Photo: Garry Nolan
Ten years ago, a six-inch skeleton was found in a pouch in a ghost town in the Atacama Desert of Chile. It ended up in private collection and the UFO community was abuzz that we've finally found physical evidence of alien life.
When immunologist Garry Nolan of Stanford University heard about the skeleton, since named the "Atacama humanoid" or "Ata" for short, he decided to lend his scientific expertise to find out what exactly is the mysterious being:
Among the apparent abnormalities, Ata sports 10 ribs instead of the usual 12 and a severely misshapen skull. "I asked our neonatal care unit how you would go about analyzing it. Had they seen this kind of syndrome before?" Nolan says. He was directed to pediatric radiologist Ralph Lachman, co-director of the International Skeletal Dysplasia Registry at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. "He literally wrote the book on pediatric bone disorders," Nolan says. Lachman was blown away, Nolan recalls: "He said, 'Wow, this is like nothing I've ever seen before.' "
To study the specimen, Nolan sought clues in Ata's genome. He initially presumed the specimen was tens or hundreds of thousands of years old—the Atacama Desert may be the driest spot on the planet, so Ata could have been preserved for eons. He consulted experts who had extracted DNA from bones of the Denisovans, an Asian relative of European Stone Age Neandertals.
Find out what the researchers concluded about the mysterious Ata, over at this post by Richard Stone of Science: Link
They could for instance change their fundamental genetic structure to mach our own, but as I said with Tiffany, if aliens did that to themselves they would cease being alien genetically and you wouldn't have a hybrid, just another normal human child who's mother or father use to be alien. A very smart, advanced alien who, for some reason, decided to become human, but, hey, I don't judge.
It also brings us back to the problem that aliens, being alien, developed on a completely different planet then us, despite having a common origin.
Having a common ancestor doesn't automatically mean able to have a healthy child with them. True, the more recent the ancestor, the easier it is to do so, but the given the huge scale of the universe and distances between stars, any ancestor we'd have with other life in the universe would certainly not be recent. Interbreeding would certainly not be possible. Not unless one party changes their fundamental genetic structure to mach the other. But if aliens did that to themselves they would cease being alien genetically and you wouldn't have a hybrid, just another normal human child who's mother or father use to be alien. Same goes visa versa. It would still sound cool, and certainly make the headlines, but the child wouldn't be identifiable as a hybrid.