Pembroke woman finds ‘alien-looking skull’ in her front yard

PEMBROKE – The thing definitely has a stark, menacing look.

And the object is, as the caller put it, “an alien-looking skull” about the size of a baseball.

The finder’s aunt, Reba Duncan, who was calling from Texas, first notified The Robesonian about the unusual partial skeleton that her niece had found in her yard outside the town limits of Pembroke.

“I thought it was awful strange looking,” Duncan said earlier this week, roughly four days after its discovery under the shrubby spread of a Christmas tree planted about two decades ago. “If it’s authentic bone, it’s nothing from this planet.”

Tanya Dial made the discovery. Or, it’s closer to the truth to say her frisky dog, Bishop — with its white-haired, church-like image spotting his black behind — found the skull. Bishop was chewing on it at the time.

“My dog is bad for digging things up,” she noted.

Usually after Bishop drags something home from his adventures, Dial said she’s likely to toss it on the trash pile.

Not this time, though.

“It’s something like I’ve not seen in my life,” said Dial, who lives in a three-bedroom mobile home in rural Robeson County.

She agreed to an interview at her place, where the agreeable bulldog, Bishop, was playing with her other dog, Hub, which is part lab. Bishop relished the attention from a complete stranger; Hub, not so much. He appeared to want some warm love but remained skeptical.

A winding dirt road, pocked here and there by potholes and mud puddles, takes you to her isolated home near some woods. Her grandfather’s old house is but a shout away on the property that she described as swampland.

Dial said she had only shown the skull to a few family members, such as her son and Duncan, her aunt.

“I haven’t shown it to anyone,” she replied, when asked if she has had it examined by someone in the know. She intends to take it to the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and hopefully have a researcher on staff take a look at its strangeness.

After giving it some thought, it brings to mind a bighorn sheep. Maybe a lamb to that species of sheep native to North America.

Taking it further, it brings to mind the sci-fi movie alien Predator.

The origin will take an expert to determine.

The shape of the skull is unique and uniform. A gaping hole appears on top of the head, and she imitates that odd opening with her mouth.

“It has a diamond-shaped skull,” Dial said as she carefully pulled the bony structure out of a plastic baggie. She kept the skeletal framework in a thermos cooler in her yard.

“One of the horns is broken off. The horns are curved,” she said, turning it over and over again. “It looks like it has four eye sockets. To me, it’s like something demonic or don’t look right.”

Perhaps by coincidence, Bishop and Hub never came around while she was showing it off like something from a P.T. Barnum freak show.

“That has been dead for a while,” Dial surmised. “I don’t know nothing that has horns on top of his head like that.”

She wondered if the skull had somehow surfaced over time from the white sand that coats her yard. Dial said, over the years, she has found “shells and other stuff” outside her home.

But nothing that compared to this extraterrestrial-looking curio.

She has lived on the 64-acre family old place since she was 7.

“I’m 58 years old,” said Dial, “and I’ve never seen anything like that. I’m going to keep it for right now. I don’t think it’s nothing from this world. It’s nothing like I’ve seen before.”

She flipped it over again in her hand.

“That’s a hole like an alien,” she said, once more pointing out the opening on the bony head. “I don’t know what that thing is.”