Lucie Barsali ‘27

Photo credit: Daniel Cardenas, Getty Images

It has been a while now, but you probably remember the proliferation of alien memes in mid-September, due to the hearing where several ‘alien mummies’ were presented in front of the Mexican Congress.

Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) researcher and journalist Jaime Maussan presented these “alien bodies” on Sept. 12. He was invited to speak at a Mexican Congress hearing about UFOs by lawmaker Sergio Gutiérrez Luna. The latter justified this invite by saying, “What we did here was an exercise in listening, […] Learning about subjects, whatever they may be, is done by finding contrasting opinions.”

Maussan–who was proven to have shown false evidence of extraterrestrial life in the past– claimed that these mummies were retrieved in 2017 from the Peruvian city of Nasca and proved to be around 1,800 years old. He explained, “This is the first time [extraterrestrial life] is presented in such a form and I think there is a clear demonstration that we are dealing with non-human specimens that are not related to any other species in our world."

Jaime MAUSSAN and the bodies - EFE/HISTORY CHANNEL

Anyone laying eyes on these ‘alien mummies’ would have doubts concerning their legitimacy, so it’s no surprise that the Mexican and global scientific communities expressed their discontent. The first encounter I had with this criticism was through a TikTok by the famous scientist-influencer Hank Green, published on Sept. 13. He offered to give his own analysis of the alien bodies to his nearly eight million followers. For him, the bodies look like they were molded by human hands. However, Maussan also provided an x-ray of the bodies, which revealed a full skeleton and eggs. Green hypothesizes that these might be bird bones put together. He concludes that to verify the legitimacy of these bodies, they should be examined by independent scientists, who should easily be able to determine if their bones are really non-human. He adds that this should be an open process–in the event that this is proof of extraterrestrial life, this great discovery must be public.

Green’s rhetoric in this video is similar to the one expressed by two National Air and Space Association (NASA) scientists, answering a question by Sam Cabral for the British Broadcasting Corporation. They claim that samples of the bodies should be made available to the world’s scientific community–much as NASA is doing with lunar rocks for instance. One of them added, “We’re trying to move conjecture and conspiracy towards science and sanity, and you do that with data.”

Still from the video “Mexico 'Alien Bodies': Those viral artifacts get lab tests” by the BBC

But what is the link to white supremacy? Jo Osborn, an archeologist and andeanist who specializes in the Indigenous people of the area of the Central Andes in South America, explains this in a video. She argues that in addition to being completely fabricated, these aliens are not crafted with bird bones (which would already be macabre) but with human remains. The New York Times makes the same conclusion: “Analysis of the specimens in question in Peru showed that they were manufactured using a combination of human and animal bones, vegetable fibers and synthetic adhesives.”

She explains that the Andean archaeologist community has known about these kinds of mummies for years. A group of alien hunters started digging them up between the years 2015-2017. As I explained before, Maussan claims that the mummies were discovered in 2017. This, and the fact that he is known in Mexico for “dabbling in the realm of pseudoscience on television and on YouTube” according to this New York Times article, seems to match Osborn’s claims.

She explains that these pseudo-scientists do not actually dig up alien bodies (which seems kind of obvious at this point) but loot indigenous burials, which are easy to find in the Peruvian desert–notably in Nazca where our bodies were ‘found’. Then, they craft horrific “artifacts” using the human bones they find by profanating ancient burial sites.

Osborn explains, “These mummies are the latest trend in a long history of pseudoscientific racism aimed at discrediting the accomplishments of Indigenous pre-hispanic people.” She explains that Maussan’s claim that the bodies were retrieved in Nazca is not a coincidence: it is where geoglyphs called the Nazca lines are situated. There is a common belief among pseudo-scientists such as Maussan that indigenous people could never have built such impressive structures, so they explain with another theory: aliens. This happens in many different areas, but there seems to be a pattern of non-white Indigenous people being accused of collaborating with aliens. For example, Mayans, Egyptians and Native Americans.

This idea is rooted in white supremacy: these groups of people are so strongly opposed to the idea of indigenous people of color creating impressive monuments and art that they create alien conspiracy theories to explain it. Osborn even claims that these kinds of theories have existed for decades, if not centuries. Alien theories were popularized in the 1960s, but before that there were traces of others, like the help of ‘giants’, or the help of white Europeans who lived there in the past. Colonizers used these theories to explain how indigenous people were deprived of intelligence, creativity and had to be saved from themselves by the white, superior settlers.

What was understood as a ridiculous event, the unveiling of fake evidence to alien life, has actually been proven to be actively harming the scientific community (ridiculing the Mexican scientists as a whole, as well as the Mexican Congress for taking this seriously) and of being rooted in white supremacy and imperialism. As a Wired article explains, roughly a week after the hearing, the aliens were proven to be fake. José Franco, researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s Astronomy Institute, joked: “No life has been found anywhere, and neither has intelligence been found in Congress.” But most articles on the subject fail to mention the huge problem of racism hiding behind this case.

On Oct. 23, Mexico announced a second session of hearings on UFOs will take place on Nov. 7. I hope that the coverage of this session won’t fail to account for the stories of the indigenous people of Peru, whose burials were looted to create what was then used to delegitimize their craft and their culture as a whole. The somber irony of this situation must be recognized at higher levels.

My name is Luc(ie), and this is the first issue of my monthly series called Minitel Drama (with a little bit of delay).

What is Minitel Drama? I’m a French exchange student and I happen to spend a lot of time on the internet. I had the idea to transform this lost time online into something productive. This is what I am doing with Minitel Drama, a column dedicated to internet dramas and how they relate to broader societal issues such as white supremacy, patriarchy or ecocide.

The Minitel is the ancestor of the internet, launched in France in 1982. It looked (approximately) like this…

Minitel Drama: October Issue – Aliens Are White Supremacists Too, Here Is Why