Peru's Nazca Lines: Where Crop Circles Meet Easter Island

It's hard to imagine creating a complex and laborious work of art that you would never be be to actually see, right? Well, unless historians have drastically missed the mark on the first human flight, this is exactly what the native inhabitants of Peru's Nazca desert did about 2,000 years ago. Their creations consist of hundreds of images, ranging from fairly simple geometric lines to more complex images including a 360 foot wide curly-tailed monkey comprised of a single labyrinth-like path, etched into the desert floor by scraping away the darkly colored topsoil to reveal the pale clay below. The 500 square-mile area that these geoglyphs cover is among the driest on earth and sees very little temperature fluctuation or wind, which has allowed these incredible images to persist for as long as they have. Whether the lines were drawn as a tribute to the gods, to signal visiting aliens, or simple to fend off the desert blues is unknown. But there is one thing I think we can all agree on: it's gotta be the aliens, right?

Behold a very dramatic old video whose creators apparently did their research before there was wikipedia, but are kind enough to abruptly bid you adieu at the end.


For more info, check out an interesting article at The Skeptic's Dictionary. Though, spoiler alert, they do disagree slightly with our consensus about the aliens. Some people are just no fun at all.