Since neither NASA nor the Air Force is engaged in day-to-day UFO research, neither one reviews UFO-related articles intended for publication, evaluates UFO-type spacecraft drawings, or accepts accounts of UFO sightings or applications for employment in the field of aerial phenomena investigation.
UFO POINTS OF CONTACT
1. For further information on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, please contact the SETI Institute, 2035 Landings Drive, Mountain View, CA 94043, (415) 960-4530.
2. News media requiring Project Blue Book files should contact the National Archives Public Affairs Office, (202) 501-5525. Public queries should be addressed to the Project Blue Book archivist at (202) 501-5385. For queries not related to Project Blue Book, contact the National Archives receptionist at (202) 501-5400. Documentation is available from: Modern Military Branch, National Archives and Records Service, Eighth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20408.
3. The Air Force publication, “The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert,” a lengthy document providing all of the details available from the Air Force on the Roswell incident, is available for $52 from the US Government Printing Office, Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-9328.
4. There are a number of universities and professional scientific organizations that have considered UFO phenomena during periodic meetings and seminars. A list of private organizations interested in aerial phenomena may be found in Gale’s Encyclopedia of Associations.
5. Persons wishing to report UFO sightings are advised to contact law enforcement agencies.
—NASA
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) NICAP was founded in October 1956 by a former Navy scientist, Townsend Brown, and a small group of Washington, D.C., area professional men. Initially it planned to publish a slick magazine and to have an elaborate and costly staff structure, but this failed to materialize. With the support of retired Admiral Delmer S. Fahmey and other prominent figures, Major Donald E. Keyhoe, USMC, Ret., became director in January 1957 and established a more realistic operating plan. NICAP flourished between 1957 and 1970, attaining a membership of over ten thousand, then began a slow decline. John L. Acuff, an entrepreneur of small associations, became director/president in 1973. During the 1950s, NICAP established itself, through national news media publicity, as a research organization willing to accept UFO reports in confidence from pilots, military personnel, and others in sensitive positions. Scientists, engineers, and other technically trained persons were encouraged to participate in UFO investigations. Beginning in 1958, a national network of investigators was established; these “subcommittees” included operational units at major scientific and military establishments. Active members also formed affiliates in Chicago, Connecticut, Kentucky, Los Angeles, and New York City.
Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, the affiliate/subcommittee network funneled information into the Washington, D.C., headquarters office which was maintained for over fifteen years. (Mr. Acuff later moved the office to the Maryland suburbs.) NICAP used the information to dispute Air Force contentions that UFO sightings were being explained adequately and to keep government officials apprised of important sightings by reputable and competent observers. Information also was supplied to interested members of Congress and congressional staffs, and NICAP repeatedly recommended that congressional hearings be held to illuminate the UFO question.
In 1964 NICAP published The UFO Evidence, edited by Richard Hall. This 200,000-word documentary report was supplied to every member of Congress and to local and national news media.
NICAP collaborated with the University of Colorado UFO Project, but early in 1968 it broke off its formerly close relations, alleging that its director, Dr. Edward Condon was prejudging UFOs by making negative and skeptical public statements and that the project was ignoring hundreds of important cases. When it became clear that the project’s report would be negative, NICAP devoted its resources to countering the report and offsetting its presumed detrimental effect on UFO investigations. The supplying of large amounts of information in the form of photostatic copies and the publishing of additional reports (UFOs: A New Look and Strange Effects from UFOs, both in 1969) depleted NICAP’s finances. This, coupled with a decline of public interest in the wake of the Condon Report led to the organization’s decline.
The NICAP board, in 1970, relieved Major Keyhoe as director (he continued to serve as a board member) and appointed John L. Acuff. As manager of several small associations, Mr. Acuff was charged with reorganizing NICAP on a businesslike basis. The scale of operations was drastically reduced, costs were cut, but NICAP continued to publish a newsletter, The UFO Investigator. The membership continued to decline, however, and the NICAP budget for research and investigation was minuscule. Mr. Acuff resigned as president in 1978 but accepted a position on the board. The new president in 1979 was Alan N. Hall.
As of early 1979, NICAP was engaged in an attempt at fundamental reorganization and was considering a merger with one or more other UFO groups. A controversy arose concerning the alleged CIA connections of several then-current board members. The membership was stated to be about two thousand.
By 1980 NICAP became inoperative and its files were given to the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies.
—RICHARD HALL
Nazca “spaceport” Thought by some to be an ancient landing site for extraterrestrials, the Nazca plain is located in a desert near the southern coast of Peru, and occupies an area of at least forty square miles.
Though built by the pre-Inca Nazca civilization (ca. 200 B.C. - 600 A.D.), the immense lines and figures received little attention until the German-American mathematician and amateur archaeologist Maria Reiche decided to devote her life to studying them.
Beginning in the 1940s until her recent death, Ms. Reiche roamed the lines with a jeep and a 10-foot stepladder, mapping them in painstaking detail. Her work was not generally known in the United States until a 1955 article in Fate magazine by the writer. Later, Erich Von Däniken and other writers popularized the lines, because of their superficial resemblance to a giant airport or landing field, giving rise to speculation that they were intended to be seen by the occupants of flying saucers.
The lines represent an important engineering feat only because of their great length, running as long as several miles each, and because of their absolute straightness. Most are almost parallel to each other, and in a few cases as many as a dozen of them intersect at small artificial mounds. Treasure hunters in the 1950s were unable to find anything of value in these mounds.
Mingled among the lines are large figures of various animals, very similar to the animal designs on the ancient Nazca pottery that is still found in tombs in the valleys near this coastal desert.
These figures, like the straight lines themselves, were made quite simply by clearing away the reddish topsoil of the desert, exposing the white sand beneath it. Since there is virtually no rain at all in the area, these markings on the desert lasted intact for all these many hundreds of years.
Much nonsense has been written on this subject. There is no question as to who made the lines, or how they were made. The only mystery is in regard to why. Since the ancient people of Peru (and elsewhere in South America) had no written language, we will never know for sure. Maria Reiche and other serious researchers suggest an astronomical explanation, and this most likely is correct.
The Nazca lines were apparently an attempt to correlate with the most visible stars and planets in the sky. Over the entries the apparent positions of these heavenly bodies kept shifting slightly; thus the fact that so many of the lines are nearly parallel, but not quite.
A pilot’s-eye view of the Nazca “spaceport”
Legend has it that these lines can be seen only from the air. Whereas the entire area can only be seen at once from an airplane, significant portions can be seen from Ms. Reich’s 10-foot ladder, or from low hills that surround the N
azca plain. As usual, reality is less exciting than myth.
Little known is the fact that very similar but less complex patterns of lines have been found hundreds of miles away near Lima, the Peruvian capital, as well as in Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, and possibly other countries of South America. Their purpose is not clear.
—JAMES W. MOSELEY
ANOTHER VIEW: Across 30 miles of gravel-covered desert near the southern coast of Peru are the famed Nazca lines and effigies. The latter—figures of animals and birds, including a 440-foot-long “condor”—are so large that they can effectively be seen only from the air. In his Chariots of the Gods? (1970), Erich von Däniken speculated that the drawings were “signals” to extraterrestrials and the wider lines “landing strips” for alien spacecraft. He suggested that the figures could have been “built according to instructions from an aircraft.”
A giant Condor on the Nazca plain. The line running parallel with the wings is a solstice line.
However, the late Maria Reiche who devoted her life to mapping and preserving the markings, observed that the imagined runways were on soft ground, commenting, “I’m afraid the spacemen would have gotten stuck” (McIntyre, 1975). And when von Däniken exhibited a photo of one Nazca configuration “very reminiscent of the aircraft parking areas in a modern airport,” he failed to tell his readers that it was a cropped view of the knee joint of one of the bird figures.
In fact, everywhere there is evidence that the lines were made by the local Nazca Indian culture which flourished in the area from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 600. One of the wooden stakes found at the termination of some of the long lines was actually carbon-dated to A.D. 525 (plus or minus 80 years), and the stylized Nazcan figures bear striking similarity to those of other Nazcan art. Nazcan pottery is also found in association with the lines, and their graves and ruins of their settlements lie nearby.
Aerial photograph of full-scale Condor drawing made by Joe Nickell (and helpers) in eastern Kentucky
Why the markings were made remains a mystery, although various hypotheses have been offered, ranging from von Däniken’s “ancient astronauts” notion to the idea that they represented a giant astronomical calendar or some form of offerings to the Indian deities or even the path of a ritual maze. The outlines of the figures were made by removing surface gravel to expose the lighter soil underneath (Isbell, 1978, 1980; McIntyre, 1975).
Exactly how the Nazcans made such ruler-straight lines and giant drawings, so large their creators could not effectively view them, is another mystery. Some writers have exaggerated the difficulty, and even Maria Reiche in her book Mystery on the Desert (1976) went so far as to say, “Ancient Peruvians must have had instruments and equipment which we ignore and which together with ancient knowledge were buried and hidden from the eyes of the conquerors as the one treasure which was not to be surrendered.”
However, no such special equipment has ever turned up, and indeed need not be assumed. It has been shown that straight lines could be constructed over many miles by using a simple series of ranging poles. As to the figures, one suggestion was the use of a grid-system by which a small drawing would be enlarged square by square onto a large grid (Isbell, 1980). However, such a technique seems not to account for the asymmetry of some figures.
In 1982 with five helpers I reproduced the giant “Condor” on an eastern Kentucky landfill using only sticks and string. We laid out a center line on the ground and plotted the coordinates of significant points. (On the small drawing we would measure along its center line from one end to a point on the line opposite the point to be plotted—say a wing tip. Next we measured the distance from the center line to that point. We then repeated the process on the ground, using larger units of measurement. We employed a T-shaped device to keep the sightings at right angles to the center line. We plotted 165 points (temporarily marked with stakes) which we later smoothly connected (using white lime in the manner of marking a playing field) to produce the figure. We then photographed it from an airplane at nearly 1,000 feet. (Nickell, 1982).
Our method was so accurate that we reproduced flaws in the original target figure, suggesting that the Nazcans probably used a simplified form of this method, with perhaps a significant amount of the work being done freehand. The results demonstrated that extraterrestrials need not be invoked to explain the Nazca lines.
—JOE NICKELL
References
Isbell, William H. “The Prehistoric Ground Drawings of Peru,” Scientific American (October, 1978).
———. “Solving the Mystery of Nazca,” Fate (October 1980).)
McIntyre, Loren. “Mystery of the Ancient Nazca Lines,” National Geographic (May 1975).
Morrison, Tony. Pathways to the Gods (Harper & Row, 1978).
Nickell, Joe. “The Nazca Drawings Revisited: Creation of a Full-Sized Duplicate,” Skeptical Inquirer (Spring 1983).
Reiche, Maria.. Mystery on the Desert, revised ed. (Privately published, 1976).
Von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
POSTSCRIPT: First discovered in 1927 (by Toribio Mexta Xessepe, a member of a Peruvian aerial survey team), the Nazca markings cover about a 330-square-mile area of desert that became a gigantic drawing board for its ancient inhabitants. There, discernible only from an elevated vantage point, are found enormous straight lines, trapezoids, triangles, spirals, and the outlines of animals: birds, fish, lizards, a spider, and a monkey. There are something like 13,000 lines, 100 spirals, trapezoids and triangles, and nearly 800 huge animal drawings. The markings, made between 400 B.C. and A.D. 900, were etched into the desert floor by removing the surface stones to expose the lighter subsoil underneath.
To von Däniken, the geometric designs looked like landing strips, probably for interplanetary spacecraft. Again, as in most other cases of his alleged evidence for the space-god theory, the original idea was not his own. (The “spaceport” interpretation had been offered earlier by George Hunt Williamson in his 1959 book Road in the Sky as a complete chapter entitled “Beacons for the Gods.”)
Von Däniken popularized the idea with the following suggestion made in Chariots of the Gods? (1970):
“If you fly over this territory—the plain of Nazca—you can make out gigantic lines, laid out geometrically, some of which run parallel to each other, while others intersect or are surrounded by large trapezoidal areas. The archaeologists say that they are Inca roads. A preposterous idea! Of what use to the Incas were roads that ran parallel to each other? That intersected? That were laid out in a plain and came to a sudden end?…
Seen from the air, the clear-cut impression that the 37-mile-long plain of Nazca made on me [italics in the original] was that of an airfield!
Then, a year later, von Däniken became more bold and stated his theory matter-offactly in Gods from Outer Space (1971): “At some time in the past, unknown intelligences landed on the uninhabited plain near the present-day town of Nazca and build an improvised airfield for their spacecraft which were to operate in the vicinity of the earth.”
While previous authors of the ancient-airfield theory are easily found in the popular literature of the 1950s and 1960s, it is not so easy to find references to any archaeologists who ever seriously considered the Nazca lines as Inca roads. In fact, the first archaeologist to investigate the lines, the late Paul Kosok of Long Island University, ruled out this possibility in his first article on the subject, published in 1947. In his preliminary report, entitled “The Mysterious Markings of Nazca,” Kosok pointed out that although the present inhabitants of the Nazca area sometimes referred to the markings as Inca Roads, “their very nature, size, and position indicate that they could never have been used for ordinary purposes of transportation.”
Dr. Kosok was the first to investigate the strange desert markings. In 1939, while studying ancient irrigation systems on the coast of Peru, he noticed that one of the lines coincided with the point on the horizon where the sun set on the day of the winter sol
stice in the Southern Hemisphere (i.e., the shortest day of the year). This discovery led Kosok to theorize that the lines represented a gigantic astronomical calendar.
A brief study of the lines was reported in 1973 by astronomer Gerald Hawkins of Boston University in his book Beyond Stonehenge. After making computer calculations of significant alignments of a selected number of lines at different dates in the ancient past, Hawkins concluded that the solar, lunar, and stellar alignments were no better than what would be expected by chance. But mathematician Maria Reiche, who had studied the Nazca lines for decades, supported the calendar theory; and at least one American astronomer, William Hartmann of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, partially agrees with her.
Stars making up the southern-sky constellation Pavo, the Peacock, superimposed on the outline of a giant bird, identified as a Condor, depicted on the Nazca plain.
Hartmann suggests that the lines may not represent a single undertaking at one particular point in time. When Hawkins fed into the computer the question: “What stars did the lines point to at any date between 5000 B.C. and A.D. 1900?” he says, “The print-out sheets were full, stars at the end of each line. But Hawkins rejects the significance of this finding, because he requires that the lines “hang together” in any given century; that is, for each century investigated, the number of alignments should be more than would be expected by chance for the number of lines, or directions, tested. Furthermore, Hawkins’ study was not geared to detect other kinds of alignments, such as how the shadows of certain hills and ridges, marked by the lines, might also prove to be significant.
It is interesting that certain of the animal figures laid out on the Nazca plain almost perfectly coincide with some of the ancient constellations over the Southern Hemisphere. The drawing following this paragraph shows the constellation of Pavo, the Peacock, superimposed on the outline of a bird, identified as a condor, “drawn” on the plain. The stars fit the condor in much the same manner as the northern star patterns line up with their mythical counterparts. Perhaps the Nazca figures were representations of constellations recognized at the time. This hypothesis supports Maria Reiche’s suggestion that the large figures were drawn from reduced models; the models might have been the star patterns that form the outlines of the subjects represented.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 72
