Last Updated: 10/27/2004 8:03:47 AM.
Early in 1999, a misshapen skull was presented to Lloyd Pye, who thought it would take six months to interest U.S. scientists in testing it to determine it's biological heritage. Six months turned into six years as Lloyd tried to interest scientists to have a serious go at a skull given the unfortunate name of "Starchild." Scientists would have nothing to do with something even casually suggestive of alien heritage.
Fortunately, in early 2004, Lloyd was invited to London to have a series of bone chemistry tests run at the Royal Holloway Scientific Institute. The results have been astonishing, and are currently visible at www.starchild-uk.com. Previously unknown "fibers," for lack of a more precise term, have been found embedded in the bone, along with a reddish residue in its cancellous holes, considered impossible for human bone 900 years old.
Now the stage is set for an extensive group of tests that need to be done to establish the nature of the fibers and the residue, which will determine if the Starchild is, in fact, or otherworldly origin, or was misnamed and has all along been the most unusual human malformation in history. One way or another, history will be made by this amazing relic that fits no known pattern of human morphology.
Just over 70 years ago, a young girl in Mexico wandered into a cave. She discovers a human female skeleton lying on the cave floor with a small skeletal hand sticking out of the dirt, grasping the arm of the skeleton.
The young girl began to dig.
"She found in a shallow grave another skeleton of a smaller being that she said was misshapen all over," says Lloyd Pye, the author and researcher for the Starchild Research Project.
It's this misshapen skeleton, of which only the skull remains, which has baffled scientists and researchers. "Who" and perhaps more importantly "what" was found in that Mexican cave? Pye believes it's a Starchild, or a human-alien hybrid, along with its mother or some sort of caretaker.
Pye adds, "When (the Starchild) died, she buried him, left his hand sticking up out of the ground, wrapped his hand around her arm and she committed suicide."
Pye says stories of Starchildren are common among ancient cultures. The stories say a being from the heavens comes to earth and impregnates a woman who is usually infertile. Then, the village raises the child until the being returns several years later to take the child with it. As far-fetched as this might sound, Pye has done everything to prove that this couldn't possibly be what he now believes that this is the remains of a real Starchild.
"There is nothing to account for it, because we've been through every book that we can find about human deformities and there's nothing like it."
Pye says all reasonable theories have been disproved. And that the symmetrical, but flattened head, the unusual position of the eye sockets and the unusually low bone density point to this skull as being genuine.
But Pye's argument isn't enough to convince anthropologists Dr. Michael Galaty and Dr. Julian Murchison. Both men viewed a videotape with great details about the skull presented by Pye.
Galaty says, "I didn't see anything that looked so outlandish that I couldn't - I wouldn't - expect it to exist."
"(Pye) didn't convince me that all other possibilities had been accounted for," says Murchison.
Galaty continues, "What you have here is a case of someone who has found something that's interesting, that he can't explain. Therefore he is jumping to the most extreme possible explanation." "It was totally out of context," says Murchison. "We, as anthropologists - as scientists - are concerned about how things appear in context. So, he tells this fantastic story about sort of how this woman found the skull and the position of the bodies, but there's no way to go back and check that out."
Both anthropologists agree that it's tough to judge Pye's argument without physically examining the skull for themselves. However, they did suggest one way that could solve the mystery of the Starchild skull once and for all - DNA testing. Interestingly enough, Pye agrees, "That should tell us definitively one way or the other whether it is indeed a very unusual human deformity as rare and bizarre as the "Elephant Man" in it's own way. Or whether it's something else."
Pye managed to get certain tests done, enough to convince me and a small group that they were onto something if a means could be found to have sophisticated scientific testing done.
In October 2002, a patron in London, Belinda McKenzie, agreed to fund the badly needed ancient DNA test. This was accomplished in 2003 with a tantalizing result.
The Starchild’s mitochondrial DNA was relatively easy to recover and showed it had a human mother (expected if it is a hybrid), but its nuclear DNA, the part that would reveal its father’s genetic heritage, couldn’t be recovered with current primers. Pye was advised to wait for primers to become more efficient. We were also advised to investigate its bone chemistry because in conducting the DNA tests, some intriguing discoveries were made.
The bone was significantly harder to cut that it should have been. There was a stronger-than-usual smell of “burning bone” when cutting it. When put into EDTA, the normal solvent for human bone, the Starchild should have dissolved within a week, or perhaps less since it is less than half as thick as normal human bone.
Ten weeks later the Starchild bone had not dissolved a bit.
When a strong detergent was added to the mix, the Starchild bone dissolved completely, overnight, down to a thin layer of residue.
Thus, its chemistry seemed to be unusual enough to warrant a full-scale investigation. For most of 2004, Pye has been doing precisely that, and now has results with scientific merit and investigative significance.
Currently, Pye is efforting to acquire funding for the final round of testing on the Starchild skull.
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