A teenage girl crawled into a long-abandoned mine tunnel in Mexico in the 1930s and came across two skeletons – one of which was unlike anything previously found on Earth. Or so the story goes.
Eight decades later, the extraordinary skull of the smaller skeleton – described as being unlike any specimen in recorded medical history by a team of 11 medical specialists – is at the centre of a disagreement, between scientists and paranormal researchers, about its significance.
It is the skull of a severely deformed child who suffered from a rare medical condition, say the many sceptical scientists and medical experts.
Wrong, says ‘alternative knowledge’ expert Lloyd Pye and other paranormal researchers; it is the ‘Starchild Skull’ – a skull belonging to an alien-human hybrid.
There are endless pages on the internet devoted to the significance of the skull, and Mr Pye is in Malta to reassure believers and persuade legions of sceptics that conclusive proof of the alien-human hybrid theory is not far away.
“Scientists are afraid because when we get the final confirmation it will change everything they have been taught to believe about human history. Everyone is afraid to challenge their beliefs because they’re not sure if they can handle the alternative,” he told The Sunday Times.
Scientists have certainly had the opportunity to study the skull since it was passed to Mr Pye in 1998 by its then owners, who could not accept that the misshapen skull was the result of human deformity.
Its owners believed its characteristics were similar to that of so-called ‘grey’ aliens – supposedly bulb-headed creatures which UFO enthusiasts believe are commonly involved in alien abductions.
Mr Pye, who at that time specialised in the study of Hominoids – that’s Big Foot, the Yeti and friends – began contacting specialists for a conclusive explanation for the skull’s many differences to a normal, healthy human skull.
He said many scientists and medical specialists refused to even consider examining the skull, but the more he learnt about it from experts who did agree to examine it, the more he became convinced it was not totally human.
It seemed the hybrid skull theory was shattered in 1999, however, when a DNA test found standard X and Y chromosomes when samples were taken – evidence that the child was not only human, but that both of his parents must have been human as well. However, Mr Pye believed the samples were contaminated and had it re-tested by a different lab in 2004, which managed to recover mitochondrial DNA, but not nuclear DNA.
This meant either the nuclear DNA was too degraded to recover, or the DNA from the father was too different from that of a human to be detected.
This year, the skull was tested by an ultra high-tech genetic lab, which was unable to match part of the nuclear DNA samples to any other samples in the enormous genetic database at the US National Institutes of Health.
Mr Pye is convinced it is only a matter of time before the geneticist can prove conclusively that a significant part of the Starchild’s genome cannot be found on Earth today.
Lloyd Pye will address the ‘2012 – A Positive Outcome’ conference at the Grand Hotel Excelsior, Valletta, on Saturday.