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 (nûñnë'hï), nunumbiï, yunwi tsunsdi (yûñwï 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.
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