Right out of the box there was a problem. Relative to a normal human, the Starchild's bone had proved extremely difficult to cut, even though it was half as thick and half as heavy as normal human bone. Then, when Jason and Ripan put it into normal solvents for dissolving human bone, it resisted those routine attempts to break it down. Ultimately, a very powerful solvent had to be administered to get the bone into a condition to be tested, after which six attempts brought no recovery at all-not even a trace of nuclear DNA.

How could that be? In the first place, if the Starchild's bone was from a normal human, normal solvents should have easily dissolved it. Secondly, after 900 years in optimum preservation conditions, the small degree of degradation in the bone should have made it easy to recover its nuclear DNA, as was the case with the female's. And why was it that only the Starchild's nuclear DNA resisted recovery, not its mitochondrial DNA?

There was only one plausible answer: something was "wrong" with its father's DNA. Somehow Dad's contribution to the Starchild's genetic package had produced a genome that would not respond to the chemical primers used to recover segments of human nuclear DNA.

What could be done about this frustrating technical stalemate? According to Jason and Ripan, nothing, at least not in the short term. They told me that in 3 to 5 years they expected the headlong rush of their field's technical improvements to create an atmosphere in which problems like ours with the Starchild would be resolved. So what, I asked them, could I do now? "Get the bone's biochemistry tested," they told me. They wanted an explanation for why it had been so difficult to cut when they removed their samples.

London. I spent all of 2004 in London getting as many tests done as we could manage with our time and resources. One of the first things we did was arrange an analysis by the scanning electron microscope at the Royal Holloway Scientific Institute outside London. It revealed something utterly astonishing: embedded in the matrix of the Starchild's bone were fibers of some kind, fibers which seemed to be incredibly durable because they had been shredded rather than sheared by the cutting blade that removed the bone samples from the skulls. Such fibers had never been found in any other bone in any other animal species on earth, so this was yet another blinking red neon sign that the Starchild skull represented something extraordinary.

Later, forensic geologist Dr. Ken Pye (no relation to me) discovered at his laboratory outside London that a red residue of some kind was scattered in the Starchild's cancellous holes. Normally upon death, corpses activate a wide array of internal bacteria that scour every vestige of marrow from the cancellous holes in every bone, leaving them, in effect, sparkling clean. So the residue discovered in the Starchild's cancellous holes was something else not found in any other bone in any known species on earth. Certainly not in human bone, so it was more evidence of the Starchild's uniqueness.

For more information or to purchase click here: The Starchild Skull -- Genetic Enigma or Human-Alien Hybrid?