Did the Nazca Lines actually serve as landing strips or is that theory completely dead now?

Landing strips theory was basically murdered by the fact that the lines aren't flat or reinforced enough to handle any aircraft we can imagine, ancient or otherwise. But I still think people dismiss it too quickly just to sound smart.

The more interesting angle to me is the geoglyph visibility thing - they're only really "readable" from altitude, which begs the question of who exactly they were performing for. Not necessarily aircraft but maybe something else entirely. Interdimensional observers don't need a runway, do they.

What gets me is how confidently academics just go "ritual purposes" and close the book like that fully explains why you'd spend centuries drawing a spider you can only see from 300 feet up. Ritual for who though.

Anyone here looked into the Maria Reiche research properly? Curious what people make of her astronomical alignment stuff compared to the ET theories.

The landing strip idea is basically toast yeah, but the more interesting angle that never gets enough attention is the water/irrigation hypothesis. Certain lines actually track underground aquifers pretty closely and the Nazca region was desperate for water.

@TwilightSpecter830 you're right that people are too quick to throw the whole thing in the bin just because von Däniken was a fantasist. The dismissal tends to baby out with the bathwater. Ritual processional routes still makes the most sense to me - you walk the line as a kind of prayer or offering to the sky gods, which is why the figures only really "work" from above. The audience was never meant to be human.

Doesn't mean aliens obviously. Just means a culture with a very different relationship to landscape and the divine than we have now.