How Pseudoscience Exploits Human Remains for Alien Theories

January 9, 2025 by Fredrik Trusohamn

Welcome to Digging Up Ancient Aliens. This is the podcast where we examine alternative history and ancient alien narratives in popular media. Do these ideas hold water to an archeologist, or are there better explanations out there?

We are now on episode 78, and I am Fredrik, your guide into the world of pseudo-archaeology. This time, we will talk about Ancient Alien but the focus will be more on how the supporters and believers use human remains online to support their idea. This is a bit of an extended version of the talk I presented at the Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting in Bournemouth this December. It was during a session on human remains in the online sphere in general. There were a lot of great talks and I’m a bit sad that not more of them are available online.

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Now that we have finished our preparations, let’s dig into the episode.

Background

With regard to this topic and all its many sensitivities, where to start is a good question, a question best pondered with the bitter taste of a recently rediscovered cup of cold coffee. As Jack Kerouac once said, "But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies." While the subject we're about to dive into may not be crazy, it certainly is unusual—and crucial. Ethics. Especially in archaeology and how it compares to the pseudohistorical use of human remains online. But before we get into the use of human remains in pseudohistorical places, we need to understand Ancient Aliens and the ideas of history. For those who have been lucky enough to have been spared from the Ancient Alien theory, let me ruin that for you. The main gist of this Ancient Alien Theory or Ancient Astronaut theory or, as professor Ken Feder calls it, "the horny spaceman theory." Is that human evolution, cultural development, and all of human history can only be understood if it was caused by a third party. In this case, it's E.T. who, instead of building a phone and going on a bike ride, creates humans and plays a part in our development. All knowledge, architecture, and societal advancements are given to us by alien beings with a vested interest in us. I'll get to why Prof. Feder calls it the horny spaceman theory in a moment.

At this point, one might wonder where this idea originated from. There are a couple to choose from, but a name is often left out of this discussion, and there's no one less than Carl Sagan. In 1963, he published a paper suggesting space-traveling aliens' existence. In the end, he implied that myths on Earth could be evidence of aliens visiting us. If Erich von Däniken was aware of this paper when he published his book "Chariots of the Gods" in 1968, is unknown. We know that building on the ideas of Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier—who drew significantly from the work of H.P. Lovecraft and the esoteric movements that emerged after World War II—Erich von Däniken promoted the notion that an alien civilization visited Earth and played a role in the creation of humanity and the development of our history. All human technology originates from an alien source, given to our "primitive" ancestors, as they call it.

Another big name within the movement is Zacharia Sitchin, who is maybe most known for his theory that alien beings came to Earth to mine gold since their atmosphere was out of it. Sitchins' evidence for this was Sumerian tablets, which he claimed to have been able to translate. There is, however, little evidence that Sitchin could even read cuneiform; experts have pointed out that the translations often contradict the dictionaries of the scribes of Sumer, Akkadia, and following cultures.

As so happens, the gold-digging aliens were either lazy or horny, and they started to experiment or mate with early hominids, creating humans as we are today. Through this, they could get a slave workforce for their mining operations. Depending on the author, there's also a hierarchy between the perceived races; von Däniken, for example, wrote in Chariots of the Gods, "Was the black race a failure and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then program a white or a yellow race?" - Note the early use of "just asking question."

While we could easily spend much more on Ancient Alien theory, in fact, the whole back catalog of this show has hours of it. In summary, it builds upon hyperdiffusion, anti-evolution, racism, and a colonial idea about our history. We will see these elements in how these Ancient Astronaut theorists use human remains online.

Mexican Aliens

Do you remember that in September last year, evidence of alien beings was presented to the Mexican government? As things turned out, it was not real aliens; it was just cake. Or was it? This is one of those rare cases where it would be great if viral videos online were true.

In September 2023, a journalist named Jaime Maussan presented what he claimed were two alien beings to the Mexican parliament. In the hearing, Maussan claimed these specimens had been tested by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM, which could confirm these being Ancient Alien mummies. While it's correct that UNAM did a C14 analysis of a provided sample (LEMA Instituto de Física, 2023), it did not support Maussan's claim that the University confirmed it to be an alien life form.

Something left out from the original reporting is that Jaimie Maussan has been involved in several hoaxes, like the Metepec Creature, which turned out to be a shaved monkey (Romano, 2023). As we learned back in episode 38 and the Montauk monster. Identifying a creature that's supposed to have furr and no longer has can be surprisingly challenging. If you don't believe me, pause the podcast for a moment and google "shaved bear." Now, would your first suggestion if seeing that in the wild be that it's a bear? Probably not, or you might be way better at zoology than I am. I'm not an expert on that, so it might not be so difficult. This was followed up with the daemon fairy, which, according to Aja Romano (2023), consisted of a bat's remains, sticks, and epoxy glue. If you picture a daemon fairy made out of bat remains and glue, you probably are quite close to what Maussan created. He has been doing some weird hobby crafting at home, for sure.

In 2015, Maussan leveled up to using human remains, presenting a Peruvian mummy of a child as an alien being in a now private YouTube video from the Gaia channel. The abuse of remains of children is not a one-time occurrence in this story, unfortunately. We will also get to how these people get access to remains like this in a little bit.

So if the aliens were not cake nor extraterrestrial beings, what were they? According to Flavio Estrada, a forensic archaeologist who had the opportunity to study some of the Maussan mummies, they consist of human remains, animal bones, glue, and paper (El País, 2024). X-rays taken on some of these specimens confirm this. We see a mixture of different sets of bones, a monkey cranium, and phalanges facing the wrong direction (Sokolov, 2023). Bones, in general, are basically floating around and can quite easily be identified by someone with even a rudimentary understanding of the skeleton. This is not a very sophisticated creation by someone with expertise in autonomy. Still, Maussan has not been known for being a paragon of scientific rigor. Or even a good hoaxer, as seen in the previous examples.

So, while the aliens seemed to be some sort of crude papier-mache art project at first glance, the reality is much darker. Instead, we have smuggled remains from Peru mixed together with animals, glue, and paper. Maussans' source for the remains seems to be a man called Leandro Rivera, who admittedly smuggled some 200 remains (Garrison and Aquino, 2024).

The Ancient Alien people rarely regard remains as something worthy of dignity. To them, they are objects or artifacts rather than beings. On one of Giorgio Tsoukalos's profile pictures for one of those sites where you can get a personal video message we see Tsoukalos posing with an elongated skull in his hands. Here, we plainly see that it's not an individual but a prop. Geoffrey Scarre talks of approaching remains in a way that gives them dignity and preserves their self-respect. Applying the ideas of Kant to see how we can ethically approach remains while keeping their integrity intact. In the case of Tsoukalos posing with the remains, one can question if the integrity of the individual is intact. Another thing to consider is that Ancient alien theorists don't even view the remains as human. As we will see, some of these people claim that these elongated skulls are not humans but hybrids or even alien beings. So, not only is this person in the picture stripped of integrity but also their humanity.

Elongated skulls

Suppose you go online to places where alternative history ideas are shared. In that case, you will note that many of them, if showing human remains, show remains from Peru. This can be explained by the practice of artificial cranial deformation (or ACD), which we recently mentioned. A practice of the Paraquas and Nasza people. The elongated craniums of these people have been a staple in the social media postings of pseudo-scientists. Even if ACD can be found all over the globe, it is well understood and even practiced since 1900 in, for example, France, where it was called the Toulouse deformity. That many of the posts claiming to show alien remains are from Peru can be explained by the rampant smuggling.

But all this is often ignored, and posts regarding the craniums are usually accompanied by claims of DNA tests showing that these are not humans. They are either alien or 50% alien. It's hard to claim that this is little other than dehumanization. When something is not human, it's easier not to apply an ethical reflection regarding the remains—not that we have seen such reflections among the pseudoscientific crowd so far.

The claim regarding the DNA often seen in these posts is the work of Brien Foerster and later L.A. Marzulli. Brien Foerster is a sculptor and tour guide who has made a name for himself by promoting Ancient Aliens as part of South American and Egyptian history. In 2014, he managed to take samples from remains and had those sent to an unspecified lab. The sampling can be seen on YouTube and is quite is quite disturbing. In the video, we can see how people without adequate gear for DNA sampling destroy the mummy of a very young child. Dr. Jennifer Raff (2016), Carl Faegan (2018), and Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews (2014) all point out that the results of the Foresters 2014 samples were contaminated, as shown by the data. Again, this is not strange due to the handling and lack of care when taking the samples.

The remains were obtained from a private museum called the Juan Navarro Hierro Paracas Museum. We can see how they utilize these remains and Ancient Alien personas to market themselves on their social media. The museum has previously allowed the TV show Ancient Aliens to film parts of its episodes at its facilities.

A similar story seems to occur with Marzullis's tests. Dr. Raff (2016) points out that while a proper lab was used, the lab warned Marzulli that the samples showed signs of contamination. Something that did not hinder Marzullis from claiming the DNA was evidence of a Giant/European hybrid creature.

This whole process, ranging from sampling without an ethical discussion to using bad samples as evidence, is highly unethical. Spreading it online without proper sources reinforces the idea that the human remains displayed are not human. They are something different.

Giants and AI

I want to continue on Marzullies' track here on Giants. They have this weird place in Ancient Alien lore and can sometimes refer to the fact that the aliens were large or that they created the giants in a lab. But if we go online, claims about giants being found are among the oldest and most common hoaxes we find online. In some cases, like Derek Olson, also known as Stargate Voyager, they just take a picture and hope you won't Google it. Mr. Olson posted some time ago about giants with a picture of human remains. It was cropped in the hope that you'd think it is a giant. However, the image was stolen from a Mirror article discussing a find in the Astrakhan Region of Russia (Best, 2019). The people discussed in the article were of average human height and not giants in any sense of the word.

In other cases, we see old-school Photoshop or generative AI being used to promote these ideas. I can't help it, but I love these old pictures of giant skeletons excavated by photoshopped people. It's almost so bad it becomes good. However, we should not forget that the remains are still individuals we see and that these images contribute to the otherization of groups, often those of color.

If you have spent any time online lately, AI images have become a staple of the internet. Conspiracy theorists and alternative history promoters have, of course, seen the value of these tools and used them to flood us with manipulated images of a past that never was. Giants are a ubiquitous thing, of course, and without the need to know how to resize an image in Paint, you can have as many bad AI renderings of human remains as you like.

Giants are also alternative history legends, among the oldest, and have been hoaxed since the 1800s. The San Diego Giant started appearing in papers around the turn of 1900 and can still be found in posts today online, portrayed as a real archaeological find.

The origins

These are just a few examples of how Ancient Alien pages and accounts use human remains online. It is worth noting that they did not invent this story or approach. Ancient aliens did precisely what we now see online, but for years, first in book form, then through the Ancient Alien TV series that's been going on for more than 18 seasons at this point. While it remains, luckily, it isn't displayed much on television. We see the same ideas as online when they are. For example, in an early show episode, we follow an author named David Childress to a museum to see hidden giant remains.

In the clip, we see Childress lifting the remains of an Indigenous person by putting his thumbs in the eye socket. He then goes on to describe the cranium as being part of another species. Again, this demonstrates an act of dehumanizing the remains and objectifying them. We see similar tendencies when the show visits the Juan Navarro Hierro Paracas Museum, as we mentioned earlier.

In summary

The Ancient Astronaut theory is clearly not based in science. While archaeology has started to deal with its colonial roots (González-Ruibal, 2013) and discuss the ethics of research on human remains (de Tienda Palop and Currás, 2019; Scarre, 2003; Scarre, 2013; Sellevold, 2012), the alternative history crowd has gone the opposite way. They are continuing the colonial legacy and doubling down on things like hyperdiffusion. I'm not going to argue that Archaeology as a field is perfect.

A recent example is when samples were taken from craniums stored at the Kon-Tiki Museum against the Norwegian ethics board's recommendations (NESH, 2018; Rasmussen and Viestad, 2021; Fugelsnes, 2022). Raft enthusiast Thor Heyerdahl collected the remains on Rapa Nui between 1955 and 1956. As far as I can understand, these remains were collected with the approval of the Chilean government but not the local population of Rappanui. While this was not an uncommon practice back in the day, this is not how we should do things today. So when Norwegian professor Erik Thorsby applied to the Norwegian Ethics Board in 2017, they asked him to obtain permission from Rappanui before any samples could be taken. Unfortunately, Thorsby ignored the recommendations and proceeded to take the samples anyway.

There will always be those who prioritize their needs and careers over others. Of course, this is hard to prevent. However, as a field, we can discuss this and how, for example, remains should be displayed both in museums and online. There are guidelines and recommendations on how to use remains in press releases and online content on archaeology. We are interested in improving and dealing with complex questions as a discipline.

On the other hand, the alternative history crowd is more interested in being perceived as doing science. Methodology and reflection are always in the backseat if practiced at all. For them, remains are objects that can be used to prove their story. Something we can clearly see in their presence online.

In the end, what we see online—the "Mexican cake aliens," the reassembled mummies of Peru, the so-called giants conjured up from photoshopped or AI-generated images, and the elongated skulls miscast as half-alien hybrids—is not simply eccentric entertainment or harmless speculation. These spectacles, promoted by figures like Jaime Maussan or authors who claim DNA evidence from mishandled samples, reflect a deeper, more troubling pattern. They inherit a colonial legacy of hyperdiffusion and racism, casting non-European histories as primitive and dependent on mythical outsiders. They turn human remains into mere props, as if ancient ancestors were nothing more than puzzle pieces to be rearranged and glued together to support a preconceived narrative—one rooted in the belief that "primitive" peoples couldn't possibly have achieved cultural or technological feats without the meddling of "horny spacemen."

This misuse of ancestral human remains, often taken without ethical reflection and displayed without dignity, serves a larger purpose: to validate a fantasy denying human cultures' complexity and autonomy. The pseudo-archaeological approach these fringe theorists take contrasts sharply with the self-examining field of archaeology, which continues to wrestle with its ethical breaches, such as the mishandling of the Rapa Nui skulls at the Kon-Tiki Museum. Where archaeologists strive to acknowledge past wrongs and foster responsible, respectful curation, alternative history proponents double down, producing content that dehumanizes the dead, disregards scientific standards and resists accountability.

By recognizing these patterns—by seeing how Erich von Däniken's racist "failures" of human evolution, Zacharia Sitchin's gold-mining extraterrestrials, and David Childress's casual handling of Indigenous crania all echo through today's AI-generated hoaxes—we can reject these exploitative fantasies. In doing so, we honor the lived experiences of our ancestors, protect cultural heritage from further misuse, and ensure that our understanding of the past is grounded not in spectacle but in integrity, empathy, and rigorous inquiry. In short, when we choose to respect the dignity of ancient peoples and resist cheap shortcuts to "alien" explanations, we reaffirm our commitment to a history that belongs to all of humanity—truthful, accountable, and worthy of our collective memory.

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Sources, resources, and further reading suggestions

Music

“Folie hatt” by Trallskruv

Lily of the woods by Sandra Marteleur