Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know Short Stuff: Atacama Skeleton About this episode In 2003, a tiny – really, really tiny – humanoid skeleton surfaced that had been taken from Chile. The only possible explanation is that it had to be an alien mummy. Right?
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1:09 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. This is Short Stuff, which is off to a bad start already.
1:19 Speaker 03 That's right, and this is the story of the saddest skeleton.
1:22 Josh Clark? It is really sad.
1:25 Josh Clark? There's like five different reasons it's sad, but you can kind of understand a little bit why the skeleton would get so much attention. It's known as the Atacama Skeleton, and it was found in the desert of northern Chile, Atacama Desert, in an abandoned town called La Noria, back in 2003.
1:45 Speaker 03 That's right. It's little, very small, about six inches in length, or 15 centimeters, and it has a very interesting shape to the skull, very conically shaped, and also has only 10 pairs of ribs, wherein we usually have 12 pairs. And so, of course, right away, there were UFO people saying, "It's an alien. It's gotta be a tiny little alien."
2:10 Josh Clark? There's no other explanation.
2:11 Speaker 03 Yeah. Look at that thing. Other people said, "Hey, not so fast. Looks more like a non-human primate, maybe a shapeshifter. We don't know from what weird place this thing came from."
2:26 Speaker 03 That's just the beginning of the story. That's all. I don't want to ruin anything just yet.
2:30 Josh Clark? Yeah, the skeleton also is not fully skeletonized. Like, there's desiccated flesh attached to, tissue attached to it in some places too, including the face. And the reason why is because, like I said, it came from the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. That's one of the driest non-polar places on Earth. And it can mummify human remains pretty easily. It's between the Chilean coastal mountain range and the Andes. And the town of Lenoria, which is situated in the desert, was once a mining town, a nitrate mining town. I think Salpeter, actually.
3:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's right. God, you love saying Salpeter.
3:11 Josh Clark? Yeah. Why are you gonna say anything else when you can say Salpeter?
3:14 Speaker 03 Agreed. It uses a fertilizer a lot. So, they abandoned the town in 1930s, I guess, after they had mined up all that stuff. So, it's, you know, long way of saying it's a very good place to preserve skeletons there, and just naturally. But not only that, but the ancient Chinchuro culture there had a tradition of mummifying bodies on purpose through their embalming process. So, an even longer way of saying that finding something out there, it is, it is not unlikely that it would be pretty well-preserved.
3:50 Josh Clark? Yeah. And not, not the least of which because of the solar radiation there. Apparently, it's higher than anywhere on Earth. Not a lot of water. It's very hot in the day, very cold at night. It's, it's just, it's like, just a perfect place to make a mummy. And so, in 2003, the world first heard of the Atacama skeleton, thanks to a guy named Oscar Munoz, who's a treasure hunter, who said that he went to Lenoria and found, just sitting on a shelf in one of the buildings, the Atacama skeleton. And most other people say, "Oh, we don't think that you just found this thing on a shelf."
4:28 Speaker 03 Yeah. Most other people say he really dug this thing up from a burial site. So, that's sad thing number one. And no-no number one, is you're not just supposed to do that as a treasure hunter. That's not a treasure.
4:41 Speaker 03 Later on, that skeleton was sold to a guy named Ramon Navia Osorio. He was a Spanish business owner and a just collector of oddities. And also, it just so happens, a president of the Institute for Research and Exobiological Studies, which is a UFO enthusiast organization.
5:01 Josh Clark? Right. And so ufologists have like a fairly smallish community of people who will actually travel to conferences. So it's not a big surprise that Navia Osorio met up with a guy named Stephen M. Greer, who is a very prominent ufologist. I think he must have come up in our Area 51 episode because I recognize his name. But he is very outspoken about trying to get the US government to disclose all of the information they surely have on aliens, their awareness of aliens, what really crashed in Roswell, all of that stuff.
5:42 Josh Clark? And when Greer found out that Navia Osorio had the Atacama skeleton, he was like, we have to figure out what this thing is. Can I take a tissue sample?
5:52 Speaker 03 That's right. And that feels like a great place for a break. What a cliffhanger.
5:56 Josh Clark? Yeah.
5:57 Speaker 03 We'll be right back.
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8:51 Speaker 03 All right, so Stephen Greer has gotten in touch with Navaria Osorio and said, "Hey, I got a plan here. Let's get..."
9:01 Speaker 03 This, extract some DNA, have it examined for this documentary called Sirius, S I R I U S. It's inspired out of one of my books. We can figure out what this thing is, like, you know, hopefully, full bore and we can know for sure.
9:19 Josh Clark? Yeah, and I guess the Sirius got publicized enough that a guy named Gary Nolan, who's a microbiologist, he reached out to Stephen Greer and said, hey, I can help you run a genomic test on this thing for your movie Sirius. Let's do this. And Stephen Greer said, great, let's, I'm sure that was quite unexpected.
9:41 Speaker 03 Yeah. And another thing that was unexpected was they found that the DNA was, quote, "modern, abundant, and high quality, and is human, there's no doubt about it." So obviously, this was not an alien being. They published this research in March of 2018 in the journal Genome Research. And what they found is, you know, the second and probably most sad thing is that it was probably a little baby girl who died in the womb.
10:12 Josh Clark? Yeah, that she was almost certainly stillborn. If she was alive when she was born, she would not have lived very long. And they, like, if you haven't seen the autocomus skeleton, that's probably a good time to go look up a picture of her. But the reason she has such an unusual appearance is because they attribute it to the really disproportionate number of genetic mutations she has. You know, just one single genetic mutation can very easily alter a person's appearance. She had multiple genetic mutations and they have no idea why, but they're like, well, this explains basically everything.
10:54 Speaker 03 Yeah. And also, it seemed like it was...
10:59 Speaker 03 You know, I'm pretty sure that it's a preterm birth. She's very well preserved, so they're pretty sure that she's under 500 years old. And that's what I meant by fairly recent. But they said, they don't know, like, she could have died in the past, like, 30 or 40 years. And if that's true, then her parents might potentially still be around. And we have this situation where there could be parents. And even if there aren't, we have snatched this skeleton from a tomb of this little girl who died prematurely because of, you know, issues, like, birth issues. And it's like the saddest thing in the world.
11:35 Josh Clark? And not only that, people around the world are saying, like, alien, look at this, obviously, an alien.
11:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:41 Josh Clark? It's like, no, these are actually congenital genetic issues, not alien. So, yeah, you put all this stuff together, you just hope that the family is not aware of this. The thing that stood out to me, though, Chuck, if she died within, say, 40 years, that would put her in the, what, the 80s, the 70s? And the town where she was found, allegedly, Lenoria, was abandoned in the 30s. So I'm not sure what she would be doing there. But I did see in a lot of different places, they're like, she could have died quite recently.
12:12 Speaker 03 Right. Yeah. Well, it was such a sort of outrage after they found this out, when that paper was published in 2018, the Chilean Society of Biological Anthropology and the Chilean Association of Archaeologists both came out and were like, this was a really unethical study, shouldn't have done it. It's against the law, first of all. Under Chilean law, it's illegal to carry out archaeological, anthropological, or paleontological excavations without getting authorization from the Council of National Monuments, which wasn't done.
12:45 Josh Clark? That's a big one. They're also like, by the way, give us our remains back, that's repatriator. And then a lot of focus came on to Gary Nolan and his group for even running this test in the first place. And they, they essentially understood, they're like, you know, you're right, this, this whole, this whole jam is quite unethical. At least in our defense, we did not handle the body. We've never seen the body in person. We got a one millimeter, a cubic millimeter piece of bone to use as the sample. So at least there's that. And yes, we believe that, that this baby's remains should be repatriated back to Chile. So I don't, I don't, I don't know if they got all the heat off of them,
13:30 Josh Clark? but at the very least, they were willing to acknowledge the ethical lapse on their part, for sure.
13:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think that was a fairly stand up thing to do.
13:38 Josh Clark? But the body is not back in Chile. It's still in the possession of Ramon Navia Osorio in Spain.
13:46 Speaker 03 Oh, really?
13:47 Josh Clark? Yeah. He's got it still. I don't know that he's making any moves to give it back. And also I saw Stephen Greer disputes the findings that it was human. Anything else?
13:58 Speaker 03 Just a
14:01 Josh Clark? That was a scoff if I've ever heard one.
14:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:05 Josh Clark? All right. Love you, Chuck. Sure stuffs out.
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