Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Atacama Skeleton

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

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.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, Harry Potter fans. Huge news. Harry Potter, the full cast audio editions, are all being released on Audible, on a monthly basis, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

is already out. You have never experienced the wizarding world like this before. They've taken it to another level. The cast is perfect. Hugh Lorry is Dumbledore, Matthew McFaddy and is Baltimore, Riz Ahmed is Snape,

and Cush Jumbo as the narrator. And there are too many others to name. There's even a brand new musical score, and the sound design, you'll feel like you're right there. Footsteps echoing down the halls of Hogwarts, a golden snitch flying past your ear. The Hogwarts Express rumbling out of platform 9 and 3 quarters, and it's all in Dolby Atmos, which makes the wizardry even more magical. Plus, these are the unabridged versions, even more awesomeness. As I mentioned, the first book is out, and the next installments in the series will be released

every month until all seven are out. go to audible.ca slash HP1 and start listening now. And she said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas plains, teens are dying, suicides that don't make sense, strange accidents, and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened.

Listen to Paper Ghosts, the Texas Teen Murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. This is Short Stuff, which is off to a bad start already. That's right, and this is the story of the saddest skeleton. 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. It's known as the Atacama skeleton, and it was found in the desert of northern Chile, Atacama Desert, in an abandoned town called La Norea back in 2003. That's right. It's little, very small, about six inches in length or 15 centimeters, and it has a very interesting.

shape to the skull, very conically shaped, and also has only 10 pairs of ribs, wherein we usually have 12 pairs. And so, of course, right away, there were UFO people saying, it's an alien. It's got to be a tiny little alien. There's no other explanation. Yeah. Look at that thing. Other people said, hey, not so fast.

It looks more like a non-human primate, maybe a shapeshifter. We don't know 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. 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. It's between the Chilean coastal mountain range and the Andes, and the town of Lenoria, which is situated in the desert, was once a mining town, a nitrate mining town. I think salt Peter, actually. Yeah, that's right. God, you love saying salt Peter. Yeah. Why are you going to say anything else when you can say salt Peter? Agreed. It uses a fertilizer a lot. So they abandoned the town in 1930s, 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 Chinchoro culture there had a

tradition of 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. 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 just, it's like just a perfect place to make a mummy. And so in 2003, the world first heard of the Atacama skeleton, thanks to a guy named Oscar Munoz, who's a treasure hunter, who said that he went to Lenoria and found just sitting, on a shelf in one of the buildings that had a comma skeleton. And most other people say,

oh, we don't think that you just found this thing on a shelf. Yeah, 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 Osorio. He was a Spanish business owner 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. Right. And so euphologists 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 euphologist. I think he must have come up in our area 51 episode, because I recognize his name. But he is very outspoken about trying to get the U.S.

government to disclose all of the information they surely have on aliens, their awareness of aliens, what really crashed in Roswell, all of that stuff. And when Greer found out that Navia Osorio had the Atacama skeleton, he was like, we have to figure out what? this thing is, can I take a tissue sample? That's right. And that feels like a great place for a break. What a cliffhanger. Yeah. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. out. You have never experienced the wizarding world like this before. They've taken it to another

level. The cast is perfect. Hugh Lorry is Dumbledore, Matthew McFaddy and is Baltimore, Riz Ahmed as Snape, and Cush Jumbo as the narrator. And there are too many others to name. There's even a brand new musical score. And the sound design, you'll feel like you're right there. Footsteps echoing down the halls of Hogwarts, a golden snitch flying past your ear. The Hogwarts Express rumbling out of platform nine and three quarters. And it's all in Dolby Atmos, which makes the wizard's even more magical. Plus, these are the unabridged versions, even more awesomeness. As I mentioned, the first book is out,

and the next installments in the series will be released every month until all seven are out. Go to audible.ca slash HP1 and start listening now. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons? Wait, stop?

What? Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow.

Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcasts we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes.

Listen to season four of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So Stephen Greer has gotten in touch with Navaria Osorio and said, hey, I got a plan here. Let's get this, extract some DNA, have it examine for this documentary called Sirius, S-I-R-I-U-S. It's inspired out of one of my books. We can figure out what this thing is, like, you know, hopefully full bore and we can know for sure. Yeah, and I guess the Sirius 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. 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 2018 in the journal Genome Research. And what they found is, you know, the second and probably most sad thing is that it was probably a little baby girl who died in the womb. Yeah, that 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 otocomackeletalus, and 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 the really like disproportionate number of genetic mutations 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. Yeah, and also seemed like it was pretty sure that it's a preterm birth.

She's very well preserved, so they're pretty sure that she's under 500 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, 30 or 40 years. And if that's true, then her parents might potentially still be around. And we have this situation where there could be parents. And 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. 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, if she died within, say, 40 years, that would put her in the 80s, the 70s. And the town where she was found, allegedly, Lenoria, was abandoned in the 30s. 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. Right.

Yeah. Well, it was such a sort of outrage after they found this out when that paper was published in 2018, the 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, first of all, under Chilean law, it's illegal to carry out archaeological, anthropological, or paleontological excavations without getting authorization from the Council of National Monuments, which wasn't done. That's a big one. They're also like, by the way, give us our remains back. That'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 essentially understood. They're like, you know, you're right. This whole jam is quite unethical. At least in our defense, 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 this baby's remains should be

repatriated back to Chile. So I don't, I don't know if they got all the heat off of them, but at the very least they were willing to acknowledge the ethical lapse on their part for sure. Yeah, I think that was a fairly stand-up thing to do. But the body is not back to. in Chile. It's still in the possession of Ramon Navia Osorio in Spain. Oh, really? 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? Just a...

That was a scoff if I ever heard one. Yeah. All right. Love you, Chuck. Short steps out. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. She said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the Central Texas Plains, teens are dying.

Suicides that don't make sense. Strange accidents and brutal. murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of breaking bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to paper ghosts, the Texas teen murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.