The Unlucky Mummy and the Titanic
The painted coffin lid of a priestess of Amun-Ra, acquired by the British Museum in 1889 as EA22542. By the early twentieth century a story had grown around it: everyone who owned it was ruined or died, the photographer who took its picture shot himself, and in April 1912 the museum was said to have shipped it secretly to America aboard the Titanic. None of it happened. The lid is a flat board, not a mummy, and no body was ever attached to it; it has not left London except for wartime and 1990s storage, as the accession registers show. The story was got up privately by the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson and the editor W. T. Stead, who liked to tell it at dinner; Stead himself died on the Titanic.
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.
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