Mystifying geoglyphs, giant pictures covering large areas on the ground, appear across the globe, many created by ancient peoples. They only become recognizable at great distances or are situated away from the common sight of man. Some remind us that many civilizations held beliefs that dealt with ideas well beyond everyday life, while others concern rituals and legends. Many, because of scale, were obviously not meant for mere humans of Earth to see. Large scale geometric lines and animals are drawn in the sands of the Peruvian Desert. The name of the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset, England, is revealed by Clarke. Originally broadcast in September 1980, Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World brought an innovative approach to exploring natural and supernatural phenomenon.
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00:00What strange compulsion made men etch vast designs on the face of the earth, on downland
00:27and desert, on the slopes of solitary mountains? Why can so many only be seen from the air?
00:34What is their message from the distant past?
00:40Mysteries for Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 and inventor of the communication satellite.
00:46Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, after a lifetime of science, space and writing, he ponders
00:51the riddles of this and other worlds.
00:55For thousands of years, people have drawn figures, cut designs in the landscape, apparently
01:01for no one on earth to see. One of the strangest wonders of this great rock of Sigiriya, here
01:07in Sri Lanka, is this gallery of frescoes on a sheer cliff, hundreds of feet up in the
01:14sky. Yet until a modern staircase was constructed, no one could possibly have seen them properly.
01:24So why was this done? And who are these charming ladies?
01:30Similar questions can be asked of figures in many other parts of the world.
01:54Dawn breaks over the Nazca Desert of Peru, and a hazardous experiment designed to prove
02:07that primitive Indians could fly 2,000 years ago. American explorer Jim Woodman leads the
02:13team. The hot air balloon is made of materials which the ancient Indians are known to have
02:21had. Woodman's gondola of reeds is based on the traditional boats of Lake Titicaca.
02:40The balloonists risk their lives to try to unravel a mystery etched on the desert beneath
02:45them. A fantastic picture book of shapes and lines. Lines so strange and enigmatic
02:58that some have imagined they served as an airport built for ancient astronauts. Lines
03:08invisible to man until modern aviation came to South America. So grand is the design that
03:16Jim Woodman believes the Nazca Indians could only have laid out and admired their giant
03:21scratch pad, 200 square miles of it, from the air. American astronomer Gerald Hawkins
03:27has tried to map Nazca. This map extends three miles long and two miles wide, and almost
03:34all of the lines run off the edge. So right away you know they're more than three miles
03:38long. The longest line on record that I personally know about is about 20 to 22 miles long, and
03:45they can go even further than that. And they are perfectly straight. There are triangles,
03:51there are radiating triangles, and there are zigzags. In fact, it is a maze and it is quite
03:57a problem to begin to study this textbook on the surface of the desert. Hawkins was called in to
04:06crack the code of the Nazca lines, which had bewildered archaeologists for more than 40 years.
04:11In six expeditions, his team painstakingly mapped the desert floor. They made precise measurements,
04:18not only of the lines, but of huge drawings of creatures as well. A bird, a whale. The question
04:28was, how and why did the Nazca Indians make the lines and drawings?
04:32The lines turn out to be the lesser problem. In this experiment, Peruvian schoolboys using
04:50ranging poles took only minutes to lay out a perfectly straight line. They removed the
04:56surface stones to reveal the yellow sand beneath. But the vast figures must have been not only an
05:08immense labor, but almost unimaginably difficult to draw, unless the Indians really did have the
05:14power of flight, or had mastered a sophisticated technique of scaling up small drawings. Whatever
05:21the method, the results were perfect. Actually, a bad mistake on this desert would still show the
05:28lines are 2,000 years old, and if somebody had goofed, we would see their goof. I don't see any
05:34errors here. Hawkins fed the information into a computer. The most likely theory had been that
05:48the lines were an astronomical calendar, pointing to the rising and setting places of the Sun,
05:54Moon, and stars. Our immediate conclusion was that the lines as a whole are not an astronomical
06:03textbook for calendric purposes. Strangely enough, the lines that seem to work astronomically have a
06:09little picture on the end. Here we have a spider, and that line does indeed point to Orion. Here we
06:16have a condor bird, and this line does indeed point to the rising of the Sun at midsummer and
06:21midwinter. But the overriding result that we found was that there were no two or three centuries in
06:28the history of this spot on the world where every line would fit the Sun, Moon, or star. But one
06:36clue did emerge later to help explain the Nazca Riddle. It came from the nearby Altiplano Indians,
06:43who still remembered stories about making desert lines. The results that were obtained by
06:48questioning the Altiplano Indians show that the lines that they built were pointing to what they
06:57would call gods. These gods took many, many forms. One form the god could take would be a mountain
07:04peak. The higher the mountain peak, the greater the god. We also know there was a tendency to
07:09point to anything that was regarded as holy. Perhaps a place where a yarmulke gave birth,
07:14perhaps a place where a rainbow was seen to end. But whatever these lines point to,
07:20it is going to be a mixture. There is no one particular object. The only thing that connects
07:26the lines together is that they probably point to god objects, and they probably are pathways
07:32connected with these gods. And so the only common denominator is that they are pathways to the gods.
07:39But the urge to leave an imprint upon the landscape is also a curiosity of the English
07:46countryside. The first of these badges was cut by soldiers of the Great War in idle hours before
07:54rifle practice. This horse was cut by Lord Abingdon's steward, Mr. G, in 1778.
08:09But all the 50 or more chalk figures of England have to be cared for from generation to generation.
08:24One of the oldest is the Cern Giant, the rude man of Cern. But no one knows why he was cut,
08:31or even what his name is, although the locals have a few ideas. I think he's a Celtic god,
08:37really. A sex symbol. We did have one girl that was been married for about seven years,
08:44and hadn't managed to have a child. So we told her to go and sit on the giant. Apparently he was
08:51supposed to sit up there with her knickers off. I don't know whether she did that or not. But
08:54the next spring she was pregnant. I look at him every day. I think he is a sex symbol because
08:59he does wonders for me. Others say the giant depicts a dissolute 16th century abbot from
09:07a nearby monastery, or Lord Hollis, an 18th century landowner lampooned by rebellious servants. But
09:15the key to the giant's identity may lie in something now missing from the drawing. What
09:20did he have in his left hand? Either a trophy, since he's bandishing in a club, or perhaps his
09:28wife, a woman. I've heard a theory that it's a head. You know, that he killed somebody and he's
09:36holding the head in his hand. They say there used to be a dog. He was holding a dog in that hand,
09:42on a leash. Some experts believe the giant portrays Nodens, a Celtic hunting god. This
09:52Celtic statue found near Cern shows him like the giant with a club in one hand. In the other he
09:58carries a rabbit or hare. Hercules is another possibility. The Romans worshipped him in the
10:06second century. Statuettes like this one, found in Bristol, show him with a club in his right hand
10:12and draped over his other arm a lion skin. We used a new technique, a resistivity survey, to establish
10:26whether the ground around the giant had ever been disturbed. This might show whether part of the
10:31drawing is now missing. 60.4. Britain's top resistivity surveyor is Dr. Anthony Clark. We've
10:38taken over 5,000 readings on a regular grid at half meter spacing, and what we're going to do
10:46when we go away from here is to turn those readings into some sort of visual map, which
10:53will show the outline of anything which is buried under the grass. And we shall probably use a
11:00computer to produce that map. It proves to be an historic experiment. On the computer map,
11:12an unsuspected area of disturbed soil appears beneath the giant's left arm.
11:22This refined dot density of yours ties in very well with this overlay of the plan of the giant,
11:29remarkably well, and we can see the feature just about as clearly as I think we shall ever see it
11:36here. There can now be little doubt about the rude man of CERN. The resistivity survey has
11:44established that there was once a curiously shaped outline, now missing, beneath the giant's empty
11:49arm. On the giant himself, the man in charge, archaeologist David Thackeray, uses the survey
12:17results to restore the complete outline for a few hours with a pail of whitewash.
12:22The result is stunningly convincing.
12:31Suddenly lost for words. Yes. The CERN giant, with his new trappings, is the image of Hercules
12:53with his lion skin. His resemblance to the Roman statuette is unmistakable to David Thackeray.
13:00He has so many of the features which Hercules has on portrayals of the period, of the Roman period.
13:07He has the club, the great virility, the superhuman size, and now the lion skin just adds great weight
13:17to the argument that he is Hercules. He may well have been the symbol of a religious cult, which
13:23he has long outlasted. But the origin of much more recent figures is just as obscure. Is this,
13:30as some say, King George III riding the Osmington Charger? And although the Littlington horse in
13:37Sussex was cut as recently as 1925, the artist's name is lost. The strangest of Britain's white
13:43horses dominates the Berkshire Downs at Uffington. It's also by far the oldest. In the 12th century,
13:49it was mentioned in a book of wonders. Leading archaeologist Professor Stuart Piggott has
13:57pondered the origins of the Uffington horse since his childhood in Whitehorse Vale.
14:01A pointer to its date lies in the coin room at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum.
14:09Looking back into the prehistoric past, at least the late prehistoric past,
14:16the best comparable representations of horses are to be found on early British coins,
14:251st century BC, pre-Roman, which do show horses on one side of them. And these horses do seem,
14:33to most of us, to be very comparable to the way in which the white horse on the hill is shown.
14:40Now, they all share the same characteristics. A horse as a wheel, which is the remains of the
14:52original prototype, classical prototype of a chariot, and the horse shown in anything but a
15:00classical manner. It's shown as elongated and disjointed, just as with the white horse. The
15:09legs have become detached from the body, they've become bananas and dumbbells, and the long neck,
15:17and the curious treatment of the head, in which the head is a sort of beak-shaped object rather
15:25than anything like a naturalistic horse. And I, and many others, would say that these provide
15:31the best stylistic parallels to the white horse, and therefore there's a reasonable supposition
15:37that the horse on the hill dates from the same, more or less the same period, as the horse on
15:44the coins, 1st century BC. But Britain once also had a red horse, cut by the Saxons.
15:59And the men in this plane think they've rediscovered it.
16:06The red horse's champion is Kenneth Cardus. From 1600 onwards, this has been called the Vale of
16:19Red Horse, from about here up to Stratford-on-Avon. It was the most wonderful work of art, the biggest
16:26Saxon work of art in England, of course, and it was a religious work of art. This is a holy place,
16:33this is where they worshipped the Saxon god Tew, the god of victory, the god who gave them
16:39victory in war, and naturally gave them land, and then looked after their crops. Beneath this
16:46landscape, the red horse now lies hidden. But Cardus believes it re-emerged in this photograph,
16:53in which he discerned an outline. An old parish map confirmed the discovery. It pinpointed the
17:07location of the red horse on the ridge above Tysoe, where the photograph was taken. The
17:14following year, Kenneth Cardus took this aerial picture of the horse. When enhanced, a stylised
17:27creature emerges. Cardus hopes the infrared photographs taken on this flight will provide
17:39unequivocal evidence of the red horse, now hidden beneath a wood, enough to convince other people
17:45that it should be re-cut. With fellow searchers Dr. Sidney Agnew and Graham Miller, it's time
18:00to view the results. That's good, it's very good. I can easily tell myself that there's a horse now.
18:10Don't tell yourself, see it. Come on Graham, can you see the bald patch where we excavated,
18:17on the tip of the ear? That's absolutely there. Can you see it, Graham? That is there. Yes,
18:25I think so. Do you think it was a lighter colouration, just where the head is? We should
18:31be coming to one, to a vertical shot, and as we look down through the trees,
18:35there's just a possibility. Last one, this is it. Now there, what about that? The trees are still
18:47too close. I don't think anybody will ever see it again. Undaunted, Kenneth Cardus still hopes
18:54to re-cut the red horse of Tysoe. It was one of the great landmarks of England. This was the
19:01Vale of Red Horse, up to 1600, and it ought to be again. If the figure were re-cut, we would have
19:08the Vale of Red Horse back again. But other lost landscape figures are being rediscovered for us
19:20to wonder at. Back in the deserts of South America, Jim Woodman, the intrepid Nazca balloonist,
19:25heard of a whole gallery of them. From Nazca, it meant a journey 600 miles to the south,
19:39to the heart of the hostile Atacama Desert of Chile. Woodman brought back this story.
19:46These deep 2,000 foot valleys are covered, literally covered, for many, many miles
19:52with geoglyphs or hieroglyphs or glyphs writing on the sides of the sand. These geoglyphs were
20:01originally thought to be Chinese characters in the first journals that recorded them.
20:05They were mysterious signs. Some people argued they were tracks of mules. Some other people,
20:11when they began to see that there was a definition, as the explorers pushed farther
20:15back into the valleys, they realized that there was a zoo of the Atacama. Animals, pumas, jaguars,
20:23tigers, llama trains, reptiles, dogs, a series of stylized men. All these immense figures were soon
20:32discovered as the Spaniards moved across the Atacama and down into the colonization of Chile.
20:38That was our first objective, to enter those valleys, to climb and scale the mountains of sand,
20:45to see the geoglyphs of the Atacama. These rocks were all carried from all through the valley
20:54down, and many of them came through the river when the spring floods bring the waters,
20:58melting waters up the Andes. These rocks slowly came down, and over the years,
21:03they've been carried up here, collected, placed in this very sophisticated art form.
21:08Let's head on up toward the top part here.
21:14As we investigated and explored the animals and the symbols and the geometric designs,
21:20always we were asking about the giants and the large men that we had heard of farther on in
21:25the desert. And always these symbols in the edges of the great desert were trying to tell a story.
21:33I felt they were panels that represented stories of ancient battles, of ancient warriors,
21:39of ancient caravans. But farther on in the desert, we kept hearing the giants. You'll find the giants.
21:49We drove 250 miles due south to the region of Tarapacá, where this legendary mountain
21:57and really legendary giant was reported to lie. We found Cerro Unitas, and I was astonished
22:08when we, about five miles from the hill, I saw Nazca-type runways.
22:17We pressed on and got to the base of the runways and began a climb around the edge
22:25of the largest ridge on this solitary mountain. And as we climbed the ridge
22:32and came to the crest, I looked across a saddle in the mountain, and there we could make out
22:38the first faint outlines of a giant. The mammoth size of the giant ran over the crest of the
22:48mountain, so it's impossible on the ground to get the full scope of a giant. In fact,
22:53had we not known he was a giant, there was no way of telling really what we were exploring.
23:00We were disappointed with the giant on the ground. The head and crown area was so confusing
23:06we could only spot the large piles of rocks that were the giant's eye. At that point I made the
23:12decision it was to appreciate it, and to even get our measurements straight, it would be necessary
23:18to fly. To the plexiglass ahead I could see Cerro Unidas, the lone mountain, and as we flew closer
23:38I had the helicopter slow and the view of the giant that began to come into view was incredible.
23:44Here, the disorganized form that we had seen close up as we explored the mountain the day before
23:52suddenly became finely engraved on the mountain ahead. And as we flew closer I began to realize
23:59the tremendous size of the giant, for the feet and the crown and the rays and the arm with the arrow
24:06all became sharply in focus.
24:11Looking toward us in the sky was the largest man that ancient man ever created. It was an
24:17exciting moment as the helicopter descended to 750 feet. I stopped, I took out my still camera,
24:23I began to photograph that drawing, and as you hang there in the air looking down into this face
24:30that stared skyward for a thousand years, you realize that this drawing was made by ancient
24:37people to be seen from the air, either by the gods or by someone with the power of flight.
25:01There are many questions about these wonderful drawings which, frankly, I can't begin to answer.
25:08Who made them? What are they? Above all, who was meant to see them? Perhaps we need look no further
25:16than man's desire for immortality, his urge to leave some abiding mark on the face of his planet.
25:30So
25:38so
26:00Next week, the monsters of the lakes.