Excerpts from an article posted at Science:
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.More at the link.
Last fall, immunologist Garry Nolan, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Proteomics Center 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...
"The DNA was modern, abundant, and high quality," he says, indicating that the specimen is probably a few decades old.
To the chagrin of UFO hunters, Ata is decidedly of this world. After mapping more than 500 million reads to a reference human genome, equating to 17.7-fold coverage of the genome, Nolan concluded that Ata "is human, there's no doubt about it." Moreover, the specimen's B2 haplotype—a category of mitochondrial DNA—reveals that its mother was from the west coast of South America: Chile, that is.
Meanwhile, after examining x-rays, Lachman concluded that Aka's skeletal development, based on the density of the epiphyseal plates of the knees (growth plates at the end of long bones found only in children), surprisingly appears to be equivalent to that of a 6- to 8-year-old child. If that holds up, there are two possibilities, Nolan says. One, a long shot, is that Ata had a severe form of dwarfism, was actually born as a tiny human, and lived until that calendar age. To test that hypothesis, he will try to extract hemoglobin from the specimen's bone marrow and compare the relative amounts of fetal versus adult hemoglobin proteins. The second possibility is that Ata, the size of a 22-week-old fetus, suffered from a severe form of a rare rapid aging disease, progeria, and died in the womb or after premature birth...
The other claim Nolan debunks is that Ata is an elaborate hoax. The x-rays clearly show these are real bones, complete with arterial shadows, he says. "You just couldn't fake it," he says, adding, with a laugh, "unless you were an alien."
Credit for photos: Garry Nolan
This must be covered by a corollary to Clark's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Something like, "Anything not yet discovered and described by science will be presumed to be magical or of extraterrestrial origin."
ReplyDeleteMaybe they're really big glasses?
ReplyDeleteThe press has reported this story as a foregone conclusion, whereas the truth is that they don't really know for sure what this being is. The following links have more information: http://siriusdisclosure.com/evidence/atacama-humanoid or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XjietgsBDY
ReplyDeleteThink you forgot the part where its DNA is 9% different from ours and we cant get the fathers DNA. We cant tell what his father was, we know its mother was an Indian.
ReplyDeleteFound this comment this morning:
Delete"The presence of ~9% “unmatched” DNA should not be interpreted to represent anything unusual about the specimen itself. Reasons for the lack of match can include artefacts generated during library preparation, low quality reads from the instrument, or insufficient data to allow computational alignment against the human reference standard. Further, since this sample is likely to be at the least a few decade olds, and possibly older, DNA degradation resultingin apparently “false” mutations can occur. For instance, degradation of cytosine (C) via deamination to uracil (U) would result in false interpretation of a C residue as thymidine (T) and a resulting guanine (G) misread as adenine (A) on the opposite strand."
I have no doubt that it is real, and it is human.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I absolutely do not believe it lived for 6 to 8 years, and if it did, it was a parasitic twin, it did not live outside of a human body.
considering Neanderthals have about 99.6% of our matching DNA, a 9% difference in DNA can potentially mean EVERYTHING. by the way, the best scientists of the world have all looked over the X-rays, CT scans, and DNA analyses to determine a few FACTS: the creature's maternal DNA shows that his mother was most definitely human; however, the creature's paternal DNA could not be identified; the genes most associated with dwarfism and other genetic birth defects appear normal; the growth plates in the knees shows that the creature did indeed, live outside of the womb for 6 to 8 years-- there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, to even speculate that this creature was only an asymmetrical or unequal conjoined twin.
Deleteyou would think that journalists and scientists everywhere would be all over this story, and yet i've never even heard it mentioned on any national news program (that's not to say they didn't, rather i just haven't seen it). the fact of the matter is, this creature is definitely human (or at least partially) that was 6" tall and lived for 6 to 8 years. alien or not, THAT IS A HUGE FREAKIN DEAL! i'll say it again, A 6 INCH HUMAN BEING THAT WAS 6 TO 8 YEARS OLD! i don't care if the scientists want to laugh at the idea that this creature could be some kind of human/alien hybrid. no problem. just follow the facts to wherever they may lead. like i said, even if it's only a really, really small human being, that's still a BIG DEAL. any scientists that refuse to study this creature aren't real scientists because that's what science is all about.