by Palmer Mebane

For each of the eight answers, there is a unique snake (one cell wide, does not touch itself) which starts at the first letter and eats the letters of the answer in order. The image above provides small numbers 1-8 in the corners of each cell of each snake; all spaces with a 1 in them are part of the same snake spelling answer 1 (snakes for different answers can overlap), and similarly for the other numbers 2-8.

Each snake also eats some different-looking gray letters, so each of the eight snakes gives a small string of 3-4 letters, which can be put together to form the answer string.

(1) TOTAL ECLIPSE gives DRJ	(2) STRAVINSKY gives ENLA
(3) CARL SAGAN gives NDI	(4) GUNPOWDER gives ACKS
(5) SVALBARD gives ONS	(6) PITCHER gives NGP
(7) FINALE gives ADS	(8) RIOT gives ALI

These can be reordered to form DRJACKSONSALIENLANDINGPADS. Dr. Daniel Jackson, an archaeologist from the movie and TV show Stargate, had a theory that the pyramids were landing pads for alien spaceships. The final answer is PYRAMIDS.