The Nazca Mummies and the Modern Grift

In September 2023 two small white boxes were carried into the chamber of the Mexican Congress and opened before the legislators. Inside lay two humanoid figures, greyish and desiccated, with elongated heads, three long fingers on each hand, and three toes on each foot. The man who presented them, the journalist Jaime Maussan, swore under oath that they were “non-human beings” not related to any species on Earth, roughly a thousand years old, recovered near the Nazca lines of Peru. Photographs of the boxes went round the world within hours. For a day or two, a national legislature had seemingly entertained the possibility that it was looking at aliens.

It was one of the strangest spectacles the world of the paranormal has produced, and the strangeness is worth unpicking slowly, because underneath the theatre lies something genuinely remarkable — and something genuinely sad. The figures in the boxes were assembled from real human beings. To understand the grift you have to first understand the real archaeology it feeds on, which is far more interesting than the fiction, and to see where the one becomes the other.

The real Peru

The desert of southern Peru is one of the great mummy landscapes of the world, and it makes mummies without anyone intending it. The coastal strip is among the driest places on Earth; a body buried in that sand loses its moisture so fast that decay barely begins, and the tissue, hair, and wrappings can survive for well over a thousand years. Long before the Egyptians, the Chinchorro people of the far south were deliberately mummifying their dead as early as 5000 BC, the oldest known artificial mummification anywhere. Later cultures — the Paracas, the Nazca, and others — left vast cemeteries of bundled, seated mummies, wrapped in exquisite textiles and preserved by the climate.

The Nazca themselves, who flourished roughly between 100 BC and AD 800 on the same plains where their ancestors and neighbours scraped the famous ground drawings that later became a magnet for ancient-astronaut theories, buried their dead in the dry ground in numbers. Those graves have been plundered for centuries. A whole informal economy of huaqueros, grave-robbers, works the Peruvian desert, digging up mummies and grave goods to sell on the black market. The looting is a real and destructive trade, and it is the supply chain on which the alien-mummy business quietly runs. Every “non-human” body that has appeared in this saga began as a looted ancient grave.

The skulls that really are elongated

There is a second strand of authentic strangeness the grift exploits: the heads. Many Paracas and Andean mummies have dramatically elongated skulls, long and swept back in a way that looks, to an untrained eye, frankly alien. This is completely real, and completely explained. It is artificial cranial deformation, a practice found across many ancient cultures, in which an infant’s soft skull is bound with boards, pads, or cloth so that as it grows it lengthens into a shape the society considered beautiful or high-status. The bones are reshaped by pressure alone, with nothing added; the sutures, volume, and features remain human. Museums in Peru display hundreds of these skulls, and their cause has been understood for well over a century.

The elongated skulls became a fixture of the fringe through the so-called “Paracas skulls” episode, in which claims circulated that DNA analysis had shown the skulls to be non-human or of unknown ancestry. The samples were handled and interpreted in ways no genetics laboratory would endorse, and where proper analysis has been done, the DNA is human. But the appearance of the skulls is arresting enough that a photograph does most of the persuading before any test is mentioned. The kernel is real: the heads are genuinely elongated, genuinely ancient, genuinely odd to look at. The fork is the leap from “shaped by human hands for human reasons” to “shaped by non-human biology”.

The man with the boxes

Jaime Maussan, the Mexican broadcaster at the centre of the 2023 hearing, did not arrive without a history. For decades he has been among the most prolific promoters of alien and paranormal claims in the Spanish-speaking world, and a striking number of them have collapsed. The most instructive was the 2015 affair of the “Roswell slides”, two old Kodachrome slides that Maussan and collaborators unveiled at a sold-out event in Mexico City as photographs of a genuine alien body recovered in 1947. Within days, online researchers had read the placard visible in the blurry image — enhanced and deciphered by amateurs — and established that the “alien” was a mummified human child, most likely a Native American boy, photographed in a museum. The reveal was swift and total, and it did nothing to slow him down.

The tridactyl mummies followed a similar arc. They first surfaced around 2017, promoted heavily through the streaming platform Gaia, which specialises in paranormal and alternative content and had an obvious commercial stake in the story. From the start, credentialed scientists who examined the figures or their scans reported the same thing: these were composites, assembled from the bones and tissue of several different real creatures. Peruvian authorities, whose national heritage was being dug up and dismembered to make them, took a dim view.

The costume of science

What lifts the modern grift above a simple carnival fake is the wardrobe of scientific respectability it puts on. The reveals came dressed with radiocarbon dates, DNA percentages, X-ray images, and men in lab coats speaking of anomalies. The dates were, in a sense, real: radiocarbon testing of the material returned ages of around a thousand years, which is true, because the material is genuinely ancient looted mummy. An old date on the tissue says nothing about whether the tissue was recently rearranged into a new shape. The dating was accurate and the conclusion drawn from it was a sleight of hand.

The DNA claims worked the same way. Announcements that a large share of the genome was “unknown” or “did not match any known species” rested on degraded, contaminated samples analysed outside any peer-reviewed process, where unmatched sequence is the ordinary result of poor data rather than a sign of a new life form. Where independent geneticists have looked, the human sequence is human. The presentations also leaned on flourishes designed to sound technical — implanted metal said to contain osmium, “eggs” visible inside the bodies, unusual bone density — each offered as a marvel and each consistent with a fabricated object built from mixed organic and mineral material and pieces of ancient remains. The point of the apparatus was never to test the claim; it was to give an audience the feeling that the claim had been tested, which is a very different and much cheaper thing to supply.

Where the record forks

The forensic verdict, arrived at repeatedly and independently, is unambiguous, and it is grimmer than the fantasy. The Nazca “mummies” are constructions built from genuine ancient human remains — looted Peruvian mummies — taken apart and reassembled into a new, false anatomy. CT scans showed bones held together with glue and metal fasteners. The three-fingered hands were made by removing the little and index fingers, or by using elongated bones from other body parts, so that a normal five-fingered human hand became a three-fingered “alien” one. The elongated heads were the real deformed skulls of the culture. Some figures incorporated animal bones and were packed with a paste, sometimes containing diatomaceous earth, to give bulk and hide the joins.

In November 2023 Peru’s public prosecutor’s office and its forensic and archaeological experts stated plainly that the bodies were “recently manufactured dolls” covered with a mix of paper, glue, metal, and human and animal remains, fabricated from looted pre-Hispanic material — not extraterrestrial and not a single unknown species. A Peruvian anthropologist working with the authorities described the trade bluntly: real ancient graves are being destroyed to manufacture fakes for profit.

This is the exact seam the kernel model is built to find. The bodies are genuinely old, genuinely mysterious-looking, genuinely from Nazca — every part of that is true, and it is what lets the claim survive a first glance. The departure from the record is precise and locatable: it is the moment a real ancient mummy, and the fingers and skull of a real ancient person, are cut apart and glued into a shape that person never had, and the composite is then presented as a being from another world.

An old trade in a new costume

None of the machinery here is new. The manufacture of a marvellous body from stitched-together real parts is one of the oldest tricks in the showman’s book. P. T. Barnum drew crowds in the 1840s with the Fiji mermaid, a monkey’s torso sewn to a fish’s tail and displayed as a genuine creature. The Cardiff Giant of 1869 was a carved gypsum figure buried and “discovered” as a petrified man, and drew paying thousands even after it was exposed. The Piltdown Man fooled science itself for forty years with a human skull married to an orangutan’s jaw. In each case the power of the fake came from its authentic components — real bone, real craftsmanship — which gave the object a physical solidity that a drawing or a story never could. You could stand in front of it. It was there.

What is new is the distribution and the money. The Nazca mummies live on a streaming subscription service, in ticketed reveals, in books and documentaries and a congressional appearance engineered for the cameras. The 2023 hearing was, above all, an act of promotion, lending the borrowed dignity of a legislature to material that had already been debunked, and buying it a fresh cycle of global headlines. The grift has an engine: attention converts to subscriptions, tickets, and sales, and each new “reveal” refuels it, regardless of how thoroughly the last one was demolished.

The lineage it belongs to

The Nazca mummies are the latest inhabitants of a story the twentieth century had already furnished. The idea that ancient peoples were visited, taught, or fathered by beings from the sky runs from the mid-century paperbacks of the ancient-astronaut movement straight through to Gaia’s streaming catalogue, and it had prepared an audience primed to read any strange old bone as a relic of contact. The Roswell legend, which grew from a recovered weather balloon into a crashed saucer with alien crew, supplied the master image of the small grey body on a table, examined by officials — the very tableau the Mexican Congress unknowingly restaged. When Maussan opened his boxes, he was handing a waiting audience a physical prop for a picture they had carried in their heads for seventy years, which is why it needed so little argument to land.

Why the boxes still draw a crowd

It would be too easy to end on scorn for the people who leaned forward when the lids came off. The pull is old and human. The genuine archaeology of the Peruvian desert is astonishing — bodies older than the pyramids, skulls reshaped by hand for reasons we can only partly reconstruct, a civilisation that drew enormous figures in the ground and buried its dead beneath one of the driest skies on Earth. Standing among that, a person can feel the nearness of something vast and not fully known, and the wish for the mystery to be even bigger — for the strange skull to mean visitors rather than customs, for the desert to hold someone else’s forgotten dead alongside our own — is a wish for the world to be more wondrous than the catalogue says.

That the same impulse animated the men who dug up the real graves is the tragedy folded inside the farce. To make the aliens, someone had to destroy the actual dead of Nazca — the genuine, irreplaceable ancestors of living Peruvians — cutting their hands and stealing their skulls to build a marvel that would sell. The authentic thing was sacrificed to manufacture the counterfeit. Understanding that is where the story properly lands: the hunger for wonder is real and worth honouring, and it was turned, by people who knew exactly what they were doing, into a machine that grinds up the very past that might have satisfied it honestly.