--- title: "We Measured 1,204 Nazca Lines Against The Sky. They Point Downhill." dek: "Twenty-seven astronomical targets, back-calculated for 200 BCE to 650 CE, tested against azimuths from a drone survey. The tolerance and the correction were published first. Nothing survives. Slope at the origin predicts bearing better than any star." kind: nullresult (The Null Result) desk: Deep History author: Dr. Perpetua Nkemelu and Dr. Ilse Vantongeren (fictional) published: 2026-08-18T08:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/nazca-azimuths-downhill tags: Nazca, pre-registration, archaeoastronomy, null result, Peru genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # We Measured 1,204 Nazca Lines Against The Sky. They Point Downhill. *Twenty-seven astronomical targets, back-calculated for 200 BCE to 650 CE, tested against azimuths from a drone survey. The tolerance and the correction were published first. Nothing survives. Slope at the origin predicts bearing better than any star.* Not one of the twenty-seven survived. That is the result of a test this newspaper wrote down in full on 14 January 2026, before it had a single azimuth: 1,204 straight lines on the Nazca pampa, measured against 27 astronomical targets back-calculated for the window 200 BCE to 650 CE, with the tolerance, the multiple-comparison correction and the stopping rule all published in advance and time-stamped. Four targets cleared an uncorrected threshold. Twenty-seven targets will do that on their own. The variable that does predict where a line points is the ground it starts on. > **Figure:** One thousand two hundred and four bearings, tested — see https://theyburied.com/article/nazca-azimuths-downhill ## What was fixed before we looked The pre-registration is published with this story and it was not amended. It names the 27 targets: the four solstice risings and settings, the equinox rising and setting, the major and minor lunar standstills, and the heliacal risings of nineteen stars, among them the Pleiades, Sirius, Canopus and both Centauri. It fixes the tolerance at ±1.5 degrees. It names the correction. It states the stopping rule, which is the sentence that mattered most: we would run the test once, on the whole survey, and report it. It also commits, in a paragraph our lawyers read twice, to publishing the result whichever way it came out. ## The survey Dr. Aurelio Chambi-Fenwick flew 21 square kilometres in February under permit, with ground control to four centimetres. The point cloud is published. So are his residuals. From it, 1,204 lines long enough and straight enough to have a defensible bearing. Two analysts were then handed the identical data and the identical plan. Dr. Solveig Nakamura-Ruiz and Professor Tobias Aguirre-Lindqvist did not know each other's names until 2 June. ## What they got The same null, by slightly different routes. Nakamura-Ruiz found four targets clearing p < 0.05 uncorrected. Aguirre-Lindqvist found four as well, but only two of them the same four — which is itself the finding. After the correction that had been named in January, nothing. "Four targets cleared the uncorrected threshold," Aguirre-Lindqvist said. "That is what twenty-seven targets do. If I had stopped there I would have had a paper, and the paper would have been about my stopping." > If I had stopped there I would have had a paper, and the paper would have been about my stopping. > > — Prof. Tobias Aguirre-Lindqvist ## What did predict a bearing Both analysts, independently, added the same two non-astronomical variables at the stage the plan permitted. Of the 1,204 lines, 939 — 78 per cent — leave their origin within three degrees of the downhill gradient at that point. And 734 of them, 61 per cent, end within 400 metres of a dry watercourse. Neither number is exotic. Both are large, and both are far larger than anything the sky produced. The lines run where walking is easy, and they run towards where water sometimes is. ## Our own correction > **Caution.** On 12 March 2026 this newspaper's wire desk published a 61-word item reporting that our survey had found a Pleiades alignment. That item was based on one analyst's preliminary run, before the pre-registered correction had been applied. The pre-registered test does not reproduce it. The item should not have been published, was not shown to either analyst before publication, and did not carry the pre-registration it was supposedly testing. It has been withdrawn and the withdrawal notice runs at its old address. The correction you are reading is longer than the item was. That sequence is the reason the plan existed. A newspaper that pre-registers a test and then prints the exciting interim number has pre-registered nothing. ## What the desk takes from this Dr. Rocío Ventura-Halstead's reply runs below and it is the strongest thing on this page. Her argument is that we tested the wrong object: that 1,204 lines made over eight centuries are not one family, that pooling them and correcting across 27 targets is a machine for producing nulls, and — the part this desk has not been able to put down — that gradient and sky were never rivals. You walk downhill to the water. The sky tells you when the water comes. We cannot answer that with our data, and we are not going to pretend otherwise in the last paragraph of our own story. What we can say is narrower and we will hold to it. Taken as a whole, this corpus does not point at the sky. It points at the valley floor. Anybody who wants to argue for a smaller family of lines that does point at the sky now has our point cloud, our plan and both working files to do it with, and they will have to say in advance how many targets they intend to try. ## Sources (invented) - The pre-registration, Analysis plan, deposited before any data was seen — Time-stamped 14 January 2026 at 09:12 UTC; the hash was printed in this newspaper the same day (January 2026) - Dr. Aurelio Chambi-Fenwick, Photogrammetrist, Arequipa — Flew and processed the survey under permit; flight logs, ground control and point cloud published in full (February 2026) - Dr. Solveig Nakamura-Ruiz, Statistician; first analyst — Computed azimuths and ran the pre-registered test with no contact with the second analyst (March–May 2026) - Prof. Tobias Aguirre-Lindqvist, Second analyst, working independently — Given the identical point cloud and the identical plan; did not know the first analyst's identity until 2 June 2026 (March–May 2026) - Dr. Rocío Ventura-Halstead, Archaeoastronomer — Read the full draft, the plan and both working files; replied at length (July 2026) ## What we could not confirm - Whether the 21 square kilometres we flew stand for the pampa. They are not a random sample. They are what the permit covered, and the permit was drawn around access roads. - Anything about the figures. A hummingbird is not a bearing. Our test is about straight lines and says nothing whatever about the animal geoglyphs or the trapezoids, and we have been asked four times already to let it say something. - Whether some smaller family of lines is astronomical. Twenty of the 1,204 could be, and our test would never see them. A subset picked after the fact can always be made to pass, which is the exact thing the pre-registration existed to stop us doing. ## Right of reply **Dr. Rocío Ventura-Halstead, archaeoastronomer** (Replied on 19 July 2026. Printed entire and unedited.): > Your arithmetic is sound and your conclusion does not follow, and I am going to be exact about where the two part company. > > You treated 1,204 lines as one family. They are not one family. They were made across something like eight hundred years by people who did not all want the same thing, over a surface that already had lines on it. Some are paths. Some bound a field. Some are a single afternoon's work by four people. Pooling them and then applying a correction across twenty-seven targets is not a strict test — it is a machine for converting heterogeneity into nulls. Run that same procedure over the ground plans of every church in Lima and you will prove that Christians do not face east. > > Second, and this matters more: you have set the sky and the ground against each other as though a line could only answer to one of them, and I do not know a single person in my field who believes that. Water is the reason to walk. The sky is the calendar that tells you when the water comes. In a place where rain falls somewhere else and arrives as a river three weeks later, those are the same subject. A line that runs downhill towards a dry channel and also happens to leave on the morning the Pleiades rise is not a refutation of archaeoastronomy. It is archaeoastronomy. > > So when your figure puts gradient and watercourse in one colour and my targets in another, it is drawing a distinction that the people who made these lines would not have recognised. > > What I will grant you, and grant you without qualification, is the discipline. You wrote the test down first. Four of my colleagues, including one I admire greatly, have published alignments where the number of targets tried is simply not stated, and I have never once seen a newspaper ask for it. You asked. You then printed a match in March that your own plan will not support, and you are correcting it in more words than you used to make it, which I have never seen anybody do. > > I would rather argue with a paper that does that than agree with one that does not. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.