achievement. They made the figures themselves, with stakes, cords, and patient surveying, scraping away dark stones to bare the pale earth below. The real mystery is not how. It is why a people would draw at a scale best grasped from high ground or the sky.