What People Get Wrong This Week: Clara and Mauricio

The public has had more than a week to come to their senses, but people are still wrong about Clara and Mauricio, the supposed aliens that ufologist Jaime Maussan recently shared with the world. Posts defending the apparent fraud are trending at the top of the UFO subreddits , and some media sources continue to breathlessly report details of the “investigation” as if it were real , or frame it as ” two sides disagree ” instead of saying “oh my god, this is fake” or ignore it completely .

News of his appearance before the Mexican Congress was widely reported, but many journalists missed a key detail: the same thing—the same “aliens” promoted by the same dubious ufologist —happened in 2017 . And it also happened almost 200 years before: there were different characters and a different fake creature in the 1840s, but the storyline is so similar that it’s essentially a remake.

What are “aliens” really?

There hasn’t been enough scientific examination of the evidence to say with certainty that Clara and Mauricio are not aliens, but they are definitely not aliens. So what are they? In a physical sense, all evidence points to these being the mummified remains of ancient humans that have been rebuilt and combined with animal bones. In a more esoteric sense, the story of the origins of the figures and their influence on the popular imagination illustrates the proverb of P.T. Barnum’s “There’s a sucker born every minute,” as well as a step-by-step repetition of one of his most famous hoaxes.

The stuffed artificial aliens presented to the world are a particularly culturally insensitive example of “gaff taxidermy”—the creation of custom-made artificial creatures by combining the remains of real ones. This tradition dates back more than 200 years and has given us such bizarre creatures as the furry trout , jackalope and, most famously, Barnum’s Fiji mermaid.

“Fiji Mermaid” by P.T. Barnum

Fiji mermaids likely originated in Japan in the early 1800s. It is believed that Japanese fishermen sewed the lower body of the fish to the upper body of the monkey, covered the seams with papier-mâché or plaster of Paris, and sold their creations to gullible sailors from Europe and America. Some of the creations survive to this day—the mermaid shown above is housed at Harvard—but Barnum made one of these strange curiosities famous.

In 1822, a Japanese fisherman sold the figurine to American captain Samuel Barrett Edes, no doubt after assuring him that it was indeed a mermaid. Edes’ son sold it to Moses Kimball of the Boston Museum, and Kimball leased it to P. T. Barnum.

In 1842, taking his Fiji mermaid into his hands, Barnum set out to make money. Like Maussan and company, Barnum understood the importance of fake experts and the real press in spreading the hoax. When a real naturalist wouldn’t vouch for the mermaid’s authenticity, Barnum hired an assistant to bring the specimen to the newspaper office, boast about it, and say he’d caught it in South America (not Fiji, for some reason). The scheme worked. There were exciting headlines across the country, with some declaring that “scientific people’s” doubts about the mermaid had been “completely dispelled.”

The man who may have created an alien

The 2023 equivalent of Japanese fishermen might be the man in this YouTube video. Known as Ronceros, he reportedly purchased fake mummies from museums around 2017. Nobody was interested in this, so he changed the story to aliens. It is unknown whether Ronceros created the Peruvian aliens or simply inspired someone to make their own gaffs, but specimens very similar to the ones Ronceros was trying to sell ended up at the center of a crowdfunding project called ” The Alien Project: Strange Mummies of Peru ” in 2017. More than 1,000 suckers contributed nearly $41,000 so the mummies could be “scientifically analyzed.” This is where we were joined by Jaime Mussan, who promoted the story on his YouTube channel and on TV shows he hosted in Mexico.

Like Barnum, Jaime Maussan and his network of dubious UFO associates found dubious “experts” who could vouch for the alienness of the mummies to an eager media. Although no reputable source has reported that aliens are real, the press’s ” wait and see (and click) ” approach amounts to the same thing.

Refutation doesn’t matter if people want to believe

In both the Fiji Mermaid case and the Mexican alien case, real scientists (and anyone with two brain cells that can rub together) quickly and thoroughly debunked the scammers’ claims (spoiler alert: the 2017 “aliens” were human bones, slightly altered and combined with a llama skull and other animal bones , and all available evidence suggests that the 2023 aliens are something similar.) But it didn’t matter: people lapped it up anyway. Barnum made money from selling mermaid tickets, just as the group of con artists behind Mexican Aliens is sure to profit in the form of TV shows and book deals, personal appearances and other forms of entertainment for the dumb.

Catching the cultural wave

Sometimes it took several attempts, but the persistence of Barnum and the weirdo aliens allowed them both to catch the perfect cultural wave. Back in the 1800s, biologists were exploring new places, mapping remnants of wildlife, and regularly discovering new exotic species, so the idea of ​​a real mermaid must have been almost plausible. In 2023, astronomers discover potentially habitable planets and discover water on the Moon, while the US government has officially admitted that UFOs (technically UAPs) are real. The UAP fever is so strong that even a now-debunked taxidermy gaffe is enough to capture the public’s imagination.

“Aliens” is more than a hoax. It’s probably a crime

However, the two stories are not exactly the same. There’s a much darker aspect to the aliens than the sassy and mischievous Snow Barnum. The mermaid was just a fish and a monkey. The aliens are most likely the remains of pre-Columbian humans – people whose graves were robbed and bodies desecrated so a bunch of crooks could make some money. In fact, this may be a crime , but even if it is not, it is very bad. As the World Mummy Committee (a legitimate group of archaeologists) has stated: “The criminal use of corpses for petty purposes deeply violates human dignity. Thus, this organization’s exploitation of pre-Columbian mummies attacks and particularly insults Andean culture by implying that its achievements were the result of supposed “alien help.”

This post only scratches the surface of the strange stories of the Fiji mermaid and the Mexican aliens from Congress. A full account of the Barnum hoax can be found in Ian Bonderson’s book The Fiji Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History . For a deeper dive into the strange “aliens” story, read this excellent article by Vox’s Aja Romano .

If you want to create your own realistic looking Fiji mermaid to fool the world, here are the step-by-step instructions ; A monkey or fish skeleton is not needed.