Strange diagonal grooves along the fingertips and toes of one of Peru’s bizarre and controversial ‘alien mummies’ point to a non-human origin for the strange remains.

Worldwide controversy erupted when veteran radio journalist and renowned UFO researcher Jaime Maussan first presented two alleged ‘alien’ mummies to the Mexican parliament last year.

Now, has spoken to a former Colorado prosecutor and defense attorney who examined one of more than half of the ‘alien’ specimens with the help of three independent forensic examiners from the United States.

‘This is not a traditional human fingerprint pattern,’ attorney Joshua McDowell told DailyMail.com. The use of fingerprints, or what are technically known as ‘friction grooves’, dates back to 300 BC in China, according to the US Department of Justice’s Fingerprint Handbook.

And forensic investigators in the US have long codified the hunt for unique features since they were first used by US law enforcement in 1902, starting with three main types of fingerprints: arches, loops and whorls.

But according to research on Maria’s alleged ‘alien’ mummy, McDowell and forensic doctors said the fingerprints did not appear to match any known human fingerprint patterns.

McDowell, now a principal at McDowell Law Firm, told DailyMail.com: ‘We didn’t see any loops or whorls on the fingerprints or toes. I’m a former prosecutor. I’m a criminal defense attorney. I’ve seen a lot of fingerprints. And these are not normal fingerprints. María’s fingerprints are not like human fingerprints,’ the attorney added.

Like most of the other ‘alien’ mummies brought to light by Jaime Maussan over the past year, María was discovered covered in diatomaceous earth (a white powdery underwater fossil left by a type of plankton called diatoms). ‘The majority of her body was covered in diatomaceous earth,’ McDowell explained, ‘however, on her exposed fingers, the cuticle ridges that I saw seemed to be mostly straight lines.’

McDowell and the three US medical examiners who accompanied him to Peru for the autopsy last April stressed that it would be ‘extremely premature’ to make any definitive statements about the mysterious mummies.

McDowell told DailyMail.com that there may be another explanation for the unusually straight ‘friction frayed’ skin patterns on María’s fingers and toes.

McDowell, formerly a deputy district attorney for Colorado’s Fourth Judicial District Attorney’s Office, brought a city police detective from Denver as well as a forensic anthropologist from the Maryland State Medical Examiner’s Office to Peru to examine María.

The third expert, McDowell’s father, Dr. John McDowell, is a forensic odontologist and retired professor at the University of Colorado who worked to identify victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center through their dental records. Joshua McDowell stressed to DailyMail.com that ‘no decisions have been made about the nature of the specimens at this time,’ adding that his team’s efforts to determine the true nature of these ‘alien’ mummies are still actively underway.

María is one of a number of specimens that have been dubbed the ‘Nazca mummies’, after the province in southwestern Peru where they are said to have been unearthed. Most of these specimens are both famous and infamous, in part because their elongated heads and three-fingered hands resemble decades of UFO myths and legends about alien ‘grey’ creatures. However, a critic of Maussan, Latin American historian Christopher Heaney, notes that many parts of Latin America, including Peru, have long traditions of head binding and shaping the developing skulls of infants.