How An Alien Mummy Is Bringing A Nation Together
I, for one, welcome our new cuddly alien mummy overlords!
Mexico's Congress, Petr Polak, pixabay, Martin Holverda / Getty Images via Canva, Depressedhappiness / Shutterstock You may remember that earlier this summer — and during the darkest days of 2020, for that matter — we basically got confirmation that aliens exist.
Or, honestly, you may NOT remember because LOLOLOL, none of us cared. Things were so bleak on both occasions that we all basically greeted the news with a collective "NOT NOW, ALIENS," and who can blame us?
But the most recent revelations about UAFs (or UFOs, or whatever we're calling them now) has gone decidedly different.
It may be for all the wrong reasons, but somehow a little alien mummy is bringing us all together.
If you open Twitter, the thing we refuse to call X now, you will see post after post about Mexican journalist and UFOlogist Jaime Maussan, who presented to the Mexican Congress what he claims the United States is too afraid to acknowledge: proof of the existence of aliens in the form of a tiny alien mummy supposedly found in a diatom mine near the archaeologically rich areas of Palpa and Nazca, Peru.
Now, first things first — if that all sounds and looks like the patently ridiculous plot to an episode of Scooby-Doo or the caper at the center of a new Austin Powers movie, that's not a coincidence. The alien mummy has been repeatedly debunked and Maussan discredited multiple times in the past.
But that hasn't stopped Maussan and his alien mummy from going instantly viral, partly because so many of us have worms for brains that we'll believe literally anything we see online so long as it confirms our biases (and accordingly all sorts of conspiracy-minded people on Twitter are convinced that the alien mummy is real). But it's also gone viral because, well.... awwwwwww! Look at him!!!
Him just a bayyyybeeee! A wittle bitty baybee him need a bwankie so he go sweepy-sweeps in a night-night box! Not to be dramatic, but I would die for this alien mummy, and I mean that from the bottom of my broken heart.
But to reiterate: Alien Mummy (I've decided he has attained proper noun status and must be capitalized) is not real. He is just the latest iteration of what appears to be a years-long grift by Maussan featuring other alien mummies going back to 2017.
But that has done nothing to damper the fun. The debunking is in itself absurd — I cannot even tell you the decibel level at which I shrieked at my laptop when I found out Alien Mummy's head is actually a backward llama skull.
This all, of course, begs the question as to why on Earth, or whatever Alien Mummy's home planet is, the Mexican Congress is entertaining any of this. Perhaps they're just feeling zany, who knows! Or perhaps it's as simple as this — collectively, as a species, our brains are all broken, all the way up to the halls of power in the Mexican government, and we all need a moment of levity.
And honey, Alien Mummy is DELIVERING, let's just put it that way.
Alien Mummy is quickly becoming a meme on the internet, and it's exactly what the doctor ordered.
There's just no way around it — this entire thing is just plain old stupid, and I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean stupid in the hilarious sense. The way absurdist or slapstick humor is stupid, the kind of stupid where you wheeze "that's so stupid!" in between breathless laughs.
First of all, look at the thing. It looks like it's made of papier-mache, and the fact that it is apparently a llama skull makes it even funnier. This is because llamas are inherently funny because they're inherently ridiculous. They spit at people for God's sake! Name a thing funnier than a llama. You can't! Except, that is, for one thing — Alien Mummy.
Look at his tiny face! His little eyes! His slightest hint of smile as if to say "¡te pillé!," which Google tells me is Spanish for, "Gotcha!" (Google is usually wrong about these things so don't come for me if that means something totally different, I took French in high school and we're all just doing the best we can.) It's as if Alien Mummy is in on the joke, as if he's subtly undermining Maussan. This is the greatest grift of all time, because it is almost the most absurd.
Of course, it helps that Alien Mummy looks nearly exactly like the titular star of Steven Spielberg's iconic E.T., or maybe E.T.'s cousin who just finished a round of Ozempic, a slim, lithe, leggy and svelte version of E.T., E.T. as supermodel, perhaps. ZZ Top famously sang that "she's got legs and she knows how to use them," and I'd like to think they were somehow thinking about Alien Mummy when they wrote that absolute poetry.
It also helps that Alien Mummy has the exact same alien face we've somehow all come to know and recognize as alien, except not menacing. Just cute! Cuddly as a koala! This is not an alien who means harm, this is an alien who just wants a friend, a home, a companion. And accordingly, the Alien Mummy memes have been fire.
There's been Alien Mummy as that infamous Italian painting of Jesus that nice old lady accidentally ruined, Alien Mummy as fried food, an Alien Mummy replica made out of dryer lint... The wildly absurd list goes on and on.
Is Alien Mummy the force that will finally bring us together? LOLOLOLOL of course not! We live in hell, but for a brief moment, can all live vicariously through Alien Mummy and be the dust-covered and desiccated shell of a being staring blankly into the middle distance while dissociating what we want to see in the world.
Photo: @jestingtime / Twitter
I for one welcome our new Alien Mummy overlord, because he's cute, and the memes are funny, and everything real in life has gotten so intergalactically stupid that in a way, an Alien Mummy composed of misassembled llama bones is the only thing that even makes any sense.
Thank you, Alien Mummy, and enjoy your little nappy-nap.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.