UFO enthusiasts last week got a gander of an alien allegedly recovered from Roswell—oversized head and all—but experts say the evidence likely originated on planet Earth, Tech Times reports. Attendees at a UFO conference in Mexico City paid $350 for the chance to see an old Kodachrome color slide said to capture an alien that crashed in New Mexico in 1947 (UFO lovers call it the "Roswell Incident"). A journalist apparently dated the film stock to the 1940s, Discovery reports, saying it was recovered in Arizona from an oil geologist's photo collection. The slide shows a small figure with a big head in a display case; Discovery argues that the skeleton belonged to a child (with typically oversized head) or the body of a mummified child with a deformed head.
Such bodies have been turning up for years in the Americas and identified as extraterrestrials, Discovery reported last year. What's more, no eyewitness at Roswell in 1947 described aliens or even a flying saucer; the first one there talked about something "made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks" (the US Air Force put it down to air balloons and radar detectors that crashed there). Yet UFO proponents at the Mexico City event stood firm: "Analysis of the body ... suggested this is not a mummy and not a human, not a mammal and not a model," says enthusiast Richard Dolan, Reuters reports. A British defense official was less enthused, telling the Mirror that "it could be a model, or it could simply be a fake image, dressed up to look like a Forties slide." (Read about Air Force UFO files now available online.)