![]() In the 19th century, Anglo-American and European craniologists and scholars who came upon artificially molded skulls in Peruvian tombs hypothesized that they were either the undeformed remnants of a lost and civilized people they named the “Ancient Peruvians,” or artificial deformations of later peoples inspired by those Ancient Peruvians’ natural forms. This inclusion of pre-Columbian Peruvians in science’s supposed cover-up of extraterrestrials echoes the previous collection and study of the indigenous dead. Incredibly, Maussan then offered $10,000 for information that might permit the Puebloan boy’s “location and recuperation.” Returned to a National Park museum in 1938, the boy was repatriated to a local tribe in 2015. More skeptical ufologists applied de-blurring technology to the “Roswell Slide” when it was released, and found that a previously undecipherable placard next to the body revealed that it was actually the mummy of a two-year-old Puebloan boy removed from the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in 1894. In 2015, Maussan tried to promote a photographic slide from the late 1940s that, he hinted, depicted the corpse of an alien child found in the American Southwest. ![]() Human beings, and indigenous ones to boot. The English- and Spanish-language tabloids and YouTube channels that cover the “discovery” reliably fill in the blanks, guarding journalistic integrity with scare quotes: “The ‘Alien’ Mummies of Nazca,” trumpeted The Sun in mid-July, when the mummy’s most prominent promoter, a Mexican “ufologist” and TV personality named Jaime Maussan, produced photographic and x-ray “proof” of at least four additional more “reptilian” “humanoid” bodies.īecause of course: What else could they be? To learn more, viewers were initially encouraged to watch the rest of the investigation behind Gaia’s paywall. The video’s experts stop short of the A-word, letting a series of vest-wearing and white coat-clad “experts” claim that x-rays, CT scans, and DNA and carbon-14 tests of the mummy’s flesh reveal that this new “humanoid” or “organic creature,” whom they have dubbed “Maria,” is no fraud. Its elongated head has no nose, no ears, and large, heavy-lidded eyes. A Hans Zimmer-esque score throbs, and a Russian-accented expert in “bioelectrography”-who elsewhere claims to have photographed the human soul escaping the body after death-declares the mummy “one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century.” The camera orbits the mummy, revealing that it has only three long fingers on each hand and three long toes on each foot. ![]() “Maria,” the “humanoid” mummy from the web series Unearthing Nazca (Screenshot from ) Its head is elongated like those of other pre-Columbian mummies, whose societies artificially shaped their children’s crania to achieve ideals of beauty or represent group belonging. It starts with what at first seems to be a typical seated Peruvian mummy, arms wrapped around its knees, like a child waiting for its parent. Since the series’ launch in June by -a website specializing in “conscious media, yoga, and more”-the teaser episode of Unearthing Nazca has been viewed 2.35 million times on YouTube alone. ![]() They worry that Unearthing Nazca is an archaeological snuff film in disguise. Archaeologists, who have been denied access to the mummy, worry that it is as old as the series’ creators claim, but that it is actually indigenous and Andean-a real human individual that has been mutilated to look like an alien. A web series named Unearthing Nazca purports to depict the investigation of a pre-Columbian and “humanoid” mummy. Now, Peruvian scientists are furious at a new and possibly pernicious permutation of the “ancient astronaut” theory. 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull put a new spin on this old tale, including, for good measure, the large-skulled aliens that pepper North American abduction stories. In 1968, Swiss author Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? introduced the mainstream to the theory that the Nazca Lines, the massive geoglyphs in Southern Peru whose shapes are fully visible only from the air, were landing strips for “ancient astronauts.” Archaeologists calmly disagree, positing that they were astronomical designs that turned the desert itself into an observatory, or counter constellations matching the dark spaces in the Milky Way, or, more abstractly, cosmological figures meant to be seen by skyward deities, of which ancient Peru had many. Peruvian archaeologists are tired of debunking claims of extraterrestrial influence on human history.
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