The Nazca Mummies: What They Are and What Peru's Experts Found

The figures became internationally known in 2017. They reached the public through material associated with the Peruvian promoter Germán Ronceros, the Instituto Inkari and the Mexican journalist and ufologist Jaime Maussan, with Thierry Jamin also among those who helped spread them. They were said to come from near Palpa and Nasca, two provinces of the Ica region on Peru's southern coast.

What exactly the figures were supposed to be has shifted over the years. Their promoters have called them extraterrestrial, non-human, and ancient beings tied to the Nazca culture. The names vary too: "tridactyl" (three-fingered) figures, "momias tridáctilas", and individual nicknames such as María and Wawito.

The account of where and how the figures were found comes from the promoters. In 2017 Ronceros delivered pieces to Peruvian prosecutors, and the authorities opened an investigation into the possible illegal removal of cultural material.

The clip most people have seen comes from 12 September 2023. That day, AP reported, Maussan presented two small bodies at a hearing before Mexico's Chamber of Deputies and said they were non-human beings found near Palpa and Nasca in 2017. He cited a date of roughly 1,000 years from radiocarbon work he associated with Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM), and said some of their DNA was "unknown."

A hearing in a legislature is a place where people speak, not a laboratory, and the session was not a scientific test of the bodies. UNAM researcher Julieta Fierro said the university had not authenticated them or endorsed Maussan's claims. In Peru, the Ministry of Culture said on 14 September 2023, as reported by the official newspaper El Peruano, that no Peruvian scientific institution supported the idea that the objects were non-human beings. The figures came back to the Mexican Congress in November 2023, in a second session AP also covered.

In October 2023, Peruvian authorities seized two of the figures at Jorge Chávez International Airport, where they were being shipped from Palpa and Nasca to Mexico. They went to the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, the forensic arm of Peru's Public Prosecutor's Office.

The Ministry of Culture announced the results on 12 January 2024. The figures were not intact mummies. They were built objects: animal bones joined with synthetic adhesives and arranged to resemble bodies. The examination also covered the three-fingered hand that Germán Ronceros had handed to the Ministry of Culture in April 2019, and specialists reported that it was made of human bones, cotton and glue.

The forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada Moreno, writing in the Ministry of Culture's archaeology journal in 2023, came to the same view in an article titled "Anatomía de un fraude" ("Anatomy of a fraud"). He describes the objects as modern fabrications made with animal and human remains, a covering of paper or similar material, and synthetic adhesive. Forensic work on the figures goes back further still: a prosecution record identifies an analysis report by the forensic chemist Ernesto Humberto Ávalos Cordero dated 16 August 2017.

One detail in those findings deserves a pause. Human bones in a fabricated figure came from a real person, someone's ancestor. That is part of why Peru treats the figures as a matter of cultural heritage and criminal law, and not just a curiosity.

The "about 1,000 years old" figure is the claim of Maussan and his associates, made about specimens they had tested. It is not a date for the objects Peru examined, and Peru's official findings give no valid ancient date for the assembled figures.

There is also a simpler reason a date alone settles little. A radiocarbon age for a piece of organic material would show how old that material is, not that a whole figure is an untouched ancient body. The figures Peru examined contained modern synthetic adhesive holding the pieces together.

Scientists and promoters still disagree, and it is fair to say so plainly. The promoters maintain that some other specimens are biological and ancient. Peru's forensic reports, on the specimens they examined, document fabrication and alteration.

For Peruvian officials, the heart of the matter has never been aliens. It is the removal of material from archaeological sites, which may mean real tombs opened and real ancestors taken from them.

The first investigation was opened in 2017 by the First Provincial Corporate Criminal Prosecutor's Office of Nasca, under case number 2106054501-2017-143-0, over the alleged extraction of archaeological material and possible offenses against archaeological monuments, according to a Peruvian Congress document describing the case.

A second case, 2106054502-2020-169-0, concerns the alleged illegal extraction of cultural property involving the objects called María and Wawito. A 2023 ruling by Peru's Transparency Tribunal says the Ministry of Culture had placed two movable cultural objects under provisional protection, and that prosecution files and expert reports were confidential while the investigation continued.

The public custody record is incomplete, so the answer comes in parts. The 2023 Transparency Tribunal ruling records María and Wawito as provisionally protected objects inside a criminal investigation.

A report dated 30 January 2026, published on a site connected with the figures' supporters and associated with the National University San Luis Gonzaga of Ica, says six specimens and related objects were formally delivered to that university under a transfer record. That report is not a Ministry of Culture notice. The two figures seized at the airport in October 2023 are a separate pair again, and nobody should assume they are the bodies shown in Mexico.

If you want the current status of a particular specimen, confirm it with Peru's Ministry of Culture and with the National University San Luis Gonzaga of Ica.

Peru does have ancient mummies, and some of the best known lie near Nasca. The Chauchilla Necropolis sits about 30 kilometres south of the town, in the Vista Alegre district of Ica. Peru's official tourism inventory describes tombs holding human remains with long hair still in place, textiles, ceramics and food placed with the dead. Here, the bodies can be seen in or near their original tombs.

The burials at Chauchilla span several periods. They are not one moment in time but centuries of the same cemetery in use. Our story on the Chauchilla cemetery tells more about the site itself.

The cemetery is run locally in coordination with the Ministry of Culture. The official inventory, dated 26 November 2022, lists an adult ticket at 8 soles, a child ticket at 4 soles and opening hours of 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Those figures are a few years old, so confirm fees, hours and photography rules with the site administrator or the Ministry of Culture before you go.

The looting concern is not abstract either. On 7 July 2025, the Nasca prosecutor's office reported that it had recovered a pre-Hispanic female mummy from Los Paredones, an Inca archaeological site, and handed her to the Ministry of Culture for study and conservation. Prosecutors opened an investigation into whether she had been taken from her grave by looters. Hers is a separate case, and it says nothing about the three-fingered figures, but it shows what is at stake for the people buried in the region.

The three-fingered figures raise a handful of questions about what, who, when and where, and each has a short answer.

The real ancient people of Peru have stories that need no invention. The Lady of Cao and the Lord of Sipán are two burials that archaeologists excavated and recorded, and Mummy Juanita and the Chinchorro mummies are other mummies of western South America. Peru's elongated skulls have a story of their own, and for another famous assembled fake, there is Piltdown Man.

To see how experts read old remains, start with what bones tell archaeologists and the practice of returning human remains to the communities they came from. For another viral claim about strange skeletons, read about Lovelock Cave, and for how one ancient people really preserved their dead, how Egyptian mummies were made.

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