The Paracas skulls: they’re not aliens (or nephilim)!

by Lita Cosner

Flickr/ Marcin Tlustochowicz (CC BY 2.0)

We’ve received a lot of questions about the Paracas skulls in Peru, which look like human skulls, only deformed. However, they are claimed to have DNA unlike any living creature on earth, let alone humans. C.S. from the UK provides a typical example:

We know that there were humans in Peru at the time of the Paracas skulls. Maybe these people were unusually tall, and their skulls were unusually large, but there is also proof that some genetic diseases which cause unusual skull size. Even among people living today, there are huge variations in human stature (from 4 1/2 feet tall pygmies in Africa to 7+ feet tall basketball players). And skulls can be intentionally deformed, and it is well known that some Mexican and South American cultures did this by placing heavy weights on a child’s soft skull. In other cultures children's skulls were tightly wrapped in bandages to create this appearance. Such practices were often done as a status symbol of sorts. So if we find what look like the distorted skulls of possibly diseased and/or purposefully deformed humans, the logical conclusion is not that “we must have found aliens!”

And this is aside from the unlikelihood of life on other planets and the improbability of making the leap from life to human-like consciousness. Even if life evolved on other planets, travelling to earth would be problematic because it would be impossible to travel the distances involved within normal lifespans.

When we examine the content of the claims, and who is making them, we find lots of reasons to be skeptical of the hype about the skulls. The announcement was not made in a scientific journal, but via the media—the same media that promotes mermaids, Bigfoot, and other sensational claims. Brien Foerster, one of the men who made the announcement, the assistant director of a private museum with no relevant credentials, runs ‘paranormal’ tours in Peru. The geneticist who did the testing wants to be anonymous, at least for now, so his expertise cannot be used to bolster the claim until he is willing to make it public.

And there is reason to be skeptical of the claim that the DNA is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. First of all, why would aliens have DNA? If life evolved elsewhere, what are the chances its information code would look anything like DNA, or produce something as human-like as the skulls?

These DNA claims are similar to the ‘Atacama child’, which we covered in our review of the Sirius documentary. In reality, DNA analysis of the Atacama child revealed that it was human, not alien. Some Christians are also keen to invoke the skulls as pre-Flood nephilim relics. We have a thorough article on this topic called Who were the ‘sons of God’ in Genesis 6? (an extract from Gary Bates's book Alien Intrusion: UFOs and the Evolution Connection. Please read this before making comments about this topic.

Christians should be cautious about buying into such sensational claims, especially when the conclusions are anti-biblical in nature.