11 The crystal skulls of Central America
A number of skulls, each allegedly carved from crystal and found in Central America, have been touted as evidence for advanced technology in the past and, much more incongruously, as evidence for unexpected anatomical knowledge. The most famous is that said to have been found in 1924 (or 1927) by Frederick Albert (or Arthur, depending on which of his books is used as a source) Mitchell-Hedges (1882-1959, also known occasionally as Mike Hedges) in Lubaantun, Belize, where the British Museum had been conducting excavations under the direction of Thomas Athol Joyce (1878-1942). Lubaantun is a late Classic ceremonial centre dated 700-900 CE. Despite Mitchell-Hedges’s autobiographical claims to have discovered and excavated the city under an exclusive twenty-year concession, it had been known for some time. Moreover, he was sponsored by the Daily Mail and was reporting on the British Museum’s fieldwork, not running any. He was therefore in no position to donate the finds to various museums in Britain, as he claimed in the 1950s. Even the date of discovery is confused: Anna Mitchell-Hedges recalled its date as coinciding with her seventeenth birthday in 1927, yet Frederick claimed never to have returned to the site after 1926.
The skull is supposed to have been found beneath and altar on top of a pyramid, which is inherently unlikely. It was not even found during the British Museum’s excavations (had it been, it would now be in the Museum’s stores), but seems to have been acquired by Mitchell-Hedges in circumstances that he never made clear. There is, in fact, strong evidence that it was bought for £400 at a sale by Sotheby’s, London, in 1943, from Sidney Burney, the owner of an art gallery. Burney is recorded as its owner in an article in Man in 1936, when he was said to have owned it since at least 1933, while Mitchell-Hedges mentioned it only in the first edition of his autobiography Danger My Ally, published in 1954, without giving an account of how he had acquired it, apart from hinting at mysterious cicrumstances. Mention of the skull was dropped from subsequent editions. Apparently, he had hoped to be buried with the object, but his adopted daughter Anna held on to it. An adventurer and teller of tall stories, much of his autobiographical work has been dismissed as invention (there are tales of wrestling with sea monsters and the like) and he has been compared with Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr (Baron) von Münchhausen (1720-1797).
The Mitchell-Hedges skull
The Lubaantun skull is 13 cm high, 18 cm from front to back and 13 cm wide, and was allegedly carved from a single block of quartz, although the mandible is detachable (and, according to Anna Mitchell-Hedges (1910-2005), was found some time after the “cranium”, which may explain why two separate discovery dates are given). It is rather smaller than an adult skull. It was claimed by Frederick Mitchell-Hedges that the skull is some 3,600 years old, although it is not clear how this estimate of age was arrived at: there are certainly no scientific techniques that would enable the carving of a quartz block to be dated so preciselt. A crystal carver, Frank Dorland, obtained permission to have the skull submitted to physical analysis in 1970; supposedly, tests were carried out by Hewlett Packard Laboratories showed that the original block had first been chiselled into a rough shape before grinding and polishing with water and sand. This is not an unusual technique in working with hard stones, although ‘fringe’ writers tend to imply that it is and that employing it would mean that it would take between 150 and 300 years continuous work to produce the skull, which is clearly ludicrous. Frank Dorland himself is a promoter of New Age beliefs about crystals and their alleged healing properties, so he is not quite the dispassionate scientist the story tends to make out.
Occultists have made even more extraordinary claims about these skulls. According to the satanist Anton Szandor LaVay (1930-1997), the Lubaantun skull was made by Satan himself! Others are a little more down-to-earth and merely claim that it emits growling noises or chanting, that it has miraculous healing powers, that images can be seen inside it, that it causes intense thirst and some people cannot stay in the same room as the skull as it induces uncontrollable terror. Fringe writers make much of the discrepancy between the technology required to manufacture these skulls and that available to ancient Mesoamerican peoples. According to them, this is proof that the skulls were made in Atlantis… Anna Mitchell-Hedges wnet one better and claimed that it was originally from outer space, and was merely kept in Atlantis before being taken to Belize.
The Mitchell-Hedges skull is only the most famous example of a number of similar objects, none of which has ever been found in adequately documented circumstances, nor have any ever been found indisputably in ancient deposits. A 1996 study of several examples by the British Museum indicated that they were made recently, probably in Germany and certainly after the mid-nineteenth century. The Smithsonian Institution discovered that some of the crystal skulls supposed to be of ancient Mesoamerican origin, including one in the British Museum and another in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, can be traced back to Eugène Boban, a French antiques dealer living in Mexico City between 1860 and 1880. He seems to have obtained the skulls from a source in Germany and is suspected of dealing in objects he knew to be faked. There is no evidence at all that any of these realistic skulls is anything other than modern. This does not necessarily mean that all are not ancient and even if at least some of them are, there is nothing about them that suggests that they could not have been made centuries ago. The ‘surprising anatomical knowledge’ shown by these skulls is hardly surprising: skulls from old skeletons may be dug up from any old burial ground and do not require a technology such as X-Rays to be seen, despite the claims of their supporters! On the other hand, all crystal skulls that can be proven to come from ancient deposits on Mesoamerican archaeological sites are stylised; until one of these naturalistic types is found under similar conditions, they must all be regarded with suspicion.
12 Model aeroplanes from South America
Alleged model of a
‘delta wing aircraft’
A number of curious gold ornaments from Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru and Venezuela have been interpreted by some as model aeroplanes after the Scottish Fortean Ivan Terrance Sanderson (1911-1973), founder of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the United States, saw a reproduction of a Colombian example. The original object had been part of a travelling exhibition organised by the Colombian government in 1954 as a result of which, the jeweller Emmanuel Staubs was commissioned to make reproductions of six of the objects. The reproduction that caught Sanderson's attention was only 5 cm long and had been made to hang from a necklace. The top end (which Sanderson identified as the tail fin of the aeroplane) had a mark on one side that he thought resembled an early Hebrew letter beth.
Zoömorphic Chimú pendants
The original pendants are of Chimú origin and are generally classed as zoömorphic types, with the majority resembling winged insects, birds, bats and sting rays. The Chimú (or Mochica) culture flourished in South America between about 200 BCE and 800 BC. Chimú gold ornaments of this type show considerable variation. Taking one object out of context, as Ivan Sanderson did, is disingenuous and borders on dishonesty. The variability shown by these pendants does not mask their origins as highly stylised representations of winged creatures.