The Ica stones are thousands of engraved stones from the region around Ica, Peru, some depicting what promoters read as dinosaurs, advanced surgery or astronomical instruments, and offered from the 1960s onward as evidence of contact between an ancient culture and knowledge it should not have had. Pathway to the Gods, broadcast by the BBC on 3 November 1977 and directed by Ray Sutcliffe, put the question to the man most associated with selling them, farmer and carver Basilio Uschuya, on camera.
Uschuya did not merely describe the forgery, he performed it for the crew: taking an ordinary stone, engraving it with a dentist's drill, and then baking it over a fire to darken and age the fresh cuts so they read as ancient patina rather than a tool mark from that afternoon. The demonstration converts a dispute that could otherwise run on competing claims about mineral weathering and iconographic style into something closer to direct observation: a named individual, on camera, producing the exact kind of object the promotional claims relied on, using tools no ancient carver had.
The film is treated as primary evidence for the forgery industry, cited directly alongside archaeological analysis of the stones' surface treatment and imagery.