The Atacama Skeleton

The Atacama skeleton, known as Ata, is a six-inch mummified human skeleton found in Chile in 2003. Its tiny size, elongated skull, and apparent skeletal maturity made it a candidate alien body in UFO circles, and it featured in the 2013 documentary Sirius. A 2018 whole-genome study concluded Ata was a human female fetus with a cluster of rare mutations affecting bone development. The finding resolved the scientific question and opened an ethical one.

In 2003, a man searching for artifacts near the abandoned nitrate mining town of La Noria in Chile's Atacama Desert reportedly found the skeleton wrapped in cloth near a church. It passed into private hands and ended up with a collector in Spain. Photographs circulated in UFO media, where the specimen was presented as possible evidence of a tiny humanoid or extraterrestrial being.

Steven Greer's Disclosure Project obtained access to the specimen and made it the centerpiece of the 2013 crowdfunded documentary Sirius. Greer arranged for analysis by Garry Nolan, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford, who led the genomic work with pediatric genomics specialist Atul Butte. Chilean scientists and officials became involved after the 2018 publication raised questions about how the remains left the country.

Ata is physically real and unusual. The skeleton is about 15 centimeters long with a cone-shaped skull and appeared on X-rays to have the bone density of a child of several years, despite fetal size, and ten pairs of ribs instead of twelve. The 2018 study in Genome Research sequenced the entire genome and found Ata was human, female, of Chilean ancestry, and likely a preterm fetus. The team identified mutations in seven genes associated with skeletal dysplasias, scoliosis, and abnormal bone development, which they proposed could explain the anomalies. Some skeletal biologists later argued even the mutation cluster was unnecessary, saying the anomalies are consistent with a normal fetus of 15 to 16 weeks and that the apparent bone age was misread.

Chile's National Monuments Council opened an inquiry in 2018 into whether the remains were exhumed and exported illegally, and Chilean scientists publicly demanded the specimen's return. The study's authors acknowledged the ethical concerns. The specimen's exact current location has not been publicly confirmed.

The scientific dispute ended with the genome: no researcher involved considers Ata anything other than human. Criticism then reversed direction. Bioethicists and Chilean archaeologists argued the specimen was likely a recently deceased fetus, possibly decades old rather than centuries, and should never have been collected, exported, or studied without provenance and consent review. Greer has continued to describe Ata as unexplained, which geneticists involved in the study reject. The case is frequently cited alongside the Nazca mummies as an example of how claimed alien bodies fare under laboratory scrutiny.