9

THE ENIGMA OF ELONGATED SKULLS

If I was educated, I’ d be a damn fool.

BOB MARLEY, REGGAE ARTIST

THANKFULLY, AKHENATEN’S ENTIRE LEGACY was not destroyed after his battle with the Brotherhood of the Snake. His saga is unique in the annals of history. He left behind a remarkable collection of art and lavishly illustrated temple walls depicting the daily lives of his family. These carved and painted images are different by several orders of magnitude from all other known Egyptian art forms. Akhenaten’s six daughters were shown, as they were seen in their day, with extended, elongated skulls. The adults also had elongated skulls but were usually shown with hats and headdresses that covered them. Experts believe they have uncovered at least two busts of his six offspring.

Although the experts can’t agree as to which bust represents who, they do agree that, of the two busts found, one is Akhenaten’s eldest daughter Meritaten. These busts have come to be known as the Princesses of Amarna and are testaments to the events that transpired during this period in Egypt’s ancient past. Meritaten was certain to replace her mother Nefertiti as queen of the two lands and was Akhenaten’s favorite daughter. Before his death, he elevated her status as “chief wife”1 in a symbolic marriage. Akhenaten was desperate for male heirs and hoped his daughters might provide his fading dynasty with them. In an interesting twist of fate, this pharaoh, who forcibly attempted to turn the cycle of ages back toward the matriarchal system, bore royal daughters, who bore still more royal daughters.

On a temple wall relief, Meritaten is shown marrying a man who is presumably Nubian Prince Smenkhkare. In appearance he has a normal human head, compared with Meritaten’s elongated skull (see plate 25).

The other bust is believed to be Meketaten, best known for sitting on her mother Nefertiti’s lap, basking under the rays of the sun disk’s outstretched hands (see plate 26).

King Tut is the most famous member of Amarna’s royal family, and he too has an elongated skull. Scholars downplay this significantly, and on television documentaries about Tut this fact is not mentioned. Another disputed topic of discussion that mainstream Egyptologists would rather not talk about is who King Tut’s father actually was. They claim an obscure, tiny inscription found on a chiseled piece of granite is proof that Akhenaten was his father.2 This even though King Tut is never shown on wall reliefs or in sculptures with Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tiye, or the princesses. In fact, there’s not even a word about him before he unceremoniously took control of the throne of Egypt.

Some scholars believe the deformities found in Akhenaten’s family during the Amarna period are associated with the genetic defects of Marfan syndrome, a disorder of the connective tissues that strengthen the body’s bone structure. This rare gene disorder affects the cardiovascular system, eyes, and skin but doesn’t actually distend the skull to the point of elongation. Other academics relate the elongated skulls and the asexual appearance of Akhenaten to artistic exaggerations with limitless, unchecked creative license—a first of its kind. While art in the Amarna period did flourish tremendously, elongated skulls and images of strange people wearing cone-shaped hats and headdresses have been found in countries and civilizations both near and far from Egypt.3

Figure 9.1. Head of the statue of a princess, one of the six daughters of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, eighteenth dynasty, c. 1350 BCE. Courtesy of Manfred Werner.

Even Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin couldn’t have written a better thriller-mystery than the saga of the Starchild skull. Its circuitous plot begins in the dusty plains of the impoverished Southwest, where an American teenage girl, a native of El Paso, made an extraordinary discovery in the 1930s while visiting relatives in Mexico. After hiking during the morning hours south of Chihuahua, near Copper Canyon, the observant girl discovered the remains of two skeletons in an abandoned mine. One was normal-size and the other shaped like that of a child. We can only imagine the curiosity with which she might have examined the eerie and oddly shaped smaller skull.

While contemplating how to bring the skeletons back to El Paso, the girl hid the two skeletons in a desert ravine, intending to return for them during a more opportune moment. Later that day, an unexpected, freak flash flood swept the bones away and thwarted her plans. After days of searching for the lost skeletons, she managed to find some damaged bits of bone and both of the skulls. After the flash flood, both of the skulls were left without lower jaws and the odd-shaped Starchild skull also lost half of its upper jaw.

The girl slyly brought the skulls to her home in El Paso and kept them as a memento of her visit to Mexico. She did not attribute any particular significance to the Starchild skull, believing it to be no more than that of a poor, deformed child’s head. The skulls sat anonymously until the skulls’ finder died in 1997 and the skulls came into the possession of fellow El Paso natives Ray and Melanie Young. The plot thickened when Melanie Young, a neonatal nurse and deformities expert, recognized the anomalies of the Starchild skull.4

With newfound curiosity, the couple sought out a man capable of understanding what might possibly be an alien skull. They were referred to maverick historian Lloyd Pye, a controversial author and archaeologist with the contacts and the clout to get the job done. Best known for his classic book Everything You Know is Wrong, Pye became the caretaker of the Starchild skull in 1999 and has had it tested in top-notch DNA-sequencing facilities (see plate 27).

With Pye’s help, the world’s most eminent experts in the fields of biology, radiology, and DNA specialties have studied the nine-hundredyear-old skull vigorously. These experts have all expressed amazement at how different the skull is compared to normal human DNA sequencing; it also comprises a number of unknown DNA strains. The Starchild skull differs from the normal human cranium in many ways. The slot found on the back of a human skull contains a knot reserved for neck muscles. This is a trait found on all Earth primates. However, the Starchild had a short neck with muscles formed at the very bottom of the skull. The Starchild also had shallower eye sockets, likely resulting in far larger, bug-shaped eyes. The skull itself is much smaller, weighs less, and is more finely rounded than an average human skull.

An artist’s sketch of the Starchild would look like the Hollywood grey alien—a small fellow with big eyes and a small mouth and nose. No matter how strange this sounds, there is a good chance that nine hundred years ago a traveler wandering the Mexican southlands looked exactly like that because, according to the experts, the abnormalities in the Starchild skull are not the result of deformations due to disease. If that had been the case, any learned scientist would have been able to diagnose the deformities immediately. What are not easily explainable are the anomalies found within the bone structure of the skull.

The Starchild skull is webbed with a fibrous internal element that penetrates the bone, making it lighter and more durable, a staggering characteristic, unheard of in any known specimen found currently on Earth. A bone tissue sequencing resembling something out of an X-Men comic is contained in the DNA of the Starchild skull, yet the media remains silent.5 Why? Because reporters rarely draw attention to the subject of interventionism, the theory that at some point in the past our DNA cells were tinkered with by aliens. But this theory, which fits right into the paradigm of the ancient astronaut, somehow is more controversial than the popularly accepted school of thought known as Darwinism.

Even creationism is accorded more credence than the intervention theory. Lloyd Pye believes the Starchild skull is proof of the intervention theory, which holds that an act—that is, an intervention by alien forces—separated us from our primate cousins and thus gave us the gifts of sound, response, and vision that we’re still trying to decode in the twenty-first century. Even without a physical genetic alteration, scientists are starting to discover that human and alien genes have gone hand in hand since the dawn of creation6 and NASA has even discovered weird alien DNA in a California lake.7 With all these DNA research–related breakthroughs, is it really that inconceivable to think the Starchild may have been an alien-human hybrid or a lost grey alien dating from nine hundred years ago?

According to DNA-test results, published as recently as October 2011, the Starchild skull unquestionably has alien genes. A team of researchers working on the skull provided fresh evidence to the scientific community that the mitochondrial DNA found in the maternal sequence was, in fact, not human at all.8 The chains that make up DNA contain two types of sequencers—nuclear (nuDNA) and mitochondrial (mtDNA). The nuDNA comes from both parents and is found within the nucleus of the DNA cells. The mtDNA act as subcellular entities, known as mitochondria, that swim in the plasmid jelly of the DNA cell’s cytoplasm. These mtDNA strains are then passed on to each generation through the maternal (that is, the mother’s) line and are retained forever as long as the predecessors are female. Nuclear DNA encodes more of the genome, but its genes are continuously rearranged during the process of recombination. There is usually little to no change in mtDNA from parent to offspring. Because of this, and the fact that the mutation rate of mtDNA is higher than that of nuclear DNA and is easily measured, mtDNA is a valuable resource in tracking the ancestry of ancient humans.

Recently, the world of DNA research got even more exciting with the announcement of a whole new prehuman species. A tooth and a finger bone of the so-called Denisovans were unveiled in 2010 after being found in a cave in the frigid tundra of Siberia. Research was carried out by Dr. Svante Paabo, a pioneering geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Liepzig, Germany. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have become groundbreaking experts when it comes to understanding and sampling fragments of ancient DNA from fossils. He and his team are responsible for completing and publishing the definitive report on the Neanderthal genome.9 When Dr. Paabo studied the bone fragments of the Denisovan, looking for traces of the Neanderthal lineage, he was stunned at what he discovered.

Dr. Paabo accidentally found himself in the middle of another Earth mystery when he “and his colleagues isolated a small bundle of DNA from the bone’s mitochondria, the energy-generating structures within our cells. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues were surprised to discover that the Denisovan DNA was markedly different from that of either humans or Neanderthals” and later admitted that it was “a great shock”10 to them that the DNA differed from both the human and Neanderthal groups.

Scientists’ curiosity about the Denisovans was further piqued when perplexed paleo-anthropologist Bence Viola made clear statements that the tooth was in no way from either a modern human or a Neanderthal. As proof of this claim, he pointed out that the “tooth had oddly bulging sides”11 and big flaring roots. Scientists are still looking for more fragments of the Denisovans to study; an intact skull would, of course, be ideal. Just like the Starchild, the Denisovans are more mysterious cousins of humankind in Earth’s foggy ancestral history. While trying to recover nuclear DNA from the Starchild’s skull to match it to the National Institutes of Health database, geneticists discovered a significant number of base pairs never seen before. The Starchild skull also has over thirty major physiological differences from that of a human skull. The Starchild skull is more than an inch and a half thicker and, upon examining photographs, it is clear that the Starchild skull’s bone density is uniformly thicker and more finely shaped.

Figure 9.2. Skull thickness comparison: human skull at left; Starchild skull at right. Courtesy of Lloyd Pye, Starchildproject. com. Also see plate 28.

In the biochemistry of a typical human bone, the calcium and phosphorus levels are high while the oxygen and carbon levels are low. But in the case of the Starchild it is just the opposite: phosphorus levels are low, while carbon and oxygen levels are elevated, indicating that its biochemistry is more like that of tooth enamel than regular bone, and the calcium levels are very high. When the Starchild skull was x-rayed, five teeth were found hidden within the nasal bone structure and ready to come down. When we die, bacteria are released that scour and eat all the marrow from our bones, leaving them polished and shiny. There is no marrow left anywhere in the bone, and this occurs with all animals when they perish. Again, this normal feature of death is not replicated in the same manner with the Starchild skull.

Found within the bone tissue of the skull are sprinkles of red residue. This is not blood, at least in human form, since our blood turns black when it oxidizes. We do not know what the tiny fibrous threads or the red blotches are that dot the Starchild’s bone landscape. All we really know is that, for the first time, the DNA results showing alien characteristics are indisputable and will continue to be so as further tests are carried out.

The Starchild skull is important because we can study and hold it. Unfortunately, there have been glimpses of other amazing skulls now lost to the annals of history. One of the most buzzed about on the Internet is the horned skull found in Pennsylvania in the late 1800s. The skull resembles something out of a Black Sabbath video—ancient and spooky. It looks nothing like dressed-up Native American skulls with recognizable attached horns. The horns on the Pennsylvania skull are visibly distinguished as attached and are seen growing out from the bone structure of the skull. The little we know about the horned skull comes from a small article published by Reader’s Digest in Mysteries of the Unexplained in 1992 and from a description in an obscure magazine called Pursuit in 1973:

Figure 9.3. This image compares the Starchild skull with the Adult Female (AF) skull reportedly found together in Mexico circa 1930. Above left shows the exterior surface of the AF bone that is covered in porelike pits, which is normal for human bone. The Starchild skull has very little pitting, which is radically abnormal for bone. Courtesy of Lloyd Pye, Starchildproject.com. Also see plate 29a–c.

Figure 9.4. These two images show a close analysis of a fiber cluster, nicknamed the “ knot.” On the left is the fiber knot and on the right is the bone surface where the knot is located. Despite its appearance these fibers are not capillaries or any other tissue normally found in bone. Because nothing like this has been previously discovered, there are no established protocols to retrieve the fibers for testing, which hampers further study. Courtesy of Lloyd Pye, Starchildproject.com. Also see plate 30.

Human skulls with horns were discovered in a burial mound at Sayre, Bradford County, Pennsylvania, in the 1880’s. Horny projections extended two inches above the eye-brows, and the skeletons were seven feet tall, but other than that were anatomically normal. It was estimated that the bodies had been buried around A.D. 1200. The find was made by a reputable group of antiquarians, including the Pennsylvania state historian and dignitary of the Presbyterian Church (Dr. G. P. Donehoo) and two professors, A. B. Skinner, of the American Investigating Museum, and W. K. Morehead, of Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. The bones were sent to the American Investigating Museum in Philadelphia, where they were later claimed to have been stolen and have never been seen again12

Figure 9.5. Model or real? The only photo known that shows the infamous horned human skull found in 1880s Pennsylvania. Photographer unknown. From Pursuit 6 (July 1973) and Reader’s Digest, Mysteries of the Unexplained, 1992.

There have been numerous accounts of human skeletons found with horns. Unfortunately, almost all of these are poorly documented and lack photographic or physical evidence. Despite this, at some level we have a deep sociogenetic memory of creatures with horns. Take, for example, the legend of the unicorn—one of our most beloved and fabled creatures, even though there is no evidence whatsoever of its existence. Most of our associations with horned figures bring to mind images of the devil and demonic entities, far removed from the fairy-tale bliss of the enchanted unicorn. Mythical giants, witch doctors, dragons, and the minotaur—all of which had horns—vastly outnumber the prancing horse forever popular with teenage girls on the scale of good versus evil.

A fascinating secondhand account even claims that master poet Lord Byron had horns:

Lord Byron was, in a sense, a devil. Incredible as the thing may seem to the thoughtless, the handsomest man in England had a small tail, a pair of rudimentary horns, and short, squab feet divided forward from the instep into two parts, instead of being furnished with toes . . . He urged, and with considerable force, that the peculiar manner in which he wore his abundant curls effectually hid from view the rudimentary horns; and that, as he never appeared in public without his boots and trousers, none would ever suspect the existence of his other defects, with the exception of his valet, in whom he placed implicit confidence.13

Lord Byron isn’t the only famous character from days of yore thought to have had horns. The lore of the horn has all sorts of mystical and magical ancient connotations associated with it. Throughout history, horns have been used during weddings and sacrifices, and as weapons, charms, antidotes, and decorative pieces on robes and helmets. At the corner of each masonic altar is a horn. Hindu temples built in Bombay from the seventh through the eleventh century had horn-headed guardians on their roofs and horns adorning the top of the temple spires. Chinese women in the 1300s wore horns on their foreheads indicating that they were married, and a ram’s horn is used in Jewish High Holy Day services.

In volume 24 of the Indian Antiquary, published in 1895, a work compiled by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland with the Archaeological Survey of India, we learn:

Figure 9.6. Coin showing the horned head of Alexander. Courtesy of Mike Peel.

Both among the fifth century white Huns of central Asia, Persia and India and among the later Huns of Asia and East Europe the women wore horns on their heads, a practice which was the origin of the fashionable high-peaked Hunische hats of fourteen century Europe.14

The party god Dionysus was horned, and Alexander the Great was referred to in Arabic as the “two-horned”; he’s even depicted on coins with a pronounced horn. The great sculptor Michelangelo depicted Moses with two horns. Scriptures alluding to Moses having horns are generally viewed as mistranslations from Exodus and Deuteronomy and have been puzzled over by both Christian and Muslim scholars for thousands of years.15

Figure 9.7. Michelangelo’s Moses in Rome. Courtesy of Wknight 94.

Horns decorated the heads of the Egyptian gods, so when Moses led his people out of the wicked land of Egypt it would make sense that he was depicted with horns as a symbol of his divinely inspired deeds. The Israelites of the time believed

that their great law-giver had become divine, that he had miraculously received the mark of divinity and of kingly power. The belief that Moses actually descended with solid horns upon his head was devoutly held, and has continued to be believed down to the middle ages.16

What we have discovered so far indicates that ancient people must have been accustomed to interacting with, or at least seeing, strange-looking beings—humans, hybrids, and aliens. We certainly are! Billions of people have either grown up on or been exposed to classic movies and literature like Star Wars, Avatar, and the Lord of the Rings. That’s over five decades of minds conditioned to accept alien and lost worlds. Take, for instance, the legend of Frodo Baggins, a Hobbit who wandered the vast realms of Middle-Earth on a quest to destroy Sauron’s ring. Frodo and the rest of the Hobbits were known as little people; they were short and smaller compared with the other inhabitants of Middle-Earth.

The Hobbits were a community of tiny people who built their own village called the Shire. This cherished slice of fictional history became real-life Earth history when small skeletons and a skull were found on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. Fitting in somewhere between the Denisovans, the Neanderthals, and humans, this breed of Hobbit, which once roamed the remote Flores Island, is officially known as Homo floresiensis. Because the ancestry of Homo floresiensis is unknown, it’s another mystifying entry in the journal of anomalies found in human evolution.

New York Times columnist John Noble Wilford writes:

Everything about them seems incredible. They were very small, not much more than three feet tall, yet do not resemble any modern pygmies. They walked upright on short legs, but might have had a peculiar gait obviating long-distance running. The single skull that has been found is no bigger than a grapefruit, suggesting a brain less than one-third the size of a human’s, yet they made stone tools similar to those produced by other hominids with larger brains. They appeared to live isolated on Flores as recently as 17,000 years ago, well after humans had made it to Australia.17

Announcements were made describing the skeletons and the skull as those of Hobbits. Researchers pointed out that they were a previously unknown type of hominid. This sparked a backlash among mainstream academia; the experts contended that they were merely human dwarfs suffering from genetic disorders. These beliefs were undermined after scientists at a 2009 symposium came to the conclusion that Homo floresiensis is indeed a distinct hominid species and that it’s likely to be far older than Homo sapiens. They even marveled at the Hobbits’ fully functioning seven-and-a-half-inch-long feet, which were out of proportion to their shorter lower limbs, and at their primitive and undefined arch bone. These were traits usually found in African apes; for the first and only time they were seen in hominids, thanks to the Hobbit-like Homo floresiensis.

Anthropological discoveries made over the past decade have added an amazing amount of new data in our search for the origin of humanity.

Elongated skulls have also been found on the ancient island of Malta, an area long known for curious megalithic temples. The local inhabitants don’t know how these temples came to be. Found in the megalithic temples of Hal Saflieni, Tarxien, and Ggantija, these skulls seem to belong to a completely different subspecies of humans altogether. They were discovered in the 1980s, but kept hidden from the public. Our only known evidence of them comes from the photographs and writings of Maltese researchers Dr. Anton Mifsud and Dr. Charles Savona-Ventura.18 These findings, once obscure and ostracized, are now being validated, thanks, in part, to the recent interest in ancient and modern alien mysteries.

Perhaps the area with the most evidence of ancient alien contact, and where the most stunning discoveries have been made with regard to alien skulls, is the Peruvian highlands. The number of elongated skulls disinterred in the forests of Peru is so great that their museums are replete with astonishing examples and artifacts that provide evidence impossible to deny (see plate 31, plate32, and plate33). It is a well-documented fact that the Inca people were known to bind and misshape their infants’ skulls on purpose to mimic the features of visitors from the sky to whom they attributed godlike qualities (see plate 34).

Some elongated skulls are in the process of being DNA-tested right now, and these skulls might be just as important in the alien grab bag as the Starchild skull. We can say without hesitation that the Starchild skull is at least half-alien, although in a March 5, 2012, interview on Coast to Coast AM, Lloyd Pye stated that he is convinced the skull is of a grey alien, and listed an astounding number of anomalies not found in human skulls.19

On November 24, 2011, an article concerning aliens and strange, elongated skulls was published by one of the world’s foremost media outlets, London’s Daily Mail. Like wildfire, this groundbreaking story quickly spread around the globe. It is rare that an article on this subject makes its way to the headlines of Yahoo!, MSN, and other mainstream media outlets without being bashed or discredited. The Daily Mail showcased high-quality images of an ancient, cone-headed mummy with three anthropologists agreeing, “It is not a human being.”20

This shocking article is a huge step toward letting the alien cat out of the bag. If ever there was a case for “slow disclosure,” this news article would certainly be it. But what exactly is slow disclosure, and how can we know if we’re in the midst of it? We turn to this issue in the next chapter.