On a low ridge above the Santa Clara River in southern Utah, sandstone boulders are etched with spirals, stick-figures, horned beings and other symbols which some people argue are representations of extra-terrestrials. This is the Anasazi Valley Trail — also called the Tempi’po’op Trail — near the towns of Ivins and Santa Clara. Today it’s a short, dusty hike from a car park off Old Highway 91. A millennium ago it was farmland, a seasonal village, and a spiritual landscape for the Virgin Branch of the Ancestral Puebloans, the people once called “Anasazi.”
Hundreds of petroglyphs line this ridge, pecked and ground into the desert varnish of boulders and cliff faces. Some are familiar: bighorn sheep, human footprints, snakes. Others are stranger: humanoid figures with antennae, enormous heads, or radiating halos. In photographs online, they look like pages from a lost graphic novel. And inevitably, the question arises: are these depictions of aliens?
It’s an alluring idea. In a land of silent cliffs and starlit skies, the line between gods, visions and visitors blurs easily. Yet the truth, as ever, is more complicated, and perhaps more interesting.
The Who and When: Ancestral Puebloans on the Santa Clara
Archaeologists agree on the basic context. The petroglyphs on the Anasazi Trail were created primarily by the Virgin Anasazi, farming peoples who lived in the region from roughly 200 BC to AD 1200. Their settlements clustered near rivers where they cultivated corn, beans and squash, supplemented by hunting and gathering.
They were not a single tribe but part of a broader network of Ancestral Puebloan cultures stretching across the Four Corners region. Their descendants include today’s Hopi, Zuni and various Rio Grande Pueblo communities. After the 12th century, climate stress and social change saw many sites abandoned; new groups such as the Southern Paiute moved into the area.
The petroglyphs along the Tempi’po’op Trail likely span centuries. Some of the most abstract designs may date back to earlier Archaic hunter-gatherers (before 500 BC). Others were added by Ancestral Puebloans. Still others may have been retouched or reinterpreted by later inhabitants. Each boulder is a palimpsest of overlapping cultures and meanings.
The Imagery: From Spirals to “Sky Beings”
Visitors today encounter a dazzling variety of motifs:
- Spirals: Single and double coils, sometimes ending in points, sometimes paired with dots. Scholars interpret these as solar calendars, water symbols, or metaphors for migration and rebirth.
- Animal Forms: Bighorn sheep, deer, birds, snakes, lizards — stylised but recognisable. These may represent prey, clan totems, or cosmological creatures.
- Grids and Rectangles: Panels of intersecting lines that resemble maps or fields. Some archaeologists think these depict agricultural plots along the Santa Clara River. Others see ritual schematics rather than literal maps.
- Humanoid Figures with Horns or Rays: Perhaps the most striking images. Stick-figures with triangular torsos sprout antennae, horns, or radiating halos. Some hold crooks or staffs. Others are faceless, abstract, or mid-transformation.
It is these last figures that light up the internet with theories of “ancient astronauts.” With their bulbous heads and protrusions, they do look uncannily like our pop-culture image of extraterrestrials.
The Alien Hypothesis: A Cultural Meme
The idea that ancient art depicts alien visitors owes much to Erich von Däniken’s 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods?He argued that gods in myth were actually extraterrestrials, and that ancient monuments around the world encode this contact. Southwest rock art, including the Anasazi Trail, is a staple of “ancient alien” documentaries and YouTube videos.
The logic runs like this:
- These beings look non-human.
- Indigenous people could not have imagined such beings without seeing them.
- Therefore, they must be depictions of real visitors from the sky.
It’s an enticing story — especially when paired with the Southwest’s skies full of meteors, comets and mysterious lights. But when scrutinised, the evidence is thin.
The Anthropological Counterargument
Archaeologists who specialise in rock art offer a different explanation. In their reading, the “alien” look of these figures reflects symbolism, ceremony and altered states rather than literal beings from another planet.
- Shamans and Spirit Beings: Across the Americas, spiritual intermediaries are often shown with horns, rays or animal attributes to signal their power. Such imagery persists in Puebloan ceremonial masks and dances today. A “bulbous head” may be a headdress, not an actual skull.
- Ritual Costume: Feathers, antlers, body paint and headgear transform human dancers into deities. What seems like a space suit to us may have been a perfectly familiar costume to its maker.
- Visionary Art: In trance states, people commonly report seeing beings with luminous outlines, merging forms and swirling patterns. Neuropsychologists have shown that spirals, grids and radiating shapes are universal “entoptic” patterns produced by the human visual system under certain conditions. Rock art worldwide often reflects these shapes, not because aliens appeared everywhere but because brains are wired the same way.
- Conceptual, Not Literal: Petroglyphs are not photographs. They are shorthand — mnemonics for stories, metaphors for natural forces, or markers of territory. A horned figure could mean power, clan identity, or celestial origin without implying an actual alien encounter.
Importantly, there is no archaeological evidence — no anomalous artefacts, no advanced materials — at the Anasazi Trail site that would support alien visitation. The techniques used to peck the petroglyphs are entirely consistent with human tools of the period.
Could They Still Depict Aliens?
And yet, the idea lingers. Could the artists have been recording what they saw — a close encounter, a sky being, a vision of something truly other?
In strict scientific terms, this remains unprovable. People in the past certainly witnessed strange phenomena: meteor storms, comets, auroras, even rare atmospheric events like ball lightning. They also experienced dreams, hallucinations and myths. Any of these could be rendered as beings descending from the sky.
If an Ancestral Puebloan truly had seen a non-human visitor, how would they record it? Almost certainly not as a literal portrait but as a symbol within their existing cosmology. Over generations, the original event would morph into a story, then a ritual, then an icon. By the time it reached stone, it would be a hybrid of memory and myth. In other words, alien encounter would look almost exactly like religious art.
Thus it is theoretically possible the petroglyphs depict something inexplicable. But there is no positive evidence to claim they do. The alien hypothesis remains, at best, an evocative speculation.
The Real Wonder
Focusing too narrowly on aliens risks missing what’s already extraordinary. These carvings are the spiritual graffiti of a thousand years of human life. They compress generations of farming, hunting, ritual and story into a gallery of stone overlooking the fields below.
Stand there at sunset and you can imagine villagers looking up at the same ridge, seeing their ancestors’ marks glow in the low light. The spiral becomes a calendar. The horned figure becomes a reminder of a clan or a ceremony. The grid becomes a map of irrigation channels that fed their crops. The art is not alien — it is deeply, beautifully human.
And yet it also speaks to a universal human experience: the sense that we are not alone, that something vast and mysterious dwells above or beyond us. Whether we call them gods, spirits or extraterrestrials, we carve their shapes into stone because they matter to us.