Here’s a riddle: what has three elongated fingers, oversized craniums, and are around 1000 years old? Alien corpses, according to Jaime Maussan, one of Latin America’s most well-known extraterrestrial investigators.
During a public audience in the lower house of Mexico’s congress on Tuesday about unidentified aerial phenomena, more colloquially called UFOs, Maussan presented two corpses in wooden boxes and said that “these beings are not human and are not part of our terrestrial evolution.” The bombastic presentation went viral online, as it’s not every day that government officials are presented with supposed alien remains that look almost exactly like E.T., as in, “E.T. phone home.”
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Maussan claimed they were discovered in the Ica region of Peru, between the towns of Palpa and Nazca in 2017. Maussan stated under oath that the two bodies were recently studied at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM for its Spanish acronym), one of the country’s most prestigious higher learning and research institutions, where scientists took DNA evidence using radiocarbon dating.
“These aren’t beings that were found after ships crashed, but rather they are beings that were buried in diatom (algae) mines, and became fossilized,” he claimed the research showed. Attempts to reach investigators at UNAM to corroborate the claims by Motherboard did not receive an immediate response. Maussan also alleged that X-rays showed that one of the bodies contained eggs with embryos.
“Whether they are extraterrestrials or not, we don’t know, but they were intelligent and they lived with us. They should rewrite history,” said Maussan.
The audience in the Mexican congress also included former members of the armed forces, scientists, and politicians from the U.S., Japan, Argentina, France, Brazil and Peru. A former Mexican pilot and air traffic controller named Enrique Kolbeck Vergara with 48 years of experience also outlined four different cases of mass UFO sightings in Mexico during his career.
There are good reasons to doubt Maussan and others’ claims about the supposed alien corpses, however. Maussan, who hosts a TV show about aliens in Mexico, has been criticized over the years for promoting extraterrestrial news and UFO sightings without enough evidence. He has previously been involved in high-profile announcements involving alleged alien corpses that were later debunked or suspected to be fakes.
The alleged alien corpses that Maussan presented to lawmakers appear to be linked to a 6-year-old claim that has long been suspected by experts to be false. He said that the mummies were recovered outside Nazca, Peru and that they were 170 centimeters tall and had 3 fingers. Those details match a supposed alien mummy that Maussan promoted in 2017, and which experts have said is likely fake.
In 2017, Maussan appeared in a video promoting supposed alien mummies that were discovered in Nazca, were 168 centimeters tall, and had 3 fingers. He said, “this is just the beginning, this is not the end, not even with the samples, there is so much more to come.” The documentarians also interviewed a Russian scientist who verified the findings. The reliability of the scientist was later called into question after it was revealed that he previously claimed to have invented a camera that could take photos of the human soul. Peruvian researchers were outraged and have repeatedly said that the bodies were in fact human. Indeed, experts pointed out that supposedly extraterrestrial features like an elongated skull are actually found in pre-Columbian mummies.
In 2015, Maussan also played a key role in an event called Be Witness that analyzed old slides allegedly from Roswell, New Mexico, including one photo of a supposed alien corpse. It was later proven to be a dead Native American child, leading a UFO investigator who promoted the image to apologize. When confronted with the evidence, Maussan said at the time that it “could be true” but “there are so many anomalies that it is impossible that this is a human being.”
Indeed, supposed alien mummies have been trotted out numerous times before, and have been debunked nearly every time. In another well known case, a six-inch-tall body found in Chile in 2003 was believed by UFO investigators to potentially be an alien corpse for years. In 2018, scientists revealed that they believed it was actually a child suffering from a genetic mutation.
The surreal event in Mexico’s congress is a reminder to take such claims with a large grain of salt, even if they’re given under oath and in front of legislators. For example, high profile government sessions in the U.S. have both excited believers, and rallied skeptics. A former U.S. intelligence official claimed under oath during the session that the U.S. government has alien bodies and spacecraft in its possession, but didn’t provide any evidence to the public.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon continues to show videos of flying metal balls and the U.S. government is publicly showing interest in exploring the UFO phenomenon more than ever before. And more UFO news from reliable sources could be coming soon: NASA is hosting a meeting on Thursday to reveal the findings of its own Unidentified Aerial Phenomena study group.