Drawing the line

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a YouTube video for my facepalming pleasure a couple of days ago, and being a generous sort, I wanted to share the experience will all of you.  The video is called "Nazca Lines Finally Solved!  The Answer is Amazing!", and is well worth watching in its entirety.  But if you understandably don't want to spend seven minutes of your life watching the video that you will never, ever get back, I'll provide you with a capsule summary and some editorial commentary from Yours Truly.

The Nazca Lines, you probably know, are a series of geoglyphs in southern Peru, which are large enough that their overall shape really can't be discerned except from the air.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The relative impossibility of seeing the pattern except from above has led to wingnuts such as Erich von Däniken (of Chariots of the Gods fame) to propose that they were made to signal aliens visiting Earth from other planets.  Why aliens would be impressed by our drawing a giant monkey on the ground, I have no idea.  It also bears mention that Nazca is hardly the only place in the world that has geoglyphs, and none of them have much to do with flying saucers.  There's the Cerne Abbas Giant of Dorsetshire, England, for example, who is really really glad to see you:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons PeteHarlow, Cerne-abbas-giant-2001-cropped, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Be that as it may, the guy in the video, one Damon T. Berry, thinks the Nazca lines are trying to tell us something.  What?  Well, he starts out with a bang by saying that "the universal language is constellations."  Whatever the fuck that means.  Given that the constellations are random assemblages of stars that would look completely different from another vantage point in space, it's hard to imagine anything "universal" about them except that they're, by default, part of the universe.

What Berry tells us then is that each of the glyphs has a code that points at a particular destination.  He starts with the glyph shaped like a bird, and then talks about birds representing flight (okay, I'm with you so far), and some of the glyphs being runways for flying machines (why the hell you'd make a runway shaped like a monkey, I have no idea), and then goes into a long part about how it's significant that the bird has four toes on one foot and five on the other.

"It is a bird," Berry says.  "It appears to be a bird.  But think like an alien.  Look closer at its feet."

I'm not sure why thinking like an alien involves looking at feet.  Maybe the aliens have some kind of weird foot fetish.  I dunno.

Anyhow, what does the fact of its having nine toes mean?  It means, Berry says, that "this is not a bird.  This is a constellation."  In fact, it's the constellation Aquila, a grouping of stars in the northern hemisphere which evidently looked like an eagle to some ancient Greeks who had just polished off their second bottle of ouzo.  The nine toes correspond to the nine brightest stars in the constellation, he says.

Then he moves on to another bird glyph, this one of a hummingbird.  Berry tells us in astonished tones that this bird has the same number of toes on each foot, as if that was an unusual condition or something.  He then says, and this is a direct quote: "The clue lies elsewhere... in the wings.  And the elongated wings are meant to draw your attention... to the wings."

I had to pause the video at this point to give myself a chance to stop guffawing.

We're then directed to count the feathers, and he comes up with eleven.  He includes the tail, but I'm not going to quibble about that because otherwise we'll be here all day.  He says that the number eleven can only mean one thing: the glyph points to the "constellation Columbia."

For the record, the constellation is actually Columba, not Columbia.  Cf. my comment about not quibbling.

The fact that Columba "has eleven stars" means there's an obvious correspondence.  Well, I have two things to say about that.

1. Do you really think that there's nothing else in the universe that is made up of eleven parts?
2. There are way more than eleven stars in Columba, it's just that the shape of the constellation (identified as a dove by the aforementioned ouzo-soaked Greeks) is generally outlined using the brightest eleven stars, just as Aquila was with the nine brightest as earlier described.

He then goes on to analyze the monkey glyph, and once again makes a big deal about the number of fingers and toes, which add to fifteen.  This points to the "constellation of the monkey," which he draws for us.  It's fortunate that he does, because as I do not need to point out to any astronomy buffs out there, there is no constellation of the monkey.  As far as I can tell, he just took some random dots and connected them with straight lines to look vaguely like a monkey.

Whether ouzo was involved, I don't know.

He finishes up by basically saying that aliens are out there and will be coming to visit us from those constellations.  At this point, I started shouting at my computer, "You can't be 'from a constellation!'  The stars in a constellation have nothing to do with one another!"  This caused my dog, Rosie, to come into my office and give me the Canine Head Tilt of Puzzlement, meant to communicate the one concept she's capable of hosting in her brain ("What?").  I reassured her that I wasn't mad at her, that I was mad at the silly man on YouTube, and she accepted that and toddled off to interact with something on her intellectual level, like a dust bunny.

Anyhow.  At the end we're told we can learn more if we just watch his longer and more in-depth production, available on Amazon Prime, but I don't think I'm gonna.  I've heard enough.  Me, I'll go back to trying to figure things out through science instead of pulling random correspondences out of my ass.  Call me narrow-minded, but it seems in general like a better way to understand the universe, even if it doesn't involve counting an animal's toes and acting like it means something significant.

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