Debunked cases — Peru
Debunked cases — Peru. 2 places in the catalogue, each with coordinates, the story behind it and a danger level from white to black.
The Ica Stones
From 1966 the Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera assembled more than fifteen thousand engraved andesite stones: men riding dinosaurs, heart transplants, telescopes. The collection became a mainstay of the whole literature of forgotten civilisations. They were supplied by a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, and in 1975 he told reporters he was carving them himself — the alternative was answering for trading antiquities. In 1977, for a BBC documentary, he engraved a fresh stone on camera with a dental drill and aged it with shoe polish and stove soot. Not one stone from the collection has ever been recovered from an archaeological layer.
Nazca and the Three-Fingered Mummies
Since 2017 Jaime Maussan has been exhibiting small pale bodies with elongated skulls and three fingers on each hand, said to come from a cave near Nazca — and in 2023 he exhibited them to the Mexican congress. Peruvian prosecutors seized part of the collection and in 2018 published a forensic report led by Flavio Estrada: dolls assembled from human and animal bones held together with modern adhesive, with animal skulls standing in for human ones. Peru's college of archaeologists and its ministry of culture demanded an investigation. The bodies are still on the conference circuit.