Aliens have been having a moment in the U.S. There have been periodic flare-ups in interest since World War II, with a notable peak achieved in the late 1960s amid a spate of high-profile UFO sightings (one in Hillsdale, Mich.). Recent revelations about government knowledge of — and encounters with — objects we are now for some reason calling “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAPs) instead of the classic UFOs have fed into the latest frenzy. Congress has held hearings, and a whistleblower testified earlier this year about alleged government possession of crashed craft.
Now our southern neighbor has decided to get in on the fun. And things got a little more exciting in what was Mexico’s first congressional hearing on UAPs: A witness presented what he claimed, under oath, were alien bodies. Per Fox News:
What were alleged to be 1,000-year-old “non-human alien corpses” were presented in glass display cases before the Mexican Congress on Tuesday during its first hearing on UFOs.
“They are non-human beings that are not part of our terrestrial evolution,” Mexican journalist and ufologist Jaime Maussan testified under oath.
As two small, mummified specimens — seen with three fingers on each hand — were unveiled, Maussan said researchers at the Autonomous National University of Mexico have conducted Carbon 14 analysis that determined the corpses are around 1,000 years old.
He claimed the purported bodies were found fossilized in mines in Cusco, Peru, in a layer of diatomaceous earth, or ancient phytoplankton algae.
As a longtime UFO enthusiast, I would surely be delighted by this story, you might think: Right in the legislative chambers of a major nation was proof of alien life! Not so. I know this field’s history and thus was immediately reminded of the Roswell “alien autopsy” hoax of the 1990s. To recap: Two enterprising filmmakers released footage, broadcast on Fox, that they claimed depicted an actual autopsy of aliens from a Roswell crash. They later admitted the footage was fake but based on a real film they had seen but that had deteriorated, making their project a “restoration,” a la the reconstruction of a painting. Uh-huh. Sure.
Images of the supposed bodies presented to Mexico’s Congress took me even further back into the history of weirdness (with which I am well acquainted). They strongly resemble P. T. Barnum’s “Fiji mermaid,” actually a monkey torso sewn to a fish tail. (Incidentally, about a decade ago Animal Planet aired a documentary strongly implying the existence of mermaids, to record ratings for the channel.)
As it happens, Maussan may be a natural fit for this particular aspect of paranormal history:
The Independent noted that Maussan, an investigative journalist who has been researching extraterrestrial phenomenon for decades, has been connected to previous claims of debunked alien discoveries, including five mummies discovered in Peru in 2017 later determined to be remains of human children.
So I don’t put much stock in this revelation. And in fact, I get annoyed when sensationalism and hokum intrude, as they inevitably do, on a topic that deserves serious inquiry. This sort of thing gets attention for a reason. The question of whether man is alone in the universe is one of the most important left for mankind to answer. The truth may indeed be out there. But, on this occasion, I don’t think it’s in Mexico.