Jaime Maussán

Jaime Maussan looking for aliens in all the wrong places.

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“”Jaime Maussan is infamous for promoting dodgy UFO videos and alien artefacts. He has cried wolf too often to be ever taken seriously by anyone with at least one functioning brain cell.

—Nigel Watson

“”A well-known sensationalist journalist, Maussan is Mexico’s very own P.T. Barnum, having made a lucrative career peddling dodgy photos and videos of UFOs, alien beings, and the like.

—Robert Sheaffer

José Jaime Maussán Flota (31 May 1953–) is a Mexican pseudo-journalist, ufologist, sensationalist charlatan and UFO huckster with over 40 frauds to his name, including, most famously, presenting fake alien mummies to the Mexican Congress. Becoming interested in the UFO phenomenon during the Mexico City flap, which accompanied the solar eclipse of July 11, 1991, Maussán has gone on to build this interest into a massive business empire and has, according to Robert Sheaffer, “made more money off the UFO mania than anyone else in Mexico, and perhaps the entire world.” Early success came from distributing material featuring Swiss New Age shyster Billy Meier. He has gone on to insert himself into all subsequently reported UFO sightings and close encounters in Mexico.

UNEP Global 500 Roll of Honour 1990

Maussán was named on the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Global 500 Roll of Honour in 1990 for dedicating two decades of his journalistic career to the protection of the environment, during which he successfully pressed for measures to clean up Mexico City's heavily-polluted air, won protection for Mexico's forests, got legislation to preserve the monarch butterfly passed, and generally raised ecological awareness particularly around climate change. That done he dedicated the rest of his career to bunkum.

The 1991 Mexico City UFO Flap

The exact opening where Maussán seemingly entered the UFO rabbit hole.

Maussán was among the alleged (by Maussán) 40,000 witnesses who saw, photographed and filmed a large stationary white light visible above Mexico City for 30 minutes during the solar eclipse of July 11, 1991.

When Maussán broadcast footage of the incident shot by filmmaker Guillermo Arriaga the following week on Sesenta Minutos (the Mexican version of 60 Minutes) the station received thousands of calls from viewers who saw the same thing, earning this incident the reputation of being one of the largest mass UFO sightings ever.

Subsequent analysis of the numerous reports, photographs and footage, however, indicates that what the vast majority of witnesses saw was, in fact, most likely, the planet Venus. Whilst some of the other sightings may have been a high altitude weather balloon above the location at that time. Nevertheless, Maussán subsequently became obsessed with collecting evidence of alien visitation.

The UFO of Las Lomas

Only employees of Publicidad Virtual were lucky enough to spot this.

Maussán, in September 1997, aired footage of a large disc-shaped UFO hovering over the rooftops of downtown Mexico City in broad daylight on 6^th August 1997. The footage was sent under a pseudonym to his TV offices on September 26^thand despite being initially suspicious as no such incident had been reported at the time, he nonetheless broadcast the footage the day after receiving it. It was immediately picked up by international broadcasters and even went viral on the then still nascent World Wide Web.

Maussán quickly located the building where the footage had been filmed and by asking around was able to turn up a few witnesses that claimed to have seen something, but none proved to be particularly reliable. Although intial study by MUFON staff video analyst Jeff Sainio suggested the footage might be genuine, further analysis pointed to several clear signs of fakery. The likely creator was eventually identified as Ignacio Ocampo Valles who was an employee of advertising agency Publicidad Virtual which had its video production facilities near to where the footage was filmed. Although this conclusion seems somewhat at odds with Maussán's factual claim that, "Mexicans do not make hoax UFO photos."

The 2004 Mexican Air Force UFO Incident

It may not look like much, but you should have seen the one that got away.

Maussán was personally invited by Mexico’s Minister of Defense, General Gerardo Clemente Vega García, to assist in the analysis and release on 12 May 2004 of a video of an encounter between Mexican Air Force pilots using infrared cameras to search for drug-smuggling planes and eleven lights 3.5km high in the sky over southern Campeche on 5 March 2004. At the press conference Maussán called this "historic news" as it was the first UFO video to have the backing of the armed forces of any country, and, "the armed forces don't perpetuate frauds." He also interviewed Maj Magdaleno Castanon, who told him how he led the pursuit of the lights:

I believe they could feel we were pursuing them. There was a moment when... the screens showed they were behind us, to the left and in front of us. It was at that point that I felt a bit tense.

UFO investigator Alejandro Franz, however, identified the lights as very stationary burn off flares from oil rigs in the Cantarell Field, with any apparent movement entirely illusory. Michael Shermer, who had appeared on CNN three times the week the story broke, noted how, like a fisherman’s tale, it grew with each retelling.

The Metepec Creature

The Metepec creature is roughly the size and shape of a skinned marmoset.

Maussán spent many years touting the apparent extraterrestrial origins of the so-called Metepec Creature, a small, smooth, whitish-grey creature, which bore a distinct resemblance to a skinned marmoset. The specimen had been purchased for US$23,000 in 2007 from taxidermist Urso Ruíz, who claimed to have captured it alive in a rat trap on a ranch in Metepec, Mexico, and shown it to multiple witnesses before killing it. In 2010, however, Ruíz made a truly shocking confession:

It’s just the corpse of a skinned squirrel-monkey. I took its ears out and involved it with all the hair and fluids of all animals I could find, then I dried it. All samples they take of it will come out as being of different animals.

Undeterred, Maussán continued shopping it around and hyping up the indeterminate DNA results which Ruíz had predicted. Analysis of advanced scanning and DNA testing at Imperial College London for Channel 4’s Alien Investigations in 2012 conclusively identified it as a marmoset and, under lie-detection for the same programmme, Ruíz confirmed it to be a Buffy-tufted marmoset he’d been sent by the local zoo for taxidermic preservation.

The Roswell Slides

The Roswell Slides look like badly composed museum holiday snaps.

Maussán hosted the 5 May 2015 beWitness event at Mexico City’s Auditorio Nacional for nearly 7,000 attendees who paid between $20 and $86 for a ticket on the promise of a “smoking gun”, what he gave them was the “Roswell Slides”. The slides, discovered in a house clearance of a deceased Texas couple, were two almost identical Kodachrome images of what appeared to be a mummified child on display in a museum, complete with labelling (albeit out-of-focus) which seemed curiously visitor friendly for a Hangar 18 or Area 51 secret archive.

Sports videographer Adam Dew had spent nearly five years investigating the photos, roping in Roswell crash self-professed experts Anthony Bragalia, Donald Schmitt, Tom Carey, and Richard Dolan along the way, because, well, Roswell’s not so far from Texas, before turning to Maussaán to help raise funds for his intended documentary on the slides. And while in all that time no one had apparently thought to deblur the labelling, within days of the presentation an ad hoc assemblage of investigators, calling themselves The “Roswell Slides” Research Group, had obtained leaked high-res scans of the images and done precisely that. The labelling, it may shock you to learn, read:

MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD: At the time of burial the body was clothed in a (unreadable) cotton shirt. Burial wrappings consisted of these small cotton blankets. Loaned by Mr (unreadable) San Francisco, California.

The exhibit was then traced to the Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum in Mesa Verde, Colorado, which confirmed that while the boy's remains had been returned to a local Native American tribe in 2015. They had prior to that been on display in the museum following their donation to the National Park Service in 1938. Subsequently, many of those involved in this disrespectful debacle admitted to their mistake and apologised, suffice it to say Maussán did not, nor did he pay out on his promise of $5,000 for similar images and $10,000 for information on the specimen's whereabouts.

The Demon Fairy

A stitch-up so bad, only a Nephilim theorist could fall for it.

Maussán reportedly paid $10,000 dollars for his next specimen, a small, winged creature with glowing red eyes, which looked like a P. T. Barnum-style stitch up, à la the Fiji mermaid, complete with taxidermist pins showing up in the X-rays. Christian ufologist and nephilim theorist L.A. Marzulli was however impressed enough to feature it on the cover of his book Nephilim Hybrids and fill out its backstory as one of the locusts described in Revelation 9:7-10:

The shape of the locusts was like horses prepared for battle. On their heads were crowns of something like gold, and their faces were like the faces of men. They had hair like women’s hair, and their teeth were like lions’ teeth. And they had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the sound of chariots with many horses running into battle. They had tails like scorpions, and there were stings in their tails.

When Marzulli finally got it to a lab in the US, however, it literally fell apart, as a zoologist revealed it to be the remains of a bat held together with toothpicks and epoxy, along with a dab of phosphorescent paint for that demonic glow. Marzulli was, of course, repentant, Maussán not so much.

The Nazca Mummy

Maussán and the Gaia team demonstrate how science is done.

Maussán teamed up with "digital New Age nonsense" streamer Gaia Inc. in 2017 for the “Unearthing Nazca” series on the scientific examination of the so-called “Nazca Mummy”. This three-fingered humanoid appears to be a plastered over an assemblage of looted ancient human remains and animal bones, as created by local hoaxer and YouTuber Luis Quispe (a.k.a., Paul Ronceros) in a batch crowdfunded by French pseudoarchaeologist and Ancient Aliens regular Thierry Jamin in 2016.

The crack team of scientific advisors filmed by Gaia roughly manhandling the specimen in the decidedly non-controlled setting of an open rooftop in Peru, consists of known cranks Konstantin Korotkov, who markets his own version of Kirlian photography and claims to have photographed the human soul, and José de Jesús Zalce Benítez, who previously authenticated the Roswell Slides for Maussán.

The series earned a stern rebuke from The World Committee on Mummy Studies who concluded that “pre-Columbian human remains” had been "maliciously manipulated and even mutilated to obtain an 'ad hoc' appearance for commercial exploitation,” and that this “criminal abuse of corpses for petty ends violates human dignity in a profound way." And the Peruvian prosecutor’s office, based on a report by the Institute of Legal Medicine, concluded that, "They are not the remains of ancestral aliens that they have tried to present," but are, in fact, "recently manufactured dolls, which have been covered with a mixture of paper and synthetic glue to simulate the presence of skin."

Quispe eventually accepted that the mummies were fake, but then claimed they were two-thousand-year-old fakes made by the ancient Nazca people to represent the aliens they saw. Unbowed, Maussán completed the 9-part series for Gaia, hawked the mummy in numerous other documentaries, and even had the gall to present it in a hearing before the Congress of the Republic of Peru.

Hydrotene

Maussan took some time off from alien hoaxing during the COVID-19 pandemic to join his long-time "scientific" advisor Zalce Benitez in promoting snakeoil miracle cure Hydrotene. Agronomic engineer Juan Alfonso García Urbina maintained, without evidence, that this “antioxidant nutritional complex” that he had spent 5 years developing provided 96% effective protection against viral infection when applied to the skin. A forum titled "Hydrotene: Strategies and Alternatives for COVID-19 Treatment," organized by Mexican senator Lucía Trasviña was cancelled following backlash which was in no small part due to Maussán’s involvement.

The Nazca Mummy returns

Maussan still playing with his dolls at a Mexican congressional hearing.

Maussán and Zalce Benitez presented two more so-called "mummies" from the Luis Quispe and Thierry Jamin collection at hearings on UFOs held in the Green Room of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies in September and November 2023. The resulting backlash included Peruvian Culture Minister Leslie Urteaga questioning how the specimens had been removed from Peru and announcing a criminal complaint from the Ministry of Culture against Maussán's associates, and physical anthropologist Guido Lombardi, who studied mummies in Peru, maintaining:

With the experience that all the researchers who have worked with pre-Columbian mummies have, especially from the Nazca area, it is very clear to us that these mummies, the large ones, are pre-Columbian human beings that have been modified for commercial purposes, and the supposed ‘small mummies’ are structures that have been put together.

A further shipment of two small figures and a three-fingered hand, from the between 20 and 200 specimens the various “researchers” now claim to have found, was intercepted by Peruvian customs on it’s way to Mexico, as part of ongoing efforts to stop the plunder of the country's archaeological sites. Following analysis, forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada made an earthshaking announcement:

The conclusion is simple: they are dolls assembled with bones of animals from this planet, with modern synthetic glues, therefore they were not assembled during pre-Hispanic times. They are not extraterrestrials; they are not aliens.

While the hand, according to Estrada had been "very poorly" built from human bones.