We Are Still Alone,

the UFO/Alien hunters world has been put back a pace or two,

this little ET was found in a ghost town called La Noria, which was once a boom town of the nitrate industry, according to a report published in the newspaper La Estrella de Arica on October 19, 2003, written by journalist Camilo Aravena Arriagada, “it all started on a winter morning when a local man from the pampa, Oscar Muñoz, was following his hobby of collecting tokens, bottles and other objects of historical value in the ghost towns from the nitrate era,” Muñoz went specifically to a ghost town called La Noria, located 56 KM to the interior of the provincial capital of Iquique,


as Muñoz dug in the area around La Noria’s abandoned church, he came across a white cloth tied by a violet ribbon, finding inside “a strange skeleton no bigger than 15 cm [the size of a pen], it was a creature with hard teeth, a bulging head with an additional odd bulge on top, its body was scaly and of dark colour, unlike humans, it had nine ribs,” thats it, it must be an alien!


the article by Aravena in La Estrella traced the early history of the creature. Muñoz sold it to a local businessman who owns a pub in Iquique for 30,000 pesos (about $64 in current exchange, it might have been a little more in 2003), the new owner then proceeded to charge money for taking pictures of the alien, the creature itself was eventually sold to a Spanish businessman for a much larger fee and taken to Spain, where it disappeared from public discussion,


fast forward to now, is it an alien? subhuman primate? deformed child? mummified foetus? the Internet is buzzing over the nature of "Ata," the bizarre 6-inch-long skeleton is featured in a new documentary on UFOs, a Stanford University scientist who boldly entered the fray has now put to rest doubts about what species Ata belongs to,


last fall, immunologist Garry Nolan, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institutes Proteomics Centre for Systems Immunology at Stanford in California, heard about Ata from a friend and contacted the filmmakers, offering to give them a scientific readout on the specimen, they asked him to give it a shot, to study the specimen, Nolan sought clues in Ata's genome. "the DNA was modern, abundant, and high quality," he says, indicating that the specimen is probably a few decades old, to the chagrin of UFO hunters, Ata is decidedly of this world, after mapping more than 500 million reads to a reference human genome, equating to 17.7-fold coverage of the genome, Nolan concluded that Ata "is human, there's no doubt about it," moreover, the specimen's B2 haplotype—a category of mitochondrial DNA—reveals that its mother was from the west coast of South America: Chile, that is, so I guess that means we are still alone, but what powers DNA has, have a look at the next post to see what I mean.