The Terrible Two's

  By: Lloyd Pye


 
  THE FIRST SIX MONTHS

 In late February of 1999, I was first shown the Starchild skull by its owners. Nameless then, it was a highly anomalous skull I initially felt would prove to be a rare genetic deformity of some kind. At that point I knew enough about deformity in general to seriously doubt the cause could be congenital (an always unique result of a sperm-egg misconnect, radiation or chemical exposure, etc.), because those tended to be misshapen at best and ugly at worst. This skull’s symmetry was astonishing, even more so than the average human. In fact, all of its bones—most of which had human counterparts—were beautifully shaped. But shaped like what? Answering that was my challenge.
 I began by assuring the owners that the process should require three or four months. That seemed like plenty of time to rally the alternative knowledge community around this incredible relic, collect the money needed to test it scientifically, and obtain a conclusive origin for potentially the greatest find in the history of the world. How could I miss? It seemed like a kill shot. So I turned my life on a dime and ceased promoting my book, “Everything You Know Is Wrong,” in favor of promoting the Starchild.

One arrogant assumption and one major mistake, right off the bat. But at the time, I didn’t know that. I proceeded under the assumption that I would somehow find my way past whatever roadblocks and/or detours I would encounter. Stumbling blindly from one misperception to another, I comforted myself with the knowledge I was doing something no one had ever attempted before, and there was no manual to tell me how to proceed. By the sixth month, self-delusion no longer worked. The Peter Principle had me firmly in its grip. I had reached my level of incompetence. Nothing was how I thought it would be.

First, I had little success rallying the alternative knowledge community to support our cause. I traveled all around the country and spoke in person to about 3,000 people. In controlled circumstances I let most of them hold and photograph the Starchild, because I felt that letting them establish a visceral connection to it would help convince them of its validity. I can only assume it did that much, but the overarching goal was not achieved. Few of them acted on our need for operating capital, and I still don’t understand why.

Apart from in-person connections, I took my case to Art Bell, Jeff Rense, Laura Lee, and dozens of other radio shows, multiple times. I spoke to as many as 20 million people during that time, if not more. That is a tremendous amount of potential support, yet little came our way. We did receive some, to be sure. But we never got the kind of response we needed to finance the most expensive of the DNA tests we required. We were able to pay for several peripheral tests, all of which were informative, but the big one—diagnostic DNA—has stayed well out of our reach. More about that later.

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

What we have to conclude from those results is that I was doing a bad job. I was doing the best I knew how to do, but everyone has to be judged by results, and my results sucked. So by the end of six months I was looking for a graceful way out. Not only was I failing at the job I had undertaken, I was beginning to sink financially. The momentum I had generated for EYKIW was starting to fade. I was working myself into a serious bind.

During those first six months, and during the next three, I kept taking the skull to so-called “experts” in various aspects of physical anatomy. A wide variety of doctors—pathologists, radiologists, dentists, ophthalmologists, chiropractors, anthropologists—all examined it with varying degrees of thoroughness. Some would glance at it perfunctorily and hand it back. Some would sit and study it for five or ten minutes, or more. A few would not hold it in their hands. But nearly all of them, in one way or another, assured me it was the product of some kind of human deformity, whether genetic or congenital.

Their most frequent diagnosis was that it was a cradle-boarded hydrocephalic (water on the brain), which I accepted at face value. But there was enough variation on that theme to make me doubt if they really knew what they were talking about. I decided to verify their conclusions at two medical libraries in New Orleans, where I live. Lo and behold, I discovered cradle boarding (binding an infant’s head to a carrying board so its mother can work with her hands free) had nothing to do with the Starchild’s condition. Cradle boarding produces a smooth surface on the bone at the rear of the head, while the Starchild’s had unmistakable convolutions. Furthermore, the uniformly upward pressure caused by hydrocephaly would not have allowed the downward contour at the top of the crown where the two expanded parietal bones met. In short, the experts were wrong.

I delved further into the medical data and discovered that no known defect of birth or genetics corresponded with the Starchild’s physiology. Armed with that knowledge, I began to contradict the experts when they would conduct their examination and give me their assessment. I would point out how their assessment—whatever it was—could not possibly be true. They might take one or two more stabs at other interpretations, all of which I could counter, and I would soon be shown the door. All but a handful of the experts I consulted were indifferent, negative, or highly negative to the idea that the Starchild might be something other than a human deformity of some kind.

DIRTY DIAPERS

Two of the questions I’m routinely asked are these: “Isn’t Science supposed to seek answers to mysteries like the Starchild? Shouldn’t they be standing in line to try to find out what it is, especially since it could be the absolute greatest discovery in history?” The answer to both questions would seem to be “yes.” However, my experience with the Starchild provides a resounding “no,” at least to this point in the process. But why? Why are the experts so reluctant to grant even the possibility of such a thing? This is a blank that can be filled by a myriad of conjectures.
My personal take on it, based on my eye-to-eye, face-to-face encounters with over fifty of them, is that it comes down to a lack of courage. I know that is a harsh judgment, but I can’t assign any other term to it. They know how potentially valuable and important it is. An idiot can see that at first glance. But they have positions to maintain, mortgages to meet, children to put through college, and they all work in fields where peer pressure makes the peer pressure of junior high school seem like a gush of helium.

They are afraid of the Starchild, afraid of what it could do to their careers if they supported it in any way and then it proved to be a deformity. Many, if not most, would probably love to be on the team that established it as alien or partially alien; but if they got behind it and it proved to be totally human, their careers would never recover. They would be a laughingstock among their peers, and everything they had ever worked for would be for naught. That’s why I don’t really blame them, or make more of an issue of it. I acknowledge the tight box of conformity they have to live in, and I pity their inability to break out of it. But I do want to stress that this does not hold true for all of them. The handful I mentioned a moment ago have been helpful to varying degrees, especially Dr. Ted Robinson, a cranio-facial plastic surgeon from Vancouver, British Colombia.

TEETHING PAINS

I met Ted in the ninth month that I had the Starchild. I knew he was interested in it because a Canadian researcher friend of mine, Chad Deetken, had told him to visit our website (www.starchildproject.com) and take a look. Ted told Chad he had never seen anything like those photos, but he needed to examine the skull in person before he could be sure it was not, in fact, some kind of bizarre human deformity. So I took it to him for a formal evaluation. Among all of the experts I had consulted, only Ted said, “I will study this problem in detail and get back to you about it.”
He did what I did, which was consult the broad expanse of data in his chosen field of medical expertise. However, he could do it as a certified expert used to working with cranial and facial deformity on a regular basis. It was his job! So when he contacted me to tell me he had completed his search of the literature and found nothing to support the idea that the Starchild could be a deformed human, we had cleared a towering hurdle.

Once I understood the depth of Ted’s enthusiasm, I asked him to relieve me of the responsibility of heading the Starchild Project. He agreed, feeling sure that his standing in the Vancouver medical community would give him access to their establishment in a way I could not hope to duplicate here in the States. So the transfer of the Starchild and power over its day-to-day handling was made in February of 2000, one year after I had acquired it. Ted and Chad would work together to accomplish all of the things I had been unable to do on my own. Everything seemed in place. Then reality set in.

Ted found his colleagues were no easier to persuade than strangers had been for me. They were polite, even cordial (though, of course, some were not), but none of them got as excited as Ted. He stood alone. He stands alone to this day. I’m afraid to ask him what effect his involvement has had on his private practice in Vancouver. I’m afraid to ask what it has done to his relationships among his peers. I don’t really want to know.

What I do know is that Ted and Chad have made little more progress in their time with the Starchild than I did in my year with it. It exemplifies the term “a hard sell.” We are caught in a redundant kind of Catch-22, in that the people we have to convince to get behind it are the very people in our society who are most vigorously trained to deny its possibility as an alien, or partially alien, relic. But we are not without hope…not at all.

WALKING AND TALKING

 The good news is that despite overwhelming resistance from the scientific professionals who should be most interested in rigorously testing the Starchild skull, we have managed by hook and by crook to find out a great deal about it. Nothing we have turned up in two years of hard looking has done anything but support the early indication that it might well be something other than human. That is a highly significant statement.

Apart from what can be seen in photographs, Carbon 14 testing indicates that the Starchild died approximately 900 years ago. We have been unable to reliably establish its age at death, so until proven otherwise we will continue to assume it was a child of about six (based on three secondary teeth found in the upper part of a piece of maxilla). From a physical standpoint, a CAT scan has proved that all of its cranial sutures were perfectly normal, which rules out any of the myriad kinds of suture-related deformities. The same CAT scan showed that its inner ears are noticeably larger than normal. It has no frontal sinuses, not even vestigial ones, which is highly unusual—if not improbable—by age six. Its chewing muscles were roughly 1/3 the size of normal, meaning the lower part of its face (its mandible, which is missing) would be greatly reduced from normal. The piece of its maxilla (upper jaw) we have does indicate that a small maxillary sinus was present.

The rear of the head and neck are astonishingly realigned and reshaped, as is the inner surface of the totally flattened occipital bone (the triangular covering of the rear of the head). There is no inion (the bump at the lower rear of normal skulls—feel your own). Instead, that area is noticeably concave. Rather than attaching to the inion, where they belong, the neck muscles attach a full inch lower, only one centimeter from the foramen magnum, where the spine enters the skull. This means its neck, like its chewing muscles, was about 1/3 the size of normal, and it was centered directly under the mass of the head rather than an inch or so to the rear, as is normal. Inside the occipital bone, pronounced ridges that support a human’s cerebellum are greatly reduced. Not wholly eliminated, but reduced enough to make brain experts wonder what kind of cerebellum it might have had.

The brain itself was a marvel. The Starchild skull is the size of a normal twelve-year-old. A twelve-year-old’s brain is in the range of 1200 cubic centimeters. A normal adult brain is 1400 cubic centimeters. The Starchild skull holds 1600 cubic centimeters, meaning it held wall-to-wall brain. So how did so much more brain get crammed into a skull the size of a typical twelve-year-old? Good question.

First, the great expansion of the parietal bones, the two swellings with the dip in the middle at the top rear of the crown. Second, no frontal sinuses to take up extra space. Third, the eye sockets. If those incredibly shallow, fantastically symmetrical sockets could support human-like eyeballs, those eyes would have been centered in the middle of the nose (where our cheeks are) rather than at the top of the nose, as is normal. And what could cause so much brain to be required? One suggestion is that with such a thin neck, perhaps speaking as we know it would be impossible. In its place, perhaps, might be a form of telepathy, which might well require greatly increased cerebral firepower.

BABY IS A BRAND NEW BAG

Perhaps the most compelling test result to date, one owed directly to the efforts of Chad Deetken and Dr. Ted Robinson, is the degree of variance from the human norm of the Starchild’s bone density. In my view, this is the most convincing piece of evidence that the Starchild was not entirely human. We knew from the beginning that the skull weighed half as much as a comparably sized human skull, but we now know that the density of its bone is only 40% of normal! 40%! Let that soak in for a moment.

If the Starchild was any kind of “normal” human deformity (if you’ll pardon the oxymoron), we could fully expect that whatever bone remained to be analyzed—however bizarrely misshapen it might be—would be fundamentally human. That stands to reason. Yet the Starchild is uniformly 40% of normal density, which is so far outside the range of acceptable variance as to be something else entirely. 90%…even 80% of normal might be tolerable, but 40% is simply too far off the mark to be reasonably considered still in the ballpark of humanity as we know it. In other words, it represents something else.

As of now, we have one major hurdle left to clear. We had a forensic DNA test run (which, by the way, was paid for when the Starchild’s owners got a second mortgage on their home), which proved conclusively that the Starchild was a male. It also revealed that the skull was buried in acidic soil that severely degraded its DNA. Luckily, enough remained to permit recovery of at least its X and Y-chromosomes. For as little as that is, relative to the full chromosomal compliment, it is enough to obtain a conclusive answer.

What we need now is $20,000 to pay for the diagnostic DNA test mentioned earlier. That will take the recovered X and Y chromosomes and break them into their component strings of base pairs, to compare them with similar strings of base pairs in normal humans. If everything lines up as it should, then the Starchild is entirely human. Period. If they don’t line up equally, then it is something other than human. Period.
Will that prove it is an alien from Zeta Reticuli? No. Will that prove it is a hybrid between some kind of “gray” alien and a human (which I am currently betting on)? No. Will it create one of the most raging controversies the scientific world has ever seen?
I think it just might.