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I remember the the day I first laid eyes on the Starchild skull over a decade ago. I will never forget the breathtaking moment when I first held it in my hands and immediately knew something was seriously “wrong” with it. It was too light, much too light for a typical human skull, even one with the slightly reduced size of an average twelve-year-old. It felt more like a dried gourd than a skull, and at first glance I couldn’t see anything normal about it. It was just plain weird.
Its owners, Ray and Melanie Young of El Paso, Texas, had invited me to come to El Paso specifically to examine it and tell them what I thought. I had some expertise regarding skulls due to my extensive research into the truth about human origins and UFO related issues, much of which I based on contrasting the many differences between humans and so-called “pre” human skulls. But I soon realized Melanie knew even more than me. For many years she had been a neonatal nurse, seeing a wide range of human skull deformities and keenly aware of the technical aspects of what went into creating such aberrations.
The word that came to mind was “impossible,” yet there it was, cradled in my hands, so I had to settle for “incredible.” The eye sockets were wildly different from normal. My father was an optometrist, so I knew about eyes. The neck opening, the foramen magnum, was well out of place. The lower rear area was without the small bump on every human’s head (or chimp’s or gorilla’s, for that matter); it had no inion. The entire rear area of its head was flat, but there was no evidence of manipulated flattening. No cradleboarding caused that flatness, it had grown that way, as had the eyes, neck, and inion.
A crease-like dent in the upper rear of the head clinched it for me, just as it did for Melanie and Ray. Humans do not exhibit that, no question. Humans are rounded in that area. However, something else does have such a crease, something familiar to everyone in the field of UFO and alien research. The so-called “grey” aliens are reputed to have such a dent in the top rear of their heads, giving them a distinctive “heart” shape. Dented crown and a bulbous cranium above a small upper face that narrowed to a very small lower face.
I held in my hand the detached piece of upper right jaw (maxilla) found separate from the cranium (which was also minus its entire lower jaw). It was the size of an infant, if that large. This being clearly had an extra small lower face, and the attachment points for its chewing muscles bore that out, being greatly reduced from where they normally were on a human. I realized I might possibly be holding the preserved skull of a grey alien. Anyone with an understanding of basic human anatomy and of how greys were supposed to look would make the same staggering connection. They’d have no choice.
It was all I could do to hold it steady in my hands as I looked at Ray and Melanie and told them what I thought, which in so many words was that it could possibly be the skull of a grey. It was so incredibly far from normal, such a wild speculation was conceivable. Nonetheless, I couldn’t initially make myself believe it was, in fact, such a stupendous discovery. I urged them to assume it was a bizarre deformity, and to maintain that view until they secured solid proof to the contrary. To emphasize my doubt, I pegged the chances at 80% deformity and 20% alien, but that 20% would remain huge until they could prove it belonged on the 80% side of the ledger.
On hearing that, they asked if I would undertake to scientifically establish their weird skull’s heritage, whether human or alien, which began a decade-long quest that continues to this day. Now, however, I can assure all fans of this amazing relic that we are at last closing in on a conclusive determination of its genetic origin. If all goes as scheduled, in 2010 the skull’s DNA will be analyzed with a new technique that was unavailable when its DNA was recovered and analyzed in 2003. This new test result lies at the heart of what makes the Starchild skull so special, and it will comprise the scientific core of what should prove beyond doubt that the skull is not entirely human.
Before I discuss the revolutionary test that will occur this year, let’s revisit what happened in 2003. This is necessary to understand why the Starchild stands on the threshold of making history as big as history can be made.
The First Five Years
From 1999 through 2004 the Starchild was put through a series of scientific tests that are recounted in detail in The Starchild Skull, a book published in 2007 (available on Amazon.com). Recently, the most salient facts became available in a highly compacted eBook, Starchild Skull Essentials (available at StarchildProject.com). Starting with surprising radiographic X-rays, to the reassuring CAT-scan results, to the Carbon-14 dating of death at 900 years ago, to the disaster of an initial forensic DNA test, to the stunning results of a clandestine analysis with a scanning electron microscope . . . it’s all there in full detail that need not be reviewed here. The bottom line is that at every turn, after every valid test, the results kept shifting my initial percentage of doubt away from “human deformity” and toward an “alien” interpretation.
In 1999 there were only a half-dozen labs that could analyze “ancient” DNA, which was older than 50 years. At 900 years since death, the Starchild more than qualified. However, among those half-dozen labs none would touch the Starchild with the proverbial ten-foot-pole. They wanted nothing to do with a skull that was being touted as potentially alien. “Doing that,” one wrote to me, “would be bad for business.” Facing such a stonewall, I decided to take a chance on a much less controlled forensic test designed for DNA less than 50 years old. It was a complete botch that left us in the lurch until 2003.
By 2003, when we were finally able to arrange a comprehensive and reliable test for the Starchild’s ancient DNA, my thinking was that we were almost certainly looking at an alien skull. I had swung completely around and now believed it was a percentage split of 80% alien and 20% deformity, which probably was being conservative. I realized that an alien skull falling into my hands was comparable to the Dead Sea Scrolls being found by a goat herder. Nonetheless, he did what he did and I was doing what I was doing, finding out what I was finding out, and I knew what the results meant.
Nothing was testing out as typically human. The bone itself was too light and much too durable to be purely human. It was more like tooth enamel than bone. The brain’s volume was entirely too large for the skull encasing it. Inside the Starchild’s cranium was a brain 1/3 larger than normal. Where did all that extra brain go? How did it all fit in there? Better yet, with such a high and steep rear angle canted toward the spinal opening, how had the brain’s matter not been squeezed out to distend the foramen magnum? This list of physiological differences was extensive, with over two dozen major points. It skewed as far from a normal human skull as did a chimp or gorilla.
DNA 101
No matter how many physiological differences we came up with, experts from mainstream science could thwart us at every turn simply by quoting their Darwinist mantra that when it came to nature, absolutely anything was possible. Therefore, we couldn’t show them any physical variation that they couldn’t explain by calling upon the unlimited power they themselves had assigned to nature. It was like trying to argue with religious zealots. No, it might have been worse. We certainly couldn’t find any room for flexibility, so in the end it all came down to DNA analysis, the premier tool of scientific certainty. People ended up on death row because of DNA evidence, just as it saved others from wrongful convictions. DNA was the weapon of choice for those wishing to make a case against closed minds and cowardly spirits.
DNA has two basic types: mitochondrial and nuclear. In nearly every cell in an animal’s body, which can amount to trillions, there is a small core, called the nucleus, surrounded by a jelly-like substance called cytoplasm. Imagine a baseball with its cork core, its twine surrounding, and its durable “skin.” This analogizes a living cell perfectly: nucleus, cytoplasm, and outer wall.
Floating around in the cytoplasm like raisins in pudding are mitochondria, which are small packets of what are called “base pairs,” the smallest units of matter that make up genes, which combine to form the chromosomes. Each mitochondrion contains about 16,000 base pairs. Keep that number in mind.
Inside the cell nucleus is the entire genome of the individual, containing all the chromosomes given to it by its parents. In humans that is 23 from Dad and 23 from Mom, a total of 46. Incredibly, our closest genetic relatives, chimps and apes, with whom we supposedly share a very close biological “descent” from a remote common ancestor, have 48 chromosomes. This is beyond bizarre, and I discuss it extensively in my work regarding human origins, though it plays only a peripheral role in the Starchild’s case.
The total genome of a typical human is made up of those 46 chromosomes comprised of roughly 25,000 genes, which are subdivided into roughly 3.0 billion (that’s billion with a “b”) base pairs. So remember that number, too, and compare it with the 16,000 base pairs in each mitochondria floating in the cytoplasm outside the cell’s nucleus. The floating mitochondria are like tiny grains of sand in relation to the basketball-sized nucleus.
Mitochondria are passed down intact from generation to generation solely by females. They change only slightly over the centuries, with a mutation here and a mutation there, but by and large staying the same. Whether you are male or female, you have essentially the same mitochondria possessed by 100 or more generations in your family line, back to the first female in your line. Thus, they are easy to track throughout the course of genetic testing.
The DNA inside the nucleus of cells is much harder to recover intact than the DNA inside mitochondria because it is much larger and far more fragile, and because there is so incredibly much more of it to degrade. Also, because it comes from both parents it is never the same in any two individuals. There will always be a large amount of mixing and matching of the base pairs and genes and chromosomes between couples who produce offspring. Each new mating is unique, and even identical twins will exhibit subtle variations.
The Starchild’s Mitochondrial DNA
We took the Starchild to Trace Genetics in Davis, California, in the middle of 2003. The first thing we discovered was how hard and dense its bone was. The geneticists had to struggle to cut it with a high-speed Dremel blade that sawed through normal human bone with relative ease. The next step was to dissolve a shard of the Starchild’s bone in a standard solvent called EDTA. It was put into a test tube in a rocker arm, and after one week it should have been dissolved. It wasn’t, not even slightly. A powerful detergent had to be added to break it down, something never needed with normal human bone.
Once the Starchild’s DNA was recoverable, the geneticists went through their processes with it. They found the DNA was well preserved and quite easy to recover from the solution it was dissolved in. Its 900 years buried in a mine tunnel had left it in almost pristine condition. It was never oxidized by a scorching sun, or leached by rainwater soaking it. It was much like a relatively fresh burial, as opposed to what the geneticists normally had to deal with. (Our geneticists had worked on the famous Kennewick Man, the 9,000-year-old skeleton discovered in the U.S. in 1996. They found that all of its DNA was hopelessly degraded by exposure to the elements.)
The Starchild’s mitochondrial DNA was easily recovered and came up bright and clear in the gel sheets used to reveal its makeup. It turned out to have a human mother from what is known as Haplogroup C, which is a type of Amerindian common to both North and South America. Nothing unusual about it. However, this discovery ruled out a couple of key assumptions we had made about the Starchild and its genetic heritage.
We knew the Starchild died 900 years earlier and seemed to be buried by a human female who then lay down beside its grave and committed suicide. Their skeletons were found and their skulls recovered by a girl exploring a mine tunnel in Mexico around 1930. We made the natural assumption that the human female had a very close relationship to it, probably its mother, whether natural or adoptive. We could think of no other relationship they might have had that would warrant the ultimate sacrifice of her own life.
When the human female’s DNA was recovered and her mitochondrial DNA was tested, it was found to be from Haplogroup A, another common type of Amerindian. That meant the Starchild and the woman who chose to commit suicide and die beside it were not genetically related. Perhaps she was an adoptive mother, or a close friend or caretaker, or lover, or even its partner in life. We had no way to answer those questions, or any number of others.
Finding out that the Starchild had a human mother also forced us to drop the idea that it might be a pure “grey” alien. Now the most we could assume was that it might be a hybrid with a human mother and an alien father. This led to another assumption. If it was a human-alien hybrid, it was in all likelihood the result of genetic engineering rather than a normal sexual union.
We based that assumption on the admittedly anecdotal evidence from many women of today who swear they’ve been abducted by greys, made pregnant by them in some “unnatural” manner, and then in the fourth month of their pregnancy their fetuses are removed and raised to birth weight in test tubes that many women see later when being introduced to their own living hybrid children. If such a program is occurring now, then why not 900 years ago?
Following the revelations of the Starchild’s mitochondrial DNA would be the analysis of its nuclear DNA, which could easily be the end of the line for us. Five years of effort would be riding on this one make-or break test. With the Starchild’s mother unquestionably a typical Amerindian, if the father’s DNA showed up in the search for the nuclear DNA we would close our case. The Starchild would have two human parents and that would be the end of it. No matter how unusual its physiological traits might be, if its genes showed two human parents, then turn out the lights, the party’s over.
The Starchild’s Nuclear DNA
To secure the recovery of DNA in 2003, geneticists had only one technique available—the use of “primers.” Primers were previously coded strings of base pairs that were common to all humans. Those strings could go on for hundreds or a few thousand base pairs, and were like keys that would fit precisely into locks. The soup of dissolved DNA could be imagined as an accumulation of those locks. The primer keys would be swirled into the soup to find their specific corollary locks, and when they did that, those lock-and-key alignments could then be extracted and analyzed by putting them into “gel sheets.” Everyone has seen those small bars that are created to represent someone’s DNA. (A photo/diagram of the Starchild’s is included.)
When the Starchild’s nuclear DNA was filled with primer keys, those keys went looking for locks that were combinations of both its mother and father. By that point those of us inside the Starchild Project were soundly rattled by the mother turning out to be human. Half of what we were betting—that it might be a pure grey alien—was now off the table. So with baited breath we awaited the first test result . . . and it was nothing, nada, no recovery. Not even a whisper of a recovery, which could mean one of two things: (1) the Starchild’s nuclear DNA was too degraded to permit a recovery; or (2) the recovery couldn’t occur because the father was not entirely human.
We felt we could rule out the first possibility based on the ease with which the human’s mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA had been recovered. Her locks-and-keys were bright and clear in her gel sheets, indicating she hadn’t degraded much, which—as noted earlier—was logical for bones entombed in a mine tunnel for 900 years. No wind, no rain, no sun bleaching. And the same was true for the Starchild. Its mitochondrial DNA had come up very easily on the first attempt to recover it. So the odds had suddenly swung in our direction. If the Dad was human, we should have had a routine recovery.
The second test also came up empty, as did the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. That was enough for the geneticists. Dad’s DNA was not letting the primers connect, and six tests meant there was no possibility of laboratory error. If Dad was a normal human, one of those six attempts would have found him. Thus, only one stark conclusion could be drawn: Dad was not a human!
Unfortunately, this did not mean we could loudly announce that we had secured ironclad proof of an alien form of life on this planet at least once 900 years ago. As we began breaking into a victory dance, the geneticists turned down the music and explained to us that the fat lady was off in the distance warming up, but she wasn’t onstage yet. We still had more to do.
The Fat Lady Arrives
Our geneticists told us the only thing they could officially state about the Starchild’s DNA tests was that they couldn’t recover nuclear DNA in six tries. The fact that the other recoveries were easy and quite clear in the gel sheets was highly indicative, but not proof of anything. The only way we would get proof, they explained, was when a new recovery technique then only on the horizon would finally become available. That technique would do away with primers entirely and go about recovery in a very different way. It would entail recovering each and every base pair in an entire genome so there could be absolutely no doubt about how that genome was constructed.
This new technique, when it became available, would allow the Starchild’s entire package of DNA to be recovered, and then it could be compared to a normal human to see how close or how far away it was from those norms. They assured me the new technique would require 3 to 5 years of further research and development. Sure enough, exactly three years later the world learned that a company called 454 Life Sciences of Branford, Connecticut, had created the breakthrough that would allow full genome recovery using only base pairs, all 3.0 billion in the case of humans. Wait One was over.
Wait Two was that we couldn’t afford the new technology, which was being applied to the Neanderthal genome because that was an answer science was anxious to have. Consequently, millions of dollars needed to get that answer were made available through science’s myriad grants. But no such money was available to secure an answer for something like the Starchild, which nobody in science wanted to secure in case it overturned their world view.
We were told that time and rapid advances in the new technology would bring it into our reach within a few more years, which turned out to be true. So here we are, 11 years gone, waiting the first five years for our first DNA test, which made it blindingly obvious we were on the right track; then three more years for the 454 technology to be created; and then four more for it to come within our financial reach. A decade-plus . . . what a grind it’s been.
As of now, the cost of the 454 DNA test has dropped from several million to less than $200,000. That drop has put it within the reach of almost anyone with “deep pockets” and a desire to help make history on a gargantuan scale. All we have to do is establish for certain whether or not the bizarre relic was entirely human, or if not human, precisely how far from human?
We know chimps are only 3% different from humans. Gorillas are only 5% different. We should know soon, within the next few months, how different Neanderthals are. Early reports suggest less than 1%, but as of this writing that’s merely rumor. It could end up more or less. However, that leaves a clear playing field for the Starchild, which could end up being very close to humans or quite far away. Only this one expensive, extensive DNA test (3 to 4 months long) using 454 equipment will let us know.
If the Starchild is, say, 0.5% different, one-half of one percent, does that mean it had an alien father? Yes, of course. If it’s not human to a range of 99.99 %, which is how astonishingly little we differ among ourselves, then it isn’t human. (Humans are, in fact, not far from clones. There is more genetic variation between two randomly selected chimps from the same inbred troop than exist among all of humanity, from Pygmies to Eskimos. This, also, is from my human origins work and only peripherally relates to the Starchild.)
So . . . where do we draw the line? Where do we call the Starchild itself an alien even though it had a human mother? Would 1% from a normal human be far enough away? How about 3% away? Or 5% away, as far as a gorilla? Would that be far enough? It’s an interesting question to posit at this point, before the test result is known; but whatever it turns out to be, the fact that it won’t be entirely human should be enough to carry the day and make history on a scale few of us alive have even imagined. I’m quite certain about that.
Based on the astonishing array of the Starchild’s physiological differences relative to normal humans—two dozen major and several minor ones—we have to say that those differences were caused by variations in the genes that told it to grow in those unusual ways. And with the skull exhibiting so many distinct physiological anomalies, we can safely presume a similar percentage existed throughout the rest of the Starchild’s body, which was described as “misshapen” by the girl who found the two skeletons.
Therefore, given such a badly misshapen skull and a misshapen body under it, I feel comfortable going out on a limb and predicting that the Starchild’s DNA should be well beyond 1% different from all humans. More likely, it will be so far away that no one can draw any conclusion other than that its father was purely an alien, and it, too, was far more than half alien.
When that result is firmly established by the 454 DNA analysis, our place in the cosmos will irrevocably shift. We will become small, if not insignificant, parts of a larger whole with infinite variety and potential. I am confident this will happen in 2010, and I hope everyone will inform themselves of the facts of this astounding case so they can vicariously follow along as it unfolds.
Lloyd Pye is a UFO and Paranormal researcher who heads the Starchild Project: http://www.starchildproject.com/team.htm
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