The series’ success is also of concern. Since the series’ launch in June by Gaia.com—a website specializing in “conscious media, yoga, and more”—the teaser episode of Unearthing Nazca has been viewed 2.35 million times on YouTube alone. It starts with what at first seems to be a typical seated Peruvian mummy, arms wrapped around its knees, like a child waiting for its parent. Its head is elongated like those of other pre-Columbian mummies, whose societies artificially shaped their children’s crania to achieve ideals of beauty or represent group belonging.

The resemblance ends there. A Hans Zimmer-esque score throbs, and a Russian-accented expert in “bioelectrography”—who elsewhere claims to have photographed the human soul escaping the body after death—declares the mummy “one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century.” The camera orbits the mummy, revealing that it has only three long fingers on each hand and three long toes on each foot. Its elongated head has no nose, no ears, and large, heavy-lidded eyes. And its skin is an eerie, powdery white.

The video’s experts stop short of the A-word, letting a series of vest-wearing and white coat-clad “experts” claim that x-rays, CT scans, and DNA and carbon-14 tests of the mummy’s flesh reveal that this new “humanoid” or “organic creature,” whom they have dubbed “Maria,” is no fraud. To learn more, viewers were initially encouraged to watch the rest of the investigation behind Gaia’s paywall.

The English- and Spanish-language tabloids and YouTube channels that cover the “discovery” reliably fill in the blanks, guarding journalistic integrity with scare quotes: “The ‘Alien’ Mummies of Nazca,” trumpeted The Sun in mid-July, when the mummy’s most prominent promoter, a Mexican “ufologist” and TV personality named Jaime Maussan, produced photographic and x-ray “proof” of at least four additional more “reptilian” “humanoid” bodies.

Because of course: What else could they be?

* * *

Human beings, and indigenous ones to boot.

In 2015, Maussan tried to promote a photographic slide from the late 1940s that, he hinted, depicted the corpse of an alien child found in the American Southwest. More skeptical ufologists applied de-blurring technology to the “Roswell Slide” when it was released, and found that a previously undecipherable placard next to the body revealed that it was actually the mummy of a two-year-old Puebloan boy removed from the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in 1894. Returned to a National Park museum in 1938, the boy was repatriated to a local tribe in 2015. Incredibly, Maussan then offered $10,000 for information that might permit the Puebloan boy’s “location and recuperation.”

This inclusion of pre-Columbian Peruvians in science’s supposed cover-up of extraterrestrials echoes the previous collection and study of the indigenous dead. In the 19th century, Anglo-American and European craniologists and scholars who came upon artificially molded skulls in Peruvian tombs hypothesized that they were either the undeformed remnants of a lost and civilized people they named the “Ancient Peruvians,” or artificial deformations of later peoples inspired by those Ancient Peruvians’ natural forms. Archaeologists came to realize that “deformed” Peruvian skulls were bound and shaped from infancy, when cranial bones weren’t yet fused—with no change to cranial capacity and, judging from the monumental societies their elites achieved, without handicap to cognitive ability. But ufology’s rise after the “Roswell incident” of 1947 has resurrected the search for secret ancestors—and its less responsible practitioners have re-enlisted ancient Peruvian skulls as evidence of the presence of large-skulled “Gray Aliens.” They speculate that Peru’s greatest pre-Columbian achievements—including Machu Picchu, according to a theory aired on the History channel program Ancient Aliens—are literally out of this world, the product of a superior, extraterrestrial “race” or their borrowed technology.

The use of the word “race” is telling, as it suggests how the repurposing of older, European collections of non-European bodies and research upon them can reproduce old and debunked theories of racial deficiency: that indigenous Peruvians, in particular, could not have built such advanced, monumental societies on their own. (“Ancient astronaut” theorists claim evidence of extraterrestrial inspiration worldwide, but only indigenous Americans see their bodies and achievements remade as only explicable by alien presence.) From the 18th century on, Northern Europeans have accused the Spanish of exaggerating or misidentifying the origins of the Incas’ achievements. Alexander von Humboldt asserted that the first Incas were actually Chinese. Inca embalming of their dead was attributed instead to natural mummification by the elements or to the diffusion of Egyptian knowledge.