A pair of “alien mummies” that turned up in a Peruvian airport last year and caused quite a stir worldwide, are far from extraterrestrial, experts have confirmed.
“They are not extraterrestrials, they are not intraterrestrials, they are not a new species, they are not hybrids, they are none of those things that this group of pseudo-scientists who for six years have been presenting with these elements,” forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada, who led the analysis, told reporters Friday.
Peru’s prosecutor’s office said the objects, which included two doll-like figures and an alleged three-fingered hand, were made with paper, glue, metal and human and animal bones.
“The conclusion is simple: they are dolls assembled with bones of animals from this planet, with modern synthetic glues, therefore they were not assembled during pre-Hispanic times,” Estrada told reporters.
It has not yet been determined who owns the objects, which were seized by customs agents in Lima in October. Officials would only say that a Mexican citizen was the intended recipient of the objects.
The experts showed reporters a couple of dolls, each around two feet long and dressed in multicoloured traditional Andean clothing.
The alleged three-fingered hand also found was X-rayed and found to be a “very poorly” hand-made structure made out of human bones.
“It’s totally a made-up story,” Estrada added.
In September 2023, Mexican journalist and longtime UFO enthusiast Jaime Maussan caused quite a stir when he stood before Mexico’s congress and presented two boxes with supposed mummies found in Peru, which he and others considered “non-human beings that are not part of our terrestrial evolution.”
The “bodies” bore a remarkable resemblance to beloved fictional alien E.T., with elongated, protruding faces, skinny limbs and three long fingers on each hand. (E.T. had four fingers and a thumb, however.)
“I think there is a clear demonstration that we are dealing with non-human specimens that are not related to any other species in our world and that all possibilities are open for any scientific institution … to investigate it,” Maussan said at the time, claiming they were found in Peru in 2017 and had been carbon-dated back 1,000 years by Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM).
Maussan was panned for his presentation, however, with many casting scorn and doubt on his claims.
Despite the ridicule, Maussan doubled down on his claims again in November, alleging that over 30 per cent of the specimens’ DNA is “unknown” or “not from any known species.”
At the Lima press conference on Friday, which was organized by Peru’s culture ministry, experts did not say that the dolls found in Peru last fall were related to the bodies presented in Mexico, but they stressed that the remains in Mexico are also not extraterrestrial.
It’s not the first time Maussan has made false claims about alien remains — in 2015 he presented what he said was a mummified alien body, which was later identified to be a mummified human child.
And in 2017 he made similar claims about a different set of alleged alien bodies, which the Peruvian prosecutor’s office later declared in a report were “recently manufactured dolls, which have been covered with a mixture of paper and synthetic glue to simulate the presence of skin.”
“They are not the remains of ancestral aliens that they have tried to present,” the 2017 report stated.
— With files from The Associated Press and Reuters
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