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Interesting. What I've always found fascinating about Viracoacha is the way the legend changed over time and adapted itself to various cultures. It was essentially one common religion stretching from central Mexico to the southern part of South America, and it was believed by peoples who had never conquered or even really traded with each other. This indicates that the religion was incredibly old and that it probably dated back to the areas earliest settlers many thousands of years ago. The version found at Tiahuanaco seems to be the parent for the versions that the Europeans ran into, but we already know that the Tiahuanaco version itself came from another version at least a thousand years older. The versions the Spanish encountered were spin-offs, where the religion had been adapted so that every civilization had named THEMSELVES as the Gods chosen people, and they'd been adapted to local geography and technology (a few versions have him/them arriving by boat, some have him sailing into the Atlantic, and a few have him walking on water or flying over the ocean up into the sky).

People have been trying to pin "him" down since the 1500's, and I doubt anything will ever come of it. It's an interesting religion because Virocoacha preached peace when most religions back then, in that part of the world, were very warlike, so it's possible that there may be some tiny grain of truth buried in there somewhere, but that history was lost millenia ago. Graham Hancock guessed that Viracoacha and his companions were from Atlantis in his book Fingerprints of the Gods. Other people have linked the legends to the Nazca lines and claim that he was an alien. Christians like to look at his peaceful nature and claim that he was everything from an Irish monk to Christ Himself (since the legend predates Christianity, neither is likely). Even the one possibility that's remotely possible, that the norse actually followed the coast to central America, is extremely unlikely since their warlike ways would have been a polar opposite of Viracoacha's peaceful preaching.

The most likely exploration is that Viracoacha was some kind of peaceful ruler who existed when one of the earliest peoples was transitioning from a tribal to a city based culture. Since white was seen as a sign of purity, the later legends gave him white skin.