Alien Astronauts Around?

This column appeared on Sunday, Sept. 2, 2007


Saturday had an air of discovery about it, so I went looking for a little island of Chester County that plays host to a place called Point Lookout. Ultimately, however, the journey took me to Nazca Lines of Peru and taught me the meaning of the word geoglyph.

Discoveries often come during searches for something you’re not looking for. Christopher Columbus discovered the New World while looking for a route to the West Indies. Frank W. Epperson was simply being forgetful when he left that stick in some flavored water on his back porch overnight but, when it froze, he still had discovered the Popsicle. So understand that I was looking for Point Lookout when I came across the geoglyphs of Chadds Ford.

The lookout sits on a triangular piece of land that sticks up like a pyramid along the Brandywine Creek, on the border between Pennsylvania and Delaware. The area is detached from Chester County, surrounded by Chadds Ford on two sides and Delaware on the third, but remains a part of our fair county nonetheless.

Parking my car, ducking a fence, crossing a meadow and following some railroad tracks, I came to a spot that I guessed was the Point, all the while wondering what the purpose of the lookout could have been. Early settlers scouting for marauding Lenape Indians? Colonial troops spying on the British Army? Or just wary Chester County gentry trying to catch Delaware County riff-raff sneaking into the county to open greasy pizza parlors.

I left the area without any resolution, but not really disappointed. I’d taken a quiet walk through a sunlit forest on a cool morning, and on the way back I came across a roadside vegetable stand that had great freshly picked corn and tomatoes. At home, I sat at my computer and tried to find any sign of the Point on an aerial map.

When the program loaded, however, what amazed me was not by an image of the lookout, but something nearby.

Across the Brandywine was a field of clearly visible lines cut into the ground in a strange, interconnected series of loops and circles. I stared at the image dumbfounded, struck suddenly by the memory of that 1970s sensationalist hoax “The Ancient Astronauts.” You remember: the book that sold us on the theory that structures like the pyramids of Egypt and the Andes village of Maccu Picchu were created with the help of visiting aliens?

One “proof” of this theory is the presence of the Nazca Lines, etchings carved into rock on a high South American desert plateau — figures called geoglyphs, I learned. The characters they depict can only be coherently visualized from high above, so the argument goes that their creators must have had help from a spaceship full of bored alien doodlers. But had they stopped off here to do the same thing, I asked myself. Could there be alien communities still operating in Chester County? Has Hollywood director M. Night Shyamalan anything to do with this?

In the end I indeed answered the mystery of the geoglyphs of Chadds Ford, but am keeping the information largely to myself. Some discoveries are just worth savoring in private, like a nice Popsicle.