THE STARCHILD SAGA
by Lloyd Pye
England's Fortean Times Magazine, December, 1999.
While touring the western United States in mid-February of this year, 1999, I was asked if I would meet with a couple wanting to show me something. The "thing" was not specified, but I am often asked to evaluate material relevant to my research in the field of non-traditional human origins. (I support the Intervention Theory, which occupies the wide swath of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. For those who do not know of me or my work, information can be accessed on the internet at www.lloydpye.com.) I assumed the request would involve some aspect of my research specialty, Hominoids, which includes Bigfoot/Sasquatch, the Abominable Snowman/Yeti, and two others, Almas and Agogwes, that are not well-known worldwide but which dominate in their particular regions. My assumption proved to be very wrong.
What the couple wanted to show me was a pair of skulls, one clearly human and one apparently not. The latter has since come to be known as "The Starchild Skull," which can be accessed at www.starchildproject.com. It is difficult to describe my feelings when the Starchild was lifted up out of the small cardboard box containing it and its companion. In my studies of human and prehuman and hominoid anatomy, which comprise the bulk of research in my book "Everything You Know Is Wrong---Book One: Human Origins" (available now), I had learned a great deal about the bones in a human body. However, nowhere in my research had I ever encountered anything remotely resembling that skull.
I sat stunned, gazing into eye "sockets" that were merely shallow indentations scooped from the front of the face, feeling the kind of awesome wonder one occasionally feels while gazing at a star-filled night sky. "What do you think?" the couple asked me. I pulled from my reverie and looked at them. "I think you might have a winner here. I think it has a good chance of being alien or part alien." They nodded, making it clear they felt the same way. "What should we do with it? How should we go about proving it?"
I told them how I would go about that, outlining a series of steps I felt would be most effective. First, consult experts in human pathology to determine if it was any kind of known deformity I was not familiar with. If those consultations indicated we should pursue the matter seriously, then a battery of formal tests should be conducted using the guidelines for studying any anthropological find: Carbon 14 to date it; an endocranial cast to determine the structure of its brain surface; a spectrographic analysis of its bone to determine the chemical makeup; but most importantly, comprehensive testing of its DNA needed to be carried out, both mitochondrial and, if possible, nuclear.
This, I knew, would be the sticking point. Nuclear DNA is difficult to recover in ancient bones, which are classified as anything over fifty years. These skulls had been found 60-70 years ago in the mountains 100 miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico, but they appeared to be 200 years old, or more. That would make recovery of their nuclear DNA only possible in a handful of labs around the world, and the costs of such work would be substantial. So I undertook trying to arrange the testing processes in a very deep financial hole that I did not prove to be very adept at digging my way out of.
Here I must confess that while I have many valuable attributes as a scholar, writer, and lecturer, I have proven to be a highly ineffectual fundraiser. There is now serious doubt about whether I could raise dust on a dirt farm. So it has taken me five full months of effort to secure the services of a DNA lab that can do the work that will be required on the Starchild skull. These tests will get underway in late August or early September, and we should have a definitive answer by mid to late October, if all goes well. [Note: These tests did not begin until three years later. I was a great deal worse at fundraising than expressed in this paragraph.]
What do we expect those results to say about the Starchild? There are three options: It is a seriously deformed human of a type that has never been seen before. It is a purely alien being of the "gray" type. Or it is a hybrid between a human and a gray type. What are the odds on any of the three being the ultimate answer? If you ask almost any establishment scientist who deals with human physiology, they will say it will unquestionably prove to be a deformed human of some kind. However, based on my extensive research into human deformity, I do not think that is likely. I think the Starchild will prove to be one of the latter two, most probably the alien-human hybrid.
In the course of forming my opinion about the Starchild skull, I consulted over forty acknowledged experts in fields ranging from anthropology to dentistry to ophthalmology to radiology to neonatology to forensic pathology. Some of them grudgingly admitted I had shown them a "highly unusual" specimen they could not be 100% certain about, but the vast majority insisted its many physiological oddities had to be the result of pathology (deformity) because the alternative (the alien hypothesis) was impossible. [Note: over 60 have now been consulted.]
As one of those experts so cleverly put it to me: "Mr. Pye, as long as pathology can account for a foot growing out of a human head, pathology can account for this skull." Challenging that kind of all-encompassing defense is a bit like trying to play Monopoly against Bill Gates using real money. The game is heavily stacked against you before it begins. But let's not be intimidated by the many Ph.D.'s who have been consulted and pronounced the Starchild a deformity. Let's simply look at the facts and let those speak for the skull. Read them and decide for yourself what you think it might be.
The eyes. Human eye sockets are cone shaped to hold an eyeball and the muscles surrounding it that allow it to move up, down, left, right. That cone extends 5 to 6 centimeters into the skull, and at its back are openings for the optic nerve and various blood vessels. As mentioned earlier, in the Starchild's skull there is no cone, but rather a shallow scoop in the bone of the face, 3 centimeters at its greatest depth. The optic nerve canals and the fissures are skewed down and away, at the bottom of the scoop and on the inside, thereby housing an eye radically different in shape and probable function.
The temples. In humans, thick bands of muscle pass beneath the zygomatic arch (cheekbone) to spread out in a fan shape and connect with the entire side of the skull. They attach from forehead to upper hairline to behind the ear. In the child the zygomatic arch has been greatly reduced and dropped from horizontal to a 30-degree angle. Instead of two fingers worth of muscle passing through, two spaghetti strands pass through. And, in a true miracle of deformity, those greatly reduced muscles have been neatly detached from the anchor points of humans, spread out in a reconfigured fan shape, and reattached across an area about 1/3 that of a human.
The parietals. In humans the parietal bones form the upper rear of the cranium. While we all know there can be quite a range of difference in this part of the head, the parietals of the Starchild are far beyond any such variation. In fact, they are so large relative to human parietals, it is conceivable they might contain individual parts of a trilateral brain (all humans and primates have bilateral brains). [Note: We feel certain now that the brain was bilateral.] If this should prove to be true (a planned endocranial cast should be definitive), there would be little doubt the child was a pure alien or an alien-human hybrid. [Note: No cast has yet been made of inside the skull, but it remains an option for later.]
The occipital and neck. The occipital is a large curved bone covering the lower rear of a human's head. Near its center is a noticeable bump (feel your own) called the "inion," which is the starting point for the neck. Above the inion is skull, below it is neck. Neck attachments fan out in an arc that carries from the inion to behind and below the mastoid bones that protect the ear canals. It is a large area, in its own way as extensive as the attachment area of the temple muscles. And in all cases of head binding, you can’t bind below the inion without damaging neck muscles. Yet in the Starchild's skull the entire occipital is flat, as if designed that way, with a gently convoluted surface that belies any possibility of binding--ever. Furthermore, the inion is subtly concave relative to the bone around it. And, as with the temple muscles, the neck muscles have somehow been detached from where they would normally be on a human skull, greatly reduced in size, then reattached in a semicircle roughly 1/3 the area of a human neck.
The foramen magnum. In humans the foramen is positioned rear of center to balance a heavy rear cranium against an essentially empty face area. The front of a human face has numerous sinus cavities, two deep eye sockets, a mostly empty nasal passage, and a rather large mouth. This means the weight of the brain is dominantly rearward, under which is the human foramen. The Starchild's foramen is centered under the head, balancing it like a misshapen golf ball on a vertical tee. This shift in its center of gravity is necessary because the child's cranium is essentially wall-to-wall brain. It has no sinus cavities and greatly reduced eye sockets above an apparently small nasal passage and mouth.
Weight and brain volume. An adult human skull weighs about 2.2 pounds. The Starchild's skull weighs 13 ounces without its teeth or jaws. With them it might have weighed 15 to 16 ounces. It is definitely made of bone that is lighter and thinner than normal human bone. Furthermore, it lacks the internal ridges of bone that support a normal cerebellum, which among other functions in humans is the coordinating center for muscular movement. The lack of those ridges does not necessarily mean the Starchild lacked a cerebellum, but if it did that would be incompatible with life as we know it. Furthermore, one of the most startling differences between humans and the Starchild is in brain volume. A normal adult's brain capacity is around 1400 cubic centimeters (c.c.), while the Starchild's is an astonishing1600 c.c.!
In anthropological circles a jump of 200 c.c. in brain volume heralds a new species. Homo Erectus is 200 c.c. more than Homo Habilis. Homo Archaic is 200 c.c. more than Homo Erectus. Homo Neanderthalensis is 200 c.c. more than Homo Erectus. But in the case of the Starchild skull, it is officially considered a mere freak of nature, and so it will remain until DNA testing and other testing now underway definitively proves its lineage to be either a very ugly human, a pure alien gray, or a gray-human hybrid. I'm betting on one of the latter two.
All Original Material Copyright 2007
© Lloyd Pye