Peru, a South American country of about 34 million people with its capital at Lima, stretches from an arid Pacific coast across the Andes to the Amazon basin. The highlands were the heart of the Inca Empire, ruled from Cusco until the Spanish conquest began in 1532, and Peru declared independence in 1821. Its archaeology ranges from Machu Picchu to the works of desert cultures far older than the Incas.

The best known of those desert works are the Nazca Lines, geoglyphs made on the plateau between Nazca and Palpa between roughly 500 BC and AD 500. More than 70 depict animals such as a hummingbird, spider and monkey, and the lines became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. Erich von Däniken's 1968 book "Chariots of the Gods?" popularized the idea that they were landing sites for ancient astronauts, a claim archaeologists including Maria Reiche rejected; reproductions showed the figures could be laid out with simple tools. In 2024 Yamagata University and IBM Research used AI and field surveys to confirm 303 previously unknown figurative geoglyphs.

Peru also has an unusually formal UFO record. In April 1980, Peruvian Air Force pilot Oscar Santa María Huertas said he fired 30mm rounds at a bulb-shaped object over the Arequipa region that climbed away apparently undamaged. The air force ran an anomalous aerial phenomena office, OIFAA, founded by Commander Julio Chamorro, from 1999 to 2005, and in 2013 reopened a successor department, DIFAA, to collect public reports; in 2014 Defense Minister Pedro Cateriano described unidentified objects as a threat to civil and military air safety. Former Marine Jonathan Weygandt says he saw a guarded crashed craft while deployed in Peru in the 1990s, an account no official record confirms.

Since 2017 Peru has also produced the so-called Nazca mummies, three-fingered bodies promoted as non-human. A 2017 Peruvian prosecutor's report called the figures recently manufactured dolls. After Mexican journalist Jaime Maussan presented two bodies to Mexico's Congress on September 12, 2023, forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada, working for Peru's prosecutor's office, said in January 2024 that seized humanoid figures were dolls built from animal and human bones and synthetic glue. In 2026 Jesse Michels said on the Joe Rogan Experience that he had heard of specimens selling for seven figures, while guests on the Weaponized podcast called them desecrated human remains. For Peru, the controversy has become as much about looted archaeological remains as about UFOs, a modern echo of the extraterrestrial speculation that has surrounded the Nazca desert since 1968.