I saw this article today which I know will be of interest to everyone except those who still give Steven Greer the time of day: “Alien-Looking Skeleton Poses Medical Mystery.” The short article is worth reading. The best part is the absolute confirmation, via DNA (including mitochondrial DNA), that the Atacama “alien” is human.
That’s right: human.
The only mystery is why the human corpse (a female) is so small, as scientific analysis is pointing to an age of 6 to 8 years old at death. If that analysis is correct, the corpse would of course not be a fetus as I suggested earlier. Given the anomalous nature of the specimen, I’m actually not quite ready to abandon the fetus view, but only because the anomalous nature might involve tampering with the specimen to produce anomalous results. That speculation is mine, and it is only a speculation. Unfortunately, as I have blogged at other times, citing other websites, Greer has a track record in in this sort of thing. Did he know *know* the specimen was anomalous, but human, and then milk the public for money after casting the specimen as proof of an extraterrestrial presence? If he didn’t know it was human, then that doesn’t say a lot for his research or ability to vet the project of inept researchers. So it’s either deception or incompetence.
More analysis should get to the bottom (presuming anyone in the real science community will care enough to spend the time and money on this boondoggle).
Some excerpts from the article (emphasis mine):
“While the jury is out regarding the mutations that cause the deformity, and there is a real discrepancy in how we account for the apparent age of the bones … every nucleotide I’ve been able to look at is human,” researcher Garry Nolan, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford School of Medicine, told LiveScience. “I’ve only scratched the surface in the analysis. But there is nothing that jumps out so far as to scream ‘nonhuman.’”
Nolan and his colleagues analyzed the specimen in the fall of 2012 with high-resolution photography, X-rays and computed tomography scans, as well as DNA sequencing. The researchers wanted to find out whether some rare disorder could explain the anomalous skeleton — for instance it had just 10 ribs as opposed to 12 in a healthy human — the age the organism died, as its size suggested a preterm fetus, stillborn or a deformed child, and whether it was human or perhaps a South American nonhuman primate.
