Alien or Human?

In 2003, a strange, little skeleton was discovered in the Chilean ghost town of La Noria, in the Atacama Desert the driest place in the world. It was nicknamed Ata.

Sep 13, 2024

Abandoned ghost town of Humberstone in the Atacama Desert

La Noria, is an old nitrate-mining town, and nearby is another town named Humberstone. The towns existed around the discovery of saltpeter in the late 19th century, which can be used to create fertilizer.

La Noria opened in 1826, making it one of the oldest saltpeter mines in Chile. In 1901, it almost went bankrupt after a fire. However when synthetic saltpeter was discovered in Germany during the 1940s the city was abandoned. Miners who came here were joined by their entire families, including their children.

Ata, a mummified child found in the town of La Noria in 2003

Humberstone which operates as a museum during the day, has a reputation of being haunted by black shadows, full body apparitions and unexplained noises. Even the empty theater has its own ghost, and children’s faces are seen at the school.

Of the two towns, La Noria is the most desolate, especially its huge cemetery. People from the town of Iquique, which once was connected by a railway line, refuse to visit at night due to the “zombies” which are said to have sprung from all the open graves. The cemetery has been deteriorated by the hot, desert sun and wind, others by grave robbers. There are stories of figures who rise and walk towards the town when the sun sets.

Its among these lonely graves that in 2003, Oscar Muñoz found the 6 inch skeleton inside a leather pouch, wrapped in white cloth and tied with a violet ribbon. Others claim she was found on a shelf in a building near a church in La Noria. It was then reportedly sold at least twice in Chile. There is a great deal of mystery as to where the child was taken from.

It was a remarkable find in which the tiny features seemed to be fully formed. The child was eventually sold to its current owner, Ramón Navia-Osorio, a Spanish businessman and collector.

In 2012, he allowed Steven Greer to x-ray and use CT imaging to analyze the skeleton. Greer is the founder of the Disclosure Project, which produced the 2013 UFO film Sirius.

This spurred efforts to analyze the remains further, and Greer provided bone samples to Garry Nolan, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. DNA was extracted and answers were provided about what this child truly was. She was female, a stillborn or dying soon after birth. Instead of 12 pairs of ribs she had only 10. Her head was an elongated cone shape.

It was found she had mutations in at least 7 genes that cause skeletal malformations along with dwarfism, scoliosis, and abnormalities in the muscles. This would explain her size, lack of ribs, skull shape and the appearance of the advanced age of her bones. She might have had a condition called congenital diaphragmatic hernia, which doesn’t allow the diaphragm to fully develop. She had 64 unusual mutations in 7 genes linked to the skeletal system; finding so many had never been reported before.

The original paper included a theory the mutations were the result of nitrate poisoning.

The scientists concluded that without knowing who were Ata's relatives, it's very difficult to decide which of her genetic defects caused her symptoms. If they could study DNA from Ata's parents they could check which of these mutations were present in them, and if they had other children which were born with problems. Her parents lived long enough to conceive a baby.

In 1996, another strange child was found in Russia. She was dubbed Alyoshenka or the Kyshty Dwarf. Tamara Vasilyevna Prosvirina, was taking a walk at night, when she heard what she later described as a small animal running through the underbrush. She followed the cry or whistle, and found that it came from a small, baby-like figure.

She wrapped it in a shawl and took it home naming the creature, Aleshenka. She treated as her own child. Prosvirina’s family were startled with what she called her “new baby.”

Prosvirina’s daughter-in-law said the creature ate the food provided, however it sucked it in without moving its mouth.

Several days or week after the discovery of Aleshenka, neighbors supposedly called the authorities saying the old woman was crazy telling people she had a baby.

It was not a stretch to believe the old woman was mentally ill, since she was known to be peculiar and walk through the local cemetery at night, taking the flowers left for the dead and displaying them in her house.

Once Tamara Prosvirina was hospitalized there was no one to feed the creature, and it was later found dead, and in the process of mummifying. According to the attendants who took her away to the hospital, the old woman kept talking about a child at her apartment, but all they saw was a cat wrapped in rags.

Prosvirina was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for treatment, and allegedly the little corpse was taken by the local police. In 1999, Prosvirina was killed in a car accident after she was hit by a truck attempting to escape from the hospital. According to locals she had been dancing on the highway. It's said that many of those who saw the child have died.

Vladimir Bendlin a local police officer who first took charge of the remains, turned it over to Dr. Irina Yermolaeva for analysis. The fetus measured 9.8 inches in length. The head was hairless and had dark spots. The skull had strange ridges that met in a central ridge similar to a leaf's veins, and did not resemble something that belonged to a healthy human. The eyes were very large.

She found it was once a living human child that was born prematurely at about 20 to 25 weeks of gestation, and probably lived only a few hours. Its deformities were attributed to the fall-out of the 1957 Kyshtym Disaster.

The 1957 Kyshtym Disaster was a nuclear accident at the Mayak nuclear site in the Soviet Union. It is considered the third most severe nuclear accident in history, behind the Fukushima Daiichi and Chernobyl disasters.

Prosvirina’s family repeatedly asked for the remains to be returned, but they never were, and some believe it was sold to a wealthy collector.

The story is that Bendlin was approached by Boris Zolotov, a ufologist who offered to have the remains tested. He waited weeks and then months and heard nothing from Zolotov, who was finally found by a TV station.

He gave a bizarre story in which his assistants who were driving to the lab with the body, were waylaid by a UFO that blocked the road and took the tiny corpse.

Some think that Zolotov was forced to turn over the fetus to intelligence services, and others believe he sold it to a private collector for money.

Whatever the truth is, the remains have never been seen again.

But then an unnamed woman came forward claiming she had taken the blanket the fetus had been wrapped in. She offered it to Bendlin for DNA analysis. Prosvirina’s daughter-in-law confirmed the blanket was the one the old lady use to wrap the little creature in.

Supposedly the results came back showing there were traces of human DNA (thought to be Prosvirina’s) and an unknown strain.

In April, 2004 scientist made an official statement that it was a premature human infant, approximately 20 to 26 weeks old, with severe deformities. Also that it was female and not male.

Some believe that perhaps a young woman gave birth to a premature, deformed baby which she dumped in the woods. Experts stated that the child could not have survived more than a few hours after its birth. There is a possibility the abnormalities were a result of the fallout from the Kyshtym incident.

Prosvirina’s daughter-in-law Tamara, and a neighbor who saw the child claimed it was alive and was not human. This was Tamara’s statement:

I used to visit my mother-in-law twice a week. She was living on her own. On that day I brought her foodstuffs just like I did before. I was about to leave when she told me: ‘We’d better give some food to the baby too.’ Then she showed me to the bed. I took a closer look at it and saw him. He was on top the bed, squeaking some funny sounds. I could see his mouth shaped like a small pipe. His tiny scarlet tongue was moving. I also spotted two teeth inside. In a way, he looked like a little baby. His head was brown, and his body looked gray. I didn’t see any eyelids. He didn’t have any genitals either. And the pupils of his eyes were widening and narrowing just like the cat’s eyes do when you turn on the light and turn it off again several times in a row. The fingers on his hands and feet were pretty long. I only bothered to ask my mother-in-law where on earth she’d got the monster from. She told me she’d found him in the forest. She kept calling him ‘Aleshenka.’ She gave him a candy and he started sucking on it. I thought it was some kind of animal.

Alien or Human?

In 2003, a strange, little skeleton was discovered in the Chilean ghost town of La Noria, in the Atacama Desert the driest place in the world. It was nicknamed Ata.

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