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Anomaly Physical Evidence Investigation Group & DNA Investigations |
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IUR F SPRING 1999 4 Peter Khoury pt 13
One might predict further that her DNA should match closely that of racial types in Finland, Iceland, or Scandinavia, given the long, thin blonde hair as direct evidence, plus her tall stature and fair skin from eyewitness testimony; but as we shall see below, that seems not to be the case. Because of the subsequent clarification of the nature of the anomalous hair DNA sample, additional controls from blood samples were obtained from the young man, his wife, and a Chinese man who spent some time in the same room as the alien hair (but who never contacted it directly).
From these, mitochondrial DNA was amplified and analyzed as before in the region 16,023–16,270. The results show that all three control samples lie very close to a modern human consensus, with few if any substitutions as seen for the alien hair. Thus, the Chinese man shows a single substitution at 16,223 (C to T), typical of most Asians; while the young man’s wife shows no substitutions at all. Finally, the young man shows a single substitution at 16,249 (T to C); a region near 16,190 remains unclear.
The heteroplasmies seen for DNA taken from the young man’s hair, in no more than one out of 6-12 clones, may therefore represent just occasional mutations in an aged hair, since they are not found in blood. In summary, the blonde hair has a strange and unusual DNA sequence, showing five consistent substitutions from a human consensus (present in all cloned sequences), which could not easily have come from anyone else in the Sydney area except by the rarest of chances; is not apparently due to any sort of laboratory contamination; and is found only in a few other people throughout the whole world (see below).
COMPARISON WITH OTHER DATA
A detailed survey of the vast literature on sequence variation in Hypervariable Region I of mitochondrial DNA (see Mitomap) revealed that only four persons from this entire literature, consisting of tens of thousands of individuals, contain the extremely rare C to T substitution at 16,108. Quite surprisingly, those four persons who contain a C to T substitution at 16,108 also contain all four of the other substitutions at 16,129, 16,162, 16,172, and 16,304 in the blonde’s sample, yet show almost no other changes in the entire hypervariable region of 380 base pairs (one person differs by a single base).
Hence, we may conclude with high probability, that those four human persons and the tall blonde female share a common maternal ancestor, some-time in the past 2,000–10,000 years, given known rates of substitution in mitochondrial DNA. Indeed, a perfect 5/5 match between the tall blonde and those four persons indicates that little if any random substitution has occurred in the intervening period. Who might those four persons be, who seem to share a distant maternal ancestor with the tall blonde female, who left her hair with a young man in Sydney in 1992?
It turns out that all four are of the Mongoloid Chinese racial type, with presumably Asian appearance as well as dark black hair. One was included as part of a small group from China, while the other three were found as just 4% in a large group of Taiwanese (see D84952, D84956, and D84985 from the DNA Data Bank of Japan). All four thus belong to a rare third human racial type (again, as defined by DNA sequence), found only in Asia.
(See S. Horai and K. Hayasaka, “Intraspecific Nucleotide Sequence Differences in the Major Noncoding Region of Human Mitochondrial DNA,” American J. Human Genetics 46 (1990): 828–842; and S. Horai, et al., “MtDNA Polymorphism in East Asian Popu-lations,” American J. Human Genetics 59 (1996): 579– 590.)
What implications might these comparisons have for possible authenticity of the hair sample as collected by the young man in Sydney in 1992? While it would not be impossible for him to have had sexual contact with some fair skinned, nearly albino female from the Sydney area, such an explanation is ruled out by the DNA evidence, which fits only a Chinese Mongoloid as a donor of the hair. Furthermore, while it might be possible to find a few Chinese in Sydney with the same DNA as seen in just 4% of Taiwanese women, it would not be plausible to find a Chinese woman here with thin, almost clear hair, having the same rare DNA.
Finally, that thin blonde hair could not plausibly represent a chemically bleached Chinese (including the root), because then its DNA could not easily have been extracted. The most probable donor of the hair must therefore be as the young man claims: a tall blonde female who does not need much color, in her hair or skin as a form of protection against the sun, perhaps because she does not require it.
Could this young man really have provided, by chance, a hair sample which contains DNA from one of the rarest human lineages known (family C2), that lies further from the mainstream than any other except for African Pygmies and Aboriginals (family C1)? Note that a few other persons from China, Japan or Korea show a partial 4/5 match to the blonde hair DNA, but none to date show the rare change at 16,108.Strange Evidence : [01] [02] [03] [04] [05] [06] [07] [08] [09] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]
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