#2449 - Raul Bilecky

Man, I love your work. That clip of the undocumented megalithic site in Peru blew my mind, and the drone pass over those ruins was brutal—just craters from looters everywhere. When did the worst of that happen?

Most of the heavy looting ran from the 1980s into the 2010s. You can date it by the trash—old cigarette packs and soda bottles. Some areas stretch for kilometers and look like the moon, with human remains scattered like landfill.

What are they even after in graves that old?

Jewelry, metal ornaments, textiles—anything valuable. The mummies get torn apart, and what’s left is bones and broken pottery everywhere.

Heartbreaking. Is any of it reaching museums, or is it all hidden away?

Mostly private buyers. I met a wakero in Miraflores selling real artifacts in an artisan market. There’s no consistent government presence out there, so the pieces end up in collections instead of being preserved.

Peru feels like an unsolved epic. Tons of unexplored sites, but money and attention chase tourist magnets like Machu Picchu.

You hit a construction trench and you find a site. The scale is overwhelming, and budgets focus on destinations that draw visitors.

Machu Picchu still makes no sense—why build that masterpiece on a mountain?

That place lit my fuse. I’m Peruvian, and when I was a kid I found seashells in the walls up there. It sent me chasing ancient cataclysms and strange timelines; now I’m doing solo expeditions all over.

So what’s the standard dating on the big stonework?

Conventional view pins it on the Inca in the late 1400s to early 1500s, but places like Viñayc show precision megaliths buried deep beneath later Wari masonry held together with mud. Only a sliver has been excavated.

Classic pattern—complex stone on the bottom, rougher builds on top. Same weirdness as Baalbek, where Romans documented the pretty parts and ignored the impossible blocks.

I started by reading Fingerprints of the Gods and never bought the tidy answers. Saying “we don’t know” would be more honest than forcing the puzzle to fit.

They got rocked by Göbekli Tepe and still dig in. If Felipe Biondi’s pyramid scans hold up—hundreds of them—then the old guard will have to admit they got big pieces wrong.

This is the moment to pivot with the evidence. Clinging to ego and textbooks just wrecks credibility.

UFO discourse has the same problem—signal and noise, plus disinfo to muddy the waters. Some advances after Roswell look suspiciously fast, but we need real proof, not campfire stories.

Agreed. Without transparency, truth has nowhere to land.

Those supposed Nazca “non-human” mummies are where it gets bizarre. Some are obvious composites, while a few look anatomically coherent with tendons and even reported eggs. What do you think?

I think most of them are crafted. Likely real ancient bones reassembled with skilled taxidermy to pass scans. Follow the money—series, subscriptions, and spectacle generate far more profit than any single sale.

Are the makers evolving the hoax each time they get called out?

Yes. Newer specimens fix earlier tells. Medical experts I’ve looked into have a track record of validating sensational fakes for decades. There’s even talk of an Ica mafia; journalists and doctors down there keep their heads down because this scene can get violent.

I found reports of organized trafficking and big money moving Peruvian artifacts through South America and Europe.

Buyers ask for “provenance” videos of items being pulled from the ground. I’ve seen them. American collectors are in the mix.

Let’s separate that from elongated skulls. You’ve found a few in the wild—what’s your read?

The three I found had normal sagittal sutures, which points to head-binding. The bigger question is why the culture did it; maybe they were imitating a group with different head shapes, or chasing altered states and status.

Some skulls seem to have greater volume and larger eye sockets. How does binding account for that?

A subset does appear to exceed normal volume and show jaw differences, but we lack rigorous studies. Bureaucracy blocks DNA work, and looting keeps thinning the field.

At minimum, the strangest skulls deserve full exams with DNA, metrics, and peer review. If they’re a distinct branch, that changes the story.

Totally. Brian Foerster’s tried for years to run proper tests. I want multiple universities to study them, not TV reveals. Right now, permits and funding in Peru are the bottleneck.

Zooming out, Peru’s density of sites is insane—Nazca lines, Sacsayhuamán, Caral. Why so much in one region?

Caral and the Norte Chico valleys hold pre-ceramic pyramids with sunken circular plazas and no signs of warfare for a thousand years. They grew cotton to trade for fish nets, and I think that cultural horizon ran far up the coast.

No writing like Sumer, though, right?

We have quipus—knotted cords likely used as a recording system. The Spanish burned most and killed the specialists. There’s ongoing work using AI to decode surviving examples.

You’ve been finding unlabeled sites by drone. What stood out?

I documented a sunken-plaza temple with a stone circle that looks astronomically aligned, and no formal study exists. Looting is one threat, but agriculture is erasing sites even faster—corporate fields and small farms plowing through ruins.

That’s a tough dilemma when it’s a local farmer trying to live.

Exactly. One woman even wrote the Ministry asking what to do and never heard back. My goal is to at least document everything—pins, 3D models—before it’s gone.

Tell me about the Purulén pyramids you filmed.

Sixteen platform pyramids carved from bedrock right on the coast, hammered by tsunamis for millennia. A brief 1970 survey guessed around 1800 BCE from a single sherd, but even the researcher suspected it was older. I found a burial alcove aligned almost perfectly east–west, likely for elites. This place screams pre-ceramic and deserves real work.

If it’s pre-ceramic, then what tools shaped that bedrock? And how did they level those platforms?

It blows my mind that you might have the only modern footage of some of these places, and if you hadn’t done it, it could sit there for ages or get bulldozed.

It’s a grind, but something in me has to record this before it’s gone.

From the air you can see they’re carved straight out of bedrock and they’re massive, which is what makes that site so wild.

Peru’s history pulses between the coast and the valleys because El Niño floods force people uphill, then back down to rebuild on older layers, but you don’t get Cusco-style megaliths on the coast because the stone isn’t there. Wind and water erase things fast; I saw a year of sand bury fresh features between visits.

If you had to guess, how old could this stuff be?

There’s work at Huaca Prieta accepted at around 12,500 BCE, with a bedrock mound built up by layers of refuse and adobe into a platform. There’s also evidence of a sunken circular plaza there that predates the later ones by millennia, which hints the tradition started earlier than we think.

How do people even get there that far back?

If you live by water, you see wood float, lash logs together, fish, and storms carry you; over generations that becomes real seafaring driven by curiosity and necessity.

If this is what remains from fifteen thousand years ago, what survived from twice that?

New subsurface imaging is proving accurate on known targets, so if it becomes affordable we could scan buried features and even offshore shelves where sea levels rose, though the Humboldt Current makes that work costly, and I’d bet there’s a lot out there.

The web puts pressure on institutions, and places like Egypt could supercharge tourism by opening up the mystery under the pyramids where shafts and tunnels seem to lead to caverns.

There are old accounts of labyrinths, and I fell into this because of the internet too; my whole aim is to document as much as I can while it still exists.

How did you fund all this?

I emptied my savings on the first trip and strangers stepped up with donations, which honestly kept me going.

Your stuff is addictive, and the algorithm helps the right people find it.

Trip one was twenty-three days and two terabytes; the last was forty-two days, and some sites I filmed have literally no other drone media anywhere.

Those bedrock pyramids you found are just insane.

Down the coast they found the Lady of Cao in 2006 with tattoos and high status, maybe a female ruler.

Early on you see powerful women’s burials and vivid wall art that show a different social picture than most expect.

El Brujo’s murals show how colorful it all was, and that complex came to light in 1990 after locals tipped off a banker.

That tracks with huaqueros revealing spots after a wave of loot shows up.

There’s a wild Lord of Sipán story where archaeologists guarded a dig as townspeople fought to get gold, and for years plantation owners paid workers a couple bucks per pot which is why museums are packed while finders earned almost nothing.

How long have you been doing the channel?

Two years; I was a video editor who started flagging unlabeled spots on Google Earth, then proved it in the field with ninety sites in twenty-three days and a perfect hit rate, and now I’m sitting on five terabytes of new footage.

It’s crazy to think we’d never know any of this if you hadn’t gone, and it makes you ask what culture carved those stone pyramids.

A later survey backed the observations I made on camera; the place felt pre-ceramic with no houses, more like a pilgrimage center, which is just an intuition but it fits the lack of domestic debris.

How many of those were there, and with what tools?

I counted sixteen, and a 1970 photo shows a carved chamber inside the main one, but erosion and tsunamis scrub most clues and anything wooden or metal would be gone.

Houses would vanish and you’re left with stone, and if there were buildings on top they’re long gone; the kicker is every one of those forms faces northeast toward the solstice, yet some folks still insist it’s just natural hills.

I don’t argue online anymore; the alignments alone scream design.

We forget our past, and friends in Alaska keep finding deep layers of burnt bones under older sites which hints at repeated cataclysms over tens of thousands of years.

That matches myth cycles where civilizations rise and fall across epochs.

Feels like we’re in the confusing age before the rebuild, which kind of fits the moment.

I got pulled into social media fights over the Nazca mummy stuff and realized it was making me defensive, so I stepped back because the personal attacks never end.

Best move is to post and then walk away, which is healthier and still lets you find shows you love without the chaos.

I’m grateful the platforms exist because this work found its audience.

What you’re doing matters, and showing millions that someone carved repeated equinox-aligned shapes from solid rock changes how people think about the past.

From the ground you see a bump, then the drone outlines whole complexes in the sand that no one’s cataloged, and it feels like a whole nursery of civilization out there.

If this began during the ice age, that coast would have been ideal to grow sophisticated fast.

They even pulled a colossal ancient whale out of the Peruvian desert and there are tales of whale vertebrae used as stools, which paints a strange coastal scene.

Coprolites and fossils get trafficked out there too, which adds another dark layer to the desert.

Between Caral-Supe and Casma I used Google Earth and a local’s hint to reach an undocumented temple with a sunken circular plaza, pottery, and huaquero pits, and it’s not even in the Ministry database.

It’s nuts that it still sits as rubble until a drone shows rooms underfoot, and you deserve a salute for finding it with free tools.

I’ve only used Google Earth so far, and up there I found paired cacti in line with features which made me wonder about San Pedro rituals tied to the temple use.

Getting there took fourteen hours, and meanwhile developers flatten sites while protection is thin; Caral’s lead archaeologist was even shot by land traffickers grabbing ground for farming.

They even threatened to bury people and killed a dog as a warning, which is horrific.

Chavín’s underground galleries go deep, the Lanzón sits in a chamber they ban photos in, and walking there sober I felt lightheaded and altered while evidence shows hallucinogens were used in rituals that spread their iconography far and wide.

The no-flash rule sounds silly when modern cameras can shoot without it, but the whole maze-and-cactus ritual setup makes sense.

If I felt it without anything in my system, imagine that same path on San Pedro.

Sacsayhuamán still fries my brain with its interlocking giants that ride out quakes like nothing.

Up close the joints are paper-tight, the stones look rounded as if softened, and there are old stories of a plant and pyrite paste that could have helped shape or fuse the surfaces.

Legends even pair a stimulant with a stone-softening plant, which would explain the sheer workload.

Cusco is laced with tunnels that start natural and then turn into carved passages with steps, and some are so tight you could get stuck which is why I won’t push into the truly risky squeezes.

Never cave dive or crawl into a death funnel, but before we end, show us one more.

Chisñiri near Cusco still shows colored mud panels on walls and a hillside of tombs ripped open by looters with skulls exposed, and a local community leader spent his day guiding me through it.

It looks like the start of a horror film with bones everywhere, but I’m glad you chose this path and that people can watch it on Pillars of the Past; do you post on X too?

I’m posting there and building a site where people can pin finds on a shared map so we can crowdsource the hunt.

Graham Hancock cracked the door for a lot of us and that Netflix series opened the floodgates, so come back after your next run because these are real mysteries and they’re riveting.

I’ll be speaking at the Quest for Ancient Civilizations events in Sedona and Austin, plus touring the Yucatán with Mike Collins and Hugh Newman, and on the Sage Wall I’m cautious until multiple lines of evidence line up.

There are natural lookalikes and AI-faked images out there, so people should seek original footage before making up their minds.

Some scans suggest depth which is intriguing, but I keep a skeptical eye and want more data.

Some shots look like strata and others like masonry, so maybe we go see it one day; thanks for the ride today, this was a blast, and we’ll see you next time.