Destination Chile

In 2013, a NASA-funded rover trundled across the Atacama Desert in Chile, the driest place on the planet, where some areas haven't seen rainfall in centuries. The mission was designed to test equipment for Mars exploration by collecting soil samples from below the parched surface. When the results were published in 2019, the rover had discovered microbial life thriving just below the desert floor—life existing where it "really shouldn't be," as one researcher put it. For ancient astronaut theorists, this finding is just one thread in a much larger tapestry. They point out that the Atacama is also home to more than 5,000 geoglyphs—nearly five times as many as the famous Nazca lines in Peru—carved into the ground at enormous scale. The largest, the Atacama Giant, measures 390 feet long and sits on a hillside where it can only be properly seen from above. As one theorist puts it, "There is no way that anyone would go through this effort unless something very compelling and something very real happened to our ancestors."

A Flight Path Etched in Stone