Word: nazca
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Scientists have long wondered how the ancient Nazcas were able to draw the giant designs and figures that stretch for miles across Peru's bleak Nazca plains. They have been particularly fascinated by the fact that although there are no nearby mountains, the designs are recognizable only from a high elevation...
Maria Reiche, a German researcher, speculates that the Nazca artists executed the drawings by first sketching them on small plots of land, then used a complex system of strings and central piles of rock to make large-sized "blowups" (TIME, March 25, 1974). Members of the International Explorers Society, a travel-oriented organization based in Coral Gables, Fla., have another explanation. They believe that the Nazcas laid out their remarkable figures while being guided by observers hovering above them in a hot-air balloon. In an attempt to prove their point, I.E.S. members last month flew a crude balloon over...
...Nazca ceramic pot seems to represent a hot-air bag. The researchers also found a significant clue in documents at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. These papers revealed that in 1709 a Brazilian-born Jesuit missionary named Bartholomeu de Gusmao went to Lisbon and demonstrated (74 years before France's Montgolfier brothers flew their balloon over Paris) a model of a balloon believed to have been used by the Indians. Filled with smoke and buoyed by hot air from glowing coals in a clay pot, the replica rose from Gusmao's hand and floated toward the palace...
Delayed Lift-Off. To support its theory, the I.E.S. decided to build and fly its own version of a Nazca balloon. The result was an odd contraption called Condor I, with an 88-ft.-high envelope made from fabric that closely resembles materials recovered from Nazca gravesites. The balloon's lines and fastenings were made from native fibers; the boat-shaped gondola was woven from totora reeds picked by Indians from Peru's 2.4-mile-high Lake Titicaca...
...cosmologist Erich von Däniken conjures up primordial heroes from the plain of Nazca and the temples of Palenque ?extraterrestrial astronauts who strayed to this planet long ago and then vanished. Today heroes and leaders bred on the earth seem almost as scarce. "There is a very obvious dearth of people who seem able to supply convincing answers, or even point to directions toward solutions," says Harvard President Derek Bok. "Leadership," observes Northwestern University Political Scientist Louis Masotti, "is one of those things you don't know you need until you don't have...