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What strange compulsion made man etch vast designs on the face of the

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earth on downland and desert on the slopes of solitary mountains? I can so

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many only be seen from the air. What is their message from the distant past?

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Mysteries for Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 and inventor of the

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communication satellite. Now in retreat in Sri Lanka after a lifetime of science,

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he ponders the riddles of this and other worlds. For thousands of years people have drawn figures,

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cut designs in the landscape, apparently for no one on earth to see. One of the

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strangest wonders of this great rock of Sigiriya here in Sri Lanka is this gallery of frescoes

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on a sheer cliff hundreds of feet up in the sky. Yet until a modern staircase was constructed,

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no one could possibly have seen them properly. So why was this done and who are these charming ladies?

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Similar questions can be asked of figures in many other parts of the world.

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Dawn breaks over the Nazca desert of Peru and a hazardous experiment designed to prove that primitive

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Indians could fly 2,000 years ago. American explorer Jim Woodman leads the team.

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The hot air balloon is made of materials which the ancient Indians are known to have had.

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Woodman's gondola of reeds is based on the traditional boats of Lake Titicaca.

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The balloonists risked their lives to try to unravel a mystery etched on the desert beneath them.

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A fantastic picture book of shapes and lines. Lines so strange and enigmatic that some have

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imagined they served as an airport built for ancient astronauts. Lines invisible to man until

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modern aviation came to South America. So grand is the design that Jim Woodman believes the

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Nazca Indians could only have laid out and admired their giant scratch pad 200 square miles of it

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from the air. American astronomer Gerald Hawkins has tried to map Nazca. This map extends three

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miles long and two miles wide and almost all of the lines run off the edge. So right away you

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know they're more than three miles long. The longest line on record that I personally know about is

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about 20 to 22 miles long and they can go even further than that and they are perfectly straight.

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There are triangles. There are radiating triangles and there are zigzags. In fact it is a maze and it

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is quite a problem to begin to study this textbook on the surface of the desert. Hawkins was called

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in to crack the code of the Nazca lines which had bewildered archaeologists for more than 40 years.

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In six expeditions his team paints takingly mapped the desert floor. They made precise measurements

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not only of the lines but of huge drawings of creatures as well. A bird, a whale. The question was

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how and why did the Nazca Indians make the lines and drawings. The lines turn out to be the lesser

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problem. In this experiment Peruvian schoolboys using ranging poles took only minutes to lay out a

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perfectly straight line. They removed the surface stones to reveal the yellow sand beneath.

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But the vast figures must have been not only an immense labor but almost unimaginably difficult

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to draw unless the Indians really did have the power of flight or had mastered a sophisticated

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technique of scaling up small drawings. Whatever the method the results were perfect. Actually a bad

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mistake on this desert would still show the lines are 2,000 years old and if somebody had goofed we

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would see their goof. I don't see any errors here. Hawkins fed the information into a computer.

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The most likely theory had been that the lines were an astronomical calendar pointing to the

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rising and setting places of the sun, moon and star. Our immediate conclusion was that the lines as

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a whole are not an astronomical textbook for calendric purposes. Strangely enough the lines that

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seem to work astronomically have a little picture on the end. Here we have a spider and that line

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does indeed point to Orion. Here we have a condo bird and this line does indeed point to the

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rising of the sun at midsummer and midwinter. But the overriding result that we found was that

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there were no two or three centuries in the history of this spot on the world where every line would

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fit the sun, moon or star. But one clue did emerge later to help explain the Nazca Riddle. It came

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from the nearby Altiplano Indians who still remembered stories about making desert lines. The

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results that were obtained by questioning the Altiplano Indians show that the lines that they

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built were pointing to what they would call gods. These gods took many many forms. One form the

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god could take would be a mountain peak. The higher the mountain peak the greater the god. We also

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know there was a tendency to point to anything that was regarded as holy. Perhaps a place where a

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yammer gave birth, perhaps a place where a rainbow was seen to end. But whatever these lines point

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to it is going to be a mixture. There is no one particular object. The only thing that connects

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the lines together is that they probably point to god objects and they probably are pathways

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connected with these gods. And so the only common denominator is that they are pathways to the gods.

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But the urge to leave an imprint upon the landscape is also a curiosity of the English

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countryside. The first of these badgers was cut by soldiers of the Great War in idle hours before

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rifle practice. This horse was cut by Lord Abingdon's steward Mr. G in 1778.

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But all the fifty or more chalk figures of England have to be cared for from generation to generation.

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One of the oldest is the Cern Giant, the rude man of Cern. But no one knows why he was cut

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or even what his name is. Although the locals have a few ideas. I think he's a Celtic god really,

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a sex symbol. We did have one girl that was uh been married for about seven years and uh

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hadn't managed to have a child. So we told her go and sit on the giant. Apparently he was supposed

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to sit up where he knickers off. I don't know whether she did that or not. But uh the next spring she

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was pregnant. I look at him every day. I think he is a sex symbol because he does wonders for me.

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Others say the giant depicts a disillute 16th century abbot from a nearby monastery.

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Or Lord Hollis, an 18th century landowner lampooned by rebellious servants. But the key to the giant's

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identity may lie in something now missing from the drawing. What did he have in his left hand?

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Either um a trophy since he's bandishing in a club or perhaps uh his wife a woman.

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Well I've heard a theory that it's a head. Um uh you know that he killed somebody and

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and he's holding the head in his hand. They say that there used to be a dog. He was holding a dog in

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that hand on a leash. Some experts believe the giant portrays Nodun's, a Celtic hunting god.

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This Celtic statue found near Cern shows him like the giant with a club in one hand. In the other he

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carries a rabbit or hare. Hercules is another possibility. The Romans worshiped him in the

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second century. Statuettes like this one found in Bristol show him with a club in his right hand

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and draped over his other arm a lion skin.

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We used a new technique, a resistivity survey, to establish whether the ground around the giant

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had ever been disturbed. This might show whether part of the drawing is now missing.

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60.4.

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Britain's top resistivity surveyor is Dr Anthony Clark.

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We've taken over 5,000 readings on a regular grid at half meter spacing

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and what we're going to do when we go away from here is to turn those readings into some sort of

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visual map which will show the outline of anything which is buried under the grass

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and we shall probably use a computer to produce that map.

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It proves to be an historic experiment. On the computer map an unsuspected area of disturbed soil

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appears beneath the giant's left arm.

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This refined dot density of yours ties in very well with this overlay of the plan of the giant

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and it's done remarkably well and we can see the feature just about as clearly as I think we shall

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ever see it here. There can now be little doubt about the rude man of CERN. The resistivity survey

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has established that there was once a curiously shaped outline of the giant's body.

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The resistivity survey has established that there was once a curiously shaped outline now

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missing beneath the giant's empty arm.

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On the giant himself the man in charge archaeologist David Thackeray uses the survey results to

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restore the complete outline for a few hours with a pail of whitewash.

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The result is stunningly convincing.

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Suddenly lost for words. Yes. The CERN giant with his new trappings is the image of Hercules

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with his lion skin. His resemblance to the Roman statuette is unmistakable to David Thackeray.

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He has so many of the features which Hercules has on portrayals of the period of the Roman period.

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He has the club, the great virility, the superhuman size and now the lion skin just adds great weight

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to the argument that he is Hercules. He may well have been the symbol of a religious

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which he has long outlasted. But the origin of much more recent figures is just as obscure.

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Is this as some say King George III riding the Osmington charger?

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And although the Littlington horse in Sussex was cut as recently as 1925,

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the artist's name is lost. The strangest of Britain's white horses dominates the

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Barksha Downs at Uffington. It's also by far the oldest. In the 12th century it was mentioned

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in a book of wonders. Leading archaeologist Professor Stuart Piggott has pondered the

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origins of the Uffington horse since his childhood in Fythorse Vale.

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A pointer to its date lies in the coin room at Oxford's Ashmolyer Museum.

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Looking back into the prehistoric past, at least the late prehistoric past,

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the best comparable representations of horses are to be found on early British coins,

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1st century BC, pre-Roman, which do show horses on one side of them. And these horses do seem,

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to most of us, to be very comparable to the way in which the white horse on the hill is shown.

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Now, they all share the same characteristics. A horse is a wheel, which is the remains of the

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original prototype, classical prototype of a chariot, and the horse, shown in anything but a

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classical manner. It's shown as elongated and disjointed, just as with the white horse,

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the legs have become detached from the body, they become bananas and dumbbells,

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and the long neck, and the curious treatment of the head, in which the head is a sort of

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beak-shaped object, rather than anything like a naturalistic horse. And I and many others would

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say that these provide the best stylistic parallels to the white horse, and therefore

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there's a reasonable supposition that the horse on the hill dates from the same, more or less the

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same period, as the horse on the coins, 1st century BC.

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But Britain once also had a red horse, cut by the Saxons.

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And the men in this plane think they've rediscovered it.

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The red horse's champion is Kenneth Cardis. From 1600 onwards, this has been called the

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bale of red horse, from about here up to Straton on Aden. It is the most wonderful work of art,

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the biggest Saxon work of art in England, of course, and it was a religious work of art.

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This is a holy place, this is where they worship the Saxon god too, the god of victory,

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the gods who gave them victory in war, and naturally gave them land, and then looked after

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their crops. Beneath this landscape, the red horse now lies hidden. But Cardis believes it reemerged

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in this photograph in which he discerned an outline. An old parish map confirmed the discovery.

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It pinpointed the location of the red horse on the ridge above Tyso, where the photograph was taken.

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The following year, Kenneth Cardis took this aerial picture of the horse.

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When enhanced, a stylized creature emerges.

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Cardis hopes the infrared photographs taken on this flight will provide unequivocal evidence

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of the red horse, now hidden beneath a wood, enough to convince other people that it should be recut.

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With fellow searchers Dr Sidney Agnew and Graham Miller, it's time to view the results.

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That's good, it's very good.

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I can easily tell myself that there's a horse now.

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Don't tell yourself, see it. Come on, Graham. Can you see the bald patch where we excavated

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on the tip of the air? That's absolutely there. Can you see it, Graham? That is there.

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Yes, I think so. I think so.

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I just think there's a lighter coloration than just where the head is.

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We should be coming to one to a vertical shot and as we look down through the trees,

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there's just a possibility. Okay. Last one, this is it.

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Now there, what about there? Now when you've got me, it's too close.

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The trees are still too close. I don't think anybody will ever see it again.

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Undaunted, Kenneth Cardis still hopes to recut the red horse of Tyso.

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It was one of the great landmarks of England. This was the Vale of Red Horse, up to 1600,

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and it ought to be again. If the figure were recut, we would have the Vale of Red Horse back again.

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But other lost landscape figures are being rediscovered for us to wonder at.

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Back in the deserts of South America, Jim Woodman, the intrepid Nazca balloonist,

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heard of a whole gallery of them.

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From Nazca, it meant a journey 600 miles to the south,

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to the heart of the hostile Atacama Desert of Chile. Woodman brought back this story.

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These deep 2000 foot valleys are covered, literally covered for many, many miles,

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with geoglyphs or hieroglyphs or glyphs writing on the sides of the sand.

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These geoglyphs were originally thought to be Chinese characters in the first journals that

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recorded them. They were mysterious signs. Some people argued they were tracks of mules.

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Some other people, when they began to see that there was a definition,

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as explorers pushed farther back into the valleys, they realized that there was a zoo of the Atacama,

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animals, pumas, jaguars, tigers, llama trains, reptiles, dogs, a series of stylized men.

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All these immense figures were soon discovered as the Spaniards moved across the Atacama and down

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into the colonization of Chile. That was our first objective, to enter those valleys, to climb and

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scale the mountains of sand, to see the geoglyphs of the Atacama.

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These rocks were all carried from all through the valley down and many of them came through the river

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when the spring floods bring the waters, melting waters, up the Andes. These rocks slowly came down

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and over the years they've been carried up here, collected, placed in this very sophisticated art

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form. Let's head on up toward the top part here. As we investigated and explored the animals and

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the symbols and the geometric designs, always we were asking about the giants and the large men

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that we had heard of farther on in the desert. And always these symbols in the edges of the great

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desert were trying to tell a story. I felt they were panels that represented stories of ancient

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battles, of ancient warriors, of ancient caravans. But farther on in the desert we kept hearing,

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the giants. You'll find the giants.

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We drove 250 miles due south to the region of Tarapacá, where this legendary mountain and really

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legendary giant was reported to lie. We found Cerro Unitas and I was astonished when we were

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about five miles from the hill. I saw Nazca type runways. We pressed on and got to the base of

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the runways and began a climb around the edge of the largest ridge on this solitary mountain.

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And as we climbed the ridge and came to the crest, I looked across a saddle in the mountain and there

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we could make out the first faint outlines of a giant. The mammoth size of the giant

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ran over the crest of the mountain so it's impossible on the ground to get the full scope

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of a giant. In fact, had we not known he was a giant, there was no way of telling really what we

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were exploring. We were disappointed with the giant on the ground. The head and crown area

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were so confusing we could only spot the large piles of rocks where the giants eye. At that point

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I made the decision it was to appreciate it and to even get our measurements straight, it would be

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necessary to fly. To the plexiglass ahead I could see Cerro Unitas, the lone

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mountain. And as we flew closer, I had the helicopter slow and the view of the giant that began to come

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into view was incredible. Here the disorganized form that we had seen close up as we explored the

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mountain the day before suddenly became finely engraved on the mountain ahead. As we flew closer,

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I began to realize the tremendous size of the giant for the feet and the crown and the rays and

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and the arm with the arrow all became sharply in focus.

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Looking toward us in the sky was the largest man that ancient man ever created. It was an

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exciting moment as the helicopter descended to 750 feet. I stopped, I took out my still camera,

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I began to photograph that drawing and as you hang there in the air looking down into this face

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that stared skyward for a thousand years you realize that this drawing was made by ancient

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people to be seen from the air either by the gods or by someone with a power of flight.

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There are many questions about these wonderful drawings which frankly I can't begin to answer.

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Who made them? What are they? Above all, who was meant to see them? Perhaps we need look no further

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than man's desire for immortality is urged to leave some abiding mark on the face of his planet.

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The monsters of the lakes.