What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Clara and Mauricio

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

The news of his presentation before Mexico’s congress has been widely reported, but many journalists left out a key detail: This same thing—the same kind of “aliens,” hawked by the same shady ufologist—happened in 2017. And it also happened almost 200 years before that: In the 1840s, there was a different cast of characters and a different fake creature, but the story arc is so similar, it’s basically a remake.

What the “aliens” really are

There hasn’t been enough scientific scrutiny of the evidence to say for sure that Clara and Mauricio are not aliens—but they are, for sure, not aliens. So what are they? In a physical sense, all evidence points to them being the mummified remains of ancient humans that have been re-arranged and combined with the bones of animals. In a more esoteric sense, the origin story of the figures, and their hold on the popular imagination, is an illustration of P.T. Barnum’s adage “there’s a sucker born every minute,” as well as a beat-by-beat re-run of one his most famous hoaxes.

The faux-alien effigies trotted before the world are an especially culturally insensitive example of “gaff taxidermy”—creating bespoke fake creatures by combining the remains of real ones. This tradition dates back over 200 years, and brought us such fanciful creatures as Fur-Bearing Trout, the Jackalope, and, most famously, Barnum’s feejee mermaid.

P.T. Barnum’s “feejee mermaid”

Feejee mermaids likely originated in Japan in the early 1800s. Japanese fisherman, it’s believed, would sew the lower bodies of fish to the upper bodies of monkeys, hide the stitches with a little papier-mâché or plaster, and sell their creations to gullible sailors from Europe and America. Some creations have survived to this day—the mermaid seen above is held at Harvard—but Barnum made one of these odd curios famous.

In 1822, a Japanese fishermen sold a figure to American sea captain Samuel Barrett Edes, no doubt after assuring him that it was really a mermaid. Edes’ son sold it to Moses Kimball of the Boston Museum, and Kimball rented it to P.T. Barnum.

In 1842, with his feejee mermaid in hand, Barnum set out to profit. Like Maussan and company, Barnum understood the importance of fake experts and the real press in spreading a hoax. When an actual naturalist wouldn’t vouch for the authenticity of the mermaid, Barnum enlisted an associate to bring the specimen to newspapermen’s office, show it off, and say he’d caught it in South America (not Fiji, for some reason). The scheme worked. Breathless headlines appeared all over the country, some proclaiming that the doubts “scientific persons” once had about the mermaid “were entirely removed.”

The man who may have crafted the alien

The 2023 equivalent of the Japanese fishermen may be the man in this YouTube video. Known as Ronceros, he was reportedly shopping fake mummies around to museums circa 2017. No one was interested, so he changed the story to aliens. Whether Ronceros created the Peruvian aliens or merely inspired someone else to make their own gaffs isn’t known, but specimens looking very much like the ones Ronceros tried to sell ended up at the center of a crowd-funding project called “Alien Project: The strange mummies of Peru” in 2017. Over 1,000 suckers ponied up around $41,000 so the mummies could be “scientifically analyzed.” That’s where Jaime Mussan got on board, hawking the story on his YouTube channel and TV shows he hosted in Mexico.

Like Barnum, Jaime Maussan and his web of shady UFO associates found dubious “experts” to vouch for the alien-ness of the mummies to an eager media. While no reputable sources are reporting that the aliens are real, the press’s “wait and see (and click)” approach amounts to the same thing.

Debunking doesn’t matter, if people want to believe

In both the case of the feejee mermaid and the Mexican aliens, real scientists (and anyone with two brain cells to rub together) quickly and thoroughly debunked the fraudsters’ claims (Spoiler: The 2017 “aliens” were human bones re-arranged a bit and combined with the skull of a llama and other animal bones, and all available evidence suggests the 2023 aliens are something similar.) But it didn’t matter: The people still lapped it up. Barnum made a mint selling mermaid tickets, just as the cadre of fraudsters behind the Mexican aliens will surely profit in the form of TV shows and book deals, personal appearances, and other forms of entertainment for the dumb.

Catching a cultural wave

It sometimes took a few tries, but the perseverance of Barnum and the alien cranks allowed both to catch perfect cultural waves. Back in the 1800s, biologists were exploring new places, mapping the last of the wilderness, and discovering new, exotic species regularly, so the idea of a real mermaid must have been almost believable, In 2023, astronomers are discovering potentially habitable planets and finding water on the moon, while the U.S. government has officially acknowledged that UFOs (UAPs to be technical) are real. UAP fever is so strong, even an already debunk taxidermy gaff is enough to capture the public imagination.

The “aliens” are more than a hoax. They’re probably a crime

The two stories aren’t entirely the same, though. The aliens have a much darker aspect than Barnum’s cheeky and mischievous snowjob. The mermaid was just a fish and a monkey. The aliens are likely the remains of pre-Colombian people—humans whose graves were robbed and whose bodies were desecrated so a bunch of crooks could make a little money. It might actually be a crime, but even if it isn’t, it’s quite bad. As the World Committee on Mummy Studies (a legit group of archeologists) put it: “The criminal abuse of corpses for petty ends violates human dignity in a profound way. Thus, exploitation of pre-Columbian mummies carried out by this organization, attacks and particularly offends the Andean Culture, implying that its achievements were due to an alleged ‘alien aid.’”

This post barely scratches the surface of the strange stories of the feejee mermaid and the Mexican congressional aliens. For a full account of Barnum’s hoax, read Jan Bonderson’s The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History. For a deeper dive into the strange story of the “aliens,” check out this excellent article by Vox’s Aja Romano.

If you want to make your own realistic looking feejee mermaid to hoax the world, here’s step-by-step instructions; no monkey or fish skeleton needed.

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