Sierra Gorda

La Noria and the Ata Mummy

In 2003 a mummy six inches long was found in the abandoned nitrate town of La Noria in the Atacama: an elongated skull, ten pairs of ribs instead of twelve, bone maturity like a six-year-old's. A 2013 UFO documentary announced an alien. The genome was sequenced at Stanford, and the result published in Genome Research in 2018 is not ambiguous: a human girl of Chilean descent who died at or before birth, carrying a rare combination of mutations in seven genes governing skeletal development. Chilean authorities later took an interest in how the remains had left the country at all.