Bizarre Skeleton Leaves UFO Hunters And Scientists Baffled

Alien? Subhuman primate? Deformed child? Mummified foetus? The internet is buzzing over the nature of “Ata”, a bizarre 12-centimetre-long skeleton featured in a new documentary on UFOs. A Stanford University scientist who boldly entered the fray has now put to rest doubts about what species Ata belongs to. But the mystery is not over.

The story began 10 years ago, when the diminutive remains were reportedly found in a pouch in a ghost town in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Ata ended up in a private collection in Barcelona; producers of the film Sirius latched onto the bizarre mummy as evidence of alien life.

Wow, this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before 

Last year, immunologist Garry Nolan, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Proteomics Centre for Systems Immunology at Stanford in California, heard about Ata from a friend and contacted the filmmakers, offering to give them a scientific readout on the specimen. They asked him to give it a shot.

Among the apparent abnormalities, Ata sports 10 ribs instead of the usual 12 and a severely misshapen skull. “I asked our neonatal care unit how you would go about analysing it. Had they seen this kind of syndrome before?” Nolan says. He was directed to paediatric radiologist Ralph Lachman, co-director of the International Skeletal Dysplasia Registry at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles. “He literally wrote the book oS paediatric bone disorders,” Nolan says. Lachman was blown away, Nolan recalls: “He said, ‘Wow, this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’ “

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