America's "Nazca Lines?"- The Blythe Intaglios

Here's a ground view look at two of the three human figures of the Blythe Intaglios.  The largest human figure is 171 tall. I pulled this video off of YouTube, since I haven't been out to see these myself. 

As a kid from the 1970's, growing up with three channels of TV, we didn't see much programming on the weird and mysterious stuff of the world, that was covered in books, and a handful of magazines then.  We did get the TV series In Search Of, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, best known to us then as Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek series.  That show, in the late 1970', got into mysteries like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Nazca Lines in Peru, among others.  I was always fascinated by these weird mysteries.  Those 70's era shows on these topics, and nearly every show since, have not found definitive answers to most of these mysteries.  There is some evidence now that some of the Nazca lines line up with underground streams, and entrances to those streams, so native people of Peru could find water in that desert.  But that may only explain some of the famous Nazca lines.  Then there's the Ancient Aliens idea that they were made to contact aliens or something, but I'm not buying that idea.

Somewhere else along my path, I heard of a huge human figure, a geoglyph, visible best from the air, in Southern California.  Nobody seemed to know who made it, or how old it was.  That figure, scraped in to the earth, has been one of those mysteries in the back of my head for decades.  Since we are officially still pretty much in lock down mode from the Covid-19 pandemic, and I don't have a car, I decided to start looking up some of these mysteries.  I figured I can do some computer research on some of these mysteries while I'm unable to do other things.  At some point, I'd like to go check these things out in person.

So I looked up what is best known as the Blythe Intaglio.  "Intaglio" is a word for geoglyphs up humans, I guess.  It's a huge geoglyph of a man, about 171 feet tall.  These days, with Google Maps, it's easy to find.  You can serach it on Google Maps, switch to satellite view, and zoom into to see it.  It's about 15 miles north of Blythe, California, which is about 200 miles east of Los Angeles, real close to the California/Arizona border, and the Colorado River.  Blythe is a desert town, right on I-10, and is the first city in California when coming from the East on I-10.  For SoCal people coming back from Arizona, it's the "We made it back to Cali" town. 

My first surprise was that there isn't one Intaglio, there are three human figures there, one four legged animal, and a spiral thing.  I always heard there was just one big guy (and we know it's a male because he has a dick).  Those three were rediscovered by pilot George Palmer, flying over the area in 1932.  He reported it to some scientists in Los Angeles, who studied them a couple of years later.  Once word got out, people started visiting the intaglios, and they began to get damaged.  Those four, best known intaglios (just off of Route 95), are now fenced off, but your can park nearby, and walk up to the fence to see them.  

Already surprised that there were more than one of these huge, mysterious figures, I looked them up on Wikipedia.  None of the indigenous tribes of the area claim to have made them, although some used them in ceremonies at times.   Even more amazing, there aren't just four big geoglyphs in California, there are more than 200 intaglios, mostly near the Colorado River.  

This is my bad photo from Google Maps, of the Kokopelli intaglio, located a ways east of Blythe, and more remote than the others, though still close to a road.  This odd figure with braids or dreadlocks, playing a flute, is as big, or bigger, than the other human figures.  It looks to be about 180 feet tall.  There's another, much smaller intaglio across the river, called the Fisherman intaglio, that's only about 15 feet tall.  

 

So this mystery that I heard of 30-40 years ago, just got more mysterious.  There are hundreds of these things, not just one, here in Southern California, Arizona, and maybe further up the Colorado River.  No one knows who made them, what they are for, or how old they are.  You can't carbon date rocks, because they're not organic.  But Wikipedia says someone got a date of 900 BCE to 1200 CE (A.D.) by carbon dating something associated with them.  If those dates are accurate, that makes these mysterious figures 800 to 2,900 years old.  That's a pretty wide range.  So these could have been made as far back as 100 years after King Tutankhamen in Egypt was alive.  

So there's a quick look at the Blythe Intaglios, a much bigger mystery than I first thought, and right here in the Southern California desert, a 3-4 hour drive from here.