December 10, 2025 • 10 mins
In 2003, a tiny – really, really tiny – humanoid skeleton surfaced that had been taken from Chile. The only possible explanation is that it had to be an alien mummy. Right?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. But I'm Josh
and there's Chuck and Jerry, so you're sitting and forget
for Dave. This is short stuff, which is off to
a bad start already.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's right. And this is the story of the Saddest Skeleton.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
It is really sad. There's like five different reasons it's sad.
But you can kind of understand a little bit why
the skeleton would get so much attention. As known as
the Atakama skeleton, and it was found in the desert
of northern Chile, Atacama Desert, in an abandoned town called
Ladnoria back in two thousand and three.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
It's little, very small, about six inches in length or
fifteen centimeters, and it has a very interesting shape to
the skull, very conically shaped, and also has only ten
pairs of ribs where we usually have twelve pairs. And
so of course right away there were uf people saying
(01:02):
it's an alien. It's got to be a tiny, little alien.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
There's no other explanation.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Yeah, look at that thing. Other people said, hey, not
so fast. It looks more like a non human primate,
maybe a shape shifter.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
We don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
From what weird place this thing came from. But that's
just the beginning of the story, that's all. I don't
want to ruin anything just yet.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah. The skeleton also is not fully skeletonized, like there's
desiccated flesh attached to tissue attached to it in some
places too, including the face. And the reason why is because,
like I said, it came from the Atacama Desert in
northern Chile. That's one of the driest non polar places
on Earth, and it can mummify human remains pretty easily.
(01:49):
It's between the Chilean coastal mountain range and the Andes
and the town of Lenora, which is situated in the desert,
was once a mining town, a nitrate mining town. I
think Saltpeter.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Actually, yeah, that's right. You love saying Saltpeter.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah. Why are you gonna say anything else when you
can say Saltpeter?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Agreed, It's used as a fertilizer a lot. So they
abandoned the town in nineteen thirties, I guess, after they
had mined up all that stuff. So it's, you know,
long way of saying, it's a very good place to
preserve skeletons there and just naturally. But not only that,
but the ancient Centori culture there had a tradition of
(02:33):
mummifying bodies on purpose through their embalming process. So an
even longer way of saying that finding something out there,
it is not unlikely that it would be pretty well preserved.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah, and not the least of which because of the
solar radiation there. Apparently it's higher than anywhere on Earth,
not a lot of water, it's very hot in the day,
very cold at night. It's like just a perfect place
to make a mummy. And so in two thousand and
three the world first heard of the Atikamma skeleton thanks
(03:06):
to a guy named Oscar Munos who's a treasure hunter,
who said that he went to Lenoria and found just
sitting on a shelf in one of the buildings the
ati Kama skeleton. And most other people say, oh, we
don't think that you just found this thing on a shelf.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Most other people say, he really dug this thing up
from a burial site. So that's sad thing number one,
and no, no number one, as you're not just supposed
to do that as a treasure hunter. That's not a treasure.
Sure later on that skeleton was sold to a guy
named Ramon navia Asorio. He was a Spanish business owner
(03:44):
and a just collector of oddities. And also, it just
so happens a president of the Institute for Research and
Exo Biological Studies, which is a UFO enthusiast organization.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Right, And so you fologists have like a fairly smallish
community of people who will actually travel to conferences. So
it's not a big surprise that navia Osorio met up
with a guy named Stephen M. Greer, who is a
very prominent ufologist. I think he must have come up
(04:18):
in our area fifty one episode because I recognize his name.
But he is very outspoken about trying to get the
US government to disclose all of the information they surely
have on aliens, their awareness of aliens, what really crashed
and roswell, all of that stuff. And when Greer found
out that navia Osorio had the Ada Kama skeleton, he
(04:42):
was like, we have to figure out what this thing is.
Can I take a tissue sample?
Speaker 2 (04:47):
That's right, and that feels like a great place for
a break.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
What a cliffhanger? Yeah, we'll be right back, all right.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
So Stephen Greer has gotten in touch with Navaria Assorio
and said, hey, I got a plan here. Let's get
this Let's extract some DNA, have it examined for this
documentary called Sirius S I R I U S. It's
inspired out of one of my books. We can figure
(05:35):
out what this thing is like, you know, hopefully full
bore and we can know for sure.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah. And I guess the Serious got publicized enough that
a guy named Gary Nolan, who's a microbiologist. He reached
out to Stephen Greer and said, hey, I can help
you run a genomic test on this thing for your
movie Serious. Let's do this, And Stephen Greer said great,
let's I'm sure that was quite unexpected.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, And another thing that was unexpected was they found
that the DNA was quote modern, abundant and high quality
and is human. There's no doubt about it. So obviously
this was not an alien being. They published this research
in March of twenty eighteen in the journal Genome Research.
And what they found is, you know, the second and
(06:27):
probably most sad thing is that it was probably a
little baby girl who died in the womb.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah, she was almost certainly still born. If she was
alive when she was born, she would not have lived
very long. And they like, if you haven't seen the
autocommon skeleton, that's probably a good time to go look
up a picture of her. But the reason she has
such an unusual appearance is because they attribute it to
(06:57):
the really like disproportionate number of genetic mutation she has.
You know, just one single genetic mutation can very easily
alter a person's appearance. She had multiple genetic mutations, and
they have no idea why, but they're like, well, this
explains basically everything.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, and also it seemed like it was you know,
I'm pretty sure that it's a preterm birth. She's very
well preserved, so they're pretty sure that she's under five
hundred years old, and that's what I meant by fairly recent.
But they said they don't know, like she could have
died in the past, like thirty or forty years And
if that's true, then her parents might potentially still be around.
(07:39):
And we have this situation where there could be parents,
an even if there aren't, we have snatched this skeleton
from a tomb of this little girl who died prematurely
because of you know, issues like birth issues, and it's
like the saddest thing in the world.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
And not only that, people around the world are saying,
like alien, look at this, obviously an alien. Yeah, it's like, no,
these are actually congenital genetic issues, not alien. So yeah,
you put all this stuff together. You just hope that
the family is not aware of this. The thing that
stood out to me though, Chuck, is she died within
say forty years. That would put her in the eighties
(08:20):
the seventies, and the town where she was found, allegedly Lenoria,
was abandoned in the thirties, so I'm not sure what
she would be doing there, but I did see in
a lot of different places they're like, she could have
died quite recently.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Right, Yeah. Well, it was such a sort of outrage
after they found this out when that paper was published
in twenty eighteen that Chilean Society of Biological Anthropology and
the Chilean Association of Archaeologists both came out and were like,
this was a really unethical study. Shouldn't have done it.
It's against the law.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
First of all.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Under the Chilean law, it's illegal to carry out archaeological,
anthropological or paleen to logical excavations without getting authorization from
the Council of National Monuments, which wasn't done.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
That's a big one. They're also like, by the way,
give us our remains back, let's repatriator. And then a
lot of focus came on to Gary Nolan and his
group for even running this test in the first place,
and they they essentially understood. They're like, you know, you're right, this, this,
this whole jam is quite unethical. At least in our defense,
(09:31):
we did not handle the body. We've never seen the
body in person. We got a one millimeter a cubic
millimeter piece of bone to use as the sample, so
at least there's that. And yes, we believe that that
this baby's remain should be repatriated back to Chile. So
I don't, I don't. I don't know if they got
(09:51):
all the heat off of them, but at the very
least they were willing to acknowledge the ethical lapse on
their part for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, I think that was a fairly stand up th
to do.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
But the body is not back in Chile. It's still
in the possession of Ramon Navia Osorio in Spain. Yeah,
he's got it still. I don't know that he's making
any moves to give it back. And also I saw
Stephen Greer disputes the findings that it was human anything else,
(10:21):
just a that was a scoff if I've ever heard one. Yeah,
all right, love you. Chuck Short stuffs out.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Podcasts
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. But I'm Josh
and there's Chuck and Jerry, so you're sitting and forget
for Dave. This is short stuff, which is off to
a bad start already.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's right. And this is the story of the Saddest Skeleton.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
It is really sad. There's like five different reasons it's sad.
But you can kind of understand a little bit why
the skeleton would get so much attention. As known as
the Atakama skeleton, and it was found in the desert
of northern Chile, Atacama Desert, in an abandoned town called
Ladnoria back in two thousand and three.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
It's little, very small, about six inches in length or
fifteen centimeters, and it has a very interesting shape to
the skull, very conically shaped, and also has only ten
pairs of ribs where we usually have twelve pairs. And
so of course right away there were uf people saying
(01:02):
it's an alien. It's got to be a tiny, little alien.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
There's no other explanation.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Yeah, look at that thing. Other people said, hey, not
so fast. It looks more like a non human primate,
maybe a shape shifter.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
We don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
From what weird place this thing came from. But that's
just the beginning of the story, that's all. I don't
want to ruin anything just yet.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah. The skeleton also is not fully skeletonized, like there's
desiccated flesh attached to tissue attached to it in some
places too, including the face. And the reason why is because,
like I said, it came from the Atacama Desert in
northern Chile. That's one of the driest non polar places
on Earth, and it can mummify human remains pretty easily.
(01:49):
It's between the Chilean coastal mountain range and the Andes
and the town of Lenora, which is situated in the desert,
was once a mining town, a nitrate mining town. I
think Saltpeter.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Actually, yeah, that's right. You love saying Saltpeter.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah. Why are you gonna say anything else when you
can say Saltpeter?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Agreed, It's used as a fertilizer a lot. So they
abandoned the town in nineteen thirties, I guess, after they
had mined up all that stuff. So it's, you know,
long way of saying, it's a very good place to
preserve skeletons there and just naturally. But not only that,
but the ancient Centori culture there had a tradition of
(02:33):
mummifying bodies on purpose through their embalming process. So an
even longer way of saying that finding something out there,
it is not unlikely that it would be pretty well preserved.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah, and not the least of which because of the
solar radiation there. Apparently it's higher than anywhere on Earth,
not a lot of water, it's very hot in the day,
very cold at night. It's like just a perfect place
to make a mummy. And so in two thousand and
three the world first heard of the Atikamma skeleton thanks
(03:06):
to a guy named Oscar Munos who's a treasure hunter,
who said that he went to Lenoria and found just
sitting on a shelf in one of the buildings the
ati Kama skeleton. And most other people say, oh, we
don't think that you just found this thing on a shelf.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Most other people say, he really dug this thing up
from a burial site. So that's sad thing number one,
and no, no number one, as you're not just supposed
to do that as a treasure hunter. That's not a treasure.
Sure later on that skeleton was sold to a guy
named Ramon navia Asorio. He was a Spanish business owner
(03:44):
and a just collector of oddities. And also, it just
so happens a president of the Institute for Research and
Exo Biological Studies, which is a UFO enthusiast organization.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Right, And so you fologists have like a fairly smallish
community of people who will actually travel to conferences. So
it's not a big surprise that navia Osorio met up
with a guy named Stephen M. Greer, who is a
very prominent ufologist. I think he must have come up
(04:18):
in our area fifty one episode because I recognize his name.
But he is very outspoken about trying to get the
US government to disclose all of the information they surely
have on aliens, their awareness of aliens, what really crashed
and roswell, all of that stuff. And when Greer found
out that navia Osorio had the Ada Kama skeleton, he
(04:42):
was like, we have to figure out what this thing is.
Can I take a tissue sample?
Speaker 2 (04:47):
That's right, and that feels like a great place for
a break.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
What a cliffhanger? Yeah, we'll be right back, all right.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
So Stephen Greer has gotten in touch with Navaria Assorio
and said, hey, I got a plan here. Let's get
this Let's extract some DNA, have it examined for this
documentary called Sirius S I R I U S. It's
inspired out of one of my books. We can figure
(05:35):
out what this thing is like, you know, hopefully full
bore and we can know for sure.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah. And I guess the Serious got publicized enough that
a guy named Gary Nolan, who's a microbiologist. He reached
out to Stephen Greer and said, hey, I can help
you run a genomic test on this thing for your
movie Serious. Let's do this, And Stephen Greer said great,
let's I'm sure that was quite unexpected.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, And another thing that was unexpected was they found
that the DNA was quote modern, abundant and high quality
and is human. There's no doubt about it. So obviously
this was not an alien being. They published this research
in March of twenty eighteen in the journal Genome Research.
And what they found is, you know, the second and
(06:27):
probably most sad thing is that it was probably a
little baby girl who died in the womb.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah, she was almost certainly still born. If she was
alive when she was born, she would not have lived
very long. And they like, if you haven't seen the
autocommon skeleton, that's probably a good time to go look
up a picture of her. But the reason she has
such an unusual appearance is because they attribute it to
(06:57):
the really like disproportionate number of genetic mutation she has.
You know, just one single genetic mutation can very easily
alter a person's appearance. She had multiple genetic mutations, and
they have no idea why, but they're like, well, this
explains basically everything.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, and also it seemed like it was you know,
I'm pretty sure that it's a preterm birth. She's very
well preserved, so they're pretty sure that she's under five
hundred years old, and that's what I meant by fairly recent.
But they said they don't know, like she could have
died in the past, like thirty or forty years And
if that's true, then her parents might potentially still be around.
(07:39):
And we have this situation where there could be parents,
an even if there aren't, we have snatched this skeleton
from a tomb of this little girl who died prematurely
because of you know, issues like birth issues, and it's
like the saddest thing in the world.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
And not only that, people around the world are saying,
like alien, look at this, obviously an alien. Yeah, it's like, no,
these are actually congenital genetic issues, not alien. So yeah,
you put all this stuff together. You just hope that
the family is not aware of this. The thing that
stood out to me though, Chuck, is she died within
say forty years. That would put her in the eighties
(08:20):
the seventies, and the town where she was found, allegedly Lenoria,
was abandoned in the thirties, so I'm not sure what
she would be doing there, but I did see in
a lot of different places they're like, she could have
died quite recently.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Right, Yeah. Well, it was such a sort of outrage
after they found this out when that paper was published
in twenty eighteen that Chilean Society of Biological Anthropology and
the Chilean Association of Archaeologists both came out and were like,
this was a really unethical study. Shouldn't have done it.
It's against the law.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
First of all.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Under the Chilean law, it's illegal to carry out archaeological,
anthropological or paleen to logical excavations without getting authorization from
the Council of National Monuments, which wasn't done.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
That's a big one. They're also like, by the way,
give us our remains back, let's repatriator. And then a
lot of focus came on to Gary Nolan and his
group for even running this test in the first place,
and they they essentially understood. They're like, you know, you're right, this, this,
this whole jam is quite unethical. At least in our defense,
(09:31):
we did not handle the body. We've never seen the
body in person. We got a one millimeter a cubic
millimeter piece of bone to use as the sample, so
at least there's that. And yes, we believe that that
this baby's remain should be repatriated back to Chile. So
I don't, I don't. I don't know if they got
(09:51):
all the heat off of them, but at the very
least they were willing to acknowledge the ethical lapse on
their part for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, I think that was a fairly stand up th
to do.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
But the body is not back in Chile. It's still
in the possession of Ramon Navia Osorio in Spain. Yeah,
he's got it still. I don't know that he's making
any moves to give it back. And also I saw
Stephen Greer disputes the findings that it was human anything else,
(10:21):
just a that was a scoff if I've ever heard one. Yeah,
all right, love you. Chuck Short stuffs out.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Podcasts
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
The Brothers Ortiz
The Brothers Ortiz is the story of two brothers–both successful, but in very different ways. Gabe Ortiz becomes a third-highest ranking officer in all of Texas while his younger brother Larry climbs the ranks in Puro Tango Blast, a notorious Texas Prison gang. Gabe doesn’t know all the details of his brother’s nefarious dealings, and he’s made a point not to ask, to protect their relationship. But when Larry is murdered during a home invasion in a rented beach house, Gabe has no choice but to look into what happened that night. To solve Larry’s murder, Gabe, and the whole Ortiz family, must ask each other tough questions.