cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5016160

Two words = Fraud >> Jaime Maussan

From the article:

Maussan is a Mexican journalist and UFOlogist who has nearly 1 million subscribers to his “MaussanTV” YouTube, which he calls “the number 1 channel in the world in investigating the UFO phenomenon, science, technology, and the investigation of space and climate change.”

I regret to inform you that this is not the first time Maussan has rolled out “humanoid” mummies from Nazca, and it’s not even the first time he’s done so in front of a country’s legislature. In 2017, Maussan and Gaia, a streaming service that offers “consciousness-expanding videos,” published a video called “Special Report: Unearthing Nazca.” In that video, Maussan and Gaia show an alien-looking mummy that appears to be larger than the ones he showed Tuesday in Mexico. That kicked off a recurring frenzy in the UFOlogy world. In 2018, Maussan gave a very similar presentation to the one he gave Tuesday to the Peruvian Congress during a four-hour hearing called “Mummies of Nazca.” In a History Channel series called “The Mummies of Nazca,” Maussan showed what appear to be the same mummies he showed Tuesday, and a 2019 documentary called Alien Mummies of Peru also followed many of these same mummies.

This is all to say that Maussan and his mummies are a pretty known entity in the world of UFOlogy. In 2018, Live Science published a debunking in which several scientists suggested that the mummies appeared to be made up of manipulated human bones, a finding that was also published by the YouTube channel Scientists Against Myths. In 2017, the Atlantic did a deep dive about why “Peruvian archaeologists are tired of debunking claims of extraterrestrial influence on human history” and how “pre-Columbian bodies are once again being used as evidence for extraterrestrial life.”

Jason Colavito has been following Maussan for years and posts about the recent claims:

Longtime UFO huckster Jaime Maussan showed the Mexican Congress two alleged “fossilized” alien bodies whose “DNA” was one-third “unidentified” in a presentation attended by Mexican and U.S. officials. Maussan claimed the bodies had been recovered near Cusco, Peru and had been carbon-dated to at least 700 years ago. They looked very much like crude clay sculptures of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., and an x-ray showed small bones embedded within them. (Previous, similar fakes were made from the bones of human fetuses and/or animals, some looted from graves.) The bodies were first publicized in 2017. At the time, the World Congress on Mummy Studies declared them a fraud.