Jaime Maussan, a journalist from another planet: ‘Put me in a debate with any scientist, I’ll tear them to pieces’

Jaime Maussan has seen things that you wouldn’t believe. Strange events that to the untrained eye may seem irrelevant and disconnected, even delusional. But for him, after a three-decade-long career spent deciphering the sky and its hidden messages — through low-resolution videos or solitary sightings at dawn — these events are irrefutable clues to the existence of life beyond Earth.

The first time was one night in 1991, in the Basilica of Guadalupe, when the Virgin herself spoke to him. The angry voice was inside his head. He was scared to death. Skeptics will say this is a lie; the naive will call it a miracle. “I think it’s a phenomenon that could be more related to the presence of intelligent [life],” he counters. Because, what’s the Old Testament, in essence, if not the story of a being from another galaxy? Someone who came to our planet, through an interdimensional portal, to sow the ideas that will save humanity from its self-destruction? “How can you explain Jesus to me?” he challenges, quoting the Gospel of John, 18:36-40: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

Maussan believes that the Popocatépetl volcano — located in the central Mexican states of Puebla, Morelos, and Mexico — contains one of those interdimensional portals. He even monitors it with a camera.

It’s a dull January day in Mexico City, rainy, with some fog… an ideal climate for contacting extraterrestrial intelligence. Maussan welcomes EL PAÍS into his home, which is dug into a hill in the Desierto de los Leones National Park. The residence is an architectural display of sustainable housing, fused with the forest. There are three underground houses, joined by long galleries under which streams run and the roots of the trees merge with the foundations. The round rooms have domed ceilings, while the walls are built with adobe bricks, baked from the soil that was extracted from the construction site. There’s also a tower that’s straight out of a Philip K. Dick novel: in the shape of a square pyramid, it’s covered in copper. On the inside, it’s lined with the wood that belonged to a tree trunk that once stood in the same place. The two other wooden cabins, each more than 150 years old, have been restored. After three decades appearing on TV, talking about Martians, Maussan has made a lot of money.

He sports his usual look: an explorer’s vest, cream pants, a well-trimmed beard and neat white hair, parted on the left. For the interview, he sits on a brown leather sofa, in the tower’s living room. Every so often, his walkie-talkie crackles with a message from his private security detail —three people who watch the estate 24 hours a day — or from the maintenance workers, four or five people who keep the seven-acre property in good condition.

The first time he felt the extraterrestrial intelligence that surrounds us — that one-on-one with the Virgin of Guadalupe — he only heard a voice in his head. He narrates the experience almost word for word, just as he recounted it some time ago to the journalist Adela Micha: he was recording a program about the Virgin in the Basilica and he was left alone with her image (the rest of the team went out to smoke). He looked into her eyes and fell into them, as if her irises were a well. He then felt a blow to the back of his neck and a voice that asked:”What do you want from me?” For some reason, this man, unafraid of revealing what’s hidden, didn’t share this experience in public until more than two decades later.

It would take a few years to see — with his own eyes — the next piece of the puzzle. One night, in the last year of the last millennium, Maussan was snoring inside his sleeping bag somewhere in the Sierra de La Rumorosa, the rocky, bare desert on the border between the city of Tecate and California. A couple of years earlier, three lost mountaineers had to spend the night in the same place. As they heard snakes approaching, they took refuge in a tree, to wait for the morning light. From there, they saw some phosphorescent beings, surrounding them in a friendly manner. Following the trail of those strangely-colored humanoids, Maussan returned to the site with the three young men, a guide and a member of his team. But after a day of marching through the desert, exhausted, he was no longer in the mood for UFOs.

His companions woke him up at 2 a.m. “Jaime, come, come, let’s go.”

“I didn’t pay attention,” he grumbles. “I pretended not to hear them. They kept calling me: ‘Well, what do you want?’”

“Come and see this.”

“If it’s a UFO, film it, I’ll see it tomorrow.”

“No, no, no, no, no, come now!”

So, angry and half-asleep, he went out to see what was going on. And there they were, in a ravine below the camp: two of the phosphorescent beings. “I had a [very old] night vision camera and I tried to record, but it didn’t work. They looked like they were talking. Their eyes were shining very brightly. Five minutes later, they vanished. Did I talk to them? No. Have I had communication with [such] beings? No. Do I have telepathic powers? No, no, no.”

Maussan, in reality, is a pragmatic guy. If you ask him, he’ll answer that he isn’t a ufologist, but a journalist. “I remain skeptical… but whoever investigates and discovers things cannot act like a fool.” In fact, his theory about Christ is a very loose interpretation of the famous scale created by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev: a way to measure the technological development of civilizations. Jesus of Nazareth would, hence, be a Type III being… creatures from futures so evolved that “they can go from one galaxy to another.”

Mummies and frauds

But let’s take it one step at a time. Who is Jaime Maussan? Well, he was once a typical journalist. He won the National Journalism Award from the Journalists Club of Mexico on three occasions. His work, recognized both in Mexico and in the United States, has involved pioneering environmental coverage. He’s a reporter with a keen eye for social issues.

In the 1980s, he crossed paths with a Swiss man who claimed to have evidence about the existence of UFOs. Maussan found it convincing and did a report on it for 60 Minutes, where he worked. And that’s when everything changed. He got a taste for extraterrestrial things… and strictly terrestrial problems were suddenly not enough. In 1991, he broke records on Mexican television as a guest on Nino Canún’s ¿Y usted que opina? (“And what’s your opinion?”): he spent 11 and a half hours on live TV debating Martians. The next day, he recalls, “half of Mexico was talking about it.” He was showered with invitations to give lectures around the world. Televisa offered him his own TV show, Tercer Milenio (Third Millennium), which continues 30 years later.

In 2023, his face appeared in the main international newspapers — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent — and on Al Jazeera’s website and channel. He had been invited to the Mexican Congress to try to convince the legislators about the existence of extraterrestrial life. And he didn’t go alone: he brought along two mummies that belong to a supposed “extraterrestrial civilization,” discovered in Peru circa 2017.

The consensus of the scientific community is that this was the biggest fraud in a long career that’s full of them. But Maussan says that these comments no longer matter to him… that time will put everyone in their place. Still, his path is a lonely one: it’s exhausting, almost biblical, depending on how you look at it. He faces false prophets and a lack of faith, as well as repeated insults from the public and the scientific establishment. From time to time, this leads him to explode in front of some journalist who’s not inclined to believe him. Yet, it doesn’t matter: he has a mission. “The war we’re facing is very difficult,” he admits, “but we’re going to win it. For the benefit of humanity.”

He talks about the drones that have flown over the East Coast of the United States. For him, these are clearly not drones, but rather, intelligent life forms. “We’ve been so brainwashed that, when we talk about this, [people look at you] as if you’ve gone mad. [And] who brainwashed us? Governments. Especially [the U.S. government]. Why? Because [acknowledging UFOs would mean] a paradigm shift. Can you imagine if, in 1947 — when the spaceship with the [extraterrestrial] beings was found in Roswell — they had honestly said that an extraterrestrial ship had crashed on Earth? The world would be very different. I believe that a great crime was committed by deceiving humanity.”

That’s Maussan. You don’t need to ask him too many questions, because he asks himself questions. And he answers them, too. He does this constantly, like a kind of internal monologue out loud, with an audience rather than interviewers. Maybe it’s because he’s spent so many years on TV.

He returns to the subject of interdimensional portals, like that of the Popocatépetl volcano. Apparently, flying objects circulate around its crater. “I can’t prove it,” he admits, “but it’s obvious that [the crater] is used by other intelligent life forms to arrive, instantly, from very far away places to Earth.” He adds: “You don’t have to hallucinate or anything: you just have to see things as they are.” Sometimes, he can be quite funny.

Other times, though, he’s not so funny. Like when he claims that his new line of food supplements, based on seaweed, can keep pediatric cancer patients alive when chemotherapy doesn’t work. This dangerous kind of statement, heard whenever some new and miraculous pseudo-medicine from a herbalist appears, has been refuted a thousand times by the medical community.

“Diabetes almost disappears [if you use these supplements], but it doesn’t completely. Cancer almost disappears… but it [actually] doesn’t,” he’ll eventually clarify. “I myself am an example [of the effectiveness]: I’m 71 — I’ll soon be 72 — and I’m as good as new, brother. I don’t have a single illness,” he emphasizes, while coughing. “Well, I caught the flu. But I don’t have a bad prostate, or liver, kidney, or heart [issues]. I have a lot of energy. I work every day, 10 or 12 hours.”

Another sensitive issue is the supposed discovery of the extraterrestrial mummies of Peru, which he presented in the Mexican Congress. Thierry Jamin — a French explorer, generally described by the scientific community as a pseudo-historian, or pseudo-archaeologist — said he had discovered them in 2017. Maussan was interested. He went to investigate them with a group of “scientists.”

“We found mummified — or, rather, dried corpses — of beings from two different species. One was [23.6-inches-long], while the other was practically human, with three enormous fingers on each hand and foot. [It had an elongated head], very thick bones, very large eye sockets.” He says that they did DNA and carbon-14 analyses, [determining] that the remains were between 1,000 and 2,000 years old.

“There are two possibilities,” he notes. “One, that it’s a different species that suddenly appeared and disappeared without a trace. The other is that they’re extraterrestrials. Why do I think they’re extraterrestrials? Because most of them have implants of very rare metals inside their bodies.”

There’s also a third possibility, which the international scientific community agrees on, as well as the Peruvian government: that the mummies are a fraud. When this is pointed out to him, Maussan becomes agitated, raises his voice, gesticulates nervously. There’s a feeling of aggression and tiredness at being questioned again. Scientists, he growls, are against him. They’re afraid that the discovery will change the history of humanity.

“They hate me in many ways, because I tell them the truth, because they don’t do research. Put me in a debate with any scientist: I’ll tear them to pieces.”

Massan has sued the Peruvian government… a trial that’s costing him a fortune. But it’s a fortune well-spent, because, as he predicts, there’s no way for the Peruvians to win. “The bodies weren’t modified — that’s a huge lie — [and] they’ve never met a person as determined as I am. I want to take the bodies to the best universities, to determine whether they’re real or not. When I do this, humanity will be shocked.”

The rest of the interview — about 90 minutes — continues along these lines. Afterwards, he’ll show EL PAÍS his impressive residence and pose for the last pictures for the article. Then, before saying goodbye, while chatting a little bit about everything, he’ll comment in passing: “And what do you think about [the president of Venezuela, Nicolás] Maduro? That guy is really crazy, huh?”

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