by Daniel Heunergardt

What came out of my research is this: When it comes to deformity of the human cranium, a little is generally too much. Because newborns are so fragile, and because the head is the center of so many of life's essential processes (eating and breathing, to name two), anything seriously wrong in that area is frequently a death sentence. Certainly in any remote village like the one where the skull was supposedly found 900 years ago, there was no social stigma attached to doing away with malformed newborns that would be a long-term drain on a mother's meager physical resources. So there is no way the Starchild should have lived past its birth, yet it survived in apparent good health until its time of death, which could have been anywhere from age 5 to 500. [Note: At present there is no way to determine this definitively, so experts are free to wildly disagree about it.]

During the Starchild's life, however brief or long it might have been, it exhibited an astonishing array of traits that cannot be considered human either in isolation or collectively. The eyes are not human; the temples are not; the forehead is not; the parietal bones (upper rear of the head) are not; the occipital bone (rear of the head) is not; the foramen magnum (hole where the spine enters the cranium) is not; its weight is not; its cranial volume (brain capacity) is not; its sinuses (which it completely lacks) are not; and its neck is not. In short, it is not human. Experts insist it is human only because their knowledge base simply does not allow the possibility that it is not human. But, experts or not, these facts cannot be denied.

Let's examine a few closely. First, as highlighted earlier, the eyes. Human eye sockets are cone shaped to hold an eyeball and the muscles surrounding it that allow it to move in all quadrants: up, down, left, right. That cone extends about 5 centimeters into the skull, and at its back are openings for the optic nerve and various blood vessels. The Starchild's skull has no cone, but rather a shallow scoop in the bone of the face, 3 centimeters at its greatest depth. The optic nerve canals and the fissures are skewed down and away, at the bottom of the scoop and on the inside, thereby housing an eye so different in shape and probable function that to attempt any comparison is an exercise in straw grabbing.

Part II