Lost Paititi & the Non-Human Remains of Nazca

By Thierry Jamin

French explorer and anthropologist Thierry Jamin relates findings from his years in Peru in search of the lost Inca city of Paititi plus his most recent escapades with non-human skeletons at Nazca on the coast. Chapters include: On the Path of Adventure; On the Tracks of the Lost City of the Incas; Machu Picchu and the Mystery of the Secret Room; The Strange Square Mountain; Where It All Begins; In the Footsteps of “Mario”; Summit Meeting; Strange Relics; The New B.E.; A Mysterious Man in Black; Three Eggs!; The Incredible Hybrid; First Results… and New B.E.; The Lima Conference; The Real False Site; The “Familia”; Analysis and Pressure on All Sides!; The Final Proof; The Starchild; Transfer of the Mummies; The Ica Conference; The Flight Over the Gran Paititi; The Case of Nazca Continues; more. Includes an 8-page color photo section.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781948803601

Thierry Jamin

Thierry Jamin is anthropologist and explorer from France. He currently lives in Cuzco, Peru. He has been on a number of television shows including the History Channel.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

ON THE PATH OF ADVENTURE

My name is Thierry Jamin. I am French. I have lived in Cusco, in the south of Peru, for nearly twenty years. Some of you know me already. Others will have perhaps heard about me, on the occasion of this business of Nazca, and not necessarily have heard good things.

Since the end of 2016, my team and I have been involved in a story that is hardly believable. Strange mummies, looking like aliens, had been discovered near Nazca, in Peru, by tomb looters.

To tell the truth, this affair reached me almost by chance. A journalist friend of mine had contacted me to introduce me to a man who had supposedly recovered some strange mummified relics in the arid desert. This improbable story was soon to unleash passions throughout the world. But I’d just like to back up a little bit.

I lived the first years of my life in Chartres, a hundred kilometers southwest of Paris. In the shadow of its cathedral, I spent my childhood devouring history and archaeology books. Fascinated by the history of the old civilizations now long gone, my childhood hero was Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, an English explorer who disappeared in the Amazonian jungle in 1925 on the track of a mysterious lost city, which he probably never found.

I am also of the generation of the famous Adventures of Tintin, Adventurers of the Lost Ark and especially Mysterious Cities of Gold, with Thao, Zia and Estéban. And to do like Estéban, I started history and geography studies, after I got my bachelor’s degree.

For more than twenty years, my team and I have been crisscrossing the Amazon jungle in search of Paititi, the famous lost city of the Incas. According to the chronicles of the time and the local traditions, Paititi was a huge city, buried somewhere in the Amazonian forest of southeast Peru. Over the centuries, it has been sought all over South America. But over the past 50 years, prospecting has focused on a region wedged between Peru, Brazil and Bolivia.

The starting point of the legend was when the Inca empire, or Tawantinsuyu, was facing a bloody war of succession between Huascar, legitimate son of the deceased Huayna Cápac, and his halfbrother Atawalpa, who ruled over the provinces of the north of the empire. The war broke out a few years after the death of Huayna Cápac, which occurred in 1527. Meanwhile, further north, Hernán Cortés had just submitted the Aztec empire to the Spanish Crown. In 1532, Francisco Pizarro finally reached the coast of Tumbes, after several unsuccessful attempts. The Inca empire was then torn apart by the civil war. Atawalpa took his brother prisoner during a decisive battle near Cajamarca, in the north of the country. The Spanish conquistadors took advantage of this situation. During a memorable meeting, of which several chroniclers were witnesses¹, Pizarro managed to capture Atawalpa. Prisoner, the Inca proposed in exchange for his freedom the payment of a fabulous treasure. He committed to fill with gold the room of the palace where he was held, up to the height of his raised hand, and to do the same with money in two other rooms. All this was to be done in record time. Francisco Pizarro, dazzled by the wealth of Peru, accepted the track. The ransom of the emperor began to flow in to the Spanish camps of all the provinces of Tawantinsuyu. In their accounts, the chroniclers speak about real mountains of gold. It is said that at the same time a part of the Inca nobility, using a network of secret cities, found refuge in the jungle on the Amazonian side of Peru. So since then, one speaks about a mysterious world from the first years of the conquest: that of Paititi.

Was it the hidden face of the empire, a secret fief of the Incas? Nobody knows, because nobody has ever found this mysterious city. Some people say that Paititi would have been a kind of second capital, similar to Cusco, a city of the Knowledge, where one learned the science of mathematics, astronomy and writing. This secret writing of the Incas, or quellcca, nobody has ever found. Etymologically, would Paititi come precisely from paykikin, which means, in Quechua, equal to, or twin?

After the execution of the emperor Atawalpa on August 29, 1533—Pizarro not having delivered the goods—all the treasures of Tawantinsuyu would have been hidden there in urgency. At least, those of the Cusco region, the capital of the empire. Tons of gold and magnificent precious objects would have transited in a hurry towards the jungle. Some chroniclers speak about twenty thousand llamas loaded with gold, led towards the east for an unknown destination by the Coya, the official wife of the Inca. The legend of Paititi is linked to this story of ransom and gold. And this is all its drama! The majority of those who still look for it generally worry only about this treasure, the cursed gold for which many men and women died.

I have dedicated my research to the permanent presence of the Incas in the Amazonian forest for more than twenty years, and to locating their main center of settlement: the legendary city of Paititi. From 1998 to 2006, with Herbert Cartagena, discoverer in 1979 with his wife Nicole of the small Inca city of Mameria, I organized several expeditions in the jungle of the Madre de Dios in order to unlock the secrets of mysterious pyramids located in December 1975 by an American Earth observation satellite. Located at the foot of the Sierra Baja of Pantiacolla, some authors did not hesitate to make these pyramids the foundations of an Egyptian or Atlantean city, or even an extraterrestrial one! For my part, I thought that Paititi could, perhaps, be hidden not far from there. During my 2001 campaign, I discovered that these huge structures are of natural origin. They constituted a relatively rare case in geology, the result of a phenomenon of catastrophic erosion known as teeth of the devil, or chevrons. However, some of them, with regular edges, seemed to have been reworked by man.

Thierry Jamin at the Inca ruins of Mameria.

During my following expeditions, my team and I discovered an impressive quantity of Inca objects, attesting to the presence of the Sons of the Sun in this remote zone of Peru, which has not been the subject of any archaeological investigation. We uncovered various stone machetes for military use, and others made of metal.

The inhabitants of the jungle, the Matsiguengas, consider these formations a great sanctuary of the Ancients. They give to this site the name of Paratoari and tell us about the presence of socabones, or tunnels, in some of them. Some of them lead straight into the mountain. In July 2006, we located and explored one of these tunnels, situated in the north of Paratoari. About ten meters deep, it led to a small circular room two meters in diameter. But it was empty.

One day, I discovered in a nearby community a magnificent Inca mortar decorated with sculpted earth in the shape of tortoise. It was found by a young Indian in a river situated not far from the pyramids. A considerable quantity of archaeological material is regularly brought back from this river, the Rio Negro, which has its source on the other side of the sierra of Pantiacolla. There are so many clues that seem to indicate the presence, in the vicinity, of a notorious city. Over several years, my comrades and I undertook several campaigns of exploration in the sector of the pyramids, in search of this mysterious lost city. In vain.

The year 2005 marked a turning point in my research. I realized that no large city could reasonably hide in the shade of the pyramids of Paratoari. At least, none of the size of Paititi. There was inevitably a site. We had accumulated too many clues these last years to doubt it. But it could not be the secret city of the Incas. At this time, the studies I had been carrying out since 2001 at the petroglyphs of Pusharo would disrupt my work and direct me in an unknown way.

Located in the heart of the national park of Manú, on the banks of the river Palotoa, these petroglyphs have been the object of the most extravagant interpretations since their discovery. Publicized for the first time in August 1921 by a Dominican missionary, Vicente de Cenitagoya, they have no equivalent in Peru. Unknown of the majority of archaeologists, they had, before us, never been studied in a systematic and scientific way. These figures engraved on the walls of a cliff, in impressive quantity, are unique specimens of their kind. They cover the rock for about thirty meters in length and five or six meters in height. The presence of staggered signs and figures resembling tocapus (distinctive geometrical decorations), as well as the discovery of an Andean Cross, or chakana, and of the magnificent profile of an Inca emperor, allowed us to attribute to this site a cultural filiation resolutely Inca. They could date back to the XVth century, when the Sons of the Sun began the conquest of this Madre de Dios region. These hundreds of figures seem to represent rivers, mountains and places of settlement. Some of them appear and disappear, as if by magic, at specific times of the day. It is of course a question of playing with light and shadow. This is the case of three suns: a rising sun, a high sun and a setting sun. They could be directions...

Could the petroglyphs of Pusharo be a kind of memory map of a given region? The one leading to the lost city of Paititi? If this legendary city did exist, then Pusharo is undoubtedly one of the keys to get there.

A few dozen meters from this first wall, we found other engraved figures on an old path, located on a ledge. They are mainly figurative signs, even symbolic. Some are reminiscent of the sequences of an ancient writing and are contained in cartouches. Could this second rock be a relic of the lost writing of the Incas?

On a third wall were engraved geometric forms whose meaning is unknown to us today. We can also observe animal and human figures. But the presence of huge anthropomorphic faces, engraved on a mountain in front of the main wall, intrigued us the most. They are real geoglyphs! In the middle of the jungle! The main one is about one hundred and fifty meters long. It seems to look, as in mirror, and is one of the best stylized faces of Pusharo. These giant figures are observable from several kilometers away. Who were their makers? And what sense can we make of them? In August 2006, my team and I spent several weeks trying to unlock the secrets of this stone message.

A map of the Paucartambo area east of Cuzco.

One evening, our team walked through the forest to the main wall. The atmosphere was strange, almost mysterious. Our lamps vibrated on the silhouettes and faces. They seemed to be alive. I tried to see reliefs that I had not yet detected in the more direct light of the day. Near the face of the Inca, our lamps made suddenly appear strange geometrical figures: five enigmatic characters, perhaps five warriors of the Inca, of which one holds a solar blazon on his right arm while he exhibits a decapitated head on the left hand. That of an enemy, dead in battle? Both a frightening and upsetting scene.

Elsewhere, other mysterious forms: straight or broken lines, staggered signs, triangles, rhombuses, or strange labyrinths. These forms seemed to cover the entire upper wall. A double spiral had been carved above the sun at the zenith. It looked like a galaxy, perhaps our Milky Way. And what qas the meaning of the strange comet with a variegated tail? It seems to be heading straight for the Andean Cross, symbol of the Inca empire. Little by little, the superior wall of Pusharo reveal itself in its totality. The invisible petroglyphs came out of the oblivion after more than five centuries of silence. We were the first ones to contemplate them since the Inca time. Strange characters with folded arm, turned towards the sky seemed to dance around the sun. Perhaps they commend to Inti the soul of the dead, having died in the field of honor. Perhaps they implore his grace for the life and health of the emperor. Or, quite simply, they may ask the Sun god for his protection to lead them safe and sound to