What was it about the "Starchild Skull" that warranted
the ensuing campaign to learn the truth about it?

The eyes are what did it for me, as they do for most people. Hauntingly different from the human norm, they are two stark windows into forbidden knowledge, strongly hinting that we are not at all what we think we are, and that in life the owner of those eyes knew secrets of the universe that we Earthlings can barely begin to imagine. Gazing into those eyes (eye sockets, actually), I felt the way people in the early 1600's must have felt when first gazing into a telescope, seeing spread out before them the infinite depth of their ignorance about physical reality. Like them, I felt myself staring at a similar depth of personal ignorance regarding biological reality.

Soon after that first glimpse into my possible past and future, I was offered the job of caretaker for what has come to be called the Starchild skull. Soon after that, I began consulting experts in various aspects of cranial anatomy, all of whom assured me that the astonishing degree of "deformity" evident in the skull was the result of cranial binding (practiced throughout South America) combined with a highly unlikely but not impossible combination of physical pathologies. This did considerable damage to my initial conviction that the skull might prove to be the greatest relic in the annals of human history. Then I went to my local library and spent many hours researching human deformities, which taught me that I had been misinformed by the experts I consulted.

I do not choose to believe my misinforming was deliberate. I choose to believe it was what often results when personal ego and professional reputation are mixed with the hubris that can come from being considered an "expert." Having achieved that lofty status, there can be an overpowering temptation to pound all square pegs into the round hole of conventional thinking, whatever that happens to be at any moment in time. So I choose to believe the experts I consulted were acting in good faith, victimized by their own extensive educations which, past a certain point, tends to become indoctrination, which leads to collective peer-reviewed agreements that ultimately ossify into dogma.

In the medical libraries of Tulane and LSU (I lived in New Orleans then), I used their own texts to discover the truth, which was that the Starchild possessed an aggregate of "deformities" like no others ever seen before. Individually, each could be stretched to conform to an existing corollary, but two or more dozen such deformities somehow miraculously combined into a perfectly coordinated skull was flatly impossible. This negated all the assurances I had heard that "this isn't so very different from any number of others I have seen in my career as a (fill in the blank)." Those were all lies, whether to themselves or to me. None of them had ever seen anything like it before because I was looking through their own texts and nothing like the Starchild was there. Nothing even close. Not even a whisper of it. So my lost conviction rapidly returned.