Lloyd Pye

STARCHILD OR STAR BEING?

Evidence Pro and Con

by Lloyd Pye

England's X-Factor Magazine, November 1999.

At the end of February of this year (1999) I was asked to meet with a couple who had recently acquired two skulls, one clearly human, the other highly anomalous. Because of knowledge I had gained researching and writing "Everything You Know Is Wrong--Book One: Human Origins" (available now), they felt I was capable of having the skull scientifically analyzed and tested to determine if it was merely a poor, misshapen human or something not entirely human. It was a task I undertook with the zeal of a politician seeking excuses.

I began by consulting with experts in a wide variety of relevant fields: anthropologists, pathologists, dentists, ophthalmologists, pediatricians, radiologists, and anyone else with specialized knowledge about skulls. Strapped for funding from the beginning, I initially had to live with "eyes only" inspections done by people I asked to examine the skull as a personal favor. Collectively, these cursory analyses indicated the human skull was a female in her late twenties, and the anomalous skull was a child of about five.

At the time, the data on which these conclusions were reached seemed solid. The human skull had a confusing mixture of cranial features that looked more female than male. It had the gracile brow ridge of a female, cheekbones that could belong to either sex, and mastoid bones that looked slightly more male than female. But it was small and light relative to human norms, so the consensus was "female."

The human skull was aged in its late twenties by the wear pattern on its maxilla (upper jaw) teeth, all but one of which (a rear molar) were present. The cusps of the bicuspids and molars were worn flat, a condition normally seen in the U.S. in octogenarians who eat a grit-free diet their entire lives. However, since the skulls were found in a primitive area of northern Mexico, a diet based on stone-ground corn could be presumed. Using that as a baseline, the dentists best-guessed that it would require no less than twenty years of eating grit-laced food to cause such cusp wear. This seemed logical inasmuch as only the cusps were worn flat; the crowns (the portion above the gum line) were intact.

The anomalous skull was similarly aged through a more roundabout process. Its two visible teeth were connected to a detached piece of maxilla alleged to be part of it by the woman (deceased) who found both skulls. Technically, that detached piece of maxilla could not be considered part of the skull until DNA testing definitively linked the two. Nevertheless, it carried great weight with everyone who saw it (myself included) because its staining pattern closely matched that of the skull, and because it seemed to clearly delineate an age at death.

That maxilla piece extends from the midline of the upper jaw front, curving right to encompass five tooth spaces. The first three are missing, the last two are in place. A fluoroscope X-ray revealed several molars impacted in the bone above, poised to replace the two visible teeth and fill the empty holes. That meant the two visibles were primary (baby) teeth and the impacted molars were typical secondary (permanent) teeth. Also, there was an impacted front tooth seemingly making its way into the foremost of the front holes. With so much indication of a standard primary-secondary transition, which normally begins at around six, the dentists agreed on an age of five for the anomalous skull.

A nagging concern was that a number of other specialists who examined the anomalous skull did not think it was five. They would point to the cranial suture between the lower left parietal area and the upper left occipital bone (the left rear quadrant of the head), a three-inch length of Wormian bones, small "islands" of bone that fill in gaps appearing in suture lines during periods of rapid, sustained growth. Those Wormian islands made the skull appear much older than five, perhaps by a decade or more. But when shown the evidence of the maxilla X-ray, they would concede it made a powerful case for dating the skull at five.

At this point, let’s go over some backstory. The two skulls were found at the rear of a mine tunnel 60 to 70 years ago in the mountainous backcountry 100 miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico. The woman who found them was a teenager at the time of her discovery, first finding the human skeleton lying on its back on the surface of the ground. She noticed that wrapped around one of its upper arm bones was a "misshapen" hand attached to a wrist sticking up out of the ground beside the human skeleton.

Gathering her courage, she scraped away the dirt covering a shallow grave to expose a noticeably smaller being whose body and skull were also "misshapen." Unfortunately, before she died she did not clarify the quality or extent of those malformations. But we do have a distinctive staining pattern on the back of the human skull and over the entire anomalous one, which strongly supports the discovery story she related. [Note: Both skulls have been dated by Carbon-14 analysis to 900 years ago + or – 40 years. This is highly precise and therefore does strongly indicate they died together.] That led me to postulate a murder-suicide as the most logical explanation for how they were found.

While concocting the murder-suicide scenario, I was also being told about well-known (though not to me) legends that extended through the whole of South America and into the American west. These "Star Being" legends stated that the extraterrestrials we call "Grays" had an extended history (many centuries) of impregnating native women with Gray-human hybrids. These hybrids would be allowed to mature with their mothers until six or so, then they would be removed to serve whatever purpose they were created for.

Those Star Being legends tied in well with my murder-suicide scenario. The human was a late-20's female (perfect child-rearing age) that had been impregnated with a Gray-human hybrid. She had raised it to around the age of six, the avowed pick-up time, then somehow gotten word "they" were coming to retrieve her child. For reasons difficult to imagine, instead of giving the child away she chose to drag it off into a mine tunnel, kill it, bury it in a shallow grave, and leave one of its hands sticking up out of the ground to hold onto as she poisoned herself and lay down beside it to die. [Note: It could just as easily have died in some other way—accident, disease, sudden illness.]

Such action by a mother against a child boggles the mind, but one fact seemed to make it plausible: in the human skull's left parietal bone (above and to the rear of the left ear) was overt evidence of a major concussion suffered not long before death because the shatter lines in the bone showed no signs of calcification. The brain addling that injury might have caused made a lunatic act feasible and wrapped everything into a tidy little package. Then we began to receive enough donations for some serious testing to be conducted, and my carefully constructed scenario went to hell in the proverbial hand basket.

A well-respected dental laboratory near my home in New Orleans, Louisiana, undertook a detailed analysis of the teeth of both skulls. The results were stunning. For months I had been fanatical about protecting the human's teeth, several of which were loose. Without so much as a fare-the-well, the lab pulled a front one, examined it, and glued it back in place, notifying me that its root was long enough to strongly indicate the dentition was a male's! Also, they knew a great deal more about wear patterns on tooth enamel than the dentists consulted earlier, and it was their opinion that a high-grit diet would cause such flattened tooth cusps after no less than forty and probably forty-five years!

I was dumbfounded. "Mom" had become either "Dad" or, more likely, "Granddad." Then the lab reported on what I had blithely been calling "The Starhild." Its two "baby" teeth were almost certainly not baby teeth because they had obvious wear at the edges of their cusps, wear that compared to "Mom's" teeth had not been significant but which compared to real baby teeth was noticeable. Furthermore, the enamel on those two teeth was "crazed" with numerous vertical cracks clearly visible under magnification.

"You don't get crazing in baby teeth," said Linda Faircloth, manager of Pfisterer-Auderer Dental Laboratory. "Got to be up around twenty or so to start showing that. These look like adult teeth." I was thunderstruck. "Not only that," she went on, "you have a missing space here, a space where a bicuspid should go. And you have three roots on a tooth (the bicuspid) that should have only two." What did it all mean? I was reeling.

"We may be looking at someone with three sets of teeth," she went on. "What looks like primary teeth to us may in fact be secondary teeth that have been in the mouth for years and will be replaced at some point in the future with that impacted third set. Or maybe these are primaries that don't come out early the way ours do. Or maybe they live a lot longer than we do and need three sets of teeth to carry them through extended lives."

Though her assessment had no impact on whether the anomalous skull might prove to be alien to some degree, it was a blow to my sense of correctness about what I was doing. However, from the beginning I had vowed to maintain a strict policy of openness and honesty, letting the chips fall where they may, announcing failures with fanfare equal to successes, so I called Mark Bean, my chief lieutenant and webmaster, and told him an extensive redraft of the website would soon be on its way to him. Mark posted it without embellishments at www.starchildproject.com, and we left the previous text up so anyone could see how and where we had gone wrong, and what we had done to correct it.

At that moment, the lowest of the previous six months, Karen Scheidt called from Florida to say she had a photograph of two skulls taken in 1975 at Cholula, Mexico (80 miles SE of Mexico City), which looked to her remarkably like our "Starchild" skull. And her two had full maxilla and mandibles (upper and lower jaws) visible, which our skull lacked. Unfortunately, Ms. Scheidt could not recall how flat their rears were. She felt certain they were flat, but after 25 years she could not recall if they were vertical from cradle-boarding (a common practice of the region) or steeply angled inward like our skull.

The story that went with the skulls was fascinating. Mrs. Scheidt's guide told her group the two skulls belonged to "gods" that had come down from the sky many centuries earlier to help the local people learn mathematics and astronomy and all the best ways to live in harmony with nature. Those gods planned to return to their home at some point in the future, but before they could do that a group of other gods arrived, precipitating a battle in which the two local gods were killed.

They were buried beneath a small temple near the main Cholula temple (the largest in the Americas, covering 45 acres), and that temple became pilgrimage destination for natives for miles around. Indeed, for reasons shrouded in time and mystery Cholula has always been a place of pilgrimage for Amerindians. But Mrs. Scheidt was told the purpose was to come pay homage to the two gods she had photographed in 1975, and I had to admit that from the eyes up their heads did have the distinctive outward "flare" of our skull.

Now I must determine if those two skulls are still there in Cholula, and whether someone like me can gain access to them for a close examination. If so, I will go there and find out how much they do or do not resemble our skull. If there is a close resemblance, then we will know ours is not a billion-to-one "freak of nature," but actually part of a currently unknown (or at least unaccepted) genotype, whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial. [Note: I was never able to go to view these skulls for myself, but I did send someone I knew who was going there and he was told the skulls have not been on exhibit for several years and their current resting place was unknown. However, my friend had the feeling a bribe was being solicited, and he felt if he offered any money he would be shown any two skulls and he would have no way to know the difference.]

DNA testing should be in hand by the end or October or early November. At that point we will learn whether it is fully human or not entirely human, and whether it is male or female. However, DNA will not tell us if it was a Star Child or a Star Being. Indeed, we may never learn its actual age at death. But considering our era's overweening political correctness, I worry that we will confer the ultimate indignity upon it: "Star Person."

[Note: DNA testing was inconclusive. Mitochoncrial DNA, from the mother, was easily recovered and was typical of Amerindians of 900 years ago. However, though the skulls bone was relatively well preserved in a mine tunnel, and its mitochoncrial DNA was easily recovered, its nuclear DNA, which contains the DNA of its father, has never been recovered by primers for human DNA.]

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