Major breakthrough with Peru ‘alien mummies’ as fingerprints are ‘not human’ | World | News
Unusual diagonal fingerprint and footprint grooves on one of Peru’s bizarre and hotly debated “alien mummies” have been attributed to non-human origins.
A former Colorado prosecutor and current defence attorney, Joshua McDowell, examined one of the over half-a-dozen specimens along with three independent US forensic medical examiners.
Speaking to MailOnline, he said: “These were not traditional human fingerprint patterns.” He added that they did not see “any loops or whorls” – two of the three broad types of fingerprint – on the fingers or toes.
According to the US Department of Justice’s Fingerprint Sourcebook, the use of fingerprints – also known as friction ridge skin impressions – date back to around 300 BC in China.
“Maria”, the so-called “alien” mummy that McDowell examined, appeared to have fingerprints that do not match any known human pattern. Maria first debuted in November 2019, alongside three others, “Wawita”, “Albert” and “Victoria”.
“Much of her body is covered in diatomaceous earth”, McDowell explained – white powdery aquatic fossils left behind by diatom plankton – “however on the fingers that were exposed, the epidermal ridges I saw appeared to be in mostly straight lines”.
He warned, however, that it was too soon to make any definitive statements and there may be a terrestrial explanation for the unusual skin pattern, including “the way her skin was preserved”. McDowell did admit though that the situation was “very odd”.
He emphasised that his teams’ efforts to identify the true nature of the specimens was very much still active, spending several hours a day on the case.
In September, the prolific UFO researcher Jaime Maussan first presented two alleged “alien” corpses to Mexico’s congress. The collection has been dubbed “the Nazca mummies”, after the province in southwestern Peru where the bodies were allegedly found.
They gained worldwide fame due to their extraterrestrial-looking elongated heads and three-fingered hands. One of his latest ideas is that the mummies may be alien-human “hybrids”, with his colleagues declaring that some specimens contain 30 percent unknown DNA.
Peruvian archaeologists also claimed that one of the mummies appears to be pregnant. Maussan carried out initial X-ray and ultrasound scans on the bodies in March this year.
Since their discovery, Maussan and his team have been embroiled in bitter clashes with Peru’s Ministry of Culture, who described the mummies as man-made hoaxes.
In January, Flavio Estrada, a forensic archaeologist of the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of Lima of the Public Ministry, told a press conference that two of the alien bodies seized by Peruvian customs were “dolls”, assembled with animal bones with “modern synthetic glues”.
Similarly, Latin American historian Christopher Heaney noted that several Latin American regions, including Peru, have a rich tradition of head-binding and head-shaping practices on infants’ developing skulls.
