583: Legend of the 13 Crystal Skulls | From Mars to the Maya
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Frank Dorland watched quietly from the corner of the lab at Hewlett-Packard's research department. HB scientists had tested thousands of crystals. Their quartz technology powered the modern world. But they'd never seen anything like this.

This was the famous Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull. It was over 10,000 years old, yet the quartz was as clear as glass. They lowered the skull into a bath of benzyl alcohol and turned on the polarized light to examine its structure. The test results didn't make sense. The skull defied everything the scientists knew about physics, geology, engineering, and optics.

The level of technology required to create the Crystal Skull didn't exist thousands of years ago, and it doesn't exist now, at least not on Earth. For over 20 years, the CIA ran Project Stargate, a program focused on remote viewing. When the Stargate files were declassified, the targets of interest weren't surprising.

The CIA had remote viewers looking at facilities in the Soviet Union, China, and the Middle East. But one target stood out from the rest: Mars. But the CIA wasn't interested in present-day Mars. They were interested in ancient Mars. Using the information in the envelope, please focus on 40.89 degrees north, 9.55 degrees west.

I wanna say it looks like, I don't know, it sort of looks like pyramids. I just keep seeing very large people. They appear thin and tall, but they're very large, wearing some kind of strange clothes. - So in 1984, they sent one of their most talented psychics, Joe McMoneagle, to ancient Mars. He saw tall, slender beings with advanced technology.

We did a couple of episodes about this where you can read and hear, in Joe's own words, exactly what he saw on Mars. Links down there in your fanny pack. On the surface of Mars were towers made of pure crystal that could store and transmit information across vast distances. These were not just buildings, they were giant computers. The Martian civilization was technologically advanced, but their atmosphere was being stripped away and they couldn't stop it.

The Martians knew they were facing extinction, so they preserved their knowledge in 13 crystal skulls. Each skull contained the complete history of a different world where intelligent life existed. 12 skulls represented those 12 planets. The 13th skull connected them all. One skull to rule them all. One skull to find them.

So the 13th... One skull to bring them all, and in the darkness, bind them. You done? Oh, sorry, but that was kind of a layup. Keep going, Precious.

Anyway, the 13th skull contained the combined knowledge of every civilization in our galaxy. They gave the skulls containing this knowledge to the Atlanteans, whose technology was almost advanced as their own. In Atlantis, priests built temples for each skull and kept them closely guarded. They understood the skull's power and knew that, in the wrong hands, this knowledge could destroy worlds.

For thousands of years, the crystal skulls were safely kept in Atlantis. But then Atlantis faced its own extinction event: a great flood. Before the continent sank beneath the waves, Atlantean priests transported the skulls to different locations around the world. They entrusted the most powerful skull, the 13th skull, to the Maya. According to Maya legend, this skull was different. It could communicate telepathically and respond to any question.

The skull knew mankind's true origin and purpose in the universe. It knew the truth behind every mystery, including the pyramids, Stonehenge, and even Atlantis. All you had to do was ask. The legend says that when all 13 skulls are brought together, the power of the gods will be unleashed, and the fate of the entire human race will be revealed. But the skulls won't be found until mankind is worthy.

So for 12,000 years the skulls remained hidden, waiting for the day when the human race could be trusted with such great power. Then in January 1924, that day arrived.

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The jungle of British Honduras held ancient secrets, and it was determined to keep them.

Fertilance vipers and coral snakes hid in decaying leaves. You had to watch your step. Their venom could kill you within hours. But you also had to watch the trees. Jaguars attacked from above. Their jaws could crush a human skull. Few explorers made it this far into Maya territory, but Frederick Mitchell Hedges wasn't an explorer. He was an adventurer.

Mitchell Hedges believed great discoveries weren't made in a library. They were made in the field, in the dirt. He titled his autobiography, "Danger, My Ally." And here in the jungle, danger was everywhere. Mosquitoes carrying malaria filled the air. Spiders, scorpions, and fire ants covered the vines. Parasites were in the water. Flesh-eating bot flies were in the mud. None of this frightened F.A. Mitchell Hedges.

He was a spy and a soldier. He was captured by and escaped dangerous tribes. He fought deadly animals with his bare hands. He explored ancient ruins and discovered buried treasure.

The stories of his adventures made him a bit of a celebrity back in England. This guy sounds like a real-life Indiana Jones. Well, he kind of was. Much of the story from the fourth Indiana Jones movie, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, was based on this legend of the 13 skulls. Uh, uh, excuse me. There was no fourth Indiana Jones movie. 2008 with Cate Blanchett and Shia LaBeouf? Eh, doesn't ring a bell. Really? Because... There were only three Indiana Jones movies, and I'll hear nothing more about it. Fine. Fine.

Mitchell Hedges had been to Central America many times, but this expedition in January 1924 was unique. Mitchell Hedges was obsessed with lost cities and ancient civilizations, especially the Maya. Their sophisticated knowledge of math and astronomy seemed to appear suddenly in their historical record. He speculated that an advanced culture helped the Maya, or rather the survivors of an advanced culture, the survivors of Atlantis.

Local workers in British Honduras, now Belize, told Mitchell Hedges stories about star people. These beings appeared suddenly, shared knowledge with the Maya, and then vanished. Some descendants of the Maya believed those beings were from Atlantis. Mitchell Hedges believed it too. Now local guides were leading him through the jungle to find a lost city that could finally prove his theory.

It was slow going through the jungle when Mitchell Hedges thought he saw a break in the canopy above, barely noticeable. He signaled for everyone to stop. He crouched and started digging in the dirt. About six inches down, he thought he felt something. He called for help. It took only a few minutes to clear the soil and then they saw it. A gleaming white stone. The legend was true.

F.A. Mitchell Hedges had found an ancient lost city. He had no idea he was about to discover something much, much older. F.A. Mitchell Hedges and his team spent days clearing the site. The ancient Maya city was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. Its stones were perfectly cut and fitted together without mortar. This wasn't typical Maya construction. The walls reminded him of ancient sites in Egypt, halfway across the world.

There were homes, markets, temples, an amphitheater, and at the center of it all, a great pyramid. These were the ruins of Lavantun, which translates to "place of the fallen stones." And you can't help but wonder, where did the stones fall from? Mitchell Hedges documented everything in his field journal: the position of each stone, the alignments of the buildings. He was looking for proof that an advanced civilization once spanned the globe.

After clearing some debris from the top of the pyramid, a small opening was revealed. Forty feet below, they saw a glint, a flash of light, like something glowing in the darkness. Mitchell Hedges measured the opening. It was much too small for him to fit through. He needed one of the younger, thinner men.

They all refused. They said this was a temple and it was cursed and they shouldn't disturb whatever's inside. Mitchell Hedges was not deterred. - He didn't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus. - He didn't, but his local guides did. He looked at their faces. All the excitement turned to fear. He asked, "Does nobody have the courage to make the greatest discovery in history?" There was only silence. Then from the back of the group, a soft voice said, "I'll do it."

Mitchell Hedges' 17-year-old daughter stepped forward. Anna had been her father's traveling companion since she was 10 years old. She was just as fearless as he was, and maybe just as reckless. Anna crouched over the opening and scanned the cavern below. A few seconds later, she turned around and said, "Fetch me the rope." It was her 17th birthday in 1924. Anna climbed to the top of the pyramid with two ropes wrapped around her body. Workers carefully lowered her into the void.

When she reached the floor of the temple, she approached the altar. She fell to her knees and began digging with her bare hands. A few minutes later, she tugged twice on the rope, the signal to come back up. For days we kept seeing something shining through the stones where the sun was giving. And of course, we were anxious to get to that one spot. I went to pick it up because I had smaller hands than the other people did. And I picked it up and showed it to my father.

And he just couldn't believe that we found this beautiful crystal skull. Now what? She didn't have to put a bag of sand near, you know, to avoid the booby traps. There were no booby traps. What are skeletons? Snakes? No skeletons or snakes. Somebody should tell the old lady her story has a second act problem. Do you want to know what she found or not? Yeah, yeah, keep going. But if nobody's face melts off at the end, I'm going to be disappointed.

When Anna finally emerged from the pyramid, she had something wrapped in her shirt. She handed it to her father. A human skull carved from a single piece of pure quartz crystal. It was flawless. Mitchell Hedges held the skull high in the air. There was a moment of silence. The Maya workers were stunned. Then they erupted with joy.

A Maya elder told them that the skull was ancient, thousands of years old. According to legend, the high priest could will someone to death by using the skull. From then on, Mitchell Hedges called it the Skull of Doom. Mitchell Hedges returned to London and packed the skull away. He wouldn't show it to anyone for almost 30 years. He only wrote about it one more time before he died in 1959. When Anna inherited the skull, she took it out of storage. Then she learned why her father never mentioned it.

The crystal skull started talking. Frank Dorland was an art restorer and a crystal expert. Adam Mitchell Hedges contacted him in 1963 and asked him to analyze the skull. Of course, he said yes. As soon as Frank received it, he noticed something strange. The skull would sing. Soon, peculiar things started to occur whenever the skull was out of the vault. We noticed that when we were quiet, we could hear soft voices and music.

Here was this inanimate object sitting on our research desk, singing to us. Oh, did it take requests? Yeah, I don't think so. Hey, I'd get one for the studio if that head could sing like Sinatra. No, it didn't sing like Sinatra. It was more like whispers and humming.

Then there was the smell. It smelled like Sinatra? No, it was the sweet smell of apple blossoms. Sinatra smelled like apple blossoms? Will you stop with Sinatra and let me get through this? Sorry, sorry, I'm just trying to understand what happened. Sheesh, what a grouch. What happened was, Frank Dorland studied the skull for six years.

At night, he and his wife heard whispers and singing. The skull had other properties too. The skull channeled light through its eyes, making them glow. Different people experienced different effects. Some people got thirsty. Others smelled vinegar or apple blossoms. Like Sinatra. Some people, when looking through the skull's left eye, saw visions of ancient temples and ruins played like scenes from a movie.

One night, he heard movement downstairs. He heard bells, chimes, and whispers. The next morning, objects were scattered everywhere, and there was the skull, capturing the sunrise, staring at him with bright orange eyes. Frank needed help understanding this artifact. He contacted Hewlett-Packard's Crystal Lab. Their scientists agreed to test the skull, and every test led to the same conclusion: this object should not exist.

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Frank Dorland, his wife, and many other witnesses had strange experiences with the skull. Visions, sounds, and smells. But Frank didn't think the skull was magical. He thought it was a machine.

He believed the crystal interacted with thought and consciousness through what he called crystallography. To prove his theory, he took the skull to the crystal lab at Hewlett-Packard. Nobody on Earth had better equipment or more expertise in crystal analysis. They had top men working on it. They did. Top men. I got it.

Tests proved the skull and its detachable jaw came from a single crystal. Now that's hard to do. The quartz was cut against its natural axis. Well, that's almost impossible to do. The more they studied, the more the scientists had trouble understanding the skull. When viewed under a microscope, there were no tool marks. The skull's surface was perfectly smooth.

The only explanation was that the skull had been polished with water and sand every day for over a hundred years. Or... Or it was made with technology we don't understand. Martian technology! Well, the skull's engineering suggested that.

The cranium contained ribbon prisms and light tunnels. The eye sockets were lenses. This wasn't an accident. This was engineered. The only way to achieve this effect with a solid piece of crystal is by altering its molecules. We can't do this. Yeah, but Martians could. Well, that brings us back to the legend of the 13 crystal skulls.

When the scientists at HP publicized their tests, people started wondering. If the legend was true and mankind was now worthy, then there would be more crystal skulls out there. So researchers started calling museums to see if they had any ancient crystal skulls in their collections. Did they find more? They found more. A mysterious package arrived at the Smithsonian in 1992. No return address. Inside, a crystal skull weighing 31 pounds.

Dr. Jane Walsh had seen this before. The skull, now called the Paris Skull, started her investigation into crystal skulls. Her research led to two skulls discovered before Mitchell Hedges made his find. In 1878, an Aztec crystal skull appeared at the Musée du Lome in Paris. Another showed up at the British Museum in 1897. Both skulls shared a connection: Eugene Vauban. Remember that name.

Bobin was a French archaeologist turned antiquities dealer. Napoleon sent him to Mexico in 1857 to collect artifacts for France. He collected a few for himself too. Everybody wants their beak. Bobin opened a shop in France in 1869. He sold a crystal skull to a French explorer, the first publicly displayed skull. Ten years later, he sold another to Tiffany's, which became the London skull.

When Walsh and British scientist Margaret Sacks examined these skulls with modern equipment, the legend of the 13 crystal skulls took a hit. No! Under electron microscopes, they found marks from grinding wheels. Martian grinding wheels? No. The marks match stones cut at Idar-Owenstein in the late 19th century.

The German village was famous for its gem cutters. Tests showed the crystals weren't from Central America. They were from Mars? No. Atlantis? No. Brazil or Madagascar. Crap. Around this time, Idar Obenstein received a large shipment of Brazilian quartz. Both Boban skulls were made in Germany between 1870 and 1890.

The mysterious Smithsonian skull had identical grinding patterns. Later tests using hydration dating placed the skulls in... 1870 to 1890? Yup. Sometimes I hate science. Three supposedly ancient skulls exposed as forgeries. Modern reproductions sold by Eugene Boban as authentic Mexican artifacts. The world was stunned. The ancient legend of the crystal skulls was unraveling.

Skeptics wanted answers. Believers wanted proof. So all eyes turned to the most famous crystal skull of all. It was time to test the Skull of Doom. This episode is sponsored by Greenlight. Who taught you about money? Your parents? Your school? Most of us learned way later than we should have. But imagine if you had the tools to start earlier. That's where Greenlight comes in. Greenlight is a debit card and money app designed for families. It helps kids learn how to save...

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When the truth about the crystal skulls hit the media, everyone wanted Anna Mitchell Hedges to allow her crystal skull to undergo the same tests as the others. Anna refused. She protected her legacy until she died in 2007. When Anna passed away, her husband, Bill Holman, inherited the skull. The wife's skull? The crystal skull. Ah, right. That's much less creepy.

In 2008, Hohmann confidently walked into the Smithsonian to face Dr. Jane Walsh and her team of researchers. It didn't take much time to prove that the Mitchell-Hedges crystal was man-made. The same tool marks as the other skulls were there. Anna's father, F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, really was an adventurer and writer, but his adventures were wildly exaggerated or outright fiction. And Anna seemed to take after the old man. Her story is a complete fabrication.

She said she found the skull in Loubantoun in Belize in 1924, but she was never there. She said she found the skull in 1924 or 1925 or 26 or 1927 or 1928, but it was always her 17th birthday. She admitted she was a little hazy on the date, but you'd think she'd know the day and the year that she was born. You lie about the year you were born. No, so do you. Touche.

Now, speaking of Le Bantoun, her father didn't discover it. It was found by Dr. Thomas Gann in 1903. Mitchell Hedges got the skull in 1943, and we have documentation of this.

He bought it from Sotheby's Auction House. That's why the skull isn't mentioned in the 1920s or 1930s by Anna or her father. They'd never heard of it. The seller was Sydney Burney of London. When Anna was confronted with this, she said Burney was holding onto the skull as collateral because her father owed him money. Then he bought it back. But that's not what Burney says. He says he got it from a collection once owned by Eugene Boban.

F.A. Mitchell Hedges seemed to have borrowed his story from a novel written by Jack McLaren in 1936 called The Crystal Skull. It's about a scientist who finds a crystal skull that can show the future.

As for Frank Dorland, he made up all the supernatural stuff about the skull, which actually annoyed Anna, and they had a falling out. Uh-oh, what happened? Well, she gave Frank the skull for an appraisal. She wanted to sell it. His stories about magic, voices, and poltergeists were making buyers uncomfortable. So Dorland offered her a compromise. They should work together and write a book. There's always a book. The book never happened.

Now Hewlett-Packard did test the skull, but they refused to test anything supernatural related. All they did was confirm it was a single piece of quartz. So the Maya legend of the 13 crystal skulls is firmly debunked. Neither the Maya nor the Aztecs had any such legend. They both worked with quartz, but not to make skulls. Both cultures like skulls, but I don't want to get into that here.

The truth is that the crystal skull myth was created by the New Age fraud, I mean fad, that popped up in the 1970s and 1980s. This legend fooled people for 100 years, and you know what? It wasn't a waste of time. Quartz crystal is about as close to a magic material as we can get.

Crystals can manipulate light frequencies, split them, combine them, create lasers. Crystals can generate electricity. We talked about this during the Tesla Pyramid episode. Pyramid power plant, link down at the bottom of your cereal bowl.

Crystals can also store electricity more efficiently than batteries. But here's the big one. Certain crystals can conduct electricity with perfect efficiency. This starts to get into zero-point energy territory. Crystals can entangle particles, making them useful in quantum computers. Scientists are using crystals to create self-healing materials. Some say crystals could be the secret to teleportation or the secret to consciousness itself.

Now, a lot of this is theoretical, but there is one magical property crystals have that we're using right now: data storage. And here's where the Martian Atlantis story pops up again. If you were an advanced civilization going extinct and you wanted to preserve all your knowledge forever, you would encode that knowledge onto crystal.

Crystal is harder than steel. It can survive extreme heat and pressure, and the data on it can last for over 13 billion years. And quartz crystal can store a lot of data, which is an understatement. Recently, scientists encoded the entire human genome on a crystal smaller than a quarter. So how much data could you store on a 30-pound crystal skull?

exabisive data. So what does that mean? Well, in one skull you can store the full text of every book ever written and still have room for every scientific paper, journal, and study ever done and still have room for every letter, manuscript, and record in history and still have room for every photo or video ever taken, every song ever sung,

and you would still have room for every word spoken in every conversation by every human who ever lived. The legend of the Crystal Skull should remind us that wisdom doesn't have to come from a lost civilization. Technical innovation doesn't have to come from outer space. The human race is capable of everything we've talked about today and much more. We haven't even scratched the surface of our potential.

Now, I have no doubt that one day we'll unlock all the power and technology described in today's legend. Interstellar travel, anti-gravity, telepathic communication, teleportation, and instant access to all human knowledge. But we won't get this power from a skull from Mars. It will come from a machine far more advanced, the skull sitting on your shoulders.

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No, it never ends.

I'm told.

And his name was Cole. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fishes. Heck, I'll fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And the wild birds have been eating all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So the wild birds...

The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come to have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets are both to Project Stargate and where the Dark Watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though, the Black Knight said a lot, he told me so. I can't believe I'm dancing

So the wild boars all repeat all through the night.

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Good luck to me.