Lloyd Pye

RAISING THE STARCHILD

By Billy Cox

Fate Magazine, November 1999.

Author and crypto-historian Lloyd Pye is risking his reputation on a wonderfully bizarre hypothesis: that a grotesquely misshapen child's skull is proof of alien life.

As he approached his fifty-third birthday, obstinate nonconformist Lloyd Pye thought he had it all figured out. Finally, a way to make a living without working for or with anyone else. A labor of pure love gestating since childhood, up and running, mobile as a circuit rider. Book signings at the fringe conventions from New Orleans to Vancouver, B.C., where sales penetrations were beginning to reach a remarkable 50 percent. And his vocabulary - impressing crowds, from the "foot-slope orientations of the prehistoric Laetoli" to the "braincase rounding of the Australopithecines." So tight a command did he have of missing-link paleoanthropology, he would move like a force across the land, he and his revelations about hominoids and the Anunnaki, campaigning for a prime-time showdown against the only institution qualified to stop him - academia. And he would chew 'em up and spit 'em out in the court of public opinion, those tweedy ostriches and their willful ignorance.

Lloyd Pye, a guy who'd rather drive a car with 218,000 miles on the odometer than compromise, would help rewrite the history of mankind. But then, last February, he was immobilized by the dead gaze of Starchild. And the locomotive of momentum jumped the rails and vanished into the dark. Now Pye is tooling across the mute bayous of Louisiana with a pair of skulls in the trunk of his Buick Roadmaster. And he's a little scared because both the skulls may be human. And what if that's the case? "I'm a blowed-up peckerwood, that's all there is to say," Pye laments in his Louisiana drawl. "I'm as low or lower than when I started. It's going to be really, really bad."

Thanks to Starchild, he has postponed promotion of his self-published assault on Darwinism, the audaciously titled "Everything You Know Is Wrong - Book One: Human Origins," (available now). Today Pye is staking his credibility on something imminently more verifiable. He's wagering one of the skulls locked up back there in a tool box - the one he calls Starchild - is a space alien. Or at least an alien hybrid, mongrelized with human blood. The DNA verdict is expected anytime. Maybe as early as Thanksgiving. Whatever currency Pye holds as a competent revisionist is now linked to the outcome.

The Starchild and Mr. Pye
Like an urban legend, Starchild's origins come without papers, and are shrouded in hearsay. Pye is shielding the identities of Starchild's owners, at their request. Therefore, Pye's version of the story is the only one being told: Sometime between the first and second world wars, a teenage Mexican-American girl, unnamed, explores an abandoned mine shaft 100 miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico. She is startled by a skeleton, maybe five feet tall, lying on its back. From beneath the dirt, a smaller, skeletal hand the girl describes only as "misshapen" is wrapped around the other's upper arm bone. The girl digs. She exhumes the remains of what she presumes is a child, because of its size. But its hands and body are also "misshapen." And the skull - the skull is nearly as big as the adult's.

She gathers the entire bone pile in a basket. She goes home and leaves the basket outside, where its contents are washed away in a flash flood. The girl recovers only the skulls, which have been banged up by the weather's violence. For the rest of her life she keeps them at home in a cardboard box, where they collect dust. Shortly before her death, six or seven years ago, she bequeaths the skulls to a neighbor somewhere in the American Southwest. The neighbor hangs onto them for a while, until his wife orders him to throw out the ghoulish relics. But the browbeaten hubby cannot force himself to do it. So the neighbor contacts friends, a married couple. They're into UFOs, alien abductions. Maybe the skulls are related somehow. He gives them the skulls, free, around the first of this year.

The couple - one an engineer, the other a massage therapist - starts talking it up. In February, they bring the skulls to a friend, who happens to be speaking at a UFO conference. The speaker/friend has just read "Everything You Know Is Wrong." And the author just happens to be lecturing at this particular conference. Pye is not into UFO's, but he is not quite at home in the world, either. He's a Bigfoot guy, hooked on Yeti tales since reading Ivan Sanderson's "The Abominable Snowman" as a kid. He attended Tulane University on a football scholarship, 1964-68. Graduated with a degree in psychology because "nobody's going to give a degree in hominoids." Kicked around in the Army for a couple of years. Missed Vietnam. Conventional careers left him hollow. "I couldn't see myself listening to people piss and moan all day long," he says, "and I'm not enough of a materialist or a humanitarian to go into law or medicine."

He does like to write. He spent the better half of a decade in Hollywood. Six screenplays optioned off, nothing produced. One writing credit to show for it - "Scarecrow and Mrs. King," Kate Jackson's post-"Charlie's Angels" series. His first novel, in 1977, was about a football player for the Green Wave. It almost got made into a TV movie. His second and last novel in 1988 was a high-tech thriller. But there are few kindred souls on the road less traveled. "I never did all that well in relationships because the women I dated were making more money than me." Pye winces as he pushed west along I-10, toward his parents' home in Slidell. "It was just embarrassing at parties I'd go to with them. People asking, 'What do you do?' 'Well, I'm t rying to be a writer.' 'Who do you work for? What have you written?' That kind of thing." Through it all, he kept up his reading about origins, specifically hominoids, those elusive, lumbering ape-like beings inhabiting the fog of cryptozoology. His conclusion: "Science is a long series of corrected mistakes."

Cradle Robbers of the Gods
In 1990, Pye picked up "The Earth Chronicles," the magnum opus of Zecharia Sitchin. Over several books, the Russian-born scholar of ancient Sumerian texts proposed a provocative new Genesis story, literal and revolutionary: Some 430,000 years ago, aliens from the elliptically-orbiting planet Nibiru colonized Earth. Among other things, the Anunnaki left behind a legacy of genetically-manipulated Earthlings -- us. Impressed, Pye followed Sitchin on pilgrimages to sacred sites in Egypt, Peru and Jordan. Things began to click. He fused Sitchin into his own cosmology: Cro-Magnons are the hybrid slaves of the Anunnaki, while many of the hominoids - particularly the Bigfoot-like, man-sized Almas of Russia - are the living remnants of the ape-like Neanderthals.

Pye stitched his unified field theory together in his 1997 book. And just as he was starting to get known for his own work -- he commanded an audience of millions on Art Bell's radio show that December -- the Starchild owners confronted him in a motel lounge. They liked his analysis of bones, particularly the remains of early protohumans. So they showed him the skull. "As soon as I saw the eyes, it blew me away." Pye pulls into his parents' home. He prefers to discuss his treasure here instead of his cramped apartment in Metairie. "We all in this field know what the Greys look like. I thought, 'Holy moley, could this be the real thing?' "

He totes the toolbox inside and unlocks it on the kitchen table. His folks are out of town; they've heard it all before. "Well," he says. The latch clicks. The crackling of plastic bubble padding. "Here it is." Starchild is in bad shape. It looks like its face got shot off at point-blank range. That is, if it really is a child. Pye initially thought, due to the remains of apparent baby teeth that it had lived only five or six years. But several of what seem to be additional teeth have been analyzed, indicating Starchild might have been a late teen or young adult. And the other skull -- Pye believed it was a female at first, perhaps the mother. But subtle forensic indicators are more ambiguous. Perhaps it's a male.

At any rate, what's left of Starchild's mandibles are a couple of teeth still packed inside a chunk of the upper jaw, detached from the skull when Pye got it. But Starchild is unquestionably bizarre, especially when compared to its companion, which he still can't rule out as its mother. The head is egregiously misshapen, bulbous. Vaguely archetypal. Most experts, Pye says, blow Starchild off as a "cradleboarded hydrocephalic." In pursuit of cosmetic exotica, Pre-Columbian cultures often bound boards to the heads of infants to sculpt the growth of putty-soft skulls -- a practice known as cradleboarding. Furthermore, this kid apparently was double-whammied at birth by water on the brain, a.k.a. hydrocephaly -- a condition in which accumulation of water in the head causes enlargement of the skull.

But wait a minute. Pye had done research into Native American folklore, where legends of "Star Beings" can be harvested from the American Southwest to Tierra Del Fuego. In story-telling traditions dating back to antiquity, the gods once descended from heaven to impregnate barren females in remote villages. Mothers bearing these strange seeds would then nurture and raise the "Star Children" until the age of six or thereabouts, when the gods would return to reclaim their progeny, leaving villagers staring up into the infinite night.

Look at this skull, he beckons. Starchild's brain capacity is 1,600 cubic centimeters; a typical adult averages roughly 1,400. And check out the eye sockets, or orbits. Human orbits are cone-shaped and about five centimeters deep in the skull. But Starchild had no cones, merely shallow, three-centimeter-deep housings that make comparison to human eyes a serious stretch. And explore Starchild's reduced zygomatic arch, the bony loops around temples. In normal humans, you'd be able to pass two fingers' worth of muscle through it. Wit this sucker, you can barely slip two strands of spaghetti in between. Talk about your weak cheek muscles. Oh -- and the inion bump, down where the skull ends and the neck muscles would begin. "I've seen a lot of cases of cranial binding, but not one of them involves going below the inion," Pye says. But look here -- the entire rear skullbone, called the occipital, is flattened, unlike any other cradleboarded specimen in the book.

See those parietal bones forming the upper rear of the cranium? Too huge to be human. Big enough maybe to house a trilateral brain. And there's enough of a nasal cavity left to show that this thing never had sinuses. Look at the positioning of Starchild's neck hole, called the foramen magnum. The foramen magnum is centered under the head. Good God -- what's that all about? In humans, the hole is situated rear of the center to balance the heavy cranium against the relatively weightless face. This is beyond freaky. All told, Starchild's skull weighs about 13 ounces. Add on the missing mandibles and you're looking at maybe 16 ounces tops. The average five-year-old skull weighs in at 20 ounces and the average adult skull comes in at 35. Starchild's head is bigger, but its bones are lighter.

"This is either alien," Pye says, "or the most anomalous human specimen since the Elephant Man."

Clash of the Skeptics
The experts who have examined Starchild don't know what to make of it. A quick poll reflects a house divided. Ed Waldrip, director of the Southern Institute of Forensic Science in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, agrees that the adult skull is female, perhaps the mother. The slight flattening on the back of her head suggests she was cradleboarded as a child, too. His vote: Starchild is a cradleboarded hydrocephalic. He feels privileged to have held this rare conjunction in his own hands. "As a forensic investigator, this is not a skull you'll run across in a lifetime of investigation," he says.

Trent Holliday, a Tulane anthropologist who specializes in Neanderthals, buys the cradleboarding theory. But he doesn't think Starchild was hydrocephalic. A hydrocephalic child in an early Native American culture would never have lived to age five. Other than that, Holliday doesn't think Starchild looks all that weird. Not even the eyes. "The orbits look perfectly normal to me," he says. But not to Fred Mausolf, a Lincoln, Nebraska, opthamologist who wrote a book on skulls and their orbits -- "The Anatomy of the Ocular Adenexa." Mausolf is unwilling to concede Starchild's orbits conflict with human physiology, but he calls the kid's condition "surprising," even "shocking." He is simply bewildered. And he is not sure if Pye's scheduled DNA tests will resolve anything. "Even if the results are compatible with human genetics, that still doesn't rule out aliens, does it?" Mausolf wonders. "Do we have any alien DNA to compare it to?"

Joseph Smith is the director of radiology for Children's Hospital in New Orleans, and a professor of radiology and pediatrics at Tulane and Louisiana State. In all his years in medicine, dating back to 1959, Smith has never encountered anything like Starchild. "I've seen hydrocephalics so big you had to carry 'em around in a wheelbarrow," Smith says. "This is no hydrocephalic. The cranial sutures are normal. I personally think we're dealing with a deformed child with a neuromuscular illness. I think the kid may have been living flat on his back for five to six years, which would account for the positional molding on the back of the head. What impressed me most of all -- the most unusual abnormality -- were the orbits and the narrow space between the eyes. I've never seen orbits like this before -- the shallowness, the teardrop appearance, with the small parts slanted toward the nose. This is most peculiar."

The next step: DNA testing. Pye has a lab picked out, but he's concealing its identity, as well as the identity of Starchild's owners. In April, Pye made the mistake of blabbing the name of a lab that had volunteered to do the work on Art Bell's Coast to Coast A.M. Millions of Americans were tuned in. The lab didn't need the heat, and wimped out. The second lab will need the teeth -- the repository of genetic information. Starchild has only four left. Plan A: Cut them out by the roots, bore out the pulp, and save the tooth. Plan B: If the pulp is too degraded, pulverize the teeth into dust and scan whatever turns up. If nothing else, they'll be able to resolve a genetic link between Starchild and the adult.

Either way, the nuclear DNA test is expensive, maybe $20,000 a shot. The secret lab has agreed to shoulder the cost, which brings up the next point. For all the secrecy, Pye says he told Starchild's owners back in February that the best way to handle this was out in the open. Go national with it. Build public expectations, which he did immediately, at a UFO conference in Laughlin, Nevada. Why? Because, well, frankly, Pye was a little paranoid about government scrutiny. Maybe his strategy worked. Because, well, just as frankly, he's experienced no sign of government shadows whatsoever. "I'm almost disappointed," he says.

Search for a Meaning
A brief glimpse into Pye's lifestyle reveals no visible signs of financial gain. He says he hasn't made a dime off Starchild, nor have its owners. His Buick Roadmaster is old. His apartment is so small and carelessly regarded he doesn't even like to invite his girlfriend over. He does have a computer, above which a wall map is posted, showing all the Bigfoot sightings in the United States. Pye often checks his email and updates his Website, www.lloydpye.com. Reluctantly, he had informed readers that he's strapped for cash. Between the loss of projected revenues for the book he no longer promotes and his out-of-pocket Starchild expenses, Pye reckons he's $20,000 in the hole at mid-year. And he needs another $10,000 or so for peripheral analysis, such as Carbon-14 dating on the skulls, an endocranial cast to reflect Starchild's brain shape, neutron spectroscopy to qualify the bone chemistry, and a clay sculpture to flesh out the skull. He is not optimistic. "Truthfully," he says, "my fund-raising skills are so sparse, I'm not sure I could raise dust on a dirt farm."

So the world waits. And Pye waits. He aims his old car toward the airport. "I've tried to handle this thing aboveboard, with as much dignity and correctness as possible," he says. "Too many issues in this field are contaminated by money. The potential gain to humanity is too great for that." Fallback plans? "Yeah, I'll jump off a bridge and let my insurance pay off everything."

Finding the real thing -- new and old all at once, but original, authentic -- is damn near impossible these days. Not even the name of his book is original. Immediately after publication, Pye was informed "Everything You Know Is Wrong" is the name of a cultural trivia book by Paul Kirchner -- "Everything You Know Is Wrong: Common Fallacies, Mistakes and Misattributed Quotations." But Starchild is different. He can feel it in his bones. It feels like immortality.

"All my life," he continues, "I've wanted to do something that wasn't just different, but something with value, something with meaning." Lloyd Pye wonders what horrific debacle unfolded at the bottom of a Mexican mine shaft several hundred years ago. A mother and her godforsaken kid? Murder-suicide? Something worse? The airport swings into view; another stranger is about to return to the sky.

"My only obligations are financial. I'm single, I don't have a mortgage or kids to support." Congestion ahead. "It's a risk I can afford to take. It's almost as if I've been unconsciously positioning myself to be at this very point in my life. So it was a pretty easy decision." A fractured smile, quick and gone. "I had no choice."

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