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On Tuesday of this week, to much fanfare among the UFO community, a group of UFOlogists presented a pair of small mummified bodies to a Mexican congressional committee hearing. The main presenter, Jaime Maussan (full name Jose Jaime Maussan Flota) was accompanied by Ryan Graves, a former US Navy F-18 pilot and one of the three UFOlogists who appeared before the US congressional subcommittee UFO hearing on July 25, 2023.
Fans of alien visitation gasped everywhere as videos of body scans were shown to the hushed crowd:
A bit of a spoiler here: You do not need to get too worked up about this. It turns out Maussan is a serial alien body hoaxer. Maussan has been presenting these bodies (or similar ones) for a long time — much to the chagrin of anthropologists, because they are (rather horrifyingly) the mummies of actual deceased Peruvian children, obscenely doctored to appear strange, including clipping off two fingers from each hand and replacement of the children’s skulls. Here’s how it all went down the last time he was caught at this:
According to a 2018 article in Live Science, tomb robbers working illegally in Nazca, led by a man named “Mario,” recovered a number of ancient Peruvian mummies in 2015. Mario has been looting sites for over 25 years, and is well known to Peruvian police.
A Russian man, claiming to be named Konstantin Korotkov and employed by St. Petersburg University, presented himself as this group’s lead scientist when several of these mummies were shown to the alternative press. Nobody by that name is known in the field, and none of his claimed university and institutional affiliations were true.
Maussan was also a member of this group, at the time calling himself a journalist who was covering their “important work.”
In an earlier 2015 hoax, Maussan took some photos of a mummified child in a museum and showed just the photos to a UFO conference, claiming they showed an alien body at Roswell. He used an “expert” then to confirm that alien identification, José de Jesús Zalce Benítez, “Professor of Forensic Medicine at the National Medicine School of Mexico.” And guess what: Benítez also appeared in this most recent event, claiming to have extracted DNA from these newest bodies and confirmed that it’s not human (he’s the one explaining the body scan videos above). The lack of credibility is laughable.
Whether these two bodies that Maussan showed the Mexican subcommittee are two of the same ones from 2015 is not yet known, nor is it known whether Mario was the looter who illegally acquired these specific mummies — or yet whether these are mummies at all, or just sculptures. As in the earlier case, in addition to removing some of the fingers and replacing the skulls with modified llama skulls, the responsible parties also coated the mummies in some unidentified white substance, presumably to disguise the evidence of the tampering.
It is beyond despicable.
I had thought that David Grusch’s testimony was the bottom of the barrel. Apparently Ryan Graves has found an even lower bottom by participating in this. Once Maussan’s history exploded all over Twitter, Graves tweeted:
Being part of Maussan’s morbid circus shows a mind-numbing lack of due diligence. Googling his name is all it would have taken. I have little sympathy. Evidently Graves was more interested in having yet another government stage from which to trumpet his UFO beliefs.
Note: Since this was published, Graves has tweeted that he did, in fact, know all about Maussan and his history of fake plaster dolls, in advance of his appearance there, but chose to share the stage anyway. He has since deleted the tweet.