Debunked cases — Mexico
Debunked cases — Mexico. 4 places in the catalogue, each with coordinates, the story behind it and a danger level from white to black.
The Acámbaro Figures
In 1945 the German dealer Waldemar Julsrud began buying clay figures at Acámbaro in Mexico, dug up on the Bujares hill by a local farmer, Odilón Tinajero. Some thirty-three thousand accumulated over the years, dinosaurs among them, standing beside people. The archaeologist Charles Di Peso of the Amerind Foundation excavated the site and found the figures lying in disturbed ground with no patina of age and fresh unoxidised breaks, some still carrying file marks. In 1969 thermoluminescence testing at the Pennsylvania museum returned modern dates, and the laboratory formally withdrew its earlier results, which had been taken without allowing for the firing.
Copper Canyon and the Starchild Skull
A skull with a disproportionately large braincase and almost no occipital relief was found around 1930 in a mine tunnel near Copper Canyon in Chihuahua. From 1999 the author Lloyd Pye promoted it as the Starchild, evidence of a human-alien hybrid. DNA testing in 1999 and 2003 returned human mitochondrial and nuclear sequence including a Y chromosome: a boy, with human parents on both sides. The shape of the skull is consistent with congenital hydrocephalus, which in a child of about five produces exactly this deformation.
Metepec and the Ranch Alien
In 2007 the Mexican television presenter Jaime Maussan exhibited the body of a tiny creature said to have been caught alive in a trap on a ranch near Metepec in 2005 and drowned in a water tank. According to Maussan the ranchers wanted a fortune for it. The testing that the promoters themselves reported produced an answer nobody had ordered: a skinned primate — a squirrel monkey or a marmoset — with the jaw bones removed and the skin sewn shut. Maussan went on to present several more alien bodies to the public, the Nazca mummies among them.
Mexico City and the Roswell Slides
On 5 May 2015 a seven-thousand-seat hall in Mexico City was shown two Kodachrome slides from 1947: a small body in a display case, announced as an alien from Roswell. Tickets were twenty dollars and the stream was extra. The slides included a placard blurred past reading. Within days a group of sceptics led by Nab Lator stacked frames from the broadcast into a legible version: the mummified body of a two-year-old boy, an exhibit at the Mesa Verde museum in Colorado. Nobody was refunded.