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The so-called Starchild skull is touted as an alien/human hybrid. Like so many objects with unusual claims, tests on it are controlled by its owners.

The “Starchild skull” Published 21 October 2012 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews The so-called “starchild” skull (source Wikipedia) The “Starchild skull”, a real enough skull, is claimed to be physical evidence for a dead alien (or alien/human hybrid) right here on earth. Unfortunately, like so many of these objects that are supposed to derive from elsewhere in the cosmos, it is treated as private property and access to it for testing is tightly controlled. No independent scientific reports on it have ever been published and there are suspicions that data that demonstrates that it is human has been suppressed. Yet it has a very vocal community of supporters who tout it as proof of extraterrestrial contact (or a variety of other equally outlandish claims). The problems with the skull go way beyond simple data collection, analysis and interpretation: there are important ethical issues about the way in which the remains of a child – whether they are human or alien – are being used for commercial gain. Discovery The skull is supposed to have been discovered in the 1930s by an American girl from El Paso (Texas, USA) in an abandoned mine near Copper Canyon in Mexico, about 160 km south-west of Chihuahua. According to its current “owners”, the discoverer died in the early 1990s and it did not come into their possession until 1998, so information about its discovery is third hand, [redacted]. Nevertheless, it is said to have been discovered with the complete skeleton of an adult that lay exposed on the floor of the mine. The skeleton to which this skull belongs was covered by a small mound of earth, leaving only an arm and hand projecting from it; the child’s hand was clutching the upper arm of the adult. Although the girl tried to recover both skeletons, a flash flood washed away most of the remains and all she could take home were the two skulls. The skulls were given to Ray and Melanie Young in 1998; Melanie is a neonatal nurse and was convinced that the shape of the child’s skull could not be the result of ordinary human deformities. To try to find out more about it, they approached the author Lloyd Pye (1946-2013), although it is not clear why they sought his assistance in examining the skulls rather than an archaeologist or palaeopathologist. He had published Everything you know is wrong, book 1: human origins in 1997, which promotes the ideas of Zechariah Sitchin about the alien origins of humanity, using tendentiously wrong translations of Sumerian texts as his principal evidence. This makes the choice of Lloyd Pye as someone to research the remains look as if the Youngs had already formed an idea about the nature of the child’s skull. Pye and the Youngs founded The Starchild Project early in 1999, when Lloyd Pye became the “caretaker” of the child’s skull. Since then, all access to the remains has been controlled by Pye who, by 2010, had engaged the services of his own geneticist for reasons that will become apparent. The Project has promoted the skull, principally to UFO and New Age groups, among which the term “star child” is used to refer to alleged human/alien hybrids or to “the next stage in human evolution”. Description The skull of the child is large, with a capacity of 1600 cm3, some 200 cm3 larger than the average human adult, although it falls within the overall range of 1000–1900 cm3. While claims have been made that it is composed of a material resembling tooth enamel, it is of the standard mammalian bone chemical calcium hydroxyapatite. It contains the usual bones of the skull, together with all the features such as muscle attachments found in humans. However, it exhibits considerable deformities in all of them. For instance, the orbits are unusually shallow and the canal for the optic nerve is closer to the base of the orbit, suggesting a rotational deformity, while the occipital bone at the back of the skull is flattened. There are said to be no frontal sinuses, a condition that affects about ten percent of the population. Analysis of a detached portion of the right maxilla showed unerupted permanent dentition and an age at death of around five to six years has been suggested. Three views of the ‘starchild’ skull DNA tests The first DNA test was carried out by the Bureau of Legal Dentistry laboratory of the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) in 1999, which recovered a small quantity of nuclear DNA, which was said to demonstrate that the child was male. This result was set aside by Pye, who said it was the result of contamination, although we are not told how the contamination occurred. If the skull as a whole is contaminated, it means that any DNA results from it will be compromised, whether mtDNA or nuDNA (the latter is always more difficult to detect in ancient samples). A second test was carried out in 2003 by Trace Genetics of Davis (California, USA), a com...

The “Starchild skull” - Bad Archaeology