Lloyd Pye

Ancient astronauts

Pye claimed that a superior alien race called the Anunnaki from the planet Nibiru incrementally terraformed and populated Earth for their own reasons, later returning to Earth and, through a process of genetic manipulation, produced humans. These ideas supposedly come from translating and interpreting ancient Sumerian texts (Anunnaki and Nibiru are names from Sumerian religious myths). Pye argued that these alien beings are responsible for the megalithic structures around the world, the growth and advancement of Sumer, the domestication of plants and animals, and supposedly strange flaws in human DNA. (Those who are well read in pseudoscience will realize that most of his ideas have been... inspired by the claims of Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin.[note 1])

Alien creationism

Due to his belief that humans were the genetically engineered creation of aliens, Pye denied Darwinian evolution in favor of what he called "Intervention Theory."[note 2] Aside from his recycling of creationist material, many of his arguments hinged on the claim that humans are not related to neanderthals or other early hominids. This was patently false before, but even more so now that recent evidence has shown humans and neanderthals actually interbred.[1] Another one of his odd arguments against evolution was the claim that scientists are covering up the origins of chromosome 2 in humans (i.e., the reason why humans have 23 chromosome pairs and apes have 24). This demonstrates that Mr. Pye was too lazy to read widely known literature in genetics and biology, as there have been a number of papers published on the topic.[2] Of course, to Pye, this proved aliensdidit.

One of his articles, "Darwinism: A Crumbling Theory", is endorsed on Whale.to.[3]

Starchild project

Pye was also the owner of the "Starchild skull" — a 900-year old deformed human child's skull found in Mexico. He claimed that the child was a human/alien hybrid. Steven Novella provides a much better explanation — that the skull belonged to a child suffering from hydrocephalus. Furthermore, he notes that DNA testing revealed the child to have both an X and Y chromosome, making it fully human. Pye then moved the goalposts and claimed that this was really a "fusion" of human and alien DNA.[4] Intent on getting even deeper into woo territory, Pye then claimed fibers found on the skull were possibly the result of Morgellons. After Pye's death, the Starchild Project continues to claim it has "presented the scientific community with a genetic and physical profile so diffferent [sic] from human that it could be a new species" and solicit PayPal donations for further "research".[5]

Cryptozoology

He was into cryptozoology, or more precisely, into what he termed "Hominoids" - Bigfoot/Sasquatch, Yeti, etc. According to Pye: "The key point to make about these animals, and about the many other variations of names given to them around the world, is that such names simply would not exist if the creatures they are meant to describe did not exist."[6]

Neuro-woo

Pye repeated the myth that we only use 10% (or 5-15%) of our brains, a claim easily debunked by modern brain scanning technology.

Bibliography
gollark: Basically just descending the tree of ingredients for a recipe until it finds stuff it has, or something.
gollark: I had *an* approximation which was pretty computationally simple. It just wasn't very good.
gollark: Does it? I thought it could at least fall back to something you had materials for. Huh.
gollark: And, er, not that sure.
gollark: * multiple recipes per item

See also

Notes
  1. Indeed, he wrote an article called In Defense of Zecharia Sitchin.
  2. His site has a section devoted to evolution denial that rips off most of the old creationist chestnuts like Hoyle's fallacy.

References
  1. Green et al. A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome. Science, 7 May 2010: Vol. 328 no. 5979 pp. 710-722. News release from Discovery News.
  2. All hominid fossils are fully human or fully ape, Talk Origins
  3. http://www.whale.to/b/pye.html
  4. Steven Novella. The Starchild Project. 2006 February.
  5. www.starchildproject.com
  6. Hominoids page
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