Civilization Threatens Famed Nazca Lines Of Peru

By James Donahue

The encroachment of both man and machine on the high and barren plains of Nazca, Peru, is erasing the mysterious and ancient earthen lines left by an unknown civilization that only can be seen and appreciated from the air.

Featured in books, magazines and television documentaries, the Nazca Lines, or geoglyphs, remain a contemporary mystery. Many speculate they are ancient landing sites for aliens. Others, like Carl Minck, speculate that the lines are part of an ancient message that speaks to us in a complex mathematical and universal language. Minck believes the lines and the other images left in the high and dry plain point directly to the Great Pyramid at Gaza.

That the markings of Nazca include both long straight lines and large images of animals, insects and birds, visible only from the air, supports the belief that whatever their intention, it is a message for an intelligent entity that looked down at the markings from above.

Similar lines have been found all over the world, but the Nazca geoglyphs remain the most revered because of their numbers, the fact that they spread out over 400 square miles, and that they are in a flat dry place where they have remained well preserved for perhaps thousands of years.

 The Nazca plain, located south of Lima, is unique because of its flat, stony ground that diminishes the effect of wind. When pushed aside, there is exposed a lighter subsoil under the rocky crust that provides a “vast writing pad” for any artist intent on leaving his mark. An estimated 300 figures have been carefully etched there, all supposedly made by an ancient civilization called the Nazca.

The place has been considered so historically important it is included in the United Nations World Heritage list. For the last half century it was carefully guarded against vandalism by the late German mathematician Maria Reich. But since her death in 1998, the encroachment has gone unchecked.

One of the biggest problems has been truckers cutting across the zone to either avoid a Peruvian government weigh station on a nearby highway or find a short cut, an Associated Press story said.

Destruction also is coming from tourists that visit the site, leaving garbage and trash. A boom in copper and gold mining, including a mine built a few feet from a two-mile-long trapezoid, is bringing truck traffic that is defacing many of the lines.

Advertisers have literally carved huge messages in the rock and even the earth between the ancient designs.

Utility companies are stringing power cables over and around the site.

One news story said a recent fly-over and series of aerial photos of the area revealed that the traffic has severely scarred the lines and animal figures. The pictures, published in local newspapers, have stirred the ire of Peru authorities who are promising to take protective action.

The promises by governments, however, are often ineffective. The problem is overpopulation and a total disregard by most people for the preservation of historical treasures. The ancient markings in the earth mean nothing to the dim witted clogs that now inhabit this planet.

That these ancient lines in the soil show proof of an ancient link with an advanced and highly intelligent race of beings means nothing to them. The Catholic implanted entities that inhabit their bodies would like nothing less than the total erasure of all evidence of the truth as left by the ancients.