In 1999, I went to Louisiana to work up a freelance piece on a presumed dead freak called “Starchild,” which its curator, Lloyd Pye, claimed to be the 900-year-old remains of a space alien recovered from a defunct mining tunnel in Mexico. Pye’s enthusiasm wasn’t terribly surprising, given how, just two years earlier, he’d published a nonfiction book called Everything You Know Is Wrong. It was inspired by Zecharia Sitchin’s controversial interpretation of ancient Sumerian texts in which ETs genetically tampered with Earthlings thousands of years ago.

My own concerns weren’t so wide angle. I kept a wary eye on Pye’s speedometer, trying to figure out how he might explain, in 30 seconds or less, the deformed skull in back should we get pulled over by traffic cops. The thing was believed to have been a 5- to 6-year-old child, missing its jaws, save for a small set of upper teeth, and its head was suspiciously bulbous. This was a long story, naturally, and I bailed shortly thereafter, when a Vancouver dental forensics lab announced it had recovered enough DNA to prove its parents were human.

Today, the Wikipedia entry declares “Experts believe it to be the skull of a child who died as a result of known genetic or congenital abnormalities, such as congenital hydrocephalus.” Among its key references is a New England Skeptics Society blog by Steven Novella, who accuses Pye of fallaciously applying selected facts to fit a hypothesis. Novella also writes this: “[Pye and an associate] claim that they have consulted with 50 experts (whom they will not disclose) yet not one of the experts was able to adequately explain the Starchild’s appearance on the basis of a natural deformity.”

This is where it gets interesting. There are experts listed on Pye’s website, by name, including a link to a 2004 analysis performed by one Dr. Ted Robinson. Robinson is a retired certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon who studied the skull, via X-rays and CT scans, for nearly a year in Canada. Robinson’s paper lists the names of medical professionals who also examined the skull: Dr. Fred Smith, Head of Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital, New Orleans; Dr. David Hodges, radiologist, Royal Columbian Hospital, New Westminster, B.C.; Dr. John Bachynsky, radiologist, New Westminster, B.C.; Dr. Ken Poskitt, pediatric neuroradiologist, Vancouver Children’s Hospital; Dr. Ian Jackson, formerly of Mayo Clinic, craniofacial plastic surgeon, Michigan; Dr. John McNicoll, craniofacial plastic surgeon, Seattle; Dr. Mike Kaburda, oral surgeon, New Westminster, B.C.; Dr. Tony Townsend, ophthalmologist, Vancouver; Dr. Hugh Parsons, ophthalmologist, Vancouver; and Dr David Sweet, forensic odontologist, Vancouver.

Prior to Robinson’s analysis, conventional wisdom held that the skull belonged to a deformed child whose head had been artificially reshaped by the ancient practice of cradleboarding. But Robinson noted “it is entirely safe to say that the extreme flattening of the skull was caused by its natural growth pattern and is not artificial.” Furthermore, the skull “was not hydrocephalic,” he added in a letter last December to a third-party query. “Hydrocephaly is a common deformity which is characterized by entirely different deformities from the anatomical characteristics seen in this skull.”

Robinson’s itemized weirdness ran 18 bullet points long. Among other things, the specimen showed no evidence of sinus cavities, its bone matter resembled tooth enamel, the size of its eye socket cavities “would require upper lids three or four times more extensive than normal upper lids,” and a scanning electron microscope indicated the presence of “strange fibers of an unknown nature” that “are not artefactual.” Furthermore, it was half the weight of an adult human skull, but its 1600cc cranial capacity was roughly 200cc larger than a comparably sized human skull.

Robinson declined to posit a theory as to what Starchild was all about. He would only submit this in the December letter: “In my 49 years of experience as a medical doctor and plastic surgeon, I have never seen anything like it.”

Pye had complained loudly that the Bureau of Legal Dentistry, the Canadian lab that announced Starchild had human parents in 1999, had jumped the gun because it hadn’t recovered sufficient genetic material. In 2003, using technology unavailable four years earlier, principle geneticists Ripan Mahli and Jason Eschleman at Trace Genetics in California were unable to duplicate the results. “The inability to analyze nuclear DNA,” they wrote, “indicates that such DNA is either not present or present in sufficiently low copy number to prevent PCR analysis using methods available at the present time.”

What you’ve just read is a dumbed-down version of the controversy, but the reason Pye rolled into downtown Sarasota on a rainycold afternoon last week was on account of a Tampa businessman who is establishing a foundation to support the research of an unnamed geneticist who wants to take the science to the next level. There’s a new state-of-the-art tool, the Illumina Genome Sequencer, that can recover Starchild’s entire genetic map and settle questions of its Earthly paternity once and for all. Price tag: $5 million, which also includes the production of a documentary charting the entire investigation.

“I think this is going to be the absolute upending of old paradigms,” said Pye, who argues that Starchild could be exhibit A for replacing Darwinism with a case for alien intervention. “How much is this going to be worth to history? It’d be like filming the Wright Brothers from 1900 to 1903.”

But one of the great impediments to investment, Pye says, is the all-too-often source of record, Wikipedia, and specifically, its incomplete NESS reference. De Void isn’t well-versed enough in genetics to take a stand one way or the other (as if anyone cares what De Void thinks). But this is clear: A fuller picture of the mind-numbingly complex Starchild saga requires more sourcing than what appears in Wikipedia.