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town of Nazca and built an improvised airfield for their spacecraft which were to operate in the vicinity of the earth. They laid down two runways on the ideal terrain. Or did they mark the landing strips with a raw material unknown to us? As on other occasions, the cosmonauts carried out their mission and returned to their own planet. But the Pre-Inca tribes, who had observed these beings at work and been tremendously impressed by them, longed passionately for the return of these 'gods'. They waited for years and when their wish was not fulfilled, they began to make new lines on the plain, just as they had seen the 'gods' make them. That is how the extensions of the first two landing strips originated. Yet still the 'gods' did not appear. What had gone wrong? How had they annoyed the ‘heavenly ones'? A priest remembered that the 'gods' had come from the stars and advised them to lay the enticing lines out according to the stars. The work began again and the tracks laid out according to the constellations came into being. In the interim, generations were born and died. The original genuine strips made by the unknown cosmonauts had long fallen into ruin. The Indian tribes who came after only knew of the 'gods' who had once come down from heaven by oral accounts. The priests turned the factual accounts into sacred traditions and made the people constantly build new signs for the 'gods' so that they might As this kind of linear conjuring was unsuccessful, they began to scratch large animal figures in the ground. At first they drew all kinds of birds that were supposed to symbolise flight, but later their imagination suggested outlines of spiders, apes and fish. Admittedly that is a hypothetical explanation of the pictures at Nazca, but surely something like it could have happened? I have seen—and anyone else can see, too—that the animal symbols and the coordinates of the landing strips are only recognisable from a great height. But that is not all. In the vicinity of Nazca, on the rock faces, are drawings of men with rays shooting out of their heads, rather like the gloriole in paintings of Christ. Nazca is 100 miles as the crow flies from Pisco. Suddenly I had a brainwave. Was there some connection between the trident in the Bay of Pisco, the figures on the plain of Nazca and the ruins on the plateau of Tiahuanaco? Apart from a very slight deviation, they are joined by a straight line drawn on the map. But if the plain of Nazca was a landing ground and the trident at Pisco a landing signal, then there would have to be landmarks south of Nazca too, because one can hardly imagine that all the And in fact large markings, whose meaning and purpose have not yet been explained, were found on high rock faces near the south Peruvian town of Mollendo, 250 miles as the crow flies from Nazca, and others continue into the deserts and mountains of the Chilean province of Antofagasta. In many places right-angles, arrows and ladders with curved rungs can be identified, or one sees whole But the 'gods' still stayed away. return one day. astronauts flew in from the north, i.e. from Pisco.