The landing strip theory's been on life support for decades tbh. Every serious researcher I've come across has quietly moved on from it - the lines simply aren't flat or reinforced enough to support any kind of craft, ancient or otherwise.
That said, I find the ritual/astronomical alignment angle way more compelling anyway. Maria Reiche's work on the solar and lunar alignments still holds up better than anything Erich von Däniken ever threw at the wall.
What gets me is the scale of it all. I've done some aerial photography work for a doc I was putting together - nothing on the Nazca scale obviously, but even getting a proper overhead perspective on landscape features changes everything. The lines only make sense from above, which is genuinely strange regardless of what explanation you land on (no pun intended).
My current thinking is they were probably processional routes tied to water worship rituals. The trapezoids in particular seem to point toward water sources, which in a desert environment would've been sacred beyond anything we can really imagine now.
The alien landing theory is fun for a Netflix special but it does a disservice to what were clearly incredibly sophisticated people.
Anyone still genuinely defending the von Däniken angle, or has that ship sailed? And has anyone looked into the more recent FLAN project findings? Curious what people here make of those.