Beginning in 2017, figures purported to be the mummified remains of “nonhuman beings” of possibly extraterrestrial origin began emerging from the Nazca region of Peru, appearing online and even in presentations before the Mexican Congress.
Are they really the remains of ancient aliens, though, or are they simply an elaborate hoax?
To get to the answer, we have to learn a little more about Nazca culture, and just where these supposed mummies are coming from…
What do these mummies have to do with the Nazca Lines?
Between 200 BCE and 800 CE, the Nazca culture flourished along Peru’s arid southern coast. They produced elaborate textiles and ceramics, and engaged in massive construction projects, including underground aqueducts for irrigation and the creation of the famous geoglyphs known as Nazca Lines. It is these latter for which the culture is best known today.
Covering acres of land, the combined length of all the Nazca Lines is more than 800 miles. While many are simple geometric patterns, others are elaborate pictographs, including 70 animal shapes such as monkeys, lizards, hummingbirds, spiders, and more.
They were created by scraping away the surface layer of soil and pebbles, which are coated with a reddish-brown ferric oxide, to reveal a more lightly colored soil beneath. The arid and stable climate of the plateau means that the lines have been naturally preserved for centuries.
The lines have also ensured that the Nazca culture would attain worldwide awareness, even in the modern day, while also leading inevitably to the kinds of “ancient aliens” associations that are so often laid at the feet of ancient human civilizations.
Of course, the Nazca Lines aren’t the only archaeological records we have of the Nazca culture.
What are Nazca mummies?
In the 1920s, the Chauchilla Cemetery was “rediscovered” around 20 miles from the city of Nazca in southern Peru, not far from the location of the Nazca Lines.
Though grave robbers had badly plundered the cemetery, it had not been used for interments since the 9th century, making it an important source of information about the Nazca culture. It was also home to many mummies.
The bodies in the Chauchilla Cemetery dated back hundreds of years, yet they had been remarkably preserved. This was partly due to the arid and stable climate of the region—the same one which preserves the Nazca Lines themselves—and partly due to Nazca burial practices, which are believed to have included coating the bodies in resin, which helped to keep out insects and bacteria.
Continuing the link in modern minds between Nazca culture and “ancient aliens,” a fictionalized version of the Chauchilla Cemetery acts as a location in the 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where it is located on a prominence overlooking the Nazca Lines and where a secret antechamber holds the eponymous crystal skull.
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Who found the Nazca mummies?
So, it should come as no surprise that, around 2017, Nazca mummies and “ancient aliens” once more became intertwined in the public consciousness.
Around that time, reports began to be shared online of mummified humanoid remains that had supposedly been found by “a group of ‘huaqueros,’ or archaeological treasure hunters,” who were well known in the area, according to LiveScience.
In many cases, these purported mummies were hunched into a traditional posture found in many South American mummies. They seemed to be coated with some kind of white plaster of paper mâché.
Though they appeared roughly humanoid, there were obvious differences, including that some seemed to have only three fingers on each hand. Naturally, the claims that these were alien life forms began almost immediately.
Unfortunately for the scientific community, the supposed mummies have largely been withheld from opportunities for peer-reviewed study, and the names associated with their discovery and publicity are… less than encouraging.
Mexican journalist Jose Jaime Maussan Flota has been active since the 1970s and was once placed on the United Nations Environment Programme’s annual Global 500 Roll of Honour.
Since then, however, he has also become embroiled in many claims that have been dismissed as hoaxes, including the “Metepec Creature” in 2007, which turned out to be the remains of a monkey, or hawking an untested “miracle cure” for COVID-19 called “Hydrotene.”
LiveScience stated that they could find out little about Konstantin Korotkov, the “lead researcher” studying the supposed alien mummies.
The Standard, meanwhile, reported that, “In 2008 Dr. Korotkov was widely criticized when he claimed to have created a camera that could photograph the human soul.”
Though photos and videos from the find made the rounds on social media and can still find believers in places such as Reddit, they were decried by the World Congress on Mummy Studies as “an irresponsible organized campaign of disinformation.”
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Are the Nazca mummies real?
None of this dissuaded Jaime Maussan, however, and in September of 2023, he unveiled two additional bodies that he said belonged to “nonhuman beings,” presenting them before the Mexican Congress as part of their first public hearing on UFOs.
According to various sources, all attributing this information to Maussan, the two doll-like bodies were found either in a diatom mine near Cusco, Peru, some 400 miles from Nazca, or “near the pre-Columbian Nazca Lines,” possibly around the same time as the earlier Nazca mummies of 2017.
They were tiny, around two feet in length, and, unlike most genuine mummies from the region, were stretched out horizontally, rather than hunched. And, according to Maussan, one of them had eggs inside its torso.
If the previous Nazca mummies had raised a stir online, these caused an uproar, especially since they were being presented before Mexico’s Congress itself.
“It is the most important thing that has happened to humanity,” Maussan told Reuters, from his office decorated with various alien and UFO paraphernalia.
He claimed that studies had shown the two bodies were more than 1,000 years old.
“Based on the DNA tests, which were compared with more than one million species,” Jose de Jesus Zalce Benitez, Director of the Health Sciences Research Institute of the Secretary of the Navy in Mexico told Reuters, “they are not related to what is known or described up to this moment by science or human knowledge.”
The Peruvian authorities, however, were less concerned with the origins of the supposed alien mummies than with how what were claimed to be pre-Columbian artifacts had made their way out of Peru in the first place.
So it was that customs officials in Peru seized two of the figures on their way to Mexico, subjecting them to an analysis led by forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada.
“They are not extraterrestrials,” Estrada told reporters, “they are not aliens.”
Instead of being from outer space, the bodies were made using bones of terrestrial animals, along with modern synthetic glues. It was a conclusion similar to what Peruvian prosecutors had determined years before, when they examined several of the supposed Nazca mummies found in 2017 and determined them to be “recently manufactured dolls, which have been covered with a mixture of paper and synthetic glue to simulate the presence of skin.”
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons
