The enigmatic ‘Atacama skeleton’ with its peculiar oblong head might have once belonged to a diminutive humanoid species that inhabited the high caves of the South American Andes, suggests a Spanish businessman and researcher who has dedicated a decade to studying this mysterious being. Recently, he shared his new theory on Spain’s Mitele TV network. Ever since the six-inch-long ‘alien’ mummy was unearthed from an abandoned church in the ghost town of La Noria, located 3,225 feet above sea level in the arid Atacama Desert, it has been accompanied by sensational origin stories.
But seven experts in infant anatomy and anthropology maintain that there is nothing at all unusual about the skeleton, nicknamed ‘Ata’ — even as other small mummies have been presented before Mexico’s Congress as proof of extraterrestrial life. One expert called the new theory ‘absurd,’ telling DailyMail.com it was ‘not based on scientific evidence, or just knowledge of normal anatomical development of babies.’ Professor Siân Halcrow , a biological anthropologist at New Zealand’s University of Otago, told DailyMail.com that ‘Ata’ matches the profile of an ordinary, perfectly normal, human fetal skeleton. Alongside archaeologists from Stockholm University in Sweden, anatomical experts from Stony Brook medical school in the US, and others, Halcrow published an analysis in 2018 criticizing both Ata’s ‘alien’ believers and skeptics alike.
‘We estimated the length of the femur, and we estimated that the fetus would have been about 15 weeks in-utero gestation,’ Halcrow explained to DailyMail.com, ‘so very premature.’ Based on Halcrow and her co-authors’ assessment, which included tiny Ata’s 6-inch crown-of-the-head-to-heel-length measurement, the skeleton likely belonged to a fetus or premature infant that died less than four months into pregnancy. Although details are murky, a Barcelona-based entrepreneur named Ramón Navia-Osorio Villar is believed to have purchased the mummy from treasure hunter Oscar Muñoz, who had taken the 6-inch corpse from the Atacama ghost town in 2003.
A longtime UFO hunter and enthusiast, Navia-Osorio spearheaded the publication of a report on the ‘Atacama skeleton’ in 2013 via the UFO organization that he led: the Institute for Exobiological Investigation and Study (IIEE). That report, ‘ The Anthropomorphic Being From Atacama ,’ was followed by a more thorough, peer-reviewed study conducted by a team at Stanford five years later. The Stanford team’s 2018 research , however, was met with instant backlash as many questioned the findings and the ethics of the study itself, criticizing them for working with parties who arguably violated Chilean law by taking Ata’s remains.
The Stanford study, published in the journal Genome Research, sparked such immediate debate that the authors issued a statement defending it just days later. Ultimately, their analysis was skeptical of any extraterrestrial claims, however, making the argument that Ata’s genes were quite Earth-bound and displayed signs of unusual mutations linked to dwarfism and scoliosis. But Professor Halcrow noted that there is no visible indication that such genetic mutations were taking effect — or would have that early in fetal development. ‘With the skull in particular, obviously the skull is going to be larger in proportion to the body just because of the normal development of a baby,’ Professor Halcrow said.
Ata’s large and slender skull, although it might resemble a classic ‘alien grey’ to the average person, is not particularly unusual to doctors familiar with infant development, like obstetricians, or scholars of human anatomy. Professor Halcrow compared the dramatic-seeming dimensions of Ata’s skull to fetal medical replicas, called ‘ bone clones ,’ and found that even Ata’s small facial features were not unusual for her age. Professor Halcrow told DailyMail.com she knew for sure because she has ‘a series of bone clones from in-utero period up to 38-40 weeks gestation: So, full term.’ ‘You can see that the very young one in the set does look very strange, that the cranium looks quite big compared to the mid-face — but that’s just part of normal development.’ Pictured: Ramon Navia-Osorio Villar.
Because the skull of a fetus maintains many ‘fontanelles,’ or ‘soft spots,’ which allow the young brain to grow, Professor Halcrow hypothesizes that pressure during premature child birth — or even the dehydrating effects of the Atacama desert itself — may have further elongated Ata’s skull into its seemingly unique shape. But although it has been over five years since Professor Halcrow and her international colleagues published their critique, the man who acquired the ‘Atacama skeleton’ still insists that Ata is no ordinary human. On the Spanish television program ‘ Cuarto Milenio ‘ last Saturday, Navia-Osorio told the hosts Ata might have come from an extinct race of cave-dwelling tiny people. ‘They were very small people who lived in caves and only came out at night,’ Navia-Osorio said, ‘hence its strange almond-shaped eyes.’
‘A native friend from the Aymara tribe told me that these beings used to live with their ancestors before the Spanish settlers arrived,’ the businessman told the hosts of Cuarto Milenio (‘Fourth Millennium’). For at least 800 years, and potentially millenia, the indigenous Aymara people have lived on the Altiplano plateau in the Andean highlands, in a region now divided between the South American nations of Bolivia, Peru and Chile. It is Navia-Osorio’s contention that these tiny human-like cave-dwellers lived alongside the Aymara people concurrent in time with Europe’s Middle Ages. Navia-Osorio takes issue with the claims made by UFO ‘disclosure movement’ activists in the United States who produced a documentary in 2013 purporting to have conclusive evidence that Ata was an extraterrestrial.
‘We received it at the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences and there we carried out the first X-ray, with low radiation so as not to damage the specimen,’ he told Cuarto Milenio. ‘This creature was not extraterrestrial, it was terrestrial,’ Navia-Osorio said, although back during the preliminary analysis, he said he ‘started to worry.’ ‘They already told us that they did not know what it was,’ he recounted. ‘The head was so voluminous; the hands were so elongated. It had no kneecaps. The clavicle was more triangular than that of humans.’ Today he has one rebuttal to scientists, like Professor Halcrow, who believe that Ata was once simple a 15-week old fetus. ‘How could it be a fetus if it had calluses on its feet?’ Navia-Osorio asked. For now, only the desiccating heat of the Atacama Desert knows the answer.
