The narrative was, perhaps, a little too good to be true. When news broke last month of the so-called "Buddha from space" - a swastika-emblazoned statue, apparently 1,000 years old, that had been carved out of a meteorite and looted by a Nazi ethnologist - the world was enthralled.
There were only, it turns out, a few catches. According to two experts, the statue may be a European counterfeit. It was probably made in the 20th century and may well not have been looted by the Nazis, the experts said. The bit about the meteorite, though, still stands.
According to Buddhism specialist Achim Bayer, the 24cm-high statue bears 13 features easily identifiable by experts as "pseudo-Tibetan"- and which sit uneasily with researchers' speculation last month that it was probably made in the 11th-century pre-Buddhist Bon culture.
The "pseudo-Tibetan" features include the statue's shoes, trousers, hand positioning and the fact that the Buddha has a full beard rather than the "rather thin" facial hair usually given to a deity in Tibetan and Mongolian art. Bayer said he believed the statue was a European counterfeit made between 1910 and 1970.
"Up to date, no acknowledged authority in the field of Tibetan or Mongolian art has publicly deemed the statue authentic and the issue has to be considered uncontroversial," wrote the University of Seoul academic.
The statue's Asian provenance is not the only aspect being questioned. Last month, University of Stuttgart geologist Elmar Buchner said the statue's previous owner claimed it had been brought to Europe in the late 1930s by Ernst Schafer, a Nazi ethnologist who led an SS expedition to Tibet.
