What are the Tridactyls?
A warning, before you really dive into this one. If you find medical scans of seemingly humanoid corpses disturbing, don’t venture too far in.
In January of 2024, a discovery at a Peruvian airport sent waves of excitement (albeit, mostly among alien enthusiasts) across the world. A pair of small, humanoid bodies were discovered in a package shipped via DHL under mysterious circumstances. Allegedly, nobody can quite pin down how they were removed from their original home of Mexico, who shipped them, or for what purpose they were being transported. The general consensus among the scientific community is that these “bodies” are in no way real. More than likely, they’re dolls of sorts crafted from a mix of human and animal remains. Photos of the mummies soon went viral — you’ve surely seen them somewhere on the internet.
Yeah, I’m talking about these guys from TikTok. Big fans of The Smiths, these aliens.
I’m fairly certain I’ve seen, prior to their discovery by the world at large, either these “mummies” or some created in a similar manner (mummies that had the same general look to them, I mean) around fifteen or twenty years ago. This could easily be a manufactured memory, but I really think they’ve been paraded around a few times over the years. Nevertheless, apparent EBE (that’s extraterrestrial biological entity if you didn’t watch The X-Files) expert Jaime Maussan claimed at the time that these mummies were estimated to be somewhere around one thousand years old (1) and originated from a cave in the vicinity of the Nazca lines. Maussan claimed, upon their introduction to the world, that there were other mummies discovered in that same cave.
Those other mummies are what this blog post is about.
Since those other mummies were discovered and documented, I’ve wondered A LOT about how seriously I should take them. Maybe this thought is one more fitted to being included in the bit at the end where I try to sum everything up and leave you with something to think about, but I can’t help but wonder if the mummies pictured above weren’t introduced to make the latter mummies seem less reputable. As anyone who’s followed the whole UFO and alien thing through the years knows, the US government (along with the media machine) has worked wonders to ruin the reputation of anyone who seriously spoke about the phenomenon. Although the government has seemingly stopped following that playbook so closely, I can’t help but wonder about the timing of it all.
I’m not someone with a conspiratorial mind, I don’t like to believe in cover-ups, and I tend to believe that the simplest solution is often the most accurate. In this case however… I don’t know, it just feels off.
Anyways, let’s get to those other mummies. If you aren’t already familiar with them, these are the tridactyls:
Top row: Antonio, Jois, Maria, Paloma
Bottom row: Montserrat, Santiago, Sebastian
There’s a few more than the ones above, those are just the best documented.
First off, what do you think of them? What are you immediate reactions to seeing these photos? What do you notice? What do you see that’s strange? What looks familiar?
The first thing that’s strange to me is the number of digits they have on each hand and foot (not to mention the strange placement and arrangement of these digits). This is what most people introduced to the mummies notice first and, thus, this is where they get their name. Tridactyl: having three toes or fingers.
For a better look at them, check out this in depth examination of Sebastian.
After watching this for the first time, I found myself fairly impressed. Either these were made by some immensely talented artist (or, more likely, team of artists) or this was at some point a living creature. Although I’m, admittedly, not an expert at sniffing out fake mummified remains, it’s easy to believe that these mummies represent actual, deceased entities. Unlike the mummies presented at the start of the post, these don’t appear disjointed or pasted together.
Beyond that, the mummies have other elements that make them seem more believable — more real. Santiago is a child. Jois has preserved reproductive organs (and a visible anus). Many of them have visible teeth and preserved partial fingerprints. They feature elongated heads with a larger cranial capacity than that of a human.
Something common across most of the tridactyls is the presence of an implant. Sebastian’s, as seen above, is a metal strip across the back of his neck. Montserrat is covered in nine or ten golden, metallic discs. Paloma has a piece of copper in her chin.
The first of these mummies were discovered in the year 2015. A group of “treasure hunters” (read graverobbers) discovered a cave on the southern coast of Peru, just north of the Nazca lines. The first mummies were found amidst preserved artifacts. Small specimens (and a handful of severed body parts) were smuggled out and eventually found their way to a group called Instituto Inkarri. The group has renamed itself at least three times over the years. Their founder and leader, a man named Thierry Jamin, seems to like to present himself as somewhat of an Erich Von Daniken type character (2).
It’s hard to say if the group is reputable. There’s something about alien-hunters actually finding aliens that just seems somewhat suspect to me. But hey, then again, I claim to have evidence of something beyond what we consider the norm. How am I any different? Don’t I claim to be trustworthy?
Anyways, the institute ended up with some of the remains and, after a successful fundraising attempt, began a series of excavations resulting in the discovery of a handful of complete specimens, fossilized eggs of unknown types, various metallic objects, and a large array of “artifacts”. What exactly these artifacts and metallic objects are, the institute never specifies. There appears to be no documentation of anything recovered from the Nazca cave beyond the mummies themselves. I understand the focus on the mummies, but it’s definitely disappointing.
Hosted on Gaia (a North American new age television network), the institute led a press conference officially announcing the discovery of these mummies to the world at large in 2017. They claimed three things:
The mummies are comprised of biological material
The mummies are old (3)
No evidence of flagrant fraud had been discovered
Since then, the institute has had issues keeping reputable researchers attracted and attached to the project. It’s easy to say that it has to do with these scientists not wanting to tarnish their reputations. To a degree, I think that does have something to do with it. I also wonder if their inability to maintain this excitement over the project isn’t due to something that they aren’t publicizing.
This is a group of alien enthusiasts. It’s hard enough to take them seriously when they announce that they’ve discovered proof of extraterrestrial (or nonhuman terrestrial) life — factor in that their every other breath is spent declaring the existence of lost cities of gold (this is the other focus of the institute) and it makes it that much harder to believe them. In academia, a field built entirely on reputation, it’s not surprising that they can’t attract bigger names and more money.
What studies have been completed on the mummies say nothing beyond the apparent age of the metals that make up the implants in the creatures. At least one study noted that the manner in which some of the implants seemed to be created did seem to match with the style of manufacture used by pre-columbian civilizations, but this doesn’t prove the institutes lofty claims. The website for the institute seems to make a point to only include reports that attempt to analyze these metals. Despite claiming that the bodies themselves have been carbon-dated (or in some way or another verified as nonhuman due to age or composition), these reports are withheld from their database.
I hate to say it, but this is where research on the mummies has ended. The institute has lobbied for their acceptance by the Peruvian government as being culturally significant enough to warrant continued (and expanded) study, but all attempts to date seem to have failed. Any attempts at garnering some type of increased focus on the mummies inevitably ends up including the doll mummies from the top of the page. Again, if there’s any truth to the story behind the tridactyl mummies, this inclusion seems to be intended to discredit them. The institute, for reasons unknown, has never attempted to separate the two types of mummies. They seem convinced that both types are, for all intent and purpose, the real deal. At the least, even if the doll mummies aren’t part of some attempt to discredit the institute or other proponents of the tridactyls, the institute is discrediting itself in its blind acceptance of these mummies as proof positive for their claim.
This post wouldn’t be complete without my true thoughts on the mummies. I’ve believed, since first reading about their discovery, that they are at least mostly human. Take, for example, their strangely shaped hands and feet. I can’t help but wonder if they appear so strange and distended due to some process related to mummification. Perhaps, even, those who prepared the bodies after death altered them to prepare them for some afterlife. Perhaps they were altered to resemble their gods, or to appear fearsome and monstrous. Their apparently extended skulls are also not an uncommon ancient body modification. The presence of implants could prove only that ancient peoples (as we always are reminded) weren’t somehow lesser than us simply because they existed long ago. The lack of external ear and nasal structure shouldn’t be taken as proof that they aren’t human, either. Soft tissues, after all, are always the first to go during decomposition.
No, I think these are people. I think they’ve been altered—altered by time, the process of mummification, perhaps the requirements of their religion and afterlife, and altered by graverobbers.
They’re real mummies alright, they just might not be aliens.
Stay weird!
-Scott
(1) I wonder, in his usage of that phrase “one thousand years old”, if this isn’t something like “A long, long time ago”, you know? I think it might be more akin to how some cultures use one thousand years ago to mean “so long ago that nobody really knows how old it is, but it’s really REALLY old”. I really doubt that these mummies are actually confirmed to be that old.
(2) Erich Von Daniken is the author of a book called “Chariots of the Gods”. In this surprisingly racist text, Von Daniken claims that most ancient sites and structures could in no way have been built by ancient peoples. Instead, he proposes that they must have been the project of a race of ancient aliens that had maintained contact with most of the important civilizations of the distant past. Von Daniken is just about singlehandedly responsible for that show on History Channel. Although I do like the idea that aliens have been visiting humanity throughout our history, the idea that earlier peoples must have been inherently less intelligent (and less capable) of building grand or complex structures is incredibly flawed.
(3) No duh