Found in 2003 in the Chilean desert, a fifteen-centimeter mummy with ten pairs of ribs and a strangely elongated skull struck the imagination of scientists and gave hope to ufologists. Only now the analysis of her DNA has helped to understand what kind of creature it is. The unusual appearance of the mummy could be explained by mutations in genes discovered by scientists. The research results are published in Genome Research.
An unusual skeleton was found by the collector of artifacts Oscar Muñoz in the Chilean town of La Noria. The elongated skull and other anomalies in the structure of the skeleton of the mummy greatly inspired ufologists and the curious. Muñoz sold the find to a local pub owner for about $ 60, and then a Spanish businessman bought it for $ 160,000 and ended up in a private collection in Barcelona. The mummy was named Ata.
Illustrated dimensions of the Atacama mummy
Interim results of studies of the unusual mummy appeared back in 2013 and were contradictory: bone tomography data showed that it should have been a child of six to eight years old. This was evidenced by the growth areas on the epiphyses (ends) of the bones. At the same time, the size of the skeleton, not overgrown seams of the skull (the so-called fontanelle) and other non-ossified parts hinted that the mummy was a baby, possibly premature and stillborn. Some experts suggested that the mummy belongs to a monkey, and lovers of conspiracy theories even made a film about the "humanoid from Atacama", allegedly proving the presence of aliens on Earth and the conspiracy of world governments to hide their high technologies from earthlings.
Scientists led by immunologist Harry Nolan of Stanford University have extracted well-preserved samples of the mummy's DNA from the bone marrow. A comparison of the sequences with the read genomes of humans, rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees and other primates showed that the remains definitely belonged to a human girl. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (mutations-substitutions of individual "letters" in DNA) showed that this is a girl of Chilean origin.
Scientists have tested genes, mutations in which could cause such unusual changes in the structure of the skeleton. It turned out that the Chilean child had mutations in the genes COL1A1, COL2A1, KMT2D, FLNB, ATR, TRIP11 and PCNT, which are associated with the development of scoliosis, dwarfism and other anomalies in bone and muscle growth. Scientists believe that further study of this mummy will help to understand how mutations in certain genes lead to functional disorders in the musculoskeletal system.
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The remains of the mysterious creature were discovered in 2003 by Oscar Muñoz, a collector of artifacts of Native American history. While exploring the abandoned village of La Noria in the Atacama Desert, he found a package containing a 15-centimeter humanoid mummy.
In addition to its tiny stature, the mummy was striking in two more features: it had nine pairs of ribs (in humans, twelve pairs) and a highly elongated skull. She resembled the images of extraterrestrial aliens from science fiction films and was called the "humanoid from Atacama."
- Atacama Desert
- Reuters
The find was resold several times until it ended up in the private collection of a Spanish businessman. Since then, the strange creature has remained the subject of much speculation. American ufologist Stephen Greer said that a mummy with such severe deviations in the development of the skeleton cannot belong to a person. In 2013, he released the film Sirius, dedicated to his conjectures regarding the alien origin of Ata.
At the same time, scientists from the Stanford University School of Medicine under the leadership of microbiologist and immunologist Harry Nolan took up the study of the Atacama humanoid. In 2013, they presented the results of their work, according to which the mummy belongs to a seven-year-old boy who suffered from a severe and unknown type of dwarfism. According to another version, the child was sick with progeria - abnormally fast aging - and died shortly after giving birth.
New data on an old find
Without coming to a final conclusion, scientists continued their research for the next five years. Having completely deciphered the genome of Ata, experts identified mutations in several genes at once responsible for the abnormal development of the skeleton.
“It seems to me that when doctors do DNA tests on their patients, they are often looking for one specific cause, a very rare or unusual mutation, that could explain the disease. But in this case, we are sure that mutations occurred in several genes at once, which led to numerous deviations in development, "- said study author Harry Nolan.
- Pixabay
As a result of the research, Nolan and his colleague radiologist and pediatrician Ralph Lachman of Stanford University came to the final conclusion: the skeleton belongs to a Chilean infant girl who suffered from serious genetic mutations. So, the structure of Ata's bones is typical for a 6-year-old child, which indicates a rare disease of the bone structure.
“There was a similar story with the Kyshtym dwarf. Much has been invented about his origin. “Our institute examined tissue samples in which it was wrapped, and isolated the DNA of an ordinary person, only with many pathologies in development,” commented the head of the laboratory at the Institute of General Genetics. N.I. Vavilov Russian Academy of Sciences Sergei Kiselev.
Help people
Having determined the origin of Ata, Nolan continued his research. He extracted a small sample of DNA from the red bone marrow of Ata's ribs and decoded its complete genome. The scientist managed to objectively estimate the age of the find - it appeared more than 40 years ago. He also found out that the DNA of a person and Ata does not coincide by 8%. However, the reason for this lies not in the alien origin of the mummy, but in the numerous mutations of seven genes, which led to dwarfism, as well as various deformations of the bones and skull. Some of these mutations have been found in genes that were not previously thought to be responsible for bone growth or developmental disruption.
“The so-called Atacama humanoid is no longer a mystery. The information we have gained from our research on previously unknown mutations is very valuable in helping to identify similar types of bone or physical disorders in humans. Probably, with the help of gene therapy, we will be able to treat many of these diseases in the future, ”concluded Nolan.
According to Kiselev, the mechanisms of some rare diseases are not always understood, and therefore doctors do not know how to cope with them. Today, gene therapy is being used to treat complex genetic ailments, and this is bearing fruit, the expert noted.
“You can introduce the necessary genes into a cell and in this way change its further“ life ”. More often, genetics bring it to an embryonic state, in which it can differentiate into various types of cells necessary for a person. This method is used to treat patients born with hereditary diseases. So far, these are clinical studies - for example, recently, gene therapy was tested on people with hemophilia. And the experiment went well, "Kiselev noted.
However, according to the expert, in the future, gene therapy will find wide application in medicine and will be used to treat various diseases.
A miniature skeleton found in Chile 10 years ago and by its appearance, which inspired many ufologists with hope for proof that aliens exist, actually turned out to be human. This conclusion was made by American scientists after DNA analysis. The results of the study were announced in the Hollywood documentary Sirius.
The mummy of an "alien" was found in October 2003 by Chilean Oscar Muñoz, who was wandering in search of artifacts in the abandoned city of La Noria in the Atacama Desert. Not far from the destroyed church, he found a roll of white cloth. A humanoid creature measuring only 15 centimeters from feet to crown was wrapped in cloth. He had hard teeth, a bulging head, and unlike a normal person, only nine pairs of ribs, writes Diario Uno. The creature was immediately named "Atacama Humanoid".
In addition to the mystical version that this is an alien skeleton, it has been suggested that this is a baby monkey or a human embryo. The latter, as it turned out, was closest to the truth.
Six months ago, in connection with the filming of the documentary film "Sirius", its producer and part-time ufologist Stephen Greer turned to professionals with a request to find out the origin of the anomalous skeleton. For six months, it was examined by staff at Stanford University in California. They gave him X-rays and tomography, but the final results were helped by a DNA test. “We took an excellent DNA sample from the bone marrow in the mummy's ribs,” Greer said.
As a result, the research team concluded that the Chilean find represented "an interesting mutation of a male human who died at the age of 6-8." “I can say with confidence that this is not a monkey. This is a real person who breathed, ate, and digested food. The only question that remains open is what size the creature might be at birth, "said Stanford University geneticist Harry Nolan. The researchers also did not note when this creature lived.
Previously, scientists have denied the discovery of other anomalous remains - a thousand-year-old skull of an "alien" found in a Mexican village. The highly elongated and flattened skull, like that of the creature in the film of the same name by Ridley Scott, was actually human. Archaeologists explained that the skull was artificially deformed, which was used in Mesoamerican cultures to distinguish representatives of different social groups or for ritual purposes.
The doctors who performed the examination did not see anything like this in their entire practice. The creature was mummified, only in some places on the mutilated skeleton remained the remnants of the skin. Most surprising of all was the skull: four bony plates formed what looked more like a helmet. Just seven years later, another similar find was made on the other side of the planet, and it was its genetic analysis that recently made it possible to determine with a high degree of certainty who these mysterious, even frightening biological artifacts really were: one from the Ural town, the second from the Chilean desert. The mystery of the Kyshtym dwarf and the humanoid Atacama is in the Onliner review.
They named him "Alyoshenka"
Over the 22 years that have passed since its discovery, the creature from the city of Kyshtym, located between Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg, managed to acquire an incredible number of urban legends - primarily due to the fact that soon after the discovery, this mummy disappeared, remaining only in photographs and frames video filming of mediocre quality. There is no particular doubt about its physical existence: in addition to video and photographic evidence, there are numerous stories of unconnected witnesses who saw this artifact. However, the reliability of the most striking details of these descriptions is rightly questioned: the circumstances of the appearance of the Kyshtym dwarf and the environment where it happened were too peculiar.
The scene of action was not even the relatively large Ural city of Kyshtym, but its nearest southern suburb - the village of Kaolinovy (kaolin is white clay, which was mined nearby), located on the shore of Lake Anbash. One day in May 1996, an elderly local woman named Tamara Prosvirina went on her usual walk to the cemetery. The first important nuance of this whole story was that the citizen Prosvirina suffered from a mental illness, she constantly heard certain “voices” in her head, at the request of which the study of the necropolises took place. From there, the woman regularly brought home the small trophies discovered by her, one of which was the object, which later received the nickname "Kyshtym dwarf".
Lake Anbash, in the vicinity of which the Kyshtym dwarf was discovered
Prosvirina herself called him Alyoshenka, because she took the creature for a child, moreover, a living child, capable of eating and making certain sounds similar to a whistle. The pensioner began to actively share with her neighbors by the fact that her "son" appeared in her house. They were aware of the woman's medical problems and in the end behaved as naturally as possible in such a situation. In July of the same year, Prosvirina was taken away by orderlies and sent to another course of rehabilitation at a local psychiatric hospital.
In August 1996, law enforcement agencies learned about Aleshenka. As usual, it happened quite by accident. The suspects in one of the criminal cases they were investigating were a local resident, according to one version, the tenant of Prosvirina's daughter-in-law, according to the other - their distant relative. Be that as it may, for some reason he told the police that he was the happy owner of an "alien", as if he had found him dead in an empty apartment Prosvirina was recovering from. By this time, only skeletonized remains of Alyoshenka remained, which nevertheless deeply impressed the investigators.
The creature was a twisted body about 25 centimeters long. The shape of the skull, similar to a helmet with a crest, large eye sockets, thin arms and legs really resembled an alien, at least that stereotypical image created by media efforts.
Major Vladimir Bendlin, an investigator from the Kyshtym OVD, who eventually became aware of the dwarf, confiscated his remains and on August 13, 1996, in one of the city's police stations, in the presence of attesting witnesses and forensic experts, he videotaped the mummy and its measurements - this is how the most serious evidence of that that Alyoshenka existed not only in the imagination, altered by mental illness and excessive alcohol consumption.
After all, the rest of this story really looks like fantasies that were born in a protracted drunken stupor that seized the Russian outback in those years. From a modern point of view, a lot is shocking. At the request of Investigator Bendlin, a study of the creature was carried out by local pathologists, who confirmed its biological origin. Nevertheless, the body did not interest the colleagues and the major's superiors. Neither a serious investigation into the circumstances of Aleshenka's birth, nor an examination of his remains were carried out. Obviously, in Kyshtym of the 1996 model, there were not the slightest conditions for this. But why regional or even federal resources were not attracted remains a mystery. In the end, investigator Bendlin did not find anything better than to hand the mummy over to some ufologists who had multiplied at that time, in whose midst it disappeared without a trace. When journalists, including Japanese, became interested in the story of Alyoshenka, it was already too late. The "son" found in the cemetery disappeared, and the only thing left to operate was Bendlin's video recording and the stories of "eyewitnesses", many of whom were shocked by their implausibility.
For example, Prosvirina's daughter-in-law and one of her neighbors later claimed that they saw the "alien" alive. He was then plump (it turns out, he shrunk after death), ate caramel and tried to whistle. At the same time, for some reason none of these self-proclaimed "witnesses of Alyoshenka" had the idea to notify the relevant authorities about his appearance in the life of sick Tamara Prosvirina. According to them, they mistook him for a “little animal,” which eventually died of hunger when the pensioner who found him was sent to a psychiatric hospital.
In fact, much in the circumstances of the appearance of the Kyshtym dwarf becomes clear if we try to understand the context in which it happened.
Alyoshenka was "lucky" to find himself in a deeply asocial environment of a provincial depressed city in the midst of the dashing nineties. He was discovered, and then "seen alive" by people who suffered not only from psychiatric diseases, but also from hopeless drunken alcoholism. Local journalists found out that Prosvirina's apartment in the absence of the hostess, in fact, was a brothel, where, of course, they did not pay attention to the presence of the body of a certain creature in the room. The background for this was the heyday of interest in "paranormal phenomena", in which even phenomena that could be explained from the point of view of conventional logic were interpreted in a distorted way by default. The tabloid press, which was at its peak of popularity, only fueled mass hysteria and, in pursuit of the desired headline, often financed similar "eyewitness accounts." Even a modest reward, sometimes an extra bottle of vodka, were able to establish a very strong contact with the "alien civilization".
The level of social degradation was such that both the police officers and the medical workers believed in the “newcomer,” so different from the usual standard, who seriously argued that the truth was somewhere nearby, that Alyoshenka could not be a human being. The history of the humanoid Atacama speaks of how he could.
Humanoid Atacama
In 2003, a strange mummy about 15 centimeters long was discovered in one of the abandoned Chilean mining villages in the Atacama Desert. The elongated skull, large eye sockets again resembled an alien from the films rather than an ordinary person. Ufologists and other lovers of the unknown who have lost the Kyshtym dwarf have a new idol, as if a direct proof that we are not alone in the Universe. It took real scientists 15 years to get the genetic material to get closer to the truth.
In March 2018, an article appeared in the peer-reviewed American scientific journal Genome Research, written by a group of scientists led by Stanford University professor Harry Nolan. As a result of the study of the genome of the mummy, it turned out that it belongs to a girl, definitely a Chilean, who died almost immediately after birth. The authors of the text identified 64 mutations in 7 genes associated with skeletal development. The girl's skeleton was monstrously deformed, and the reason for this could be the poisoning of her mother with nitrates. A deposit of sodium nitrate was located near the place where the mummy was found.
Much later after the disappearance of Alyoshenka, when his story became a well-known urban legend, Russian scientists were already able to isolate DNA from the stains of biological material left on the tissue in which the body was wrapped before his only video filming. Subsequent analysis showed that the Kyshtym dwarf was a premature girl with numerous skeletal mutations. And in this area, alas, there is nothing surprising in this.
Kyshtym disaster
On September 29, 1957, at the Mayak chemical plant in the then top-secret city of Chelyabinsk-40, due to the failure of the cooling system of one of the containers with radioactive waste, their self-heating occurred, which ended in an explosion. Several tens of tons of high-level waste were thrown into the air to a height of 1-2 kilometers, forming a cloud, which subsequently dispersed over an area of 23 thousand square kilometers. This was the first major radiation accident on the territory of the USSR, which directly and indirectly affected the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of people. 23 villages that fell into the contaminated zone were resettled and demolished. Kyshtym himself, located 11 kilometers from the explosion site, was not injured: the radioactive trail mainly stretched northeast of the city, but it is quite possible that it was this emergency that led to the birth of Alyoshenka 39 years later.
A premature baby, most likely 20-25 weeks old with numerous developmental disabilities, was apparently born in the vicinity of Kyshtym, possibly in the village of Kaolinovy. Frightened by the girl's appearance, the mother probably decided to get rid of her and took the body to the cemetery, where after some time Tamara Prosvirina found him.
Unfortunately for many, and in this case there was no contact with aliens, but there was another human tragedy from an endless series, by chance (or the Mayak plant) became the property of millions.
Usually, all these stories about mummies of aliens and unseen creatures end with one thing - falsification, manipulation and dummy. But here everything is different ...
In October 2003, a collector of Native American history artifacts named Oscar Muñoz explored the abandoned Chilean town of La Noria, located about 56 km from the town of Iquique in the Atacama desert (desierto de Atacama). He found a package with a small humanoid mummy. Its length was about 15 centimeters and outwardly had a good preservation. Even hard teeth were present.
He was even called "an alien from the desert". 
Two unusual features were striking. First, there are only nine pairs of ribs, in contrast to the twelve usual for humans. Second, and more remarkable, the mummy's highly elongated skull. The egghead gave it a similarity to the classic alien movie. For this reason, the find was named the "Atacama Humanoid".
This creature is 15 centimeters tall, the head is large in proportion to the body, and the ribs of this creature are 2 less than that of a person. This humanoid was nicknamed in honor of the place of discovery - "Atacama Humanoid". This find gave ufologists more confidence in the existence of alien intelligence. 
After the grandiose discovery, rumors about the appearance of an alien intelligence on Earth were quickly dispelled. But 10 years later, a large screening of "Sirius" was released on the cranes, in which scientists share their views on the existence of aliens and provide reliable information from specialists who have studied the humanoid body.
But in spite of everything, skeptics claim that this is a dummy and all this is a falsification of facts, although the tomography showed that this is the real body of a real creature. Opinions were also divided among researchers, but that the body may be a small monkey or the body of a human embryo in late pregnancy.
However, studies carried out with the help of modern equipment - X-rays, tomography, DNA analysis - reveal the most interesting information about the humanoid from Atacama:
First, it cannot be a monkey. “I can say with 100% certainty that the find is not a monkey skeleton. This is something closer to humans than chimpanzees, ”said Harry Nolan, the professor who performed the genetic analysis.
Secondly, “the skeleton is not an aborted human fetus, it is excluded,” the specialist said. 
It took about six months to study the Atacam humanoid in detail at California's Stanford University. The results were released at a special press conference by research team leader Harry Nolan.
DNA analysis taken from the bone marrow of the ribs showed that the mummy is a rare human female mutation. Moreover, her mother was most definitely from the west coast of South America, that is, most likely, Chilean.
Research has revealed a previously unknown skeletal anomaly. The study of X-rays and tomography results showed that the density of the epiphase plates of the knees (cartilaginous growth plates in children at the ends of long bones) corresponds to that of a child about seven years of age. 
The age of the find was also objectively assessed. It turned out that the mummy is relatively young. She is only more than four decades old, although initially it was not excluded an age comparable to a millennium. The reason is that the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on earth, contributing to the incorruptibility of organic matter.
In 2018, Harry Nolan's group of researchers published a scientific article in the journal Genome Research on the results of research on the mummy's DNA. Scientists have determined that this is "a girl-child who was either not full-term, or was born much later than the term and died almost immediately after birth." The unusual appearance is due to negative mutations in about 60 genes that led to scoliosis, premature aging, impaired synthesis of collagen and bone tissue, abnormal number of ribs, etc. Sian Halcrow from the University of Otago (New Zealand) and her colleagues from universities in the USA, Sweden and Chile questioned the findings of researchers at Stanford University, as they found no signs of fetal skeletal anomalies in the Atacama mummy. 
“Understanding the discovered mutations that cause bone aging, as in the case of Ata, may allow us to develop drugs that can help the development and repair of bones in people who have been victims of accidents, car accidents or other tragedies ...
Although the whole story began and spread around the world as an alien, in reality it is nothing more than the tragedy of a woman giving birth to a premature baby that was sold as a bizarre artifact.
The Atacama humanoid is an incredible genetic case from which we must extract the most important and help all of humanity in the fight against this problem. Rest in peace "Ata"! " - excerpt from Professor Nolan's interview for The Guardian. 