The Nazca “alien” mummies shown to Mexico's congress

What happened in Mexico's Congress

On September 12, 2023, Mexico's Chamber of Deputies held a hearing on what officials now call unidentified anomalous phenomena, and the Mexican journalist and self-described ufologist Jaime Maussan brought two small display cases into the chamber. Inside were two small, grayish bodies with three fingers on each hand and elongated heads. Maussan told lawmakers the specimens had been recovered in Peru, near the Nazca region, in 2017, and said they were roughly 1,000 years old. The presentation, and the photographs taken of it, drew a mix of intrigue and skepticism online, Reuters reported.

An earlier version of the same claim

The 2023 hearing was not Maussan's first attempt to present three-fingered, or tridactyl, bodies from Peru as evidence of a species outside terrestrial biology. He promoted similar specimens in 2017, and Peruvian prosecutors opened an investigation into them at the time. According to Smithsonian magazine, that inquiry concluded the 2017 figures were “recently manufactured dolls,” years before a nearly identical conclusion was reached about the specimens shown to Mexico's Congress. Smithsonian also noted that a separate body Maussan had promoted in 2015 was later shown to be human remains.

What Maussan told lawmakers

Speaking under oath, Maussan testified that the bodies were “non-human beings that are not part of our terrestrial evolution.” He told the hearing that researchers at Mexico's National Autonomous University, known as UNAM, had carbon-dated the remains to roughly 1,000 years old, and he said X-ray imaging had found what looked like eggs inside one of the specimens. In a separate statement reported by Reuters, Maussan said the specimens were “not related to any life on Earth.”

UNAM disputed the way its name was used. In a statement, the university said it had not been involved in collecting the samples in question and had drawn “no conclusions about the origin of these samples,” distancing its scientists from Maussan's account of what the dating work meant.

What the photos show, and what forensic scans found

The images that circulated after the hearing show pale, shrunken, humanoid figures with stiff limbs, oversized eye sockets, and three long fingers on each hand, a shape close to popular depictions of extraterrestrials. That resemblance is a large part of why the pictures spread so widely online.

When investigators in Peru later examined comparable figures directly, under laboratory conditions rather than on a hearing-room table, they found something different from preserved alien tissue. Forensic analysis showed the material was built from bone fragments, drawn from both animals and humans, shaped and bound together with modern synthetic adhesive to resemble a small body. The apparent “skin” was not tissue at all.

Peru's official explanation

That forensic conclusion came from Peru's Ministry of Culture and the national prosecutor's office, presented at a press conference in Lima on January 12, 2024. Forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada, of Peru's Institute of Legal Medicine, told reporters the figures were “not extraterrestrials, they are not intraterrestrials, they are not a new species, they are not hybrids,” and said the claims around them were the work of what he called “pseudo-scientists.”

The specimens Estrada's team examined had been seized by Peruvian customs the previous October, before they could be shipped out of the country. Estrada pointed out that ancient Peruvian societies had built Machu Picchu and the Nazca Lines themselves, with no need for outside help explaining their monuments.

Where scientists stand

Scientists who reviewed Maussan's presentation in Mexico City were unpersuaded. Antígona Segura, an astrobiologist, said of the claims, “these conclusions are simply not backed up by evidence,” calling the hearing “very shameful.” Julieta Fierro, of UNAM's Institute of Astronomy, was more direct: “Of course it was all made up.”

Neither scientist had taken part in producing or testing the specimens; both spoke out afterward, alongside UNAM's own statement, to separate mainstream Mexican science from Maussan's claims about what the remains actually proved, adding their voices to a wave of academic skepticism that met the hearing almost immediately.

Verdict

Mexico's Congress never declared the specimens shown on September 12, 2023, to be extraterrestrial; it heard one witness's sworn testimony and viewed the bodies without reaching any conclusion of its own. The forensic evidence gathered afterward points the other way entirely: examinations in Peru of figures from the same claimed finds, in 2017 and again in 2024, found constructed objects, doll-like assemblies of animal and human bone bound with modern glue, not the remains of a creature outside earthly biology. Real or Legend files the Nazca “alien” mummies as debunked.