The mummified remains of what some believed to be a six-inch-tall alien life form are actually those of a baby girl who appears to have been stillborn, according to scientists in California.
The skeleton – which has an elongated, cone-shaped head and is missing two pairs of ribs – was found 15 years ago in an abandoned mining town in Chile.
The discovery was so unusual that the small humanoid, nicknamed Ata, was featured in a documentary called “Sirius.” In the film, Steven Greer, a former emergency-room doctor who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence and The Disclosure Project, suggested Ata is an extraterrestrial being.
The skeleton so fascinated the public that a private collector in Spain purchased it.
After extracting DNA from the bones, scientists in California say they belong to a girl who was either stillborn or who died at birth. The baby apparently suffered from extreme mutations that changed the shape of her body.
Ata’s skeleton was bundled in a white cloth and tied with a purple ribbon when she was located in La Noria in 2003. While she was just six inches tall, some portions of Ata’s body resembled those of a 6- to 8-year-old child. And she only had 10 sets of ribs rather than the typical 12 sets most humans have.
Garry Nolan, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University in California, studied the mummified remains and determined that Ata was human in 2013. But it was still unclear why she had such odd deformities.
Now Nolan and scientists at the University of California in San Francisco have officially published their findings concerning Ata’s genetic makeup. They say Ata has mutations in at least seven genes that either cause malformation or rapid development. Their research explains why she’s only six inches, has a long skull and is missing ribs. They say she may also have had a birth defect known as congenital diaphragmatic hernia, which prevents the diaphragm from proper development.
Nolan said the team’s research on Ata’s remains may help patients with skeletal defects in the future, according to London’s Guardian.
“Understanding the process might allow us to develop therapies or drugs that drive bone development for people in, say, catastrophic car crashes,” he explained.
Ata is believed to have died around 1963.
“She was so badly malformed as to be unable to feed,” Nolan said. “In her condition, she would have ended up in the neonatal ICU, but given where the specimen was found, such things were simply not available.”
He continued: “While this started out as a story about aliens, and went international, it’s really a story of a human tragedy. A woman had a malformed baby. It was preserved in a manner and then ‘hocked’ or sold as a strange artifact. I turns out to be human, with a fascinating genetic story from which we might learn something important to help others. May she rest in peace.”
