The Nasca lines are the lines in Peru (in such shapes as a spider, a monkey, an astronaut) that are supposedly landing strips for
extraterrestrials. The narrowest lines are as wide as my foot, and the widest ones can be close to an arm`s width apart. The figures they form are big, about 300 feet in size.
The lines came into my life very innocently about 12 years ago, when the education director at the Adler Planetarium asked if I`d teach a course on ancient astronomy for the general public. I knew very little about ancient astronomy, but I got people from the Oriental Institute to help me with the Babylonian and Egyptian astronomy and from the Field Museum to help me with some of the astronomy of the Americas.
Every now and then I`d want to travel to one of these places I was teaching about to get new photographs and to see it for myself. In 1983 I decided to go to Peru; I was especially interested in the Inca astronomy that included Cuzco and Machu Pichu.
I also wanted to see the Nasca lines, which I had been including in my class lectures. Ironically, I had said to my class, ”With so many lines, how could you ever prove anything?” Well, guess who`s trying to prove something now!
My husband (also an astronomer) and I went down to Peru on one of our vacations. The first day that we were there we flew over the lines. I had thought that the lines were random land art, but flying over them I had a powerful sensation of an intellect having made them and not just artists. I saw a sense of organization to them that you don`t perceive from the individual photographs I had always looked at before.
I was so intrigued that when I got down on the ground, I called up Maria Reiche, a mathematician who has spent the last 40 of her 85 years in Nasca measuring and mapping and revealing the figures to the world. We drove down to Nasca (a small town about 200 hundred miles south of Lima, Peru), had lunch with her, and stayed about two hours. Then I left, never expecting to see her again. We went on to Cuzco and Machu Pichu, had a wonderful time, and came back to the United States.
About six weeks later I received a letter that was addressed to the Chicago Observatory, U.S.A. The letter said that Maria Reiche was looking for the astronomer who had just been down in Peru. She wanted to see if I could come back down and help her with her work. She`s blind, so the letter had been written by a tourist from South Africa.
I was intrigued, but I didn`t plan on going down there to work with her. I was just getting ready to put the letter in my briefcase when the phone rang. It was another tourist from Peru saying that Maria was trying to get hold of me. (The two corresponded and Pitluga decided to go to Nasca in 1983.) I went on Thanksgiving Day, 1983, traveling down there all alone. It`s a 12-hour journey by plane (to Lima), and then another 8 hours by bus down to Nasca. I arrived Thanksgiving night about 1 a.m. in this little town. I didn`t meet with Maria until the next day.
She obviously was going to put me through a test. The next day she had me go out on the desert with an assistant who had worked with her for years and measure the direction of a line. I did the calculations and had the results for her that afternoon. I must have done a good job because she then said,
”I`ve got an idea. I`d like to have you work on the figure of the spider.”
I spent the next three weeks measuring the direction of the lines of that figure and determining which stars would have set visually beyond the ends of those lines 2000 years ago. I came up with such a stunning persuasive result that it held my fascination. I`ve been going back ever since.
I have been able to take what Maria Reiche did a step farther than she could, and that`s because I look at the lines with the eyes of an astronomer. I looked at these mounds on the pampa that she saw as rubble heaps, and to me they were places that as an astronomer I wanted to go and stand, a place from which you would look out at the sky. While she was looking at segments of lines at close range, I was seeing them stretched to the horizon and putting it together.
We find all around the world that after people stopped being nomadic, they established agriculture and homes, and they all established calendars. They watched the cycle of the sun or the cycle of the Moon. They were very tuned in to the cycles of the stars, because the roof over their heads was the sky.
In Nasca, the people had settled and had developed agriculture. What I`m trying to establish is that they also had developed a calendar based on observations made from this rocky desert. I went down there with the working hypothesis that the figures were constellations and that their associated lines were pointing to the bright stars that made up those patterns in the sky.
There are several good reasons to discount the feeling that the figures are landing strips for outer-space vehicles. What you have to realize is that the lines, the figures, the whole surface is strewn with black rocks about the size of a burned-black baked potato. If you move aside those rocks, then you`ve revealed basically a soft terrain. As a true runway, (this surface)
would not work. In addition, though the area as seen from aerial photographs looks like it is flat, it is rolling terrain.
Ironically, though I don`t believe that extraterrestrials made the Nasca lines, I think that extraterrestrials are undoubtedly part of the universe. The reason I say so with such certainty is that the basic molecules that make up you and me, we see strewn out among the galaxies. All you need once you`ve got the basic (molecular) material is time and the right temperature. Certainly the universe has had time: we`ve had 15 billion years or more. Life evolved on this planet over about 4 billion years of time, so 15 billion years ought to have been sufficient.
The critical thing then is temperature. In our own star system we know that the sun is not too hot, not too cold, it`s just right. We`re in the right temperature zone around the right temperature star. Probably that situation exists elsewhere.
The most profound effect on me of finding the Nasca lines is not the lines themselves, but the experience of going down to Peru and spending time with the people in Nasca. We are such a materialistic society in the United States. On any beautiful weekend you can see the parking lots of shopping centers jammed with cars, and you wonder why all these people are inside on this beautiful day.
The people in Peru aren`t as materialistic, they can`t be, and so they take the time to really care about one another. When you think about our busy society, we barely stop when we run in to an appointment to say, ”How are you? How are the kids?” and things like that. It`s just ”Hi,” and you get on with business. Then you dash on to the next appointment. It`s nice to be a part of a community where the people are so nice. Life is a lot simpler. I like that.
I grew up in Los Angeles, and I went to college at the University of California at San Jose. I wanted to be a geologist. (Because I was a woman) I was encouraged in the 1950s to become a teacher of science.
After I graduated from college, I was living in the same apartment complex as a fellow who worked at the jet propulsion labs in Pasadena, Calif. He`d come home from work and say, ”Gee, we just got this back from Venus, this came back from Mars.” I thought, ”Aha, other planets, not just planet Earth.” So then I went back to UCLA and started taking astronomy classes.
I applied to be an astronaut, but at that time you had to have 1000 hours of jet pilot training, and I didn`t even have a second of jet-pilot training. I still wanted to be close to the space program even though I wasn`t accepted as an astronaut. I was single, and I had been living in California at the beach. It was a time of LSD and all that, and I said, ”Hey, that`s not me.” Florida had many pulls: the space program, a climate change, and also I wanted to get away from (the lifestyle) I was a part of. I didn`t feel comfortable with it.
So I moved to Cape Canaveral in 1965 and taught science. I lived there during the Gemini days, and that was great fun. In 1967 I was accepted to a summer institute in the planetarium field in Oswego, N.Y. Somehow I had a feeling that as a result of going to the summer institute I might get a job in a planetarium. And that`s the way it worked out.
I spent the summer in this institute. I couldn`t even pronounce the name of the professor who had accepted me into the course: It was Pitluga. I knew my father-in-law before I knew my husband, because I married my professor`s son. So that turned out to be a good summer investment! He was taking the same planetarium course. We married the next summer in 1968.
I was 29 when we married. I so enjoyed my work that I decided that I didn`t want to have children. It was based on the belief that in making the commitment to have children, one should stay home and really give them a good start. I knew myself as a person, and I knew that I couldn`t do both things well. I was already into a career, and I decided to do that. For me, I have no regrets, even though I know I gave up something.
I don`t tend to dwell on the negative. I have the attitude that it`s my life, and I`m in charge of it. If I don`t like something about it, then it`s up to me to see that changes take place. The key to happiness in life, I think, is to recognize those things that you have no control over and accept them, and then to deal with those things that you can change and do something about.
I came to Chicago because my husband accepted the position at Triton College to set up the planetarium there. In 1973 I was hired for a full-time position at the Adler Planetarium. I think I`ve got a nice balance now, where I spend about half the year in Peru and half in Chicago. My husband joins me on many occasions.
I remember thinking that maybe if I solved the mystery of the Nasca lines, that they wouldn`t be interesting anymore. Then I remembered Stonehenge, how those stones sat out there and we wondered (what they were), until Gerald Hawkins saw that it was a solar observatory. That just gives us more respect for Stonehenge rather than less. So with that in mind, I`m hoping that the Nasca lines, rather than being a mystery, will be even more respected. That they are not extraterrestrial but terrestrial, that the people here did it, I think is far more exciting than conjuring up imaginary people coming here to make the lines.
