‘Alien’ skeleton found to be human
Tiny creature found in Chilean desert had severe genetic mutations, analysis finds
Bay Area scientists have solved the mystery of the strange creature of Chile’s Atacama Desert, finding clues not in the stars, but in its bones.
The tiny creature — with teeth, a cone-shaped head, slanted eye sockets, dark scaly body and too few ribs — was long rumored to be a human-alien hybrid. Beloved by UFO hunters, it conjured up images of flying saucers, eerie vortexes and supreme artificial intelligence, even starring in a popular sci-fi documentary.
Alas for the so-called “humanoid,” a new analysis by Stanford and UC San Francisco debunks those theories.
“We’re not disproving the existence of aliens. But this is not one of them,” said Dr. Atul Butte, director of the Institute for Computational Health
Sciences at UC San Francisco.
The truth is far sadder, they found. The skeleton, no taller than a dollar bill, belongs to a human female, likely a fetus. She suffered from severe genetic mutations, which caused a rare, bone-aging disorder. She has only 10 pairs of ribs, not the normal 12 pairs. Their discoveries are published in the March 22 issue of Genome Research.
She is not thousands of years old, as had been speculated, but only about 40 years old.
After her death, her family — no doubt bewildered and grieving — buried her near a Catholic church in the ghost town of La Noria in the high desert of northern Chile, an inhospitable place with an extreme, hostile climate. But the church is now abandoned. The town is deserted as well.
But in 2003, she was dug up.
She was excavated by a local man who was scavenging the dirt for valuable objects. Shoveling, he tossed dirt into a large sieve — and saw an object roll toward the bottom.
She was found wrapped in fabric, secured by a purple ribbon.
She was reportedly sold to a local pub owner for about $64. Then she changed hands again, and again, eventually ending up in the possession of Barcelona entrepreneur Ramon Navia-Osorio, who heads a UFO organization, the Institute for Exobiological Investigation and Study.
Word spread, and the ghost town became known as the site of the “Atacama humanoids,” where aliens would visit and the cemetery’s dead would awaken from their graves at night.
Garry Nolan, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford, heard about the skeleton through a friend, and studied its photograph.
“You can’t look at this specimen and not think it’s interesting; it’s quite dramatic,” he said in a statement. “So I told my friend, ‘Look, whatever it is, if it’s
got DNA, I can do the analysis.’ ”
With the help of Dr. Ralph Lachman, a professor of radiology at Stanford and an expert in a type of pediatric bone disease, Nolan set the record straight.
But what caused her gruesome deformities?
Nolan turned to Butte and UCSF bioinformatics researcher Sanchita Bhattacharya for help. In a fiveyear project, they extracted a small DNA sample from her ribs, sequenced her entire genome, and pinpointed the mutations responsible for her death.
“We started with curiosity,” said Butte, “then took it as far as we could.”
They relied on the Human Phenotype Ontology, a database that links genomic data to the abnormal phenotypes found in human disease, everything from atrial septal defect, or a hole in the chambers of the heart, to musculoskeletal abnormalities.
What they found was odd and unusual: Her mutations are not in just one but seven different genes known to govern bone development. They contribute to various bone deformities, facial malformations or skeletal dysplasia, more commonly known as dwarfism. Some of these oddities have never been described before.
Her genome identifies her as South American, with genetic variations that pinpoint her heritage in the Andean region inhabited by the Chilean Chilote Indians.
Modern genetics makes it possible to diagnosis a decades-old condition, Butte said.
“Look how far and how fast this field has moved. One year ago, you’d need 500 kids or adults with some strange disease to call it a ‘syndrome.’ Now we have the genetics of a 50-year-old sample and we can identify it,” he said.
Her home is planet Earth, scientists say. And that is where she should be returned, Nolan said.
“We now know that it’s a child,” he said. “I think it should be returned to the country of origin and buried according to the customs of the local people.”