The landing strip theory has been gathering dust since the 70s when von Däniken was flogging it to anyone who'd listen. The ground simply doesn't support it - the soil is loose, the lines are shallow scraped depressions. Nothing's landing on that without disappearing into the desert floor.
That said, I'm not convinced the ". Ritual walking paths". Explanation wraps it up either. It feels like academics desperately reaching for something respectable to put in a journal.
What nobody properly addresses is the scale. You don't need to see a hummingbird from the ground to worship it. The effort involved in creating figures only visible from altitude suggests something intentional about that elevated perspective - whether that's gods, ancestors, or yes, something else entirely.
Spent years studying anomalous phenomena and the honest answer is always the uncomfortable one: we don't know. Every time someone announces a definitive explanation for Nazca they're selling something.
The water ritual theory from the Peruvian archaeologists is probably the closest we've got, linking the geoglyphs to underground aqueducts and fertility rites. Decent evidence base. But it still doesn't fully account for the animal figures.
So no, the ET landing strip theory is dead as a serious proposition. But the smug dismissal of anything unusual about Nazca by mainstream archaeology is equally lazy.
What's your current thinking on the water/ritual explanation? Anyone here looked at the Palpa lines comparison? Those get criminally ignored in these discussions.