Mexico's 'Alien Mummies' Presented to Congress, 2023: A Hearing, Two Small Bodies, and a Swift Scientific Rebuttal

About 5 min read

On 12 September 2023, the Chamber of Deputies of Mexico held its first public hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena — and within hours it was known around the world for one image: two small, grey, three-fingered bodies in display cases, laid out before legislators under the congressional seal. The man who presented them, Mexican journalist and ufologist Jaime Maussan, said under oath that the specimens were not part of “our terrestrial evolution” and that humanity was not alone.

The hearing was real, and the bodies were real objects. But the claim that they were non-human beings was not supported by the institutions Maussan cited, and Peruvian forensic experts have since concluded that similar figures are dolls assembled from Earthly bones and modern glue. This article reports what happened, what was claimed, and what the scientific response actually was.

Table of Contents

The hearing

The hearing was convened by deputies interested in aviation safety and airspace regulation, six weeks after the United States Congress held its own headline UAP hearing in July 2023. Its stated purpose was reform of Mexico’s airspace-protection law, including provisions formally acknowledging anomalous phenomena in Mexican skies. It was the first time Mexico’s Congress had officially addressed the subject.

Maussan, for four decades Mexico’s most famous UFO promoter and host of the long-running programme Tercer Milenio, was the hearing’s centrepiece. He arrived with two small display cases holding desiccated, greyish bodies with elongated heads and three fingers on each hand. He told the deputies they had been recovered from a diatom mine near Cusco, Peru, close to the Nazca Lines, in 2017, and were believed to be more than 1,000 years old. He said carbon dating had been done by Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM), and claimed its scientists had concluded the corpses were not part of “our terrestrial evolution” and that almost a third of their DNA was of “unknown origin”.

Other speakers included José de Jesús Zalce Benítez, director of the Scientific Institute for Health of the Mexican navy, who said examinations including X-rays, 3-D reconstruction and DNA analysis had been conducted, and asserted the bodies bore no resemblance to human beings. Doctors testified the bodies were those of previously living organisms, presenting them as “potential evidence of non-human life forms” — while declining to certify them as extraterrestrial.

The response: UNAM and the scientists

The scientific response arrived almost as fast as the images. UNAM republished a statement first issued in 2017, specifying that its National Laboratory of Mass Spectrometry with Accelerators (LEMA) had only been asked to determine the age of a sample by carbon-14 testing, and had made no conclusion about its origin or performed any other testing. UNAM physics researcher Julieta Fierro said the university had never endorsed Maussan’s claims and that his data “made no sense”.

The specimens were not new. Similar three-fingered “mummies” had surfaced in Peru in 2017, promoted by Maussan in a video hosted by Gaia, Inc., and a Peruvian prosecutor’s office report that year had already called supposed alien bodies promoted by Maussan “recently manufactured dolls, which have been covered with a mixture of paper and synthetic glue to simulate the presence of skin”. Wired reported the “mummies” were believed to be “an elaborate hoax made of human and animal bones”.

The second hearing, and the Peruvian examination

On 7 November 2023, Maussan held a second presentation at the Mexican Congress on “three-fingered Peruvian mummies”, again claiming they were “not related to any life on Earth”. It included testimony from doctors and anthropologist Roger Zuniga, who stated there had been “absolutely no human intervention in the physical and biological formation of these beings”. Once again, no speaker certified the remains as extraterrestrial.

The decisive examination came from Peru. On 12 January 2024, Peru’s prosecutor’s office and Ministry of Culture held a press conference in Lima, where forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada presented an analysis by the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences. Two doll-like figures and a three-fingered hand, seized by customs in October 2023 from a shipment bound for Mexico, had been examined by X-ray and laboratory study. Estrada’s conclusion was categorical: “They are not extraterrestrials, they are not aliens. They are dolls made from animal bones from this planet, joined together with modern synthetic glue.” The objects were made of paper, glue, metal, and human and animal bones — including birds and dogs — and “were not assembled during pre-Hispanic times”. The ministry stressed the seized dolls had no direct relationship with the bodies presented in Mexico, but Estrada added of the wider claims that the figures were “not extraterrestrials, they are not intraterrestrials, they are not a new species, they are not hybrids, they are none of those things”.

No analysis meeting scientific standards has ever supported a non-human origin for any of the “Nazca mummy” specimens. The airspace-law reform the hearing was convened to promote did not pass.

Why the episode matters

NASA’s UAP study team, whose report appeared the same week, was asked about the Mexican bodies and declined to endorse them: science is done with open data, not exhibits. That remains the fairest summary — the hearing happened, the claim was made, and the evidence did not survive independent scrutiny.

What the evidence says

Documented: On 12 September 2023, Jaime Maussan presented two small, three-fingered bodies to a public hearing of Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies, claiming they were found near Nazca, Peru, in 2017, were about 1,000 years old, and were not part of “our terrestrial evolution”.
Documented: UNAM republished its 2017 statement that its laboratory had only determined the age of a sample by carbon-14 testing and had made no conclusion about its origin; UNAM researcher Julieta Fierro said the university never endorsed Maussan’s claims.
Documented: A 2017 Peruvian prosecutor’s office report had already described similar supposed alien bodies promoted by Maussan as “recently manufactured dolls” covered with paper and synthetic glue to simulate skin.
Documented: On 12 January 2024, Peruvian forensic experts, led by Flavio Estrada, concluded that two seized doll-like figures and a three-fingered hand were dolls assembled from human and animal bones, paper, metal and modern synthetic glue, and were not extraterrestrial.
Claimed, not proven: Maussan’s claims that the bodies’ DNA was almost a third of “unknown origin”, that they were “not related to any life on Earth”, and that scans showed eggs and metallic implants. These claims were made by Maussan and his supporters, not by an independent peer-reviewed study.
Disputed: Whether the specimens presented in Mexico are the same objects as those examined in Peru. The Peruvian ministry stressed the seized dolls had no direct relationship with the bodies presented in Mexico, so the January 2024 finding does not, by itself, identify the Mexico specimens — though no independent analysis has supported a non-human origin for them either.

What remains unknown

The full chain of custody of the bodies shown in Mexico — who found them, where exactly, and who handled them between 2017 and 2023 — has not been established by an independent investigation, and the specimens have not been made available for the open, peer-reviewed examination that could settle the question. Until they are, the honest status of the claim is: presented in Congress, not endorsed by the institution cited, and contradicted by the forensic examination of closely similar specimens. That is not proof of a hoax in the Mexico specimens specifically — it is the absence of proof for the claim, and a strong reason not to present it as fact.

Mexico’s ‘Alien Mummies’ Presented to Congress, 2023: A Hearing, Two Small Bodies, and a Swift Scientific Rebuttal