Mexico.Maussan · Mummies before the Mexican Congress

On 12 September 2023, the Mexican broadcaster Jaime Maussan starred in one of the most publicized —and embarrassing— episodes in the recent history of the UAP topic. During a public hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena held in the Chamber of Deputies of the Mexican Congress, Maussan displayed two small mummified bodies, enclosed in glass cases, of humanoid appearance: elongated heads, three-fingered hands and large oval eye sockets. He claimed they had been found in the Nazca region of Peru, and maintained that almost a third of their DNA was 'of unknown origin' and that they were not part of 'our terrestrial evolution'. The image of the bodies presented under oath in a legislative chamber traveled around the world.

The scientific community's reaction was immediate and devastating. Maussan attributed part of the analysis to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); but Julieta Fierro, a physics researcher at UNAM itself, declared that the university had never endorsed such conclusions and that Maussan's data 'made no sense'. Various anatomy specialists noted that the bodies appeared assembled from human and animal bones manipulated to simulate an alien morphology.

The case, moreover, was neither new nor isolated. Already in 2017, when similar 'Nazca' mummies first circulated, Peru's prosecutor's office had concluded they were 'recently manufactured dolls', covered with a mixture of paper and synthetic glue to simulate skin. And Maussan himself carried a record of discredited presentations: in 2015 he had led the 'Be Witness' event, where he unveiled a supposed alien body that turned out to be the mummy of a human child. The 2023 Congress episode thus stood, before scientific consensus, as one more fraud in a trajectory of frauds, aggravated by having been staged inside a state institution.

The Maussan episode before the Mexican Congress matters to the corpus not as evidence of non-human bodies, but as a case study of institutional capture by fraud and of the asymmetry between spectacle and proof. Its value is methodological and, above all, defensive: it shows how a legislative chamber can lend its symbolic authority to a baseless claim, and how the institutional wrapper —bodies under oath, flags, stenographers— is easily mistaken for scientific validation when there is none. For a corpus that seriously tracks the institutional dimension of the phenomenon, distinguishing the container (an act of Congress) from the content (some dolls) is exactly the hygiene the case forces one to practice.

That is why the posterior loads overwhelmingly onto the mundane/natural narrative in its fraud variant. The chain of evidence against is dense and convergent: UNAM's denial, the anatomical analysis pointing to assembled human and animal bones, the prior 2017 ruling by the Peruvian prosecutor describing paper-and-glue dolls, and Maussan's own documented record with the 2015 child mummy presented as an alien. The minimal mass of indeterminacy grants no credit to the non-human hypothesis —the case is, for practical purposes, resolved— but acknowledges the impossibility of auditing each specimen first-hand. In the corpus, Maussan 2023 is the anchor on the spectacle side: the reminder that an institutional platform amplifies but does not turn into truth, and that the right question before an 'alien' body remains who examined it, by what method and with what independent review.