Scrunched up into a ball, María is a chalky humanoid with an egg-shaped head, long three-fingered hands and three-toed feet.
Emphasis on ‘humanoid’ here. To UFO researchers, María is likely a ‘mummified alien’ that had been buried underneath southern Peru for well over a millennium.
However, if you ask scientists, government officials and archaeologists, María is probably just your run-of-the-mill human mummy. Or a convoluted prank at best.
But the mystery over exactly what María is has only deepened after a group of American experts analysed her fingerprints – and they weren’t exactly ‘human’.
When María was unearthed in remote Nazca, she was caked in diatomaceous earth – a powdery material made from the fossilized remains of plankton.
Her fingers and some of her toes, however, poked through. And what Joshua McDowell, a former Colorado prosecutor, saw was striking.
‘These were not traditional human fingerprint patterns,’ he told MailOnline of his team’s preliminary findings.
‘María’s fingerprints weren’t consistent with human prints.’
It’s often said that no two fingerprints are exactly alike but they do tend to follow three basic patterns: loops, whorls and arches.
María’s aren’t any of those. Instead, her fingerprints are diagonal grooves.
As someone who now works as a criminal defence attorney, McDowell says he knows his way around the tiny ridges of a fingerprint.
McDowell stressed, however, that these groovy fingerprints aren’t conclusive evidence that María was a planet-hopping terrestrial.
‘It could possibly have something to do with the way her skin was preserved,’ he said. ‘It’s very odd.’
McDowell brought together a team of experts to analyse the remains in Peru last April, including a Denver coroner, a forensic anthropologist from Maryland’s State Medical Examiner and his father, John, a forensic odontologist.
Their investigation remains ongoing.
María is the largest of six ‘Nazca tridactyls’, mummified, three-fingered specimens dug up in Peru in 2017 that have baffled ufologists and officials alike.
She and three other specimens – Waita, Albert and Vicotisa – were first presented at a 2019 event at Peru’s San Luis Gonzaga National University of Ica (UNICA).
Jaime Maussan, a Mexico-based journalist who has speculated widely on aliens for decades, presented two of these ‘nonhuman beings’ to Mexico’s Congress last year.
Unlike María, these two were doll-like, with stretched-out bodies and shrunken or desiccated heads.
He explained to parliamentarians that researchers from the Institute of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico carbon-dated the remains to about 1,000 years old in 2017.
Though, the institution would stress researchers never examined the specimens, they only tested some skin samples provided by a ‘client’.
‘They were not recovered in ships that crashed, but they were buried in diatomaceous earth, a fossilized algae that is 17 million years old and was abundant at that time,’ Maussan added under oath.
‘Whether they are aliens or not, we don’t know, but they were intelligent and they lived with us. They should rewrite history.’
How Massuan acquired the tridactyls is unclear. Whether the ones he presented were reproductions, or, if not, how he hauled them from Peru to Mexico, is also unknown.
Analysis conducted by the Peruvian Attorney General’s Office suggested the corpses were ‘recently manufactured’ from human and animal bones, vegetable fibres and synthetic glue.
One of the small specimens appeared to have a broken llama braincase, a common animal in the region, experts found in 2021.
But what appeared to be the same remains Maussen presented to the Mexican Congress were detained by Peruvian customs in January, with the government’s forensic experts shrugging them off as ‘dolls’.
‘It’s totally a made-up story,’ Flavio Estrada, an archaeologist with Peru’s Institute for Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences said at a press conference.
This echoes what critics have said of the mummies, likely manipulated to give them an appearance not unlike the stereotypical ‘grey’ aliens.
Maussan claimed in March that cracking the mystery of the Nazca aliens will be tough.
Peruvian officials can only thoroughly analyse human DNA, the country’s Public Ministry explained to him in a letter after he submitted DNA samples.
But in a lengthy statement shared on X, Maussan said that 10 scientists from UNICA had concluded that the DNA of the figures was 29% ‘of origin that does not belong to the evolutionary chain of the Earth’.
More testing is needed ‘due to the unknown nature of said organisms’, he added.
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