Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. But I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry, so you're sitting and forget for Dave. This is short stuff, which is off to a bad start already.
That's right. And this is the story of the Saddest Skeleton.
It is really sad. There's like five different reasons it's sad. But you can kind of understand a little bit why the skeleton would get so much attention. As known as the Atakama skeleton, and it was found in the desert of northern Chile, Atacama Desert, in an abandoned town called Ladnoria back in two thousand and three.
That's right.
It's little, very small, about six inches in length or fifteen centimeters, and it has a very interesting shape to the skull, very conically shaped, and also has only ten pairs of ribs where we usually have twelve pairs. And so of course right away there were uf people saying it's an alien. It's got to be a tiny, little alien.
There's no other explanation.
Yeah, look at that thing. Other people said, hey, not so fast. It looks more like a non human primate, maybe a shape shifter.
We don't know.
From what weird place this thing came from. But that's just the beginning of the story, that's all. I don't want to ruin anything just yet.
Yeah. The skeleton also is not fully skeletonized, like there's desiccated flesh attached to tissue attached to it in some places too, including the face. And the reason why is because, like I said, it came from the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. That's one of the driest non polar places on Earth, and it can mummify human remains pretty easily. It's between the Chilean coastal mountain range and the Andes and the town of Lenora, which is situated in the desert,
was once a mining town, a nitrate mining town. I think Saltpeter.
Actually, yeah, that's right. You love saying Saltpeter.
Yeah. Why are you gonna say anything else when you can say Saltpeter?
Agreed, It's used as a fertilizer a lot. So they abandoned the town in nineteen thirties, I guess, after they had mined up all that stuff. So it's, you know, long way of saying, it's a very good place to preserve skeletons there and just naturally. But not only that, but the ancient Centori culture there had a tradition of
mummifying bodies on purpose through their embalming process. So an even longer way of saying that finding something out there, it is not unlikely that it would be pretty well preserved.
Yeah, and not the least of which because of the solar radiation there. Apparently it's higher than anywhere on Earth, not a lot of water, it's very hot in the day, very cold at night. It's like just a perfect place to make a mummy. And so in two thousand and three the world first heard of the Atikamma skeleton thanks to a guy named Oscar Munos who's a treasure hunter, who said that he went to Lenoria and found just sitting on a shelf in one of the buildings the
ati Kama skeleton. And most other people say, oh, we don't think that you just found this thing on a shelf.
Yeah.
Most other people say, he really dug this thing up from a burial site. So that's sad thing number one, and no, no number one, as you're not just supposed to do that as a treasure hunter. That's not a treasure. Sure later on that skeleton was sold to a guy named Ramon navia Asorio. He was a Spanish business owner and a just collector of oddities. And also, it just so happens a president of the Institute for Research and Exo Biological Studies, which is a UFO enthusiast organization.
Right, And so you fologists have like a fairly smallish community of people who will actually travel to conferences. So it's not a big surprise that navia Osorio met up with a guy named Stephen M. Greer, who is a very prominent ufologist. I think he must have come up in our area fifty one episode because I recognize his name. But he is very outspoken about trying to get the US government to disclose all of the information they surely have on aliens, their awareness of aliens, what really crashed
and roswell, all of that stuff. And when Greer found out that navia Osorio had the Ada Kama skeleton, he was like, we have to figure out what this thing is. Can I take a tissue sample?
That's right, and that feels like a great place for a break.
What a cliffhanger? Yeah, we'll be right back, all right.
So Stephen Greer has gotten in touch with Navaria Assorio and said, hey, I got a plan here. Let's get this Let's extract some DNA, have it examined for this documentary called Sirius S I R I U S. It's inspired out of one of my books. We can figure out what this thing is like, you know, hopefully full bore and we can know for sure.
Yeah. And I guess the Serious got publicized enough that a guy named Gary Nolan, who's a microbiologist. He reached out to Stephen Greer and said, hey, I can help you run a genomic test on this thing for your movie Serious. Let's do this, And Stephen Greer said great, let's I'm sure that was quite unexpected.
Yeah, And another thing that was unexpected was they found that the DNA was quote modern, abundant and high quality and is human. There's no doubt about it. So obviously this was not an alien being. They published this research in March of twenty eighteen in the journal Genome Research. And what they found is, you know, the second and probably most sad thing is that it was probably a little baby girl who died in the womb.
Yeah, she was almost certainly still born. If she was alive when she was born, she would not have lived very long. And they like, if you haven't seen the autocommon skeleton, that's probably a good time to go look up a picture of her. But the reason she has such an unusual appearance is because they attribute it to the really like disproportionate number of genetic mutation she has. You know, just one single genetic mutation can very easily
alter a person's appearance. She had multiple genetic mutations, and they have no idea why, but they're like, well, this explains basically everything.
Yeah, and also it seemed like it was you know, I'm pretty sure that it's a preterm birth. She's very well preserved, so they're pretty sure that she's under five hundred years old, and that's what I meant by fairly recent. But they said they don't know, like she could have died in the past, like thirty or forty years And if that's true, then her parents might potentially still be around.
And we have this situation where there could be parents, an even if there aren't, we have snatched this skeleton from a tomb of this little girl who died prematurely because of you know, issues like birth issues, and it's like the saddest thing in the world.
And not only that, people around the world are saying, like alien, look at this, obviously an alien. Yeah, it's like, no, these are actually congenital genetic issues, not alien. So yeah, you put all this stuff together. You just hope that the family is not aware of this. The thing that stood out to me though, Chuck, is she died within
say forty years. That would put her in the eighties the seventies, and the town where she was found, allegedly Lenoria, was abandoned in the thirties, so I'm not sure what she would be doing there, but I did see in a lot of different places they're like, she could have died quite recently.
Right, Yeah. Well, it was such a sort of outrage after they found this out when that paper was published in twenty eighteen that Chilean Society of Biological Anthropology and the Chilean Association of Archaeologists both came out and were like, this was a really unethical study. Shouldn't have done it. It's against the law.
First of all.
Under the Chilean law, it's illegal to carry out archaeological, anthropological or paleen to logical excavations without getting authorization from the Council of National Monuments, which wasn't done.
That's a big one. They're also like, by the way, give us our remains back, let's repatriator. And then a lot of focus came on to Gary Nolan and his group for even running this test in the first place, and they they essentially understood. They're like, you know, you're right, this, this, this whole jam is quite unethical. At least in our defense, we did not handle the body. We've never seen the body in person. We got a one millimeter a cubic millimeter piece of bone to use as the sample, so
at least there's that. And yes, we believe that that this baby's remain should be repatriated back to Chile. So I don't, I don't. I don't know if they got all the heat off of them, but at the very least they were willing to acknowledge the ethical lapse on their part for sure.
Yeah, I think that was a fairly stand up th to do.
But the body is not back in Chile. It's still in the possession of Ramon Navia Osorio in Spain. Yeah, he's got it still. I don't know that he's making any moves to give it back. And also I saw Stephen Greer disputes the findings that it was human anything else, just a that was a scoff if I've ever heard one. Yeah, all right, love you. Chuck Short stuffs out.
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