'Sirius' film & the Atacama humanoid
Greer's 2013 film featured 'Ata', a 15 cm skeleton promoted as possibly non-human.
2013 CE · -24.50, -69.25 · status: explained
The account
The tiny Atacama skeleton became a centrepiece of the disclosure narrative. It offered a rare falsifiable claim — and the science answered clearly. The 2018 Genome Research paper (Bhattacharya and colleagues from UCSF, Stanford and elsewhere, with Atul Butte and Garry Nolan as senior authors) says Ata was found in 2003 in La Noria, an abandoned nitrate-mining town, and has 10 rib pairs instead of 12. Sequencing showed a human female of likely Chilean descent with mutations in COL1A1, COL2A1, KMT2D, FLNB, ATR, TRIP11 and PCNT. The authors judge a preterm birth likely and speculate that prenatal nitrate exposure played a part (pp.423, 428).
The sceptical view
Whole-genome analysis published in Genome Research in 2018 (first author Sanchita Bhattacharya of UCSF; senior authors Atul Butte and Stanford's Garry Nolan) showed Ata is unambiguously human, female and of Chilean ancestry, probably a preterm birth with rare mutations affecting bone development. This is a clean example of a claim tested and resolved by peer-reviewed science.
The researched reading
A rare case where a claim of the non-human was tested in a lab and answered clearly: Ata is human.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Something known, misidentified | 88% | Whole-genome sequencing by Stanford and UCSF found Ata to be a human female of Chilean descent with mutations in genes linked to bone growth. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 4% | Congenital skeletal disorders and natural desiccation explain the shape and size. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 4% | The body is real, but it was promoted as possibly alien by people with a film to sell. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 1% | Even the age estimate debate does not require anything unknown. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 1% | The film’s framing created expectation, but the science settled it. |
| Secret human technology | 1% | Not relevant. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 1% | The genome is human. |
Official position: Peer-reviewed genetic analysis identified the skeleton as a human foetus with rare bone mutations.
Connections in the atlas
- Atacama Giant, Cerro Unitas
- ? Are the "Nazca mummies" non-human beings?
- The Wow! signal
- Mexico's Congress and the 'Nazca mummies'
- Garry Nolan