Audience with ‘alien bodies’ is the target of criticism – 09/14/2023 – Science

A hearing on UFOs in Mexico’s Congress, which featured the presentation of supposed remains of non-human beings, triggered a rapid international reaction this Thursday (14). Critics labeled it a “coup.”

Mexican journalist and longtime UFO enthusiast Jaime Maussan showed politicians at Tuesday’s hearing two small “bodies” displayed in boxes, with three fingers on each hand and elongated heads. . He stated that they were found in Peru in 2017 and were not related to any life on Earth.

Images of the congressional hearing, the first of its kind in Mexico, aroused international curiosity as well as substantial derision.

Former US Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who also attended the hearing to share his personal experience with sightings of “unidentified anomalous phenomena” — or UAP, for its acronym in English — criticized the presentation.

“Yesterday’s presentation [terça] was a huge step backwards on this issue,” Graves said on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “I am deeply disappointed in this baseless scam.”

Graves attended U.S. Congressional hearings on UFOs in July, when he said that sightings of unexplained phenomena in airspace were “grossly underreported.”

Maussan said in the presentation that the specimens were recovered near the ancient Nazca Lines in Peru and were carbon dated by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam), which concluded that they were about a thousand years old. He said they were not related to any species on Earth.

Similar discoveries in the past later turned out to be the remains of mummified children.

Peru’s Culture Minister Leslie Urteaga said no scientific institution in the South American country identified the remains as non-human and questioned how the specimens left Peru.

“There is a criminal complaint from the Ministry of Culture against some people who had a relationship with these gentlemen,” Urteaga told journalists on Wednesday night (13), referring to Maussan and his associates.

“I will ask for information to see what happened… regarding the removal of pre-Hispanic objects, because I understand that they are part of pre-Hispanic skeletal remains,” he added.

Maussan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Unam, in a statement republished Wednesday and first issued in 2017, said that the work of its National Laboratory of Mass Spectrometry with Accelerators (Lema) was only intended to determine the age of the samples.

The university declined a Reuters request to see the full results of the study or interview the researchers who participated. Furthermore, he declined to say how old his study concluded the samples were.

Joey Roulette, from Washington, and Marco Aquino, from Lima, collaborated