What Are the Ica Stones—and Are They Real?

Inside the Museo Científico Javier Cabrera in Ica, Peru, is a collection of smooth black stones engraved with astonishing images. They depict what appear to be prehistoric men performing open-heart surgery and brain transplants, using telescopes and riding in flying machines. Even more shocking, the intricately carved images show humans interacting with dinosaurs—hunting Tyrannosaurus rex and riding on the back of pterodactyls—creatures that went extinct 66 million years before humans walked the Earth.

If the Ica Stones are ancient, they would challenge current scientific understanding of human history. However, art historians, archaeologists and other experts say there’s a plausible explanation for these confounding images.

They’re a hoax.

Ica is located in the arid southwest of Peru, on the edge of the vast Atacama Desert. The area was once home to two ancient Indigenous cultures, the Nazca and Paracas, who left behind troves of artifacts in burial chambers throughout the desert. Ica is also two hours away from the famous Nazca Lines—massive geoglyphs depicting plants, animals and geometric shapes.

In 1966, Dr. Javier Cabrera, a physician from Ica, received a small engraved stone as a birthday gift. It was etched with an image of a fish and Cabrera became convinced it depicted a species that had gone extinct millions of years ago. Believing that the stone could be the record of an unknown ancient civilization, Cabrera set out to find more of the mysterious rocks.

Two local antiquities dealers were happy to help. Pablo and Carlos Soldi built their careers selling artifacts looted from archaeological sites in the Ica and Nazca region, including more than 100 pieces acquired by the American Museum of Natural History. The Soldi brothers told Cabrera that there were countless more of the mysterious engraved stones buried in tombs and caves around Ica. That’s when Cabrera’s obsession really began.

Over the next decade, Cabrera amassed a collection of 11,000 Ica stones, varying in size from small pebbles to heavy boulders. To him, their stunning depictions of surgeries and humans battling dinosaurs were nothing short of a revolutionary scientific discovery.

When museums rejected the stones as fakes, Cabrera sold his medical practice and turned his home into a museum to share the stones and his theories with the world.

“Dr. Cabrera believed the stones were messages from an ancient civilization that was probably extraterrestrial in origin because they could do medical procedures like brain transplants, which modern medicine still can’t do,” says Nancy Kelker, an art historian who specializes in forged artifacts from the Americas.

Cabrera called his hypothetical ancient people “Gliptolithic Man” and posited that they were superintelligent space travelers. Cabrera’s ideas were embraced by speculative thinkers like the Swiss author Erich von Däniken, whose 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? popularized the “alien archaeology” theory, the idea that extraterrestrials visited Earth in antiquity and helped shape early human civilizations. Von Däniken cited the Ica stones as further proof that aliens had colonized the Earth in the distant past and were the real architects of monumental structures like the Egyptian and Maya pyramids.

By the time Cabrera died in 2001, there were an estimated 50,000 Ica stones in circulation. The sheer number of stones was cited as proof by Cabrera and other believers that the Ica stones couldn’t possibly be forgeries. How could anyone make 50,000 fakes?

In the 1970s, after von Däniken and other writers drew international attention to the Ica stones, the BBC sent a TV crew to investigate Cabrera’s claims in Peru. The TV special was highly critical of the stones, prompting an investigation by Peruvian authorities. That led to the arrest of local farmer Basilio Uschuya, who confessed to the police that he had carved the stones himself to sell to gullible tourists.

Was it strange that Uschuya chose dinosaurs and alien-looking spacecraft for his “ancient” creations? Kelker doesn't think so. Pop culture was saturated with sci-fi movies and TV shows about flying saucers and time travel. The hit 1966 movie One Million Years B.C., for example, starred Raquel Welch as a prehistoric woman whose tribe hunted dinosaurs. Uschuya was simply tapping into the zeitgeist of the 1960s.

Forgers aren't "removed from the wider world," says Kelker, co-author of Faking the Ancient Andes. "They’re much more sophisticated than most people assume.”

In her experience investigating forged artifacts, Kelker has also seen a lot of overlap between looting and forging. People like Uschuya often start out as looters. “Then they discover that making pieces is a lot easier than spending months in the jungle tunneling into some pyramid,” she explains.

Even after Uschuya’s confession, Cabrera and other believers continued to defend the legitimacy of the Ica stones. One theory is that Uschuya lied about forging the stones to stay out of prison. Under Peruvian law, it’s a serious crime to sell looted antiquities.

Uschuya fueled the conspiracy theories by giving conflicting reports to journalists, claiming that he didn’t make all the stones in Cabrera’s collection. Kelker says that, apart from the Ica stones, there’s no archaeological evidence of etched stonework produced by the ancient Nazca or Paracas cultures.

"In the Ica Valley of Peru, there are plenty of legitimate artifacts, but not on rocks,” Kelker says. “I'm talking about ceramics and things. It may be that some designs vaguely resemble the stones but not close enough that it's been identified as a distinctive style.”

In 1976, Cabrera published his book El Mensaje de las Piedras Grabadas de Ica (“The Message of the Engraved Rocks of Ica”), in which he claimed that various scientific labs around the world had verified the antiquity of the stones. Over the decades, there were numerous investigations, including requests to see the alleged lab results, but Cabrera always refused.

When a pair of journalists from the Skeptical Inquirer visited Cabrera’s museum in 2006, they examined the engraved rocks under magnification and concluded that the drawings were modern creations. If the etchings were ancient, they argued, a thin patina would have formed over time. No such patina was present.

As for Uschuya, journalists have since recorded him and other artisans reproducing replicas of the Ica stones in a matter of minutes using a dentist’s drill. To give the stones an aged appearance, they smeared the rocks with animal dung and baked them overnight in hot coals.