The case of Peru’s mysterious ‘alien

Recorded by the cadre of anonymous Peruvian ‘huaqueros’ (tomb raiders) who are alleged to have unearthed most of the now roughly dozen or so eerie specimens, the video documents two ‘corpses’ each about five-foot tall and apparently not human.

Like the seemingly large and elongated ‘alien skull,’ both ‘mummies’ are coated in a white powder of fossilized algae, consistent with prior examples over the past year.

This shaky, handheld phone video comes as lawmakers on Capitol Hill have finally vowed to investigate these Peruvian oddities, in an effort to determine their origins.

And forensic medical examiners from the United States — who inspected a trove of these ‘alien mummies’ this past April — are now also pleading with the government of Peru to authorize the bodies’ shipment to America for study in US labs.

Criminal defense lawyer Josh McDowell — the former prosecutor who obtained the new video — helped organize this team of senior forensic experts to get to the ground truth behind what have come to be known as the ‘Nazca mummies’ of Peru.

One member of that team, Josh’s father Dr John McDowell, described a gauntlet of diplomatic, legal and scientific hurdles to DailyMail.com, which must be cleared to analyze these mummified enтιтies in the US ‘the right way from start to finish.’

In an exclusive interview, Dr McDowell also detailed exactly what key procedures would ultimately confirm or deny whether the bodies are ‘part of an elaborate hoax.’

But Dr McDowell also marveled at the sheer number of these Nazca ‘Tridactyls’ — so named for their three-toed feet and three-fingered hands, as seen in the new video.

‘I’ve seen bodies with extra fingers or toes, or a finger or toe, or a finger or toe that’s missing, genetically,’ he told DailyMail.com, ‘but never a big group like this.’

‘To see these tridactyl organisms,’ Dr McDowell continued, ‘all of them tridactyl, I have never seen that.’

The forensic odontologist has long consulted with law enforcement on dental record identifications, including the identification of victims after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center.

But the ‘dental detective’ said he had never seen anything like the Nazca mummies, which numbered between six and 10 during his April trip to Peru, plus the new ‘beings’ documented in this recent video, two with claw-like, long and slender toes.

The videographer behind the new footage is unknown, in no small measure due to the thorny legal and ethical dimensions of handling these allegedly historical and culturally priceless ancient remains.

‘I don’t know who exactly sH๏τ the video, but there are context clues in the longer [version],’ one source, who had also been granted the tape, told DailyMail.com.

One of the ‘huaqueros’ who has long been involved in the promotion of these Nazca mummies was convicted of ᴀssault on public monuments for taking artifacts in 2022.

The man received a four-year suspended sentence and was fined about 20,000 Peruvian soles ($5,190 USD), according to Reuters: a clear example of the high-risk, extra-legal measures some have taken to seek either truth or profit from the ‘aliens.’

Nearly a year of international controversy has followed these peculiar specimens since September 2023, when veteran broadcast journalist and UFOlogist Jaime Maussan first presented two of the alleged ‘alien’ corpses to Mexico’s congress.

Maussan has now taken the Peruvian government to court hoping to ‘negotiate with Peru,’ as he put it, ‘to be allowed to export the samples to be done in America.’

‘The lawsuit is already in for $300 million,’ Maussan told DailyMail.com this June.

He explained that he is pursuing monetary damages to repair his enterprise’s damaged reputation, but intends to spend the cash on a museum for the mummies.

Dr McDowell himself has also recently pled with Peru’s government in an open letter published in one of the country’s top newspapers, La Noticia Perú, asking for official permission to study these specimens at top-flight scientific facilities in the US.

Toward that aim, the preliminary examinations he witnessed at UNICA in Peru this past April impressed him in terms of their transparency and professionalism.

‘We saw flat plane radiography, computer tomography [CT] and fluoroscopy that was done right in front of us,’ Dr McDowell told DailyMail.com.

‘And by “in front of us,” I mean, myself, Dr Caruso and also Dr Rodriguez.’

Dr McDowell was joined on this UNICA trip by Dr William Rodriguez, a forensic anthropologist with the Maryland State Medical Examiner; and Dr James Caruso, a US Navy veteran who is now the city of Denver’s Chief Medical Examiner.

‘Everything that we asked for,’ Dr McDowell added, ‘was allowed to be done.’

‘I never felt at any point that anything was withheld or obfuscated or kept occult from us,’ he said.

Those tests included the scan of the object’s chemical make-up via fluoroscopy, a method similar to hardware onboard NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover.

The noninvasive technique has gain prominence for examining the composition of a material without destroying or altering that material in the process, but researchers have also frequently reported on the technology’s limitations.

One group of environmental scientists in Arizona, for example, reported last year that their portable X-Ray fluorescence tests failed to accurately identify chromium metal content, due to high iron content drowning out the chromium’s signal.

The issue of contamination, he noted, is a particularly high risk with respect to the carbon-dating of these mysterious mummies.

As an explainer published by the University of Chicago spells out, this process — which uses radioactive decay of an isotope of carbon, carbon-14, to estimate when a living thing has died — can be easily undermined by carbon from other sources.

‘Even a little extra carbon from contamination will throw off the results significantly,’ the school’s fact page noted.

‘A million-year-old sample contaminated by only a tiny amount of carbon could yield an invalid age of 40,000 years, for example.’

And these issues can become even more thorny in the case of a truly committed hoaxer, as physicist Dr Bente Philippsen explained it to DailyMail.com.

‘If, as an example, someone fabricated fake alien mummies from ancient animal bones,’ Dr Philippsen said, ‘the radiocarbon date would still say “ancient,” i.e., the time of death of the animal.’

Worse, Dr Philippsen noted that there are even more serious issues with using the technique on suspected extraterrestrial bodies.

‘Radiocarbon dating is, in fact, only applicable to samples that had lived on Earth, as other planets most probably have different production rates of 14C [the Carbon-14 isotope] in their atmosphere,’ said the physicist.

‘If we wanted to radiocarbon date the remains of alien visitors, we would need to have a calibration curve from their home planet,’ she added — while admitting this was simply a thought experiment.

Dr Philippsen, who leads the National Laboratory for Age Determination at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, studied both physics and archeology, which together inform her work improving carbon-dating techniques.

In Dr McDowell’s view, exactly this kind of broad, cross-discipline work, done by a diverse array of scientists, will be needed to solve the Nazca mummies mystery.

‘As I said at the press conference, “None of us is as smart as all of us.”‘

‘We want to have anybody who’s taking a look at this, whether it’s an anthropologist or an archeologist, or any other expert in chemical analysis, DNA analysis, carbon dating, all of those working together,’ Dr McDowell told DailyMail.com.

‘If we work together,’ he said, ‘we’ll get it; we’ll get a good answer.’