“Non-human” alien corpses have been displayed to Mexican politicians at Congress.

The two small alleged alien corpses, retrieved from Cusco, Peru, were presented in windowed boxes in Mexico City on Wednesday, stirring excitement within the UFO conspiracy theorist community.

The event was spearheaded by journalist and ufologist Jaime Maussan, who testified under oath that the mummified specimens are not part of “our terrestrial evolution”, with almost a third of their DNA remaining “unknown”, reported Mexican media.

  • DisappointingIntro@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Mr. Maussen is the same guy that found some mummies in Peru, claimed they were alien and it was proven to be mummified children. I wouldn’t get too excited by this. If 30% of retrieved DNA was unidentifiable, then 70% was. Not an expert but unidentified genomes are likely to be a result of divergent evolution and/or simply a result of a chemical breakdown over time.

    I’d put my money on this guy having a real knack for finding dead kids.

    • morras@jlai.lu
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      1 year ago

      We have 90% of our DNA in common with mushrooms.

      So a being where its DNA is only 70% similar to us (or whatever that “unindentifiable” means) should be vastly different from any lifeform on Earth.

      Therefore, human-like aliens, LOL

      • lostferret@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve done sequencing and the unidentifiable dna is just stuff that didn’t map back to the human genome. For old samples, this is because dna doesn’t preserve too well and you end up with super short reads that are too small to map. The computer kicks those out as “unidentifiable”. So not “new genes” just chaff from poorly preserved material.

        • j4yt33@feddit.deOP
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          1 year ago

          Absolutely, it doesn’t mean that 70% of their DNA is like ours and 30% is something completely different or that 30% of their DNA is still DNA but with a different code to ours or anything like that. They could match 70% of it to known sequences and 30% to nothing, that’s all that this means.

      • alterforlett @lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I have no idea about this, but say you tried to get DNA from Egyptian mummies, reckon you would be able to identify more than 70%?

        Cool if it’s true, but I’m sceptical

      • CountZero@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Why would aliens have DNA at all? Why would it match our genetic code in any way? Maybe DNA happens to be something really special that even life on another planet would convetgently evolve, but the genetic code is arbitrary. There are even species on earth that use slightly different codons. The idea of alien species sharing any identifiable genes with humans is pretty silly.

    • j4yt33@feddit.deOP
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      1 year ago

      Absolutely, 30% unidentifiable DNA still means there’s 70% identifiable DNA. I still thought it’s interesting as The Independent is not a small news outlet and they actually have pictures and without being an expert at all, I find those quite intriguing. Might still be just misshapen human skeletons, I’m actually pretty sure that’s what these are. But still, interesting :)

    • Jummit@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Even if these are an alternate evolution path I think it’s pretty exciting. The results presented by the teams investigating this sound pretty convincing, so I don’t think it’s just “misidentified human children”.