They Built Fake Aliens Out of Ancient Bones—And Accidentally Exposed a Real Grave-Robbing Ring

“Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commissions or revenue from certain merchandise through these links.”

As you read this story, you will learn the following:

The illegal smuggling of ancient antiquities is a worldwide problem, but a high-profile case in Peru illustrates this shady operation in practice.
A doll made of human remains originally discovered in Peru’s Nazca region was dubbed an “alien” during a September 2023 session of Mexico’s Congress.
While the hoax was quickly exposed, the incident did raise the question of how these precious artifacts left Peru in the first place.

For every legitimate researcher trying their best to find evidence of alien life somewhere in the vast universe, there seem to be twice as many scammers trying to convince the world that aliens are already among us. The men in the tinfoil hats will stop at nothing to convince the world that they have found the evidence of a lifetime, including engaging in a bizarre, frenzied way of robbing a Peruvian cave discovered in the Nazca region. The Nazca region is famous for its “Lines,” another ancient wonder filled with alien conspiracies.

Like the contents of these caves near Cusco, Peru, the story begins in a strange way. In September 2023, Mexican journalist and UFO enthusiast Jaime Maussan claimed to have “alien” corpses and began displaying them before mexican congress. then, sky news According to the report, Mosan swore that “these specimens are not part of our planet’s evolutionary history… They are not organisms discovered from UFO crashes. Instead, they were discovered in diatom (algae) mines and subsequently turned into fossils.”

Of course, this is not Moissan’s The First Alien Conspiracy Rodeoexperts quickly debunked these otherworldly claims with more realistic evidence.

“They are not aliens. They are dolls made from animal bones from this planet glued together with modern synthetic glue,” Flavio Estrada, an archaeologist at Peru’s Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Medicine, told a news conference in Lima. “This is a completely made-up story.”

While the alien part of this archaeological equation is fabricated, the Peruvian artifacts that were somehow looted and exported abroad were very true.

Leandro Rivera, the man in the cave where the body was originally found, tells us Reuters He stumbled upon the site and retrieved approximately 200 sets of remains from the cave, which were later smuggled around the world.

Peru’s Nazca region is an archaeological hotspot because its salt flats have done wonders in preserving human remains. But this also makes it a target for tomb robbers eager for quick success.

Evelyn Centurion, head of cultural heritage restoration at the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, said in an interview with the media: “The looting has not stopped.” Reuters 2024. “We need greater collaboration between local government and local authorities to prevent these illegal behaviours.”

According to archaeologists, online black markets have enabled a booming business in tomb robbing, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the problem. While the looting of antiquities across South America is likely to continue, Peru is setting up a task force to hunt down looters and increase penalties.

It turns out that an otherworldly hoax reveals a very real problem.