The Nazca "Alien Mummies" of Peru: What the Evidence Shows

On September 12, 2023, two small bodies in glass cases were carried into a hearing room of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies. The journalist Jaime Maussan told the legislators they were roughly a thousand years old, had been found in the Nazca region of Peru, had elongated skulls and three long fingers on each hand, and had DNA of which about a third matched nothing known. He named them Clara and Mauricio. Video of the session went around the world within hours, and "Mexico shows alien bodies to Congress" became one of the most-shared stories of the year.

The bodies were not new. They were the latest of a series that first surfaced in 2017, and everything about them, from where they came from to what the labs found, had already been argued over for six years. The Congress hearing did not change the evidence. It changed the audience.

The story begins in 2015 and 2016, when a grave robber, known publicly only as Mario, offered a cache of unusual desiccated bodies said to have been found in a cave or tomb near Palpa, in the Nazca desert of southern Peru. They reached Thierry Jamin, a French researcher who runs the Inkari-Cusco Institute, and Maussan, who arranged for the streaming service Gaia to fund examinations and a documentary series, "Unearthing Nazca," released in June 2017. Its star was Maria, a roughly adult-sized body coated in a white powder, with a long skull and three-fingered hands and feet. Smaller specimens, around two feet long and given names such as Josefina, Albert, Victoria and Wawita, followed.

Nothing about the recovery was documented. No archaeologist saw the bodies in place, no site has been independently examined, and the material passed through the hands of a tomb raider whose trade is illegal in Peru. Whatever the bodies are, their chain of custody starts with a sale.

Peru's Ministry of Culture and its professional archaeologists were blunt from the start: the specimens, they said, were pre-Columbian human remains and animal bones that had been cut, rearranged and glued into new shapes, and their removal and export was a crime. In 2018 a group of forensic and mummy specialists, the World Committee on Mummy Studies, examined the published scans and called the smaller specimens fabricated. The three-fingered hands, the argument runs, are built from human finger bones repositioned and extended, the skulls of the small bodies are the rear portions of llama skulls turned around, and the joints do not articulate the way a functioning hand or skull would.

The DNA does not rescue them. Samples sent to commercial labs came back predominantly human, with the "unknown" percentage explained by degradation, contamination and the portions of any ancient sample that cannot be matched to a reference database; ancient Egyptian mummies produce similar figures. Radiocarbon dates of roughly a thousand years are consistent with Nazca-era human remains, which is what the critics say the raw material is. In January 2024, forensic examiners at Peru's Institute of Legal Medicine reported on two figures seized at Lima airport in transit to Mexico: they were dolls of paper, glue, metal and human and animal bone.

Maussan and a group of researchers at the National University of San Luis Gonzaga in Ica, where several of the bodies are kept, dispute all of this. They point to CT scans showing what they interpret as organs, unbroken skin over the joints, and eggs inside one specimen, and argue that no forger could have built a coherent internal anatomy. They note that the Lima airport dolls were not their specimens and that the tomb-raider origin does not by itself prove fabrication. A second hearing in Mexico's Congress in September 2024 presented more bodies and more scans, and Maussan has continued to promote the specimens on television and at conferences through 2025 and 2026.

Independent specialists who have reviewed the scans respond that skin and desiccated tissue can be applied over a rebuilt skeleton, that the "organs" are ambiguous masses, and that the decisive test, letting unaffiliated forensic anthropologists examine the bodies directly and sequence them under controlled conditions, has never been permitted. Until it is, the argument stays where it has been since 2017.

Maussan is a Mexican television journalist who has covered UFOs since the 1990s and is the country's best-known ufologist. His record includes the 1991 Mexico City eclipse videos, the 2004 Mexican Air Force infrared footage later identified as oil-platform flares, and the 2015 "Roswell slides," promoted as images of an alien body that were shown within days to depict a mummified Native American child in a museum case. He presents the Nazca specimens sincerely and at length; his critics argue that sincerity is not the issue, and that every previous sensation he has championed has dissolved on examination.

The 2023 hearing arrived seven weeks after David Grusch told the U.S. Congress that the government held "non-human biologics," and it looked, from a distance, like the same story with bodies. It had the trappings of legitimacy: a national legislature, laboratory names, radiocarbon dates, scans on screens. And the specimens are visually striking, small and strange and unlike a costume. The pieces that were missing, the provenance, the independent examination, the published analysis, are the pieces that do not show up in a video clip.

The mummies have also become a Peruvian legal and cultural matter. Prosecutors have investigated the trafficking of human remains, the ministry has sought the bodies' return from Ica, and archaeologists have pointed out that Nazca-era graves are being looted to supply a market for "aliens." Whatever else the specimens are, some of them contain the bones of people who lived in the desert a thousand years ago.

The weight of qualified opinion is that the Nazca bodies are assembled objects: genuine ancient human and animal remains modified and combined into three-fingered figures, with the smaller ones built around llama skulls. The claims of unknown DNA and functioning anatomy have not survived review, and the only tests that could settle the matter, open examination by independent forensic scientists, have not been allowed. They belong with the famous alien hoaxes unless and until that changes.