THE MYSTERY OF THE
CRYSTAL SKULL

A strange fad emerged in the early 20th century: Life-size facsimiles of human skulls carved from clear quartz crystal began showing up in the collections of museums and wealthy treasure hunters. Purported to have magical powers, these crystal skulls came with action-packed accounts of their discoveries and otherworldly tales of their origins. But who made them? When, where, and how were they made? And for what purpose? That’s the mystery. Here’s the story of the most fascinating of them all—the Mitchell-Hedges skull.

THE PLACE OF THE FALLEN STONES

British Honduras, 1924: Intrepid British adventurer F. A. Mitchell-Hedges is exploring the ruins of the lost Mayan city of Lubaantun, which means “Place of Fallen Stones.” Joining him on the expedition is his adopted daughter Anna. It’s her 17th birthday. While the rest of Mitchell-Hedges’s team is taking a siesta, Anna climbs to the top of a pyramid to get a view of the ocean. But something at her feet catches her eye—there’s a light emanating from a hole in the stones. She crouches down and peers into the dark room, and there, under a crumbled altar, is a glowing human skull made of clear quartz crystal. Anna runs back down the pyramid as fast as she can, yelling for her father to come see what she found. Later, they lower Anna—the smallest member of the team—via a rope into the room. She picks up the heavy artifact and can immediately feel its power.

The local Mayans later tell Mitchell-Hedges that if the government finds out about their discovery, the crystal skull will be confiscated, so they give the father and daughter permission to take it out of the country.

THE SKULL OF DOOM

That’s one story of where this particular crystal skull came from. There are other stories, and other skulls: one is on display in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris; another lives in the archives of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Since the late 19th century, the true nature of these Mesoamerican artifacts has been a source of heated debate—and the most controversial is the Mitchell-Hedges skull. The first big question: Who made it? Theories range from the ancient Mayans to cultures that predate them (such as people who traveled to Central America from the lost city of Atlantis). There are even claims that the crystal skulls were deposited on Earth by aliens.

F. A. Mitchell-Hedges first referred to his as the “Skull of Doom,” the power of which he said could “kill a man.” And even though he said he wanted to be buried with it, when he died in 1959 it became the property of his daughter, Anna, and she wasn’t sure what to do with it. “It is a thing of evil in the wrong hands,” she said at the time.

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AXIS OF POWER

In 1964 Anna Mitchell-Hedges lent the crystal skull to a San Francisco art conservator named Frank Dorland in the hopes of finding out where it came from. “The first time I kept the skull in my home overnight,” Dorland told author Richard Garvin in his book The Crystal Skull, “I was awakened by unusual noises. It sounded like a large jungle cat was prowling through the house, accompanied by the sound of chimes and bells. When we got up the next morning, our possessions were strewn all about the house. Yet, all the doors and windows were still closed and locked from the inside.”

The skull spent six years in the care of Dorland, who, like others who have owned it, became obsessed with it. After studying the artifact in his lab, Dorland theorized that it was carved not from one but from three crystals. But he needed better equipment to prove it, so he took the skull to Hewlett-Packard’s crystal labs in Santa Clara, California. Initial tests determined that it is comprised of a single crystal, but that’s about the only conclusive thing they were able to find.

•It appeared that whoever made the thing did it in “total disregard to the natural crystal axis,” said Dorland. If you carve against the axis, the crystal should shatter, or, as one crystallographer put it, “The damn thing shouldn’t even be.”

•The HP techs could find no microscopic indications of cut marks made by metal instruments, so exactly how it was made remained a mystery.

•Further tests determined that the skull was probably polished by hand with sand over a period of time using “300 man-years of effort.”

By that point (around 1970), Anna Mitchell-Hedges had had enough of scientific studies. She took a Greyhound bus to California, retrieved her crystal skull from Dorland, and never let scientists near it for the rest of her life.

GOOD VIBRATIONS

Mitchell-Hedges settled in Kitchener, Ontario, where she opened a motel and made the crystal skull available for viewing—for a nominal fee—to curiosity-seekers and spiritualists. She’d tell her visitors that the skull was once the property of the High Priest of the Maya, that it had the power to “cause visions and cure cancer,” and could even “be used to transfer the knowledge of an elder to a younger person.” Right before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, she said, the skull turned cloudy. She would invite her customers to touch the object, explaining that it always has a surface temperature of 70° Fahrenheit, no matter how cold or warm the room was. A visiting reporter once wrote that the skull is “strangely luminous, reflecting a piercing blue-white light from its eye sockets.”

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And it wasn’t the “Skull of Doom” anymore. “That was one of my father’s jokes,” said Mitchell-Hedges. He’d said it was evil in the hopes of deterring would-be robbers. She called it the “Skull of Love.” And it got a whole new lease on life thanks to the burgeoning New Age movement in the 1970s and ’80s. “Peter O’Toole once sat with it for four hours,” she told a reporter in 1996, “right over there on the carpet—he wanted to lie down.” Mitchell-Hedges also bragged that Shirley MacLaine and William Shatner had made the trek to her motel to bask in its power. Science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke called the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull “the weirdest gem in the world.”

RETURN TO LUBAANTUN

In 1981, when Mitchell-Hedges was 74 years old, she received a call from Bill Homann, a fellow adventurer and a huge admirer of her father. She and Homann became friends, and she later moved in with him in Indiana. In 1989 and again in 1996, they went back to British Honduras (now called Belize) to retrace the footsteps of the 1924 expedition. And in 2002, they were married. (She was 40 years older than him; he explained that they did it so she could be added to his health insurance plan.) For the last eight years of Anna’s life, Homann was her primary caregiver and, as he told the Illinois Times, “She is my mentor and spiritual leader.”

Anna died in 2007 at 100 years old. She attributed her long life to the skull, often telling people, “I take care of it, and it takes care of me.” After a brief but contentious custody battle with the Mitchell-Hedges family, the skull was put in Homann’s care.

SCREEN GEM

In 2008 Homann was the subject of the Sci-Fi Channel documentary Mysteries of the Crystal Skull. Here’s how TV Guide described it: Glimmers of ancient civilizations and lost worlds have forever intrigued and tantalized but few ancient mysteries generate quite the fervor of the Crystal Skulls: 13 quartz crystal human skulls, now scattered to the four winds, discovered amid ruins of Mayan and Aztec societies. Legend tells us that should they ever be united, they may unleash untold energy, revealing secrets vital to the survival of humankind.

The documentary, presented by NBC newsman Lester Holt, followed Homann through dense jungles to Mayan ruins, scuba diving and spelunking, searching for another crystal skull (to no avail). That was only one of several documentaries that aired that year, all trying to cash in on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The movie follows Indiana Jones to the Amazon jungle in Peru as he looks for a crystal skull, described as “a mind weapon, a new frontier of psychic warfare.” Despite lukewarm reviews, the movie grossed nearly $800 million worldwide. All of a sudden, crystal skulls were all over the news. And then, a few months later when the hype died down, they were gone again.

Until December 2012—that was the month that the world was supposed to end, at least according to the ancient Mayan “Long Count” calendar. The only thing that would keep planet Earth from “falling off its axis,” claimed the true believers, was for all 13 crystal skulls to be reunited at a sacred Mayan site.

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HEAD CASE

Of all the weird news stories related to that “prophecy” in 2012, one of the weirdest was the report of a lawsuit filed on behalf of Dr. Jaime Awe, director of the Institute of Archaeology of Belize. Awe was suing the Mitchell-Hedges estate, demanding they “return the artifact to the people of Belize.” Also being sued were Lucasfilm, Walt Disney Pictures, and Paramount for a cut of the “illegal profits” generated by the stolen skull. “Lucasfilm never sought, nor was given permission to utilize the Mitchell-Hedges Skull or its likeness in the Film,” wrote Adam Tracy, the lawyer who filed the suit. When asked by LiveScience if the skull is genuine, Tracy answered, “The government of Belize does not believe the skull is fake. As such, I do not foresee any further testing of the artifact.”

There were a few problems with this lawsuit from the outset. For one, the crystal skull in the movie doesn’t have that much in common with the Mitchell-Hedges skull—it’s larger, milkier in color, and it was found in South America, not Central America. Indiana Jones himself even backs this up in this line of dialogue from the movie: “It isn’t anything like the Mitchell-Hedges skull. Look at the cranium—how it’s elongated at the back.” Another problem: the government of Belize was never in possession of the artifact in the first place, so it didn’t have much legal footing.

But the biggest problem with Dr. Awe’s lawsuit was that Dr. Awe himself didn’t know anything about it! After it was reported in nearly every major news outlet worldwide (that’s what first drew us to this story), Awe said he was approached by some people who told him they could get the skull back, but he told them he wasn’t interested. It turned out that the lawsuit wasn’t even filed in Belize, but in Chicago by Eyezzon Productions. It was a publicity stunt. The organizers—including Awe’s supposed lawyer—were planning to hold a concert on December 21, 2012, in Xunantunich, another Maya site in Belize. The newly returned Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull would be revealed at the end of the concert, and the world would be saved…or something like that. The event never happened. There was very little chance that Belize’s government would ever issue permits for a huge concert to be held at one of their most sensitive and culturally significant sites. As for Dr. Awe—he’s a respected archaeologist with a reputation to maintain. He said he wished to “disassociate” himself from the lawsuit. Besides, he said, he doesn’t even think the crystal skull comes from Belize.

The crystal skull mystery continues on page 329.

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