THE MYSTERY OF THE
CRYSTAL SKULL, PART II

Just like their on-screen counterpart, real-life crystal skulls are shrouded in mystery and controversy—none more so than the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull. (Part I is on page 199.)

THE PLOT THICKENS

Anna Mitchell-Hedges maintained until her 100th year that it was she who found the crystal skull in Belize on her 17th birthday in 1924. Or maybe it was 1926. In most versions, it was “on top of a pyramid,” but other times it was “under a collapsed altar inside a temple.” Her accounts changed over the years—even contradicting her father, who once wrote that he found the skull “in the 1930s.” There’s a lot about Anna’s versions of events that haven’t added up over the years. That’s a habit she picked up from her father.

STORY TIME

Just who was this F. A. Mitchell-Hedges, anyway? His given name was Frederick Albert, but he went by Mike. Born in London in 1882, the self-described “adventurer, traveler, and writer” spoke in a thick British accent and always had a pipe in his mouth. He was rumored to be one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones, but George Lucas, who created the character, has never confirmed that. Mitchell-Hedges’s 1954 autobiography, Danger My Ally, doesn’t even mention the word “archaeologist.” In that book and others (with titles like Battles with Giant Fish), and on his popular New York–based radio show in the 1930s (with jungle drums beating in the background), Mitchell-Hedges would dramatically detail his harrowing “true stories” of fighting off scary savages, wrestling sea monsters, and discovering the “cradle of civilization” in Nicaragua. Listeners had no way of knowing whether his stories were real, but it was all very entertaining. And just as outlandish as his exploits were the famous friends he claimed he’d made along the way.

After leaving England at 18 (he didn’t want to be a banker like his father), Mitchell-Hedges ended up in New York, where he worked as a stockbroker by day and a high-stakes poker player at night. It was during this time that he may (or may not) have shared a room with noted Marxist Leon Trotsky. He later wrote that Britain’s MI6 wanted him to spy on the Russian revolutionary, but he declined (Trotsky always paid his rent on time, he said).

In 1913, when Mitchell-Hedges was in Mexico looking for work, he told of being captured by the revolutionary general Pancho Villa, who accused him of being a spy. Standing in front of a firing squad, the adventurer claimed he was able to save himself by singing an “off-key rendition of ‘God Save the King.’ ” Villa took Mitchell-Hedges under his wing and made him a spy. That’s when the Englishman said he first developed an interest in archaeology. He came to believe that there must be some link between the lost city of Atlantis and the ancient Maya, and he started funding expeditions to discover that link.

How much does it cost to attend Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books? Nothing.

It was a few years later, in 1917, when Mitchell-Hedges was in Canada, that a good friend of his died, leaving behind a 10-year-old orphan named Anna. He “informally” adopted her. (But even that story has been disputed; some suspect that F. A. Mitchell-Hedges was Anna’s biological father.)

DANGER HIS ALLY

Piecing together Mitchell-Hedges’s story doesn’t get any easier after reading Danger My Ally. The thing he’s most known for only gets one paragraph in the entire manuscript. Next to a page-size photo of the “sinister Skull of Doom” he writes that it…

…is made of pure rock crystal and according to scientists it must have taken 150 years, generation after generation working all days of their lives, patiently rubbing down with sand an immense block of rock crystal until the perfect Skull emerged. It is at least 3,600 years old and according to legend was used by the High Priest of the Maya when performing esoteric rites. It is said that when he willed death with the help of the skull, death invariably followed. It has been described as the embodiment of all evil. I do not wish to try and explain this phenomena. How it came into my possession I have reason for not revealing.

Five years later, Mitchell-Hedges died, leaving no more clues behind. And in subsequent printings of Danger My Ally, all mentions of the crystal skull were removed. In fact, the only source for Anna’s version of events was Anna herself. Her father wrote a lot about his time in Central America, and he described the artifacts he found there in great detail…with the curious exception of the crystal skull. What was he hiding?

ITEM NO. 54

When actual scientists and historians attempt to trace the story of the crystal skull, the first verifiable account of the rock’s association with the Mitchell-Hedges family doesn’t come until October 15, 1943, when item no. 54 was put on the auction block at Sotheby’s in London. Here’s the listing:

A Superb Life-Size Crystal Carving of a Human Skull, the lower jaw separate, the details are correctly rendered and the carver has given the orbits, zygomatic arches and mastoid processes the similitude of their natural forms, glabellar-occipital.

A receipt reveals that F. A. Mitchell-Hedges purchased the skull at that auction for £400 (roughly $5,000 in today’s money) from a London antique dealer named Sydney Burney. That would explain why Mitchell-Hedges never mentioned finding the skull on his 1930s radio show—he hadn’t even bought it yet.

Technical name for stomach rumbling: borborygmus.

Anna Mitchell-Hedges didn’t deny that her father had purchased the skull at that auction, but she said he was buying it back. She claimed that years earlier, when her father needed funds to finance an expedition, he gave the skull to Burney, a childhood friend, as collateral for a loan. Instead of giving it back, however, Burney (or his son) tried to sell it to the highest bidder. When Mitchell-Hedges got wind of it, he “was so furious that for a while he was unable to speak.” He called the auction house and told them to call off the sale; they refused, so he went there and bought it back himself. That was Anna’s story, and she stuck to it.

A TIP FROM UNCLE JOHN

According to the Archaeological Institute of America, if you find an artifact in your backyard, try not to move it. If you have to, take photos of it first, and then call your state’s archaeology office (every state has one) and they will send someone to authenticate it.

CASTING DOUBT

Of the numerous scholars, scientists, and skeptics who question the veracity of Mitchell-Hedges’s claims about the skull, the most vocal is Joe Nickell, a senior research fellow with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. “It’s clear her father bought it off a collector,” he wrote in the 1988 book Secrets of the Supernatural. Nickell points to a letter that Sydney Burney had written a decade prior to that auction: “The rock-crystal skull was for several years in the possession of the collector from whom I bought it, and he in his turn had it from an Englishman in whose collection it had been also for several years.” The only actual “evidence” that F. A. Mitchell-Hedges had the skull prior to that auction was a 1999 report by a British inn owner who said the explorer and his daughter had the skull with them when they stayed there in the early 1930s.

After all the conflicting origin stories, it becomes more and more difficult to say for certain that the crystal skull is genuine, but that hasn’t stopped true believers from saying it is. “While its history may be somewhat controversial,” says the website CrystalSkulls.com, “the fact remains that the Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skull is a true so called ‘out-of-place-artifact’—meaning that despite the most evolved research, including extensive laboratory examination by Silicon Valley’s Hewlett-Packard, no one has been able to prove it is a hoax.”

The end? Not really. To hear what modern science has to say about the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull—and what it’s been up to in recent years—fund an expedition over to page 436.

Mozart had a childhood phobia of trumpets.