Lloyd Pye

IN SEARCH OF THE STARCHILD

by Sean Casteel

UFO Magazine, U.S. version, October, 1999.

A story of anthropological significance, Lloyd Pye's struggle to verify the suspected alien origins of a child's skull merges with the conventionally rejected theories of researchers who defy all the currently accepted notions of human development. After struggling for years as what he himself terms a "mediocre" writer of novels and screenplays, Louisiana-born Lloyd Pye says he has finally found his niche researching hominoids (creatures like Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman) and developing his own theory as to how mankind came to take up residence on the Earth. His recent book, "Everything You Know is Wrong --Book One: Human Origins" (available now), presents an argument about human evolution that runs contrary to both Darwinists and Creationists, and draws heavily on the writings of Zecharia Sitchin and his "Earth Chronicles" series. But his theory has its origins in what may be termed "hard evidence," once analysis is completed.

The story of the "Starchild" began in February of this year. Pye was contacted by an anonymous couple who said they had something to show him. "I assumed it would have something to do with hominoids," he said, "because that is my main specialty area of research, and that is what most people want to talk to me about. I was not very UFO-oriented, but I was very hominoid-oriented. So I get a lot of 'I want to talk to you about some experience I had when I was a child,' or 'I saw one of those,' or whatever." Pye said that, to his great surprise, the couple instead produced a small cardboard box.

"And they bring out these two skulls," Pye said, "the first of which is human. Then they pull out the other one, and, Holy Moley, I looked at that thing!" It was about the same size as the first, with strangely shaped eye sockets and with an even stranger shape to the cranium. "I held it and particularly looked into those eyes," Pye recalled. "I just knew this was something entirely, entirely different. I had a strong sense of the depth of ignorance about biology in the same way you look up into the sky and have a sense of the depth of our ignorance about what is
out there."

The couple had brought the skulls to Pye to ask his advice on what to do with them. He recommended a preliminary investigation that would determine whether the strangely misshapen skull was the result of a common genetic deformity or a birth defect, specifically some kind of DNA testing. The couple agreed with Pye's proposed plan of action and turned over the skulls to Pye as caretaker. He immediately told them the results of further research into the skulls should be made public and that no attempt should be made to profit from them. "If it's the real thing, there will be a reward," Pye asserts. "If it's not, we don't deserve anything more than credit for a sincere effort. That's the way I view it."

The Starchild skull was originally discovered by an American teenager visiting Mexico with her parents. Details of exactly where and when are now obscured by the passage of time, but at least some of the story has been handed down to Pye, and which he takes on faith. The teenager's parents were Mexicans who had entered the U.S. illegally, but who had eventually achieved a legal status after the young woman's birth. They returned to Mexico to visit their old family in a small rural village a hundred miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico. (The exact location is not known. The woman has since died and cannot be questioned.)

"When her family took her down there," Pye began, "the villagers and the people she was staying with told her, 'Don't go in the caves and the mine shafts around here. That's taboo. We don't do that.' So, being a teenager and being told what not to do, that is exactly what she had to do. The first opportunity she had, she sneaked away and explored the caves and the mine tunnels. In one of the mine tunnels she found a human skeleton lying on its back. At its side was a misshapen hand coming up out of the dirt beside the skeleton."

The young woman then dug farther down around the misshapen hand and found more remains in a shallow grave, both a misshapen skeleton and misshapen head to go along with the hand. She put all the bones into a big basket she had brought with her on the pretense that she was going to go berry picking, then carried the bones back to where she was staying, concealing them behind a tree. Two days later a heavy rain came and washed most of the bones away. After searching downstream for them, she recovered only the two skulls, then sneaked them into her luggage and back into the U.S.

The woman kept the skulls her entire life, and as she was nearing death she asked an American friend of hers if he would take them and keep them for her. "He kept them for five years," Pye said, "but his wife did not approve of them and didn't like them being in the box out in the garage. Luckily, he knew of a younger couple, friends who were UFO-knowledgeable. He showed the skulls to the couple and asked them what they thought. They said [about the smaller one], 'It looks like it could be a gray's skull, an alien skull.' He just gave them the skulls free and clear. Then they went on a little hunt for someone who would be the appropriate person to be the caretaker--and my name popped up because of my work with pre-human and hominoid and human bones and skeletons."

Pye and his skulls have since drawn the curious attention of the UFO community. The origins and forensic identity of the skull are completely unknown, but Pye has dubbed it the "Starchild" skull because of its anomalous, "alien" appearance. In response to questions about the exact properties of the skull that lead one to think it could be either completely alien or at least a human/alien hybrid, Pye loosed a veritable flood of very technical anatomical and medical information. Perhaps it will suffice to say that after close examination by Pye, the Starchild skull has yielded up the following facts.

First of all, the eye sockets are not human and also do not conform to any known genetic abnormality. The skull was, according to Pye, "completely redesigned from human to Starchild, but it is the same set of bones." The skull is structured so that it may have held three brain lobes rather than the normal two. [Note: We no longer consider this a possibility.] Another strange attribute may indicate that the Starchild has no cerebellum, "Which would not be compatible with life as we know it," Pye said. The neck would likely be only a third the size of a human’s, and the weight of the skull is also much lighter than any human counterpart.

"It feels almost like a gourd relative to the real density and heaviness of human bone," Pye said. "Also, the Starchild is completely minus its frontal sinuses. And its brain is a completely different size. An average human brain has a volume of 1400 cubic centimeters. The Starchild has 1600 cubic centimeters. It's wall-to-wall brain, totally redesigned to hold an awful lot more intelligence capacity."

Pye gives a brief evolutionary run-down of the size calculations. "In anthropological terms, an increase of 200 cubic centimeters is a new species, basically. Homo Habilis goes to Homo Erectus with a leap of 200 centimeters, Homo Erectus goes to Homo Archaic with a leap of 200 centimeters, Homo Archaic goes to Neanderthal with 200 centimeters. So if nothing else, we might be looking at a new kind of species here. But at a minimum we are looking at something that is highly, highly unusual."

Pye argues against any of the bizarre characteristics of the skull being the result of genetic or congenital deformity. "Genetic deformity is when you see something over and over," Pye said, "so you can just look at it and say in general terms, 'This is such and such.' You can call them by name. But the Starchild doesn't seem to fit any of those categories. And then you have congenital defects, which are birth defects caused by sperm/egg misconnects. Those are one-time-only, never-seen-before, never-going-to-be-seen-again mistakes. They can be small, they can be large, but past a certain point, they become deadly. Especially in your head, which is so important to you. One thing wrong, you can survive it. Two things wrong, you have a serious problem. Three things wrong, you're probably dead." Pye's point being that the Starchild has eight major "areas of reconfiguration" in its head, five more than the fatal three Pye describes. There is also another reason its survival to the estimated age of five is so remarkable.

"In a primitive society," Pye said, "which is where the Star Child supposedly came from, they wouldn't put up with [birth defects]. There was no stigma attached to infanticide. If something came out and it wasn't quite right, they just did away with it and started over, no problem." According to local legend, those same primitive societies were said to have been in regular contact with aliens conducting genetic experiments similar to those the abduction literature is so full of today. "These are well-known, well-regarded legends with roots spreading throughout Central and South America," Pye writes on his web site. "They are pervasive and long-standing, and in general state that on a regular basis 'Star Beings' come down from the heavens and impregnate females in remote, isolated villages. The women carry their 'Star Children' to term, then raise them to the age of six or so. At that point the Star Beings return to collect their progeny and remove them to places, and for purposes, not clearly outlined in the legends, though improving a stagnant gene pool is often mentioned as motivation."

Pye also offers a very interesting scenario on what events may have led up to the death of the Starchild and its supposed mother. "Many 'intuitives' and 'sensitives' feel the adult skeleton was a female," Pye wrote, "and the child was hers, a human-alien hybrid created by a union between her and a Star Being. Some feel the mother had learned the Star Beings were returning to take her child away from her, which she refused to contemplate. Panic-stricken and filled with dread, she took her child and fled her village, seeking refuge in the hidden mine tunnel. There she killed it and buried it in a shallow grave, leaving one of its hands out of the ground to hold onto. Then she took a fatal dose of poison and lay down beside her child to die."

This speculative story obviously contains many elements of the modern abduction scenario, including the impregnation of female abductees who then cling stubbornly to their unborn fetuses and who experience a strong emotional bonding when presented with their hybrid children on board a UFO. Perhaps the presence of a strong maternal-protective drive literally transcends time and place and is a component of the relationship between aliens and humans throughout their mutual history.

Pye offered his own further speculation on the possible circumstances of the Starchild’s birth, an extrapolation straight out of the current alien abduction memories. "The Star Being legends go back for hundreds of years," he began. "In the old days the grays would put hybrids in isolated, rural villages and nobody beyond five miles would know about it. It certainly wouldn't spread all over the world the way it would now with communications being what they are. So the grays have since gone to the harvesting program, which means they impregnate women and instead of letting them bring their hybrids to term and raise them to the age of six, they 'harvest' them at the start of the second trimester."

"Understand," Pye went on, "that grays apparently don't have an emotional capacity like we do. So they can't nurture a child. But if a child has a lot of human in it, it has to have some nurturing or it won’t grow up properly. It will languish and probably die from failure to thrive. And what our own psychologists have told us is that the age of six is right at the cutoff point. If you receive good nurturing up to the age of six, you will be okay. If you have very bad nurturing up to the age of six, you will be screwed up your entire life. They probably figured that out, that they weren't doing a good job of nurturing, so they said, 'Let the mothers do it and we'll just come back and get them when they're emotionally stable and we'll use them for whatever it is that we're using them for.'"

Pye added that when it became necessary for the aliens to shift over to the harvesting program, they began to retrieve the fetuses at the fourth month and then store them in jars, which is a sight often seen by abductees during the onboard part of their experiences. The aliens may have also permanently abducted normal adults and children to help nurture the hybrid babies on the ships, which could partially account for the many disappearances that go unsolved. In fact, those might be some of the people who end up on milk cartons," Pye added ominously.

The Starchild skull is exactly the kind of mystery that should fascinate true believers in the UFO phenomenon, especially if it can be proven to have alien or at least non-human characteristics. Pye has been trying, without much success, to raise money to conduct expensive DNA testing as well as other forms of peripheral testing in order to scientifically verify those suspicions. "There are certain people who are very interested in it and excited about it," Pye said. "But if you go by just the amount of support I have received -- financial support and even moral support -- I have been frankly stunned, shocked, and disappointed at how little it has been." Pye does name various researchers who have been supportive: "Roger Leir, Michael Lindemann, Peter Davenport, Bob and Teri Brown. I could just go on naming names. The people at the top understand what it is, but the rank and file, I must say, have not been very supportive. However, I'm inclined to believe the fault for that is mine. I have a number of valuable attributes as a scholar and as a writer and lecturer, but I've proven myself to be a terrible fundraiser! That's just something I have to deal with."

Pye is somewhat consoled by the fact that he is currently negotiating and finalizing arrangements with a DNA lab that is apparently going to attempt to recover both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from the Starchild skull and test it to retrieve genetic information on the child's parents. "I got very lucky," Pye said, "in that I found a lab that is so interested in doing it that they're willing to come up with donors to help us pay for the testing. We would also like to do Carbon-14, and have an endocranial cast done to see what the inside of the brain case looks like. We would like to do a full spectrographic analysis, which will tell us all about the chemistry of the bone, and we would like to do a forensic sculpture to get as good a look as we can at what it might have looked like. So those are the four big peripheral tests to go along with the DNA testing."

The results of that all-important DNA testing may have huge implications, according to Pye. "If the DNA proves that the skull is the real thing," he said, "it will be one of the most, if not the, most important events in history. If in fact we can prove that it is not entirely 100% human, or is not even human at all, that will create a sensation of the highest order, of the first magnitude. So for that reason I have put my book and my other career completely on hold," he continued. "There is a high element of personal risk here, because it could turn out to be just some kind of bizarrely deformed kid. In which case we simply end up adding to the base of knowledge about human deformity. I mean, it will be a major addition, to be sure, but it won't be the sensation that a genuine alien relic would create."

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