NOT ALIEN: Chile's Atacama skeleton most likely fetus from lost human race, claims UFO expert

The man who has studied the odd, oblong-headed 'Atacama skeleton' of Chile believes that the creature may have formerly belonged to a tiny class of terrestrial humanoid dwelling in the high caverns of the South American Andes.

Late last week, this Spanish researcher and businessman—who also happens to be the owner of the unsettling little skeleton mummy—unveiled his latest notion on Spain's Mitele TV network.

From the moment the six-inch-long "alien" mummy was removed from an abandoned church in the ghost town of La Noria, 3,225 feet above sea level in the dry Atacama Desert, Chile has been the subject of sensational origin myths.

The skeleton known as "Ata" is not exceptional in the slightest, according to seven specialists in child anatomy and anthropology. This is despite the fact that other little mummies have been brought to Mexico's Congress as evidence of alien life.

The new notion, according to one expert, is "absurd" and "not based on scientific evidence, or just knowledge of normal anatomical development of babies," as they told DailyMail.

"Ata" fits the description of a typical, totally normal human fetal skeleton, according to Professor Siân Halcrow, a biological anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, who made this statement to DailyMail.

Halcrow released an investigation in 2018 alongside archaeologists from Stockholm University in Sweden, anatomical specialists from Stony Brook Medical School in the US, and others, criticising Ata's "alien" believers as well as sceptics.

"We estimated the length of the femur, and we estimated that the fetus would have been about 15 weeks in-utero gestation," Halcrow explained to DailyMail, "so very premature."

The skeleton most likely belonged to a fetus or preterm newborn that died fewer than four months into the pregnancy, according to the evaluation made by Halcrow and her co-authors, which took into account little Ata's 6-inch measurement from the top of her skull to her heel.

The mummy is thought to have been bought by Ramón Navia-Osorio Villar, a businessman from Barcelona, from treasure hunter Oscar Muñoz, who had acquired the 6-inch corpse from the Atacama ghost town in 2003, however, the specifics are unknown.

Longtime hunter and enthusiast for unidentified flying objects (UFOs), Navia-Osorio chaired the UFO organisation the Institute for Exobiological Investigation and Study (IIEE), which published a study on the "Atacama skeleton" in 2013.

Five years after that report, "The Anthropomorphic Being From Atacama," a team at Stanford undertook a more comprehensive, peer-reviewed research.

However, the Stanford team's 2018 research was immediately criticised for collaborating with individuals who may have broken Chilean law by removing Ata's remains, and many questioned both the study's ethics and its conclusions.

The Stanford research, which was published in the journal Genome Research, caused such a stir right away that, a few days later, the authors released a statement supporting it.

In the end, though, their investigation cast doubt on any claims of alien life, arguing instead that Ata's DNA was distinctly Earth-bound and showed evidence of peculiar mutations connected to scoliosis and dwarfism.

However, Professor Halcrow pointed out that there isn't any obvious evidence that these genetic changes were having an impact or would have at this stage of fetal development.

"With the skull in particular, obviously the skull is going to be larger in proportion to the body just because of the normal development of a baby," Professor Halcrow said.

While Ata's huge and narrow head may look like a typical "alien grey" to the general public, obstetricians and other medical professionals who study human anatomy are more likely to recognise Ata's features as normal.