Revealed hoaxMexican Congressional UAP Hearing — Maussan "non-human bodies" (12 September 2023)

On 12 September 2023, the Chamber of Deputies of the Congress of the Union of Mexico convened a public hearing in the Recinto Legislativo de San Lázaro on the topic of unidentified anomalous phenomena. The session was chaired by Deputy Sergio Gutiérrez Luna; speakers included U.S. Navy veteran Ryan Graves, journalist Jaime Maussan, and others. The hearing was broadcast live on the Chamber’s official streaming channel and is preserved in the Congressional record.

Maussan, a Mexican broadcaster long associated with UFO journalism in Latin America, presented two small mummified specimens encased in glass display boxes, asserting under oath before the deputies that the bodies were “non-human,” approximately 1,000 years old, and had been recovered from the Nazca region of Peru. He stated that DNA analysis at UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico) had established the specimens as biologically distinct from any known terrestrial species.

The scientific community responded rapidly and unambiguously. UNAM issued a formal statement on 18 September 2023 clarifying that the DNA work cited by Maussan had been performed under contract for a private party and that the institution “does not endorse the conclusions presented.” Independent examinations by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and by Peruvian forensic specialists — most prominently Dr. Flavio Estrada of the Institute of Legal Medicine of Peru in a January 2024 examination — concluded that the specimens were composite assemblies of partial human and non-human animal bones, manually constructed using adhesives, with no biological coherence.

Maussan had previously been associated with the 2017 “Nazca mummies” promotion, the 2015 “Roswell slides” affair (the supposed photographs of an extraterrestrial body that were demonstrated to be of the 1896 mummy of a child from the Mesa Verde region), and other items that did not withstand scrutiny. The 2023 Mexican Congressional event is treated, on the public record, as a documented case of unverified material presented under oath to a legislative body and subsequently scientifically rebutted.

The damage to the legitimate disclosure cycle is non-trivial. The same month — September 2023 — also produced NASA’s UAP Independent Study Team final report and the early Schumer–Rounds amendment language. The Maussan presentation, broadcast to a large international audience, provided news outlets a convenient frame for treating the entire UAP topic as unserious. The hearing itself, with Ryan Graves’ substantive testimony, was real and on the legislative record; the bodies were not.