Who Drew the Nazca Lines?

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Scams, Money, & Murder – “Who Drew the Nazca Lines?”

Crime House | June 29, 2026
Host: Vanessa Richardson

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Episode Overview

In this episode of Scams, Money, & Murder, Vanessa Richardson investigates one of history’s greatest archaeological mysteries: the Nazca Lines of Peru. From their rediscovery in the twentieth century to wild theories involving aliens and the dogged efforts of Maria Reiche, Richardson unpacks how these giant geoglyphs came to captivate the world and what we know—or still don’t know—about their true origin and purpose.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Discovery of the Nazca Lines

• [00:55] 1927, Peru: Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejia Cespe, en route to a dig, spots long, straight, hand-dug lines running across the Nazca Valley.
  • “He has no idea who. He has no idea why, and he has no idea that the answer will take decades to find—or that some people will refuse to believe it.” (Vanessa, 01:38)
• Initially theorized to be ceremonial paths for religious processions.
• Cespe's 1927 field notes were published only in 1939 and had little immediate impact.

2. The Lines Revealed from the Air

• [09:35] 1941: American historian Paul Kosok and his wife, Rose, fly over Nazca and realize the lines form giant drawings—geoglyphs—including a bird whose tail aligns with the winter solstice sunset.
  • "Paul would call the Nazca Lines... 'the largest astronomy book in the world.'" (Vanessa, 11:09)

3. The “Lady of the Lines” – Maria Reiche

• [14:24] German mathematician and linguist Maria Reiche is recruited in the early 1940s to document and preserve the figures.
  • Overcomes hardship and funding shortages: borrows government surveying equipment, photographs lines from garbage trucks, takes notes on toilet paper, cleans lines with brooms.
  • Uncovers many new figures: hummingbird, monkey, spider, dog, whales, etc.
  • When visiting archaeologist Paul Kosok returns, he hands full control over to Reiche due to her dedication.

4. The Calendar Theory

• [19:36] Reiche theorizes the Nazca Lines are tied to astronomy and agriculture:
  • Each geoglyph connected to star constellations, tracking planting seasons and water sources.
  • Major pilgrimage center at Cahuachi (Kawachi) built by the Nazca people (100 BCE – 800 CE), descendants of the Paracas culture.
  • Process of creation: networks of farming villages gathered for rituals, drawing lines as part of religious/calendrical observances.

5. Archaeological Advances and Evidence

• [23:15] Subsequent excavations by William Duncan Strong (Columbia University) and others reveal:
  • Nazca not an empire but loose farming communities.
  • Cahuachi as ceremonial center, not a populated city—thousands of smashed ceremonial goods, not city debris.
  • Trophy heads found at sites echo iconography on pottery and textiles.

6. Rise of Alien Theories: Erich von Däniken

• [29:50] 1960s–70s, Swiss hotelier-turned-writer Erich von Däniken popularizes the "ancient astronaut" concept:
  • Authors Chariots of the Gods (1968), claiming Nazca Lines are alien-designed landing strips.
  • Interprets geoglyphs (e.g., “the Astronaut” figure) as tributes to extraterrestrial visitors.
  • Book becomes a massive bestseller; Däniken briefly imprisoned for financial fraud.

Maria Reiche’s Rebuttal:

• [35:21] Reiche counters alien theories directly:

  • Explains how Nazca people used grids and ropes to scale designs.
  • Stakes and practice plots found matching her explanation.
  • “In all her years there, Maria had never found a single piece of alien litter… If the valley really had been a bustling extraterrestrial airport, you’d think somebody would have dropped something—a wrapper, a bolt, anything.” (Vanessa, 36:13)

• Richardson’s critique of Däniken’s theory:

  • “He didn’t argue that aliens built the Parthenon… He saved that theory almost exclusively for non-European cultures. The same ones colonizers had spent centuries calling primitive.” (Vanessa, 37:33)

7. Modern Understanding and Recent Discoveries

• [39:54] Most scholars now believe:
  • Lines served multi-layered purposes: ceremonial pilgrimage routes, possibly some astronomical and water symbolism, perhaps calendar elements.
  • Not solely a calendar, not alien landing strips. The debate continues.
  • In 2024, AI and high-res imaging nearly double known Nazca figures (+303 new geoglyphs found).
  • The Nazca Lines are now a UNESCO World Heritage site and major tourist draw.

8. Maria Reiche’s Legacy

• Reiche spent over 50 years preserving and studying the lines, became a Peruvian national hero.
• “She spent more than 50 years in the Nazca Valley, transforming our understanding of the people who built it and protecting their work from highways, looters, and over-eager tourists.” (Vanessa, 39:20)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Nazca Civilization’s technical prowess:
  • “They built underground aqueducts that still work today. The largest piece of woven cloth in the ancient Americas. They tracked stars, they built pyramids. That's not a civilization that needed help.” (Vanessa, 38:07)
• On wild theories:
  • “Were the Nazca Lines a calendar, a tribute to the gods? Something else entirely? And what’s the wildest theory about them you’ve come across? Drop a comment wherever you’re listening. I’d love to hear them all.” (Vanessa, 40:19)
• On Maria Reiche’s methodology:
  • “Archaeologists had found the remnants of those small practice plots near many of the figures. Maria could also point to small holes at the center points of arcs, exactly where the Nazca would have anchored their stakes and ropes.” (Vanessa, 36:38)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:55 — Setting the scene: Nazca Valley and Toribio Mejia Cespe’s discovery
• 09:35 — Paul Kosok’s aerial revelation and solstice alignment
• 14:24 — Maria Reiche’s background and beginnings in Nazca research
• 21:32 — Early evidence of Nazca people, evolution of archaeological perspective
• 29:50 — Erich von Däniken and the “Chariots of the Gods” alien theory
• 35:21 — Maria Reiche’s evidence-based counter to alien theories
• 39:54 — Recent advances: AI-driven discoveries and UNESCO recognition
• 40:50 — Reflection on unresolved debates and Maria Reiche’s enduring legacy

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Episode Tone & Style

• Vanessa presents a narrative that is engaging, witty, and respectful of both the mystery and the science (“But the lady of the Lines had never seen it,” “That’s not a civilization that needed help”).
• She is skeptical but fair, debunking sensationalist claims and celebrating rigorous scientific methods.
• The tone honors Reiche’s stubborn genius and the indigenous cultures of Peru, while expressing wonder and delight at each new twist in the Lines’ legacy.

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Summary

This episode provides a sweeping, vivid account of the Nazca Lines’ history, unraveling scientific debates, outlandish theories, and the tenacious efforts of Maria Reiche to uncover and preserve these enigmatic desert figures. While the lines’ original purpose remains partially mysterious, the podcast stresses their creation as an extraordinary human achievement—reaffirmed by both new archaeological methods and ongoing public fascination. As Richardson summarizes: “We may never know exactly why the Nazca drew their lines, but Maria spent more than 50 years in that desert proving one thing: it wasn’t aliens who made them. It was people.” (40:37)

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Transcript

[Vanessa Richardson]

Hi listeners. Exciting news Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or or you can listen to all of them right now with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page.

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This is crime house.

[Vanessa Richardson]

Okay, it's 1927. Somewhere in the foothills of southern Peru. A young archaeologist named Toribio Mejia Cespe is hiking up a steep, dusty trail. He's on his way to a dig site. The Nazca Valley. Below him is one of the driest places on Earth, a flat expanse of reddish brown pebbles baking under the sun. Almost nothing grows here. Almost nothing ever has. But when Toribio glances down toward the valley floor, he he sees something he can't quite explain. Long, straight lines scratched into the desert. Six feet wide, hundreds of feet long, running for what looks like miles. When he scrambles down for a closer look, he can tell the lines aren't natural. Someone dug them by hand. He has no idea who. He has no idea why, and he has no idea that the answer will take decades to find one, or that some people will refuse to believe it. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy, Cults and Crimes, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. Remember, these Monday episodes are also on YouTube with full video. You can find them every Saturday. Just search for Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes and be sure to like and subscribe. Be sure also to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you're listening. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Today I'm investigating the Nazca Lines, a group of enormous drawings that were carved into a Peruvian desert almost 2,000 thousand years ago. They include a hummingbird the size of a football field, a monkey with a curly tail, a spider, a dog, a whale, and dozens of others. From the ground, they look like roads or scratches in the dirt. From the air, they look like something else entirely. So who made them and why? Some say it was an ancient calendar, others think it was a tribute to the gods. And then there are those who say it was a landing strip from for alien spaceships. But what's the truth? All that and more coming up.

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[Vanessa Richardson]

the Nazca Valley sits at the foot of the Andes Mountains, about 250 miles south of Peru's capital, Lima. It's a flat, arid plain plateau in one of the driest regions on Earth. Daytime temperatures hover in the 90s. Less than an inch of rain falls in a typical year. Nothing really grows in the open desert. The whole landscape is just reddish brown pebbles stretching for mile after mile under the brutal sun. But the valley isn't lifeless. A handful of rivers flow down from the Andes and cut through the desert, creating narrow green valleys where the soil can actually hold water. That's where people built their homes for thousands of years. They farmed corn, beans, and squash along those rivers. They wove textiles. They buried their dead. And eventually, they did something else, something nobody outside the valley would understand for almost 2000 years. But to get to that story, we have to start with the people who came before Them. The first major civilization to settle the valley was the Paracas, who lived in the region from about 800 BCE to 100 BCE. The Paracas were extraordinary artists. They made elaborate textiles out of dyed wool woven with scenes of dreamlike creatures, humanoid figures with bird heads and cat tails, often carrying severed human heads. That was a theme in the Paracas culture. They were obsessed with their dead. The Paracas wrapped corpses in layer after layer of these textiles, effectively mummifying them, and buried them in tombs filled with gold ornaments, ceramics and food offerings. Starting in 1925, Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello uncovered a Paracas burial site north of the Nazca Valley. And when he unwrapped the bodies inside, he got a shock. Many of the skulls were strangely elongated, stretched into a tall, narrow shape. Experts came to believe the Paracas had done this on purpose by tightly binding babies heads while their skulls were still forming. After that discovery, archaeologists flooded into the region. They wanted Paracas tombs, treasures, mummies, weird skulls. They wanted it all. Toribio Mejia Cespe was on his way to one of those dig sites in 1927 when he climbed a hillside overlooking the valley. And he saw something nobody had really noticed before. From up on that hill, Toribio could see lines. Long, straight grooves running through the valley floor below. Six feet wide, hundreds of feet long and lighter than the dark stones around them, like someone had scraped the surface clean to expose the pale dirt underneath. When he climbed down for a closer look, he could tell these weren't natural. Someone had dug them by hand, pulling back the surface stones to reveal the soil below. Toribio became the first archaeologist to document them. He surveyed the grooves and measured their lengths, width and depth. And based on what he could see from the ground, he came to a conclusion. These were ceremonial paths, sacred roads used in religious processions. That was it for him. He didn't have time to dig deeper. He was supposed to be studying the Paracas. The archaeological world wanted treasure and elongated skulls, not some long lines in the dirt. So Trebio wrote up his findings in an academic paper and went back to his other work. The paper sat in a drawer for years, and it wasn't published until 1939. And when it finally came out, it landed quietly. But Toribio's work hadn't been wasted. A few years later, his findings would catch the eye of someone who would see the lines from a completely different angle. In 1941, an American historian named Paul Kosak came to Peru to test a theory. Kosak was a professor at Long Island University, and he had a pet idea about ancient civilizations, he believed. And every major one. Egypt, Rome, all of them had grown out of a single shared irrigation. The Romans had aqueducts, the Egyptians had canals. So if the ancient Peruvians had pulled off a major civilization in a desert, they must have built waterworks, too. Kosak wanted to find them. So he and his wife Rose chartered a small plane and started flying over Peru's coastal valleys, photographing the ground for traces of ancient canals. It went well. Kosok found plenty of irrigation networks to study. But eventually he heard something interesting about Toribio's paper. A few academics who'd read it had suggested the Nazca lines weren't roads at all. They thought maybe they were canals, dug to capture and channel water during the desert's rare rainstorms. Canals were exactly Kosak's beat. So in late June, he and Rose flew over the Nazca Valley to see for themselves. But once they got up there, they immediately knew they weren't looking at canals From a few thousand feet up, the lines did something they couldn't do from the ground. They formed a picture. Specifically, a giant bird etched into the desert floor. Paul and Rose couldn't believe it. They were looking at a massive piece of ancient artwork hiding in plain sight. Local Peruvians had known about the lines for generations, and Peruvian pilots had spotted some of the figures from the air in the early 1930s. But nobody had taken in the full scale of what it was down there until the Cossacks saw it. After they landed, the Cossacks rushed back to the valley to survey the site on foot. The couple spent hours walking the bird's outline. And as they did, they noticed something. The central line of the bird's tail led up a nearby hillside, so they followed it. When they reached the top, they found a rocky plateau looking over the rest of the valley.

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[Vanessa Richardson]

And from up there, they could see more lines radiating out in different directions like the spokes on a wheel. Most were faint. Centuries of wind blown rocks and dust had filled the grooves and made them hard to see from the air. But now that the Cossacks knew what to look for, they could tell the valley was full of these figures. They lingered on the hilltop to watch the sunset. And that's when they made one more discovery.

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[Vanessa Richardson]

As the sun touched the horizon, Rose realized it was lining up perfectly with one of the lines running up the hillside. That's when they remembered the date. June 22. In the southern hemisphere. That's the winter solstice. The shortest day of the year. This was no coincidence. Whoever had built the lines had clearly designed at least one of these enormous drawings to align with the solstice. Which meant the other half buried figures probably had some kind of astronomical meanings too. Years later, Paul would call the Nazca Lines quote the largest astronomy book in the world. But finding it raised an obvious question. How would they read it? The answer would come from a 37 year old part time nanny in Lima. Her name was Maria Raicha, and before long the locals would come to call her the lady of the Lines.

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[Vanessa Richardson]

Paul Kosok and his wife Rose flew over a Peruvian desert and realized that the strange grooves in the ground were actually a giant ancient drawing, the first of dozens they'd find scattered across the valley. But Paul had to get back to his teaching job at Long Island University. He needed someone who could stay on site to study and protect what he'd found. And he knew exactly who to ask. Maria Reische was born in 1903 in Dresden, Germany. Her father was a judge and she had a comfortable upper middle class childhood. Until 1916, when her father died. Fighting in World War I, Maria's mother stepped up. She was a fiercely independent feminist intellectual. And after her husband's death, she went to work as a teacher and social worker to support her three kids. She also pushed them to chase whatever they were passionate about. For Maria, that was science. From an early age, she'd been obsessed with the natural world. As a kid, she built her own scientific instruments out of knitting needles and matchboxes. As a teenager, she'd sometimes sneak math problems into class, practicing complex equations on a sheet of paper hidden under her desk. After high school, she went to the Dresden Technical University, where she studied math, astronomy, geography and linguistics. Eventually, she would learn five languages. She was brilliant. She was curious. And by the early 1930s, she could see exactly where Germany was going. As Adolf Hitler's Nazi party rose to power, Maria knew she had to get out. In 1932, the 29 year old answered a newspaper ad to work as a nanny for a German diplomat's family in Cusco, Peru. Maria's first years in Peru weren't glamorous. She loved Cusco, the mountains, the food, the centuries old Inca stonework. But taking care of a seven year old wasn't really her cup of tea. And then in 1934, she nicked her finger on a cactus and the cut got infected and the infection turned into gangrene. She ended up losing the finger. But that didn't stop her. After a few years, Maria quit the nanny job and moved to Peru's capital, Lima. She found steady work teaching languages and translating scientific papers at the University of San Marcos. That's where she met Paul Kosak. In 1940, he hired her to translate one of his research papers. And the next year he reached out again. This time he had something more hands on in mind. He told Maria about the figures he'd found in the Nazca Valley and offered to hire her as a research assistant. Paul was thinking short term, maybe a year of fieldwork until he could come back himself. But as soon as Maria flew over the valley and saw that giant bird in the desert, she knew this Was it? This was what she'd been looking for her entire life. And after Paul left, Maria began the slow, deliberate work of surveying the lines. Every morning she got up at 3 or 4am and hitched a ride into the valley on a passing truck. She had to start early by afternoon. The heat made fieldwork impossible, and to take accurate measurements she needed proper surveying equipment, which she had no money to buy. So she did. What would become her trademark over the next half century? She asked. Maria walked into the local offices of the Peruvian military, explained the project and convinced them to lend her the gear they used for mapping. They said yes. It was the first of many times the Peruvian military would help her. Partly out of curiosity, partly because she was hard to say no to. Using their equipment, Maria carefully measured the dimensions of the bird the Cossacks had spotted. She was there that December for the summer solstice and confirmed that the setting sun aligned with the bird's design then too. But that was just the start. To keep going, she'd need more than a one time loan from the military. She had a little funding from Paul's research grant. The rest came out of her own pocket or from donations from friends and family. So she got creative. When she needed a higher vantage point to photograph the lines, she borrowed a garbage truck, drove it into the desert and climbed on top of it with a ladder she'd borrowed from the electric company. When she ran out of actual paper, she took notes on toilet paper. Maria had only been hired to survey the bird, but the more time she spent in the desert, the more obsessed she became with the other lines. The grooves were there, but so many dark pebbles had blown into them over the centuries that the shapes were imperfect, impossible to see from above. So Maria started cleaning them. At first she used a rake. That's how she uncovered the second figure at the site. A 300 foot hummingbird with a long, narrow beak and pointed wings. To this day, it's one of the most clearly visible drawings in the valley. But the rake was slow, so Maria switched to a broom. Line by line, she brushed the dark pebbles out of the grooves, charting her progress on graph paper as she went. She'd often spend weeks on a single figure, returning at different times of day to check the lines in different light. Once, she spent weeks uncovering a long spiral shaped tail and assumed she was working on a lizard. When the figure turned out to be a giant monkey, she collapsed on the desert floor, laughing. Over the next few years, she uncovered several more figures. A dog, a pair of llamas, three killer whales, a 150 foot spider, flowers and two lizards. One of the lizards had been cut in half by a highway someone had built years before she got there to photograph the new finds from above. She eventually persuaded the Peruvian military to take her up in one of their helicopters. When she realized she couldn't get a good angle out the window, she came up with a wilder plan. Maria had a long way wooden board strapped to the bottom of the helicopter. Then she strapped herself to the board face down and had the pilot fly low over the valley while she snapped pictures. By 1948, Maria had been working in the desert almost continuously for seven years and had become a familiar sight to the people in the surrounding villages. She was the strange German woman with the broom, walking the desert before dawn. And that year the man who'd given her the job finally came back to see what she'd done with it. Paul Kosok hadn't meant to be gone so long. He'd planned to return after a year or two of teaching. But the US had entered World War II in December of 1941, just months after his first trip to Nasca. And travel to Peru became very difficult then nearly impossible. Then his teaching duties. Duties piled up. Then the war ended and he had to wait for things to normalize. By the time he finally made it back, the desert he returned to was nothing like the one he'd left. And neither was Maria. She was practically a hermit. She'd moved into a tiny one room shack on a ranch near the valley where she spent her nights pouring over charts and calculations. The place was infested with mice, so she'd taken to be pinning all her paperwork to the ceiling to keep it from getting chewed up. Paul was blown away by how much she'd done and how meticulous she was about it. While he was visiting, he and his son helped her clean one of the lines by just kicking pebbles out of the grooves with their boots. Maria must have been horrified. Her technique was a single soft brush. The contrast wasn't lost on Paul. He'd been the one who first identified the bird from the air. He'd been the one who'd hired her. But while he'd been back home teaching, Maria had been here every day in the heat and the dust. She knew every figure, she knew every groove. She was risking her life dangling out of military helicopters to photograph her own discoveries. By the end of his visit, Paul realized something. This wasn't his site anymore. It was Maria's. Before he flew back to the States, he formally Handed control of the Nazca Line's archaeological project over to her. The lady of the lines was officially in charge. Maria didn't waste a moment. In 1949, she published a book about her discoveries called Mystery on the Desert. It was a hit, translated into multiple languages and sold around the world. The Peruvian government even used it as proof that the Nazca Lines were a national treasure. For the first time, international tourists started showing up to the valley. That quickly became a problem. The Peruvian government had recognized the Nazca Lines as historically important, but it hadn't put any real resources behind protecting them. There were no fences, no signs, no park rangers. The site was just out there. And visitors were free to wander wherever they wanted, including, in some cases, driving cars and trucks right across the figures. So Maria appointed herself the site's protector. She lobbied the government to reroute a planned highway so it wouldn't cut across one of the lines. She kept curious visitors at a respectful distance. And on at least one occasion, she warned a tour group not to come back at night unless they wanted to catch her dancing naked under the moon. While Maria was clearing and protecting the lines, she was also trying to figure out what they meant. After years of measurements and observations, she became convinced that the giant animals weren't just art. They were a calendar. A massive walkable star chart on the desert floor. In multiple books and papers, she argued that each figure was tied to a specific constellation. The spider lined up with Orion. The monkey lined up with the Big Dipper, the famous star pattern inside the constellation Ursa Major. The way the lines crossed each figure tracked the way the constellations moved across the sky. Here's why that the Big Dipper rose into the desert sky about a month before the December solstice. That same window marked the start of the rainy season in the Green river valleys, where the people who who built the lines actually lived. So picture one of those builders, a priest maybe, walking out to the giant monkey on a clear desert night. He looks up, sees the Big Dipper rising in the right position, and he knows the rains are coming. He sends word back to the farming communities. Time to plant a giant hand built calendar. Drawn into the desert by a civilization that lived and died by the timing of its harvests. It was an elegant theory, but to test it, Maria needed to know more about who those builders actually were. And in the early 1950s, an American archaeologist arrived to fill in that picture. In 1952, Columbia University archaeologist William Duncan Strong started excavating a major ruin about 15 miles from the Nazca Lines. The site was a sprawling complex of 40 small adobe pyramids, mounds and plazas. Today it's called Kawachi, and it's where archaeologists got their clearest look at the people who'd built the Nazca Lines. The Nazca turned out to be the cultural heirs to the Paracas, the same people whose elongated skull mummies had drawn archaeologists to the region in the first place. Most experts now date the Nazca civilization from around 100 BCE to 800 CE. That puts them on earth at the same time as the late Roman Empire. Like the Paracas, they mummified their dead. And they were just as fixated on severed heads. Trophy heads kept showing up in Nazca pottery and textiles, sometimes hanging from belts, sometimes held aloft. Archaeologists have also found the real thing at Kawachi. Human skulls with carrying cords threaded through holes drilled in the forehead. At first, Strong and his colleagues thought Kawachi was the capital of a powerful Nazca empire. That was the obvious read for a site that size. But the more they dug, the less it fit. There were no barracks, no storerooms, none of the trash and household debris you'd expect from a city full of people. In fact, Kawachi was strangely clear, clean. Almost the only thing they found at the site was the shattered remains of thousands of decorated clay pots and panpipes, instruments that looked like they'd been smashed on purpose as part of ceremonies. Strong's team also unearthed what may have been the largest piece of woven cloth ever made in the ancient Americas, buried at the base of the main mound. It took decades of follow up work to find, fully revise the picture. Most of it was done by two archaeologists, Helene Silverman and Giuseppe Orifici. And the conclusions they reached were striking. Kuachi wasn't really a capital, it was a pilgrimage site. And the Nazca weren't an empire. They were a network of loosely affiliated farming communities scattered across the green valleys around the desert. A few times a year, those communities would gather at Kawachi for ceremonies, burials and religious rituals. And archaeologists now believe that one of the most important rituals was creating the Nazca lines and reading them. It all fit Maria's theory. The lines weren't random, they weren't decorations. They were part of the religious and agricultural life of an entire civilization. Most archaeologists came around to some version of this picture. A few held out, arguing the figures had nothing to do with the stars at all, that they were religious art or pathways or something else entirely. But the loudest challenge came From a man with no formal training, no excavations to his name, and one very strange idea. He thought the Nazca Lines were built by aliens. Best thing that's ever happened to you financially. Go easy.

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[Vanessa Richardson]

By the 1960s, Maria Raisha had spent two decades in the Nazca Desert. She'd cleared and mapped dozens of giant figures, traced their connections to the sky, and argued in book after book that the Nazca Lines were an ancient astronomical calendar tied to the ceremonial center at Kawachi. The world's archaeologists were paying attention, but so was somebody else. His name was Erich von Deniken. You might remember him from our Stonehenge episode. And surprise, surprise, he had thoughts about the Nazca Lines, too. In the early 1960s, von Deniken was managing a hotel in Davos, Switzerland, by day and trying to solve the mysteries of the universe by night. He was an amateur archaeologist, no formal training, who'd traveled to ancient ruins all over the world. The Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, Chichen Itza in Mexico. In the mid-1960s, he added the Nazca lines to the list. These weren't vacations. He was working on a book that combined his love of ancient ruins with his other lifelong obsession, UFOs. And the question that drove the whole project was, in fairness, actually a pretty good one. He asked, how could the Nazca people have made figures this enormous if they couldn't see them from the air? It's worth taking seriously. For more than a thousand years, everyone who'd encountered the lines had just assumed they were roads. You really can't make out what the figures are without a view from a few thousand feet up. And human figures flight wasn't possible until the early 20th century. So how did the Nazca pull it off? How did they get the proportions right? How did they know where to dig? According to Von Daniken, the only answer that made sense was guidance from above. Someone overhead, something overhead telling them where to scrape next. In 1968, von Daniken's book hit the shelves and he called it Chariots of the Gods. His pitch was. Throughout human history, a super advanced alien race had been quietly guiding our development. They'd buried secret technology, underground technology the ancient world wasn't ready for. And they'd helped early humans build monuments like the pyramids and Stonehenge on top of those burial sites as markers for future generations to find. But the Nazca lines were different. They weren't markers for buried tech. They were an airport. According to Von Daniken, the layout of the Nazca lines wasn't designed by the NAZCA at all. It was designed by those aliens. They laid out the runways, parking spots and flight paths exactly the way you would at a modern airport. And he didn't stop there. He pointed to the figures and symbols drawn on hillsides around the valley, including the famous 100 foot humanoid known today as the Astronaut. It has a round head, large eyes, and a hand raised in a wave. Most archaeologists think it represents a Nazca priest, a shaman or deity, possibly tied to the imagery of an owl, which was sacred in many Andean cultures. But the figure's bubble shaped head looks a lot like a spacesuit helmet. So visitors started calling it the astronaut and the name stuck. Fondaniken claimed the astronaut was a tribute to the Nazca's alien gods. He said the other hillside markings were signals, visual guides for incoming UFOs together with the airport style line layouts. The picture he painted was vivid. A kind of intergalactic transit hub hidden in plain sight in the Peruvian base desert. For 2000 years, Chariots of the Gods was a worldwide phenomenon. It eventually sold more than 70 million copies and was adapted into an Academy Award nominated documentary. In the early 1970s, Fond Daniken became one of the most famous amateur archaeologists on Earth. There was just one problem. He'd been funding the whole project on board. Borrowed money to pay for his global travel. Fondaniken had been forging hotel records and credit references, eventually running up roughly $130,000 in fraudulent loans. In November 1968, just months after his book hit the shelves, he was arrested. In 1970, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for fraud and embarrassed embezzlement. He served one year. The book's sales paid off his debts and bankrolled the rest of his career. But while Von Daniken was selling millions of copies, the lady of the Lines wasn't buying it. In the 1970s, when the chariots of the Gods documentary was in theaters, Time magazine asked Maria what she thought of Von Daniken's theories. She laughed them off when the reporter asked how the Nazca had been built. Such precise figures without a spotter in an airplane. Maria didn't waver. Based on her research, the Nazca had started by sketching small versions of their designs on a grid of 6 foot by 6 foot dirt plots near the actual site. Using two wooden stakes and a length of rope, they could measure out the exact proportions of every arc line and center point. Once they had the small version right, they just scaled it up and repeated the same work plot by plot on the desert floor. And unlike Von Daniken, she had proof. Archaeologists had found the remnants of those small practice plots near many of the figures. Maria could also point to small holes at the center points of arks, exactly where the Nazca would have anchored their stakes and ropes. Her last point was the simplest. Archaeologists had found three thousands of traces of the humans who'd lived and worked in the Nazca Valley over the centuries. Bones, pottery, tools, trash. But in all her years there, Maria had never found a single piece of alien litter. If the valley really had been a bustling extraterrestrial airport, you'd think somebody would have dropped something, a wrapper, a bolt, anything. But the lady of the Lines had never seen it. Here's what's frustrating about Von Daniken's it hinges on the idea that the Nazca couldn't have made the lines on their own. That the math, the precision, the scale must have come from somewhere otherworldly. But look at who he was talking about. The Nazca built underground aqueducts that still work today. The largest piece of woven cloth in the ancient Americas. They tracked stars, they built pyramids. That's not a civilization that needed help. And it's worth noticing which civilizations Von Daniken kept reaching for. The Egyptians, the Mayans, the Incas, the Nazca. He didn't argue that aliens built the Parthenon. He saved that theory almost exclusively for non European cultures. The same ones colonizers had spent centuries calling primitive. Von Daniken died in Switzerland in January 2026. At 90 years old. Unfortunately, his ideas about the Nazca Lines outlived him. But so did the work of the woman who spent her life proving him wrong. Maria Raisha died in 1998 at the age of 95. She'd spent more than 50 years in the Nazca Valley, transforming our understanding of the people who built it and protecting their army work from highways, looters, and overeager tourists. In Peru today, she's a national hero. There are streets named after her, an airport. More than 50 schools are named after her. But the idea that the site was simply a calendar has evolved. Today, most archaeologists think the answer is some combination. The lines were processional paths used by pilgrims coming to Kawachi, with some astronomical and water related symbolism layered in. The calendar was probably part of the picture, but not the whole thing. The Nazca Lines are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Peru's most visited tourist attractions. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people fly over the valley to see the figures with their own eyes and form their own theories about what they were for. But I really want to hear what you think. Were the Nazca Lines a calendar, a tribute to the gods? Something else entirely? And what's the wildest theory about them you've come across? Drop a comment wherever you're listening. I'd love to hear them all. And the story still isn't finished. In 2024, archaeologists announced something Maria never lived to see. A research team using artificial intelligence and high resolution imaging had nearly doubled the number of known figurative geoglyphs in the Nazca region. They added 303 new figures to the catalog. Some were humanoid. Others were animals, smaller and stranger than anything Maria had ever uncovered. And the technology keeps getting better, which means more discoveries are coming every year. We may never know exactly why the Nazca drew their lines, but Maria spent more than 50 years in that desert proving one it wasn't aliens who made them. It was people. Thanks so much for listening. Listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media. Crime house on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories Cults and Crimes. Wherever you get your podcasts, your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap, try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios, this episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benidon, Natalie Pri, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Truman Capps, Kaylee Pine and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.

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