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Pedro the Mystery Mummy
In October of 1932, Cecil Main and Frank Carr spotted what
appeared to be gold in one of the walls of a ravine at the base of the San Pedro
Mountains, 100 miles west of Casper Wyoming. The two men blasted away a portion
of the wall behind which they found a cavern.
To their astonishment, inside the cavern the two
prospectors found a very strange creature poised on a small ledge, sitting
cross-legged, arms folded.
This creature was extremely small, having a height of 7
inches sitting, and a total height of only 14 inches! Its face resembled an old
man with huge, heavy-lidded, bulbous eyes, flat nose, low forehead, and a broad,
thin-lipped mouth. Its skin was a bronze color and very wrinkled. The body was
barrel shaped, the hands large with unusually long fingers. The head was flat on
top and coated with some kind of dark, gelatinous substance; this coating
covered all but a fringe of its hair at the edge of the temples.
Small as the creature was, however,
it was NOT the mummified body of a child!
Carefully, the men removed the figure and returned to
Casper.
At first, scientists were skeptical; nevertheless, Dr.
Henry Shapiro, an anthropologist from the American Museum of Natural History,
was intrigued enough to arrange for an X-ray examination of the tiny being. The
X-ray confirmed that Pedro (so named after the mountains it was found in)
possessed an irrefutably human-like skeleton with a complete set of ribs. The
arms were fully formed as were the legs and feet. The fontanels were closed,
indicating that it was indeed an adult.
The creature also had a complete set of adult teeth,
including a noticeably large and pointy set of canines (just like a vampire!)
An internal examination of Pedro showed that he had
been about 65 years old at the time of his death which dated far back in
history. Also evident was a damaged spine, a broken collarbone, and a smashed
skull. Evidently Pedro had died violently from a heavy blow to the head. This
explained the flattened appearance of the head and the dark, gelatinous
substance which turned out to be brain tissue and congealed blood.
Could this mummy be a fake? And, if so, who would have
created such a fake so long ago and sealed it inside a cave?
In 1993, French zoologist Dr. Francois de Sarre
suggested that Pedro could have been a human fetus suffering from abnormal
cranium and brain formation onto whose skeleton the skin of an adult man had
been carefully moulded in the same way Tzantzas created their world famous
shrunken heads and the infamous Fiji mermaid! But this would not explain Pedro's
adult teeth.
University of Wyoming's Professor of Anthropology
George Gill believed Pedro to belong to a race of unknown prehistoric men.
Modern Native Americans claim that this continent was,
and still is, home to a very aggressive race of little people whose descriptions
tally closely with Pedro! The Shoshone, for example, who are indigenous to the
region where the mummy was found, speak of little people who they say would
attack them with tiny bows and poison arrows. According to tradition, these
little people even kill their own when they become ill, either by decapitation,
or by smashing their skulls! Some of the various Native American names
given for the little people include: Geow-lud-mo-sis-eg, nimerigar, ninabineh,
ninimbeah, nunnehi (n��n�'h�), nunumbi�, yunwi tsunsdi (y��w�
tsunsdi').
Where is Pedro now?
After being displayed in sideshows for several years, the tiny
mummy was eventually purchased from Frank Carr by Ivan T. Goodman, a Casper car
dealer, who took it to New York City where it underwent the aforementioned
X-rays. Goodman died in 1950 and Pedro passed into the hands of Leonard Waller.
There has been no trace of the mummy since.
Other names for little people: Hawaiian Menehune
(small sacred workers); Irish Leprechauns; English Brownies;
German Kobolds and Gnomes.
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