Did aliens make the Nazca Lines?

Drawings in the desert

The Nazca Lines are geoglyphs, large-scale drawings and shapes cut directly into the desert floor of southern Peru. Who made the Nazca Lines is not seriously disputed among archaeologists: most were built by the Nazca people, who flourished in the region from around A.D. 1 to 700, National Geographic reports. They range from perfectly straight lines that run for miles to figures of animals and plants.

How the lines were made

The method is well understood, even where the purpose is not. The Nazca desert floor is covered in reddish, oxidized rock, with lighter-colored soil underneath. National Geographic describes the lines as geoglyphs, “drawings on the ground made by removing rocks and earth to create a 'negative' image.” Clearing the darker top layer and piling it at the edges exposed the pale ground beneath, and a climate with almost no rain or wind has kept that exposed ground legible for centuries.

Maria Reiche's life work

Much of what is known about the Lines comes from Maria Reiche, a German-born mathematician. She learned of them in 1941 from the American researcher Paul Kosok and, Smithsonian magazine reports, was immediately “hooked”; she took over his work in 1948 and moved to the desert to spend her time “finding, measuring and cleaning” the figures.

Reiche studied the Lines for roughly 40 years, developing theories about their astronomical and calendrical purpose and earning a National Geographic Society grant in 1974. She also became their protector, chasing off tourists and vehicles and fighting government plans to cut irrigation canals across them, until her death in 1998.

What the lines were for

Why the Nazca built the lines is the real Nazca Lines mystery, not who made them. Reiche argued for an astronomical calendar. More recent research points elsewhere: National Geographic reports that researchers now connect the straight lines and trapezoids to water, “not used to find water, but rather used in connection with rituals” tied to water and crop fertility, the central problem for anyone farming that desert.

Hundreds of new figures, found by AI

In 2024, a joint project between Yamagata University's Nazca Institute and IBM Research used a deep-learning model to search aerial imagery of the Nazca plain for signs of geoglyphs. Yamagata University reports that the model helped identify 303 new figurative geoglyphs in six months of fieldwork, a “16 fold increase in the rate of discovery” over prior survey work. The project also split the figures into two types: large line-type figures depicting wild animals, built for community-level ritual, and smaller relief-type figures near trails, showing human motifs and domesticated animals, which the researchers describe as functioning like roadside “billboards.”

Von Däniken's ancient-astronaut claim

The alien version of the story goes back to the Swiss author Erich von Däniken, whose 1968 best-seller Chariots of the Gods? argued that ancient monuments around the world had extraterrestrial help. Von Däniken has described a scenario in which a spacecraft in orbit sent down a probe: “My idea is that in orbit we have a spaceship which has been on a long journey and needs energy from raw material,” he has said, adding that local people treated the marks it left as a message: “The Nazcis think this is a sign from the gods and they wish that the humans make lines and start to make lines.”

Testing the claim with sticks and cord

Skeptics have tested whether the lines really required outside help. In 1982 the investigator Joe Nickell led a team of six people who reproduced the 440-foot Nazca condor figure in the Mojave Desert in two days, using only a small reference sketch, a center line, crossed sighting sticks and a knotted cord to plot points, tools available to the Nazca themselves. Nickell published the result as “The Nazca Drawings Revisited: Creation of a Full-Sized Duplicate” in Skeptical Inquirer in 1983.

Scientific American, Nickell has said, called the reproduction “remarkable in its exactness to the original.” Asked directly about von Däniken's landing-strip idea, Nickell has pointed out that the figures make poor beacons for landing spacecraft: seen from low altitude, “by the time you get close enough in the real world, you're about ready to crash.”

Verdict

The people who made the Nazca Lines are not a mystery: they were the Nazca, working the desert floor with simple tools between roughly A.D. 1 and 700, a conclusion supported by Maria Reiche's decades of fieldwork and now by AI-assisted surveys that keep finding more of their work. The claim that aliens made them, put forward by Erich von Däniken in 1968, has no support in the archaeological record and was directly tested and undercut by Joe Nickell's 1982 reconstruction. Real or Legend files the ancient-alien claim as debunked.