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Do you believe in aliens? If someone told you they had found alien remains and presented evidence to Congress, what would you think? This is not a plot from a science fiction novel, but a real event that happened recently in Mexico.

A self-proclaimed UFO researcher and journalist exhibited two so-called "alien remains" brought from Peru in the Mexican Congress. This news caused a sensation on social media, but it was also met with much skepticism and refutation.

Are these "alien remains" real? Are they really different from the life forms we know? How did they get from Peru to Mexico? These questions surround this unprecedented hearing, making people curious and confused.

"Not human, nor part of our terrestrial evolution"

On September 12, local time, the Mexican Congress held its first public hearing on "unidentified anomalous phenomena," with researchers from Mexico, the United States, Japan, and Brazil in attendance.

At the hearing, Mexican journalist and alien enthusiast José Jaime Maussan presented two boxes containing two dry "bodies" with elongated heads and three fingers on each hand. In addition to displaying the overall appearance of the two remains, X-ray photos of the interiors of the two remains were also displayed. The hearing revealed that DNA extracted from the remains also showed that they were not human.

The Associated Press reported that the two mummies were found in the deep underground of the Nazca Desert coast in Peru in 2017. The area is known for its giant mysterious figures, which are buried deep in the seabed and can only be seen from bird's eye view. Maussan claimed that, according to the carbon dating program analysis of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the mummies are about 1,000 years old. "These 'bodies' are not human and are not part of terrestrial evolution," Maussan said at the hearing.

Jose de Jesus Zalce Benitez, director of the Mexican Naval Health Sciences Institute, said that the institute had conducted X-ray, three-dimensional reconstruction, and DNA analysis on the alleged remains, and said, "I can be sure that these 'remains' are not related to humans."

The New York Times reported that it is still unclear how Maussan brought the alleged "remains" from Peru to Mexico, and whether the specimens are indeed from Peru, or just copies of the specimens.

The specific circumstances of the two remains are still under further study. According to local media reports, Mexico is planning to promote relevant legislation through the hearing. The country may therefore become the first in the world to recognize the existence of "alien beings."

However, Mexican ruling party National Regeneration Movement Party congressman Sergio Gutiérrez Luna made it clear that Congress would not make a judgment on whether the two "dry corpses" displayed by Maussan were alien remains. Luna also emphasized the importance of listening to "all voices and all opinions," and said that having a transparent dialogue on the issue of aliens is positive.

Doubts amount

However, Maussan's claims did not receive widespread acceptance. Some people who watched the hearing livestream expressed doubts about the authenticity of the two "remains." 

Mexican astrophysicist and astrobiologist Antígona Segura said that Maussan's conclusions had no evidence, calling the whole thing "absurd and shameful."

In an interview with NBD, Segura pointed out, "Maussan is a journalist that has been claiming similar things for about 2 decades, this is not new. His evidence has been debunked several times, but he keeps saying that its alien life. The Nazca "mummies" were presented in 2017 and they have not been subject of real scientific analysis, from the X rays shown it has been concluded that are bones of animals. The dating done at the UNAM (the National University of Mexico), was a service done for a client, this does not mean that the University backs up any of the claims."

NBD noted that in 2017, Maussan posted a video on the streaming platform Gaia.com showing six alleged extraterrestrial three-fingered mummy bodies. The video was posted on the YouTube platform via Gaia.com's account, and it quickly went viral on social media. Gaia.com is a video website known by outsiders as a "conspiracy theory headquarters." His so-called "discovery" was later "debunked" by the Office of the Attorney General of Peru. The office issued a report stating that the "bodies" were actually dolls covered with a mixture of paper and synthetic glue to simulate the structure of skin. It is almost certain that they were man-made, and "they are not the remains of extraterrestrials."

The authenticity of the alleged alien remains displayed at a recent hearing in the Mexican Congress remains in question, as experts continue to raise doubts about the claims made by journalist José Jaime Maussan.

Maussan has said that the two mummified bodies, which were found in Peru in 2017, are about 1,000 years old and are not of human origin. However, his claims have been met with widespread skepticism, including from within the scientific community.

Julieta Fierro, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico's Institute of Astronomy, said that many of the details about the remains are "meaningless." She said that scientists need more advanced technology than just X-ray scans to determine whether the calcified "mummies" are really alien remains.

Miguel Botella, a leading paleoanthropologist and director of the Human Evolution Laboratory at the University of Granada in Spain, said that the most sensible thing to do at this point is to ignore Maussan, calling his claims a "farce" and a "crude montage."

Botella, who spoke to the media by phone, said that he only had to take a quick look at the remains to know that they are neither human nor alien. "I think they are dolls, not remains," he said.

On Thursday, the National Autonomous University of Mexico reissued a statement that it first released in 2017. The statement said that the university's National Laboratory for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (LEMA) was only responsible for determining the age of the samples, and that "in no case do we conclude about the origin of the samples."

The university's Physics Institute also issued a statement, saying that its researchers had never personally examined the specimens that Maussan claims to have found. They said that they simply conducted carbon dating on samples that were provided to them by a client in 2017.

Astrobiology is the science that is building the knowledge to be able to answer this question. We have several strategies, such as biosignatures, that are chemical compounds produced by life and that are not produced in abundance or at all by other sources such as volcanoes or chemical reactions in the atmosphere. Astrobiologists are concerned about those strategies and the establishing scientifica an ethical parameters to make announcements about extraterrestrial life, Segura added.

Maussan's claims also attracted widespread attention in China, but on September 14, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation's certified account on Zhihu responded that, "To date, we have not found any conclusive evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life in our space activities."