{"it":{"id":"W11A12","kind":"artifact","sub":"Disputed","name":"Starchild skull","place":"a cave in Mexico (claimed; provenance unverified)","mat":"bone","dims":"cranial volume about 1600 cc (owners’ birdseed measure); age at death 5 to 6 yr (Sweet) or 4.5 to 5 yr (Brown)","loc":"privately held by the Starchild Project owners (current holder not confirmed in opened sources)","acc":"n/a","find":"claimed found by an American girl in a cave near her village in Mexico, 60 to 70 years before 2006","flag":"genuine human remains (anomaly claim disputed)","src":[81,460,569],"tags":["Disputed","Astronomy"],"sum":"A child’s skull with an enlarged, flattened cranium was promoted by Lloyd Pye and Mark Bean as an alien human hybrid. A 2003 DNA report commissioned by the owners found a Native American mother (haplogroup C).","why":"The neurologist Steven Novella diagnoses untreated congenital hydrocephalus; the owners’ consultant Ted Robinson says hydrocephaly is ruled out. No peer reviewed study exists among opened sources.","nfacts":1,"nsrc":3,"yt":"Look up hydrocephalus and craniosynostosis cases.","rel":["W11A20"],"hook":"The lab hired by the alien hybrid camp found the child’s mother was Native American.","date":"radiocarbon 900 ± 40 years (owners’ report)"},"S":{"81":["Wikipedia Starchild skull","https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Starchild_skull&oldid=1289969037"],"460":["Wikipedia: Starchild skull","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starchild_skull"],"569":["Starchild Project background page (claimant's own figures; archived)","https://web.archive.org/web/20080118090039/http://www.starchildproject.com/BackgroundTT.html"]},"rec":{"id":"W11A12","alias":[],"ms":[{"a":"cranial_volume","v":"1600","u":"cc","unc":"approx","by":"Pye team","yr":"","m":"","b":"S","t":"MEASUREMENT","id":"W11M029","s":["W11S14"],"c":"Wikipedia Starchild skull","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Starchild_skull&oldid=1289969037"}],"lab":[{"k":"Lab test","mat":"Sex chromosomes","v":"X and Y present (human male)","m":"PCR","by":"BOLD Vancouver 1999","b":"S","s":["W11S14"],"url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Starchild_skull&oldid=1289969037"},{"k":"Lab test","mat":"mtDNA","v":"human mtDNA recovered","m":"sequencing","by":"Trace Genetics 2003","b":"S","s":["W11S14"],"url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Starchild_skull&oldid=1289969037"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"museum_accession","r":"not in staged/legacy artifact record (free sources)"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA165","a":"Human-alien hybrid","who":"Lloyd Pye (from 1999)","main":"BOLD 1999 found X and Y chromosomes (human male); 2003 Trace Genetics recovered human mtDNA","ms":"W11S14","st":"contradicted","n":"","nl":"1"}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"art":{"claimed_anomaly":"Human-alien hybrid","mainstream_reading":"BOLD 1999 found X and Y chromosomes (human male); 2003 Trace Genetics recovered human mtDNA","provenance_flag":"genuine human remains (anomaly claim disputed)","current_location":"Lloyd Pye estate (private)","find_circumstances":"claimed mine ~160 km SW of Chihuahua, ~1930","claimant":"Lloyd Pye (from 1999)","status":"contradicted","dimensions":"vol ~1,600 cc; child 4.5-5 yr","material":"bone","date":"","culture":"","museum_accession":"n/a","b":"S","s":["W11S14"]},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"W11S14","t":"Wikipedia Starchild skull","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Starchild_skull&oldid=1289969037"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Starchild skull","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starchild_skull"},{"id":"S2570","t":"Starchild Project background page (claimant's own figures; archived)","u":"https://web.archive.org/web/20080118090039/http://www.starchildproject.com/BackgroundTT.html"},{"id":"VW11A12-4","t":"The Starchild Project - The NESS","u":"https://theness.com/index.php/the-starchild-project/"}],"sum":"Before the Starchild skull was tested, its promoters said DNA would show it was alien, a hybrid, or \"the most bizarre human deformity since The Elephant Man\". The first lab found an X and a Y chromosome. Both parents were human.\n\nThe skull belonged to a child of about five. Its cranial volume is about 1,600 cc, its eye sockets are shallow, and the back of the head is flattened. Lloyd Pye said he obtained it in February 1999 from Ray and Melanie Young of El Paso, Texas, who said it had been found around 1930 in a mine tunnel about 100 miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico, alongside an ordinary human skeleton.\n\nPye presented it as the child of an alien father and a human mother. DNA probes run in 1999 by Dr David Sweet's forensic lab at the University of British Columbia found the X and Y chromosomes. A 2003 test by Trace Genetics found mitochondrial DNA of haplogroup C, which the neurologist Steven Novella describes as typical of a Native American woman: the mother was human.\n\nThe mainstream explanation is congenital hydrocephalus, fluid on the brain that swells and reshapes a child's skull, which accounts for the size and the shape. Pye kept the hybrid claim alive by pointing to genetic oddities he said needed more testing, and in Novella's reading retreated to an alien code no test could reach.\n\nThe skull itself has been examined. What has never been agreed is what result would have ended the dispute.","qs":["DNA tests found the Starchild was a human boy, yet the hybrid story still spreads. What makes some claims survive any evidence?","Pye named in advance what DNA would show. When a prediction fails, is moving the goalposts ever reasonable?","Would a full nuclear genome settle the question for believers, or would a new reason to doubt appear?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fc/BR_%26_Starchild_skull.jpg/1280px-BR_%26_Starchild_skull.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BR_%26_Starchild_skull.jpg","title":"BR & Starchild skull.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"BRad06","cap":"Researcher Benjamin Radford examines a replica of the \"Starchild Skull,\" claimed to be an alien/human hybrid, at the Roswell UFO festival."}],"article":{"id":"W11A12","mode":"rewrite-plus-quick-research","research":"quick","title":"The Starchild skull: a child’s skull with an alien reputation","dek":"A strangely shaped child’s skull from Mexico was promoted as the remains of an alien human hybrid. Its own DNA report found a Native American mother, and a neurologist sees an untreated childhood illness.","byline":"The Nommo","updated":"1 Nov 2026","sections":[{"h":"The strangest true fact","p":["The laboratory hired by the people who called this skull an alien hybrid found that its mother was a Native American woman [1].","Its owners took that as support, reasoning that a hybrid would have a human mother anyway, as the neurologist Steven Novella quotes them [3]."]},{"h":"What it is and why it matters","p":["The Starchild skull is the upper part of a child’s skull with an enlarged, rounded, flattened back, shallow eye sockets and no brow ridges [2].","It came to public attention through Lloyd Pye and Mark Bean, whose Starchild Project predicted that DNA would show it was a pure alien, an alien human hybrid or an extreme human deformity [3].","The case matters because it is one of the few alien claims built around a real object that could be tested, and it was tested [1] [3].","That makes it a useful lesson in what happens when the tests come back."]},{"h":"Key facts and measurements","p":["According to the owners’ medical consultant Ted Robinson, two radiologists measured the cranial cavity by filling a plastic bag inside it with birdseed and got about 1600 cc [2].","Robinson compares that with a typical adult figure of 1400 cc, although he notes the skull’s outside size compares with a small adult or a child of about 12 [2].","He reports that the bone is a little under half the normal thickness and roughly half the normal weight [2].","The age at death is disputed between the owners’ own experts: the odontologist David Sweet put it at 5 to 6 years, while a dentist, Matthew Brown, put it at 4.5 to 5 years from unerupted teeth [2].","The Project also reports that the bone was unusually hard to cut and failed to dissolve in the standard bone solvent after ten weeks, then dissolved overnight once a detergent was added [2].","Radiocarbon dating gave an age of 900 years, plus or minus 40, according to the Starchild Project’s notes [2]."]},{"h":"How it was found","p":["The story, as Novella sets it out, is that an American girl living in Mexico found the bones of an adult and a malformed child in a cave near her village 60 or 70 years before 2006 [3].","She is said to have kept both skulls for life, passing them on shortly before her death to a man who later handed them to an American couple [3].","Robinson himself writes that the skull’s provenance “is not verified at present” [2].","The adult skull found with it was tested too, and Trace Genetics found it belonged to a woman with Native American haplogroup A [1]."]},{"h":"The strongest alternative case","p":["Robinson, a plastic surgeon who held the skull for most of a year, wrote that its shape was unique in his forty years of practice and in the literature he searched [2].","He reports that radiologists found no erosion of the inner skull and no widened sutures, and he concluded that hydrocephaly could “safely be ruled out” [2].","He also judged that the flattened back was natural growth, not head binding, because the bone surface showed no sign of shaping [2].","On DNA, the Starchild Project proposed that a hybrid might carry complete human DNA alongside an undetectable alien code, as Novella quotes it [3]."]},{"h":"The mainstream case","p":["Trace Genetics recovered the skull’s mitochondrial DNA, passed down from mothers, in two separate extractions and typed it as Native American haplogroup C [1].","Because the child and the adult had different maternal lines, the lab concluded they could not be mother and child [1].","It could not reliably recover nuclear DNA from the skull and suggested that low copy numbers or damage from earlier X rays might be to blame [1].","Novella reports that an earlier test by David Sweet at the University of British Columbia found both an X and a Y chromosome, which would make the child a human boy with two human parents [3].","Novella’s own diagnosis is untreated congenital hydrocephalus, in which trapped fluid pushes outward on an unfused child’s skull, keeping all the normal bones but distorting them [3].","The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke describes hydrocephalus as an abnormal buildup of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain, which in infants can cause a rapid increase in head size [4].","It adds that without treatment the condition can cause brain damage or death, which fits a child who did not live past early childhood [4]."]},{"h":"What’s unexplained","p":["The sex of the child is not settled across the sources, because Novella’s X and Y result sits against the 2003 lab’s failure to reproduce any sex gene result from the skull [1] [3].","Robinson’s reported absence of inner table erosion is the main point the owners’ side raises against hydrocephalus, and Novella’s essay does not address that detail directly [2] [3].","The exact diagnosis remains an open question [1] [2] [3]."]},{"h":"Related places","p":["For another skull caught between medicine and myth, see the elongated skulls of Paracas in Peru."]},{"h":"A thought to leave with","p":["About nine centuries ago, by its owners’ own dating, a small child with a swollen head died, and its bones were later found beside those of a woman [2] [3].","The most human story the skull can tell is about that child, and it never needed a spaceship."]}],"sources":[{"n":1,"text":"Trace Genetics, “Report on the DNA analysis from skeletal remains from two skulls”, 12 August 2003, as reproduced from the Starchild Project on Biblioteca Pleyades (laboratory report commissioned by the owners; proponent hosted)","url":"https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_starchild_5.htm"},{"n":2,"text":"Robinson, Ted, “Preliminary analysis of a highly unusual human-like skull”, with a dental note by Matthew Brown dated 27 October 2004, together with the Starchild Project’s own notes, as reproduced on the same page (commissioned by the owners; proponent)","url":"https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_starchild_5.htm"},{"n":3,"text":"Novella, Steven, “The Starchild Project”, New England Skeptical Society, February 2006 (neurologist’s essay, not peer reviewed; secondary)","url":"https://theness.com/the-starchild-project/"},{"n":4,"text":"National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, “Hydrocephalus”, health information page, National Institutes of Health","url":"https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/disorders/hydrocephalus"}],"source_note":"All measurements come from reports commissioned by the skull’s owners and are labelled as such: a cranial volume of 1600 cc (measured with birdseed), radiocarbon age of 900 plus or minus 40 years, and age at death of 5 to 6 years per the odontologist David Sweet or 4.5 to 5 years per the dentist Matthew Brown, shown side by side. The DNA sex result conflicts between sources and both are shown: Novella reports that an earlier test at the University of British Columbia found both X and Y chromosomes, while the 2003 Trace Genetics report could not reproducibly amplify the sex gene from the skull and treated its one result as contamination. The old card’s find site of about 160 km southwest of Chihuahua around 1930 and its “Lloyd Pye estate” location were not found in any opened source and are replaced with what Novella reports: a cave in Mexico, 60 to 70 years before 2006.","related":["W11A20"]}},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"vol ~1","h":"Recorded dimensions: vol ~1,600 cc; child 4.5-5 yr","s":[191]},{"v":"Bone","h":"Made of","s":[191]},{"v":"Lloyd Pye estate","h":"Held at: Lloyd Pye estate (private)","s":[191]}],"hs":{"191":["Wikipedia Starchild skull","https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Starchild_skull&oldid=1289969037"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/W11A12.webp","w":1280,"h":960,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fc/BR_%26_Starchild_skull.jpg/1280px-BR_%26_Starchild_skull.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}