Pachacamac & the UFO Hotspot of Chilca

The Mystery

Pachacamac & the UFO Hotspot of Chilca

Meet the elongated skulls and mummies of ancient Peru, consult the great Oracle of Pachacamac, then enter Chilca — the desert town that's claimed UFO contact since 1974 and swears its black lagoon-mud was charged by alien craft. Oracles, mummies and flying saucers, an hour from Lima.

An hour south of Lima, past the surf and the fig farms, sits Chilca — a coastal-desert town that has called itself 'the city of the UFOs' since 1974. That year a young Peruvian, Sixto Paz Wells, said he was receiving messages by automatic writing that told him where and when craft would appear in the sand — and he invited the press to come and watch. On 7 September 1974, a dozen people, including a well-known Spanish journalist, reported luminous craft over the desert 'as foretold.' Whatever you make of it, it put Chilca on the world ufology map, and the Rahma contact groups still make pilgrimages here.

This one-day trip from Lima builds the whole strange arc. It opens in a city museum among elongated Paracas skulls and mummies — real artificial cranial deformation, a mark of elite status, and not (whatever you'll read online) evidence of aliens. Then the great Oracle of Pachacamac, the pre-Inca sanctuary so powerful that pilgrims and even the Inca state came to fear its predictions. From the oracle humans built to hear the future, to the desert where humans went looking for visitors from the stars — the same longing, a thousand years apart.

In Chilca you'll visit the town's homespun UFO museum and its mineral healing lagoons — black, sulfur-rich mud that locals swear was charged by alien craft, with an optional mud bath. We tell all of it straight: the movement and the town's identity are entirely real and genuinely fascinating; the sightings are unverified claims; the mud is a real spa soak wrapped in a great legend. Nobody is mocked, and nothing unproven is sold as fact. It's an easy, sea-level day close to the city — a relief after the high Andes — and unlike anything else on offer out of Lima.