Last week, two mummified, 1,000-year-old “alien corpses” were presented to Congress in Mexico, after having been unearthed in a Peruvian mine (apparently).

Jaime Maussan, the journalist and UFO enthusiast who unveiled the bodies, claimed that more than 30 per cent of their DNA is of unknown origin. “These specimens are not part of our evolutionary history on Earth,” he told the assembled audience of Mexican officials and representatives from the US. “They are not beings recovered from a UFO crash. Instead, they were found in diatom mines and subsequently became fossilised.”

Maussan has, admittedly, made similarly outlandish claims in the past, only to have them debunked: in 2017, five “alien mummies” he was involved in analysing turned out to be the remains of human children. Understandably, people were quick to denounce his latest discovery as a hoax, with prominent scientists like Professor Brian Cox arguing that the specimens are “far too humanoid” to be the real deal (in fairness to foxy Coxy, they do look a lot like a child’s drawing of an alien). 

This week, a team of scientists – headed up by Dr Jose de Jesus Zalce Benitez, who is a close associate of Maussan’s – attempted to settle the matter with a series of laboratory tests. In a show of transparency, journalists were invited to film the proceedings, but Benitez and Maussan have been criticised by NASA for refusing to share their data samples with the wider scientific community. Given they are essentially investigating their own credibility, it’s worth taking their findings with a pinch of salt.

In the past, “alien corpses” like these have typically been assembled from a mixture of human and animal bones, which may suggest a hoax. Following his experiments, Benitez claims that the specimens were not deliberately assembled and that each one belonged to a single skeleton, or in his words, “a complete organic being”. He also said that their studies indicate that one of the aliens was carrying eggs, pointing to the presence of lumps in its abdomen (until we see one of these eggs hatching and then bursting forth from the abdomen of a hapless research assistant, I’m withholding judgement). So, the scientists have “proven” their own claims, but they’re not exactly an unbiased or reliable source. Even if the specimens had not been assembled, the more likely explanation is still that they are some form of modified human remains.

The scientific community has so far not been impressed Maussan and Benitez’s laboratory antics, calling the results “unsubstantiated”, and urging a move away from “conjecture and conspiracy towards science and sanity”. This is reasonable… but also kind of boring? Couldn’t we set aside concepts like evidence, proof and critical analysis for a more noble goal, that of having a laugh? Unburdened by the scientific method, the rest of us are free to make up our own minds: if you want to believe that the alien corpses are real, you now have proof – kind of! 

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