The Very Strange Case of the Starchild Skull...
Imagine this: You are a teenage girl on vacation in Mexico with your family. These are the days before TV. Though your parents have warned you not to venture into the caves of the wild canyon nearby, you are after all a bold, curious teen.
One day you decide to ignore you mothers warning and you gather up the courage to journey into the wild, dark confines alone.
While exploring the interior you are startled and amazed to see a skeleton lying on the cave floor. Bending over to examine it you find an arm bone sticking up through the dirt and then an even smaller, oddly-shaped skull partially buried next to the larger one…
The place is Copper Canyon located in Northern Mexico, still a vast wilderness that has caught the attention of adventure-seeking tourists in recent years. Thus began an odyssey that went on for many decades. The girl was a Mexican-American whose family often visited the area to see relatives. (Copper Canyon below)
The Starchild skull is a 900-year old bone skull found in the 1930s. The girl became attached to the skull so she never brought any attention to it. However, when she died her family turned it over to friends who, in turn, gave it to Melanie Young of El Paso, Texas in 1998.
She happened to be a neonatal nurse and clinical massage therapist. Melanie wanted to learn what deformity or condition might have caused the "misshapen" skull. She approached several of her colleagues at the hospital where she worked. But all dismissed it as some sort of natural deformity.
However, none could give her an explanation as to what condition could have caused it.
This piqued her curiosity. Suspecting that it might be something as yet unknown to medical science she sought the assistance of investigator and author the late Lloyd Pye, He was an independent researcher in the field of the paranormal and ancient mysteries. She also pursued contacts among other medical professionals for their opinions.
In 1999 Pye became the director of the Starchild Project. He quickly set about the task of uncovering the truth about the skull. But soon encountered the fact that even the experts were unable to identify the deformity, this prompted Pye to theorize the reason might be that the Skull had alien origins.
But proving that thesis would be a whole new odyssey that would take 12 more years. With the assistance - of both major and minor contributors - he organized independent scientific testing of the skull in the US, Canada, and England.
A simple visual examination, and comparison to a normal human skull, quickly shows that the Starchild is very different. The cranium is more bulbous; the eye sockets positioned differently, both distinguishing features obvious to anyone at a glance.
But those differences could have been the result of a genetic abnormality or a disease.
In order to rule out those things and to scientifically establish the true nature of it, Pye had the skull tested and examined, by various medical and scientific experts, starting in 1999.None of them turned up any known condition or deformity that could explain its wide variety of abnormal characteristics.
Tests Conducted Included:
1) CAT Scan, which proved the Skull was not deformed by abnormal fusion of the cranial sutures (the bone plates of the Starchild Skull are not stuck together in a way that stopped the skull growing properly and changed its shape)
2) X-Rays, which showed the bone of the Skull to be uniformly thinner than normal human bone, that it had no frontal sinuses, and that there was no fluid or other abnormality between the brain and the inside of the skull
3) Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) Analysis, which discovered highly unusual microscopic, fibres inside the bone of the Skull
4) Expert Analysis of the physical structure of the bone, which identified the bone as much thinner and lighter than normal human bone; but also discovered that it is much stronger than human bone, a feature possibly related to the fibres in the bone.
In spite of the repeated tests, and the credibility of the various labs and investigators, the scientific community remained either indifferent or skeptical to Pye’s work.
Naturally, the Starchild skull ignited a firestorm of controversy, once it gained the media’s attention, since it does not fit into the established primate classification system. That makes it a very hot potato for historians and anthropologists, as well as biologists.
Tenured academics and scientists either routinely dismissed anomalies without serious analysis or ignore them entirely.
Pye, however, was an old hand at this game so he decided to have the skull undergo the ultimate scientific test, DNA analysis. That would raise the stakes to the highest level possible. Either the results would show the skull was human or it was not, it was a gamble he had to take.
What most of us are unaware of is the fact that the deepest levels of DNA testing are extremely, even prohibitively expensive. The costs can range from six figures way up into the high seven figures. Pye had limited funds so he took the skull to a lab to conduct a DNA analysis that he could afford.
The first test proved to be a false alarm. In 1999 the Starchild Skull was tested by the BOLD forensic teaching lab in Canada. They thought they had recovered human nuclear DNA from the "Y" chromosome, proving that the Starchild was a normal human male. This result was later determined to be a contamination.
That false report is often used by the Skeptic community to debunk the skull.
Then in 2003 the Starchild Project arranged another DNA test, this time by Trace Genetics, the genetics lab capable of testing ancient DNA, which had successfully analyzed the Kennewick Man. They were able to recover mitochondrial DNA, but not nuclear DNA.
That left two options--either the nuclear DNA was too degraded to recover, or the DNA was too different, from that of a human, to be detected by the human primers they were using to test it. Several more years passed.
Then in early in 2010 the head of a large genetics lab in the U.S. contacted the Starchild Project and suggested that he could attempt to use a recovery technique called modified "shotgun" sequencing to isolate the Starchild's nuclear DNA. This is the same nuclear DNA that could not be recovered during six attempts in an extensive DNA test conducted by Trace Genetics in 2003.
Trace Genetics used what was available then: long human-only primers made from many thousands of base pairs strung together. The new refined shotgun technique could recover much shorter strings of as little as 200 to 500 base pairs long.
Where primers are like a single bullet, the new technique is like a spray of shotgun pellets, giving a much better chance to hit a positive result. The geneticist was certain that if the skull's nuclear DNA was still viable, then.
The National Institute of Health (NIH) in Maryland, public-access database houses a centralized repository of all the genomic data accumulated by U.S. government-funded research, and it now covers every phylum on Earth.
If you have been led to believe that the Starchild is a hoax and no serious scientific study has gone into it, check your sources because somebody is blowing smoke in your eyes.
The results came back and showed that one length of 265 base pairs from the Starchild Skull's nuclear DNA matched perfectly
with this step the one human chromosome 1. This verified that at least some of the nuclear DNA from the Starchild is from a human being.
But in a second string of 342 base A sample was extracted and the geneticist sent it to the huge genetic database located at the National Institutes pairs recovered from the Starchild Skull the result read:
"No significant similarity found. For reasons why, click here."
Those "reasons why" involved an automatically generated list of possible procedural errors designed to help geneticists check all possible flaws in their testing techniques. However, the geneticist had verified his procedures and replicated his results, indicating that no such mistakes were made.
Of course no other DNA samples had ever turned up such a result, without errors, in the NIH computers. To have recovered a string of base pairs 342 nucleotides long with NO reference in the NIH database meant there is NO known earthly corollary for what has been analyzed!
As the author repeatedly stated in the previous volume, the genome on Earth is amazingly uniform, that is why the computer indicated there must be an error. That is because the human genome has close relationships with all animals, and even many plants, in the world around us.
Human’s share 95- 97% of our genes with chimps, 70% with rats, 65% with mice, 50% with bananas and 26% with yeast! Thus, nearly everything on Earth is, in some way, genetically interrelated with humans, so it is not at all unique that some of the Starchild's nuclear DNA was found to be human-like.
So here we have the smoking gun proof we have been searching for, proving not only that aliens exist but they have or at least one has visited the earth. (The Paracas DNA results could soon change this to many)
As breathtaking as this is we are quickly confronted by a conundrum wrapped within an enigma. Who was this alien, how did he get here, and what was he doing dying in that cave next to an ordinary person in a desolate area of northern Mexico?
What we lack here is a cultural context to clarify this entities history and social background. Was he a member of the Genesis Race, the founders of humanity and the progenitors of our earliest civilizations? By his size and description we would have to conclude that that seems unlikely.
Those are questions and issues that will have to be answered in due time. In fact, the DNA testing did not stop with there.
The above test involved nuclear DNA, which the author described in the second volume of this series in some detail. That is the chromosomal genetic material. However, four fragments were recovered from the Starchild's mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) as well.
In the prior book we learned that is the DNA packet transmitted by the maternal lineage.
Among the 16,569 base pairs in each mtDNA genome, a maximum of only 120 vary between all humans. The 120 maximum is found in descendants of the first humans, who originated in southern Africa around 200,000 years ago. The rest of us carry fewer mutations because our ancestors did not develop until well after the first humans appeared.
The geneticist recovered four reasonably large fragments of MtDNA which together totaled 1,583 base pairs, or 9.55% of the 16,569 base pair total for humans. In these the Starchild was found to carry a grand total of 93 variations that are different from the extremely highly conserved human mtDNA genome.
That is 93 in only 9.5% of the genome! It's already near to the maximum of 120 variations in human mtDNA. If we do a simple but highly reliable mathematical extrapolation, expanding the 9.5% out to 100% (times 10.5) we find that 93 established variations extrapolates out to 977 variations!
Neanderthals carry 200. The new hominins, Denisovans, carry 385. The Starchild extrapólates to 977!
Starchild Skull
According to the published results, “the lab discovered a high percentage of unusual DNA.” The DNA researcher wrote the following in an abstract:
Bone of the misshapen skull is one-third the thickness of a human skull, and it weighs correspondingly less
The misshapen skull’s bone is much harder than human skull bone as determined by its strong resistance to cutting and drilling, which is likely a consequence of biochemical differences and its internal architecture;
Its chemical makeup resembles human tooth enamel much more than the makeup of human skeletal bone;
The misshapen skull apparently contained a brain of a different shape which was apparently 30% larger than normal human brains, as estimated by measuring cranial capacity;
Eye sockets of a normal human adult are 1.5-2.0 inches deep, while the misshapen skull’s eye sockets are barely 0.5 inches deep, which indicates the corresponding biological entity had very different eyes;
As deduced from the maxilla fragment, the entities mouth was infant-sized and had a flat roof, with none of the arching that is normal in humans, indicating a very small or absent tongue.
An important point to note is that nuclear DNA contains many mutations. In fact only 5% of its billions of genes carry out most of our genetic functions, which means it is not highly conserved. However, the case with MtDNA is quite the opposite. Nearly all of mtDNA (98% or more) functions at a very high level of efficiency.
Mutations are rare in MtDNA because they are almost always dysfunctional and result in the death of the individual carrying them. Now we turn to the critical FOXP2 which can be considered as a "master gene," one of the most vitally important in the body of any species on Earth. (Described in some detail on volume two.)
The author has focused on this as the site that distinguishes humans from other primates in the chapters devoted to genetics in the prior volume. The geneticist recovered a fragment of the Starchild's DNA that housed the FOXP2’like homologue. The results of the analysis proved compelling.
The lab found that , “among the 211 nucleotides of the entities FOXP2-like DNA fragment, we find a stunning 62 differences at the nucleotide level, and 18 amino acid differences. Apart from the species-specific gaps, this fragment shows more differences from the human FOXP2 than any species included in the comparison…”
Because it is absolutely vital, the FOXP2 gene it is even more highly conserved than mtDNA. As stated above, in the 16,569 base pairs found in the mtDNA genome of normal humans, as many as 120 variations can be found in those of us that have an African heritage, mainly southern Africans.
That percentage of difference is quite small, about 0.7%. Compare that with the FOXP2 gene, which in normal humans is 2,594 base pairs long, and contains no variations, that is 0% mutations! Every normal human has the exact same array of FOXP2 base pairs as every other normal human.
If we are tracking together then you are beginning to understand that the Starchild skull is an alien, an outlier, not human…
Here the author is going to quote the report presented on The Starchild Project website
The Starchild's 211 base pair FOXP2 fragment has a grand total of 56 variations! Now, while extrapolating this 211 base pair fragment is a bit more of a stretch than extrapolating the four combined fragments of mtDNA we discussed earlier, doing so does provide something to think about.
Divide 2,954 by 211, and you get 12.3. Multiply 12.3 by 56, and the range of total variations in the Starchild's FOXP2 base pairs would be 600 to 700! So let's be crazy conservative and say it's only 200 or 300. It is still astounding in a super highly conserved gene that in normal humans has no variations at all!
If we compare the same section from a rhesus monkey's FOXP2, only 2 of its 211 base pairs would vary from any human. If it were a mouse, it would be 20, if a dog, 27, an elephant, 21, an opossum, 21, a Xenopus (a kind of frog), 26. So dogs and frogs are the most different, at 27 and 26 base pairs respectively.
To put this in perspective, let's imagine that when alive, the Starchild was indeed some unknown humanoid. No matter how different from humans it might have been, to be in the humanoid family its FOXP2 gene would have to be in the range of 1 or 2 or at most 3 base pair variations from a normal human. To go past 5 or 10 would put it into another class of species. 20 to 25 would put it in the range of mice and elephants, and dogs and frogs.
To have 56 is to put it in another realm, another dimension entirely. It is utterly unique…
Now we have objectively reviewed the results of a wide variety of tests including DNA analysis of the nuclear, mtDNA and FOXP2 genes and they all agreed. The lab results clearly show, what our cursory visual investigation suspected, the skull is not human.
It is not a matter of its unusual shape, which is just an indicator. Clearly, it is the deeper genetic data that reveals the truth; the unique biochemical and DNA differences that prove that the skull is of an alien of an unknown race.
You might think that proves the ancient astronaut theory but it does not really do that. It does, however, concur with the growing body of evidence that is proving that we are not alone…life exists out there in the cosmos and is not confined to Earth.
Though the author’s work is focused on proving the theory of directed panspermia (Cosmic Ancestry 2), the scientific method requires objectivity. The reality is that none of the various ‘alien’ skulls are going to provide, the incontrovertible “smoking gun” proof that many proponents of the ancient astronaut thesis seem to believe they will.
This is true even if their DNA reveals that they are not human, as the Starchild skull has. These artifacts are simply added to the growing body of evidence which supports the theory of Directed Panspermia, that aliens seeded life on Earth. Then at the right time they came to the planet to teach humans the arts of civilization.
In fact, the Starchild skull is not all that old, only 900 years and we have to come to terms with artifacts that are thousands of years older. Who built the Great Pyramid and why?
That said, we owe a debt of gratitude to Lloyd Pye, who passed away in 2013, for carrying the torch as far as he could…