'Roswell Alien' Photo Likely a Baby Mummy

Earlier this week at a UFO conference in Mexico City two photographs claimed to have been found in a trunk in Sedona, Ariz., and depicting an alien body that crashed in Roswell in 1947 were revealed. It has created quite a buzz among UFO believers and others, but there are good reasons to question the claim.

According to the Daily Mirror, the photos “were found by former journalist Adam Dew, who has taken steps to verify the pair of alien snaps and said Kodak experts had dated the film to 1947….The photos were supposedly found in Arizona, hidden in a collection of snaps owned by oil geologist Bernard Ray and his wife Hilda Ray, who have both died.”

Assuming that a representative from Kodak authenticated the film as old stock dating back to the 1940s doesn’t mean that Kodak “authenticated” the subject of the photo; all it means is that it’s a genuine old photo, and not, for example, on film produced in the 1980s.

If it’s a genuine old photo, what could it be? An important clue about the real explanation can be seen in the photos, since the small figure appears to have been photographed in a display case (it even has what appears to be a sign explaining what it is, though the image is washed out and the quality is not good enough to read it).

It doesn’t look alien so much as a skeletal human with a large head, which is characteristic of a child’s body. And that’s likely what it is: a child’s mummified body. In fact, it is not the first time that a mummified child’s body has been mistaken for an alien. Long-dead bodies with deformed skulls have previously been mistaken for extraterrestrials, but there is nothing unusual about finding deformed skulls in the Americas; archaeologists have found them for years.

Cranial deformation is a widely known practice, and in 2012 archaeologists in Mexico found a burial ground of twenty-five skeletons; of those, more than half showed intentional skull deformation. Mummified fetuses and babies have been on display in museums around the world for decades, including in South America.

Mummified Mysteries

If it is indeed a mummified baby corpse, it would be only the latest of many to have been reinterpreted as something unknown or mysterious. Earlier this year a pair of mummified cats found in Chile was mistaken for the mysterious vampire creature called the chupacabra. The felines had disproportionately large heads compared to the rest of their bodies and were likely kittens.

Part of the reason that these objects seem so bizarre and mysterious is that very few people outside of the fields of archaeology and anthropology are familiar with the process and appearance of mummification.

For most people the word “mummy” evokes bandaged, slow-moving monsters from ancient Egypt. We typically think of bodies being reduced to a skeleton not long after death, but in fact bodies may be preserved for centuries or millennia, either through intentional preservation (such as mummification) or because the environment where a person died helps preserve the bodies (for example high in the cold Andes mountains, or in deserts where the lack of moisture inhibits decay-causing bacteria).

Adult mummies are strange enough, but baby mummies are even rarer and stranger looking. Because babies have disproportionally large heads as compared to the rest of their bodies, their dessicated remains seem all the more inhuman. A Reuters news story featured video of UFO proponent Richard Dolan at the conference claiming, without providing any evidence or documentation, that unnamed experts somehow ruled out the mummy explanation.

Of course extraterrestrials have never been proven to exist, and no photographs of alien bodies have ever been authenticated, and thus the belief or assumption that aliens would have disproportionately large craniums is sci-fi pop culture speculation promoted in entertainment media ranging from “The X-Files” to Steven Spielberg’s seminal 1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

If the “standard” alien depicted decades ago -- and since embraced by UFO buffs -- had an unusually small head and three legs, for example, this and other mummified babies would not be associated with anything extraterrestrial.

Even if it is a genuine extraterrestrial, there’s reason to doubt that the carcass was recovered in Roswell in 1947: None of the original eyewitnesses to the debris found on the New Mexico ranch described any alien bodies or even spacecraft. In fact the first person to find the wreckage described it as “made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks.”

Read more at Discovery News