The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls. Chris Morton
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records of the dig held at the British Museum, as well as why Captain Joyce never saw it and why no member of the team ever publicly spoke or wrote about the find either at the time or afterwards. For Frederick Mitchell-Hedges quite clearly explained that, upon discovering the lost city of Lubaantun,
‘Our immediate purpose was to inform the Governor of our discovery, and, at a meeting of the Legislative Council of British Honduras, an act was passed granting us a sole concession valid for twenty years, to excavate over an area of seventy square miles around the ruins.’ 14
Quite how Mitchell-Hedges was able to negotiate such an agreement was revealed in George G. Heye’s press release on behalf of the Museum of the American Indian, in which he explained:
‘[Mitchell-Hedges] conducted his own expedition under an agreement that his finds were to go to the New York Institution [the Museum of the American Indian] and to The British Museum.’ 15
Given this agreement that all finds would automatically go to one or other of the museums, is it any wonder that no mention was made of the crystal skull at the time? As Anna was also keen to point out to us, ‘If we had kept the crystal skull when we first found it, it would have gone to a museum automatically like all the other things we found,’ and, ‘If Captain Joyce had seen the skull the British Museum would have got it.’ But in the actual event and whatever the real reason, by the time Captain Joyce came to inspect the dig the skull had already been given back to the Mayans. So it never did end up in the British Museum. Anna was also keen to say that if the crystal skull had not really been found at Lubaantun, then why do the Belizean government, and the British Museum on some occasions, still claim to this day that the skull is really their property and should be returned to them?
But there was one other problem for academics and archaeologists such as Elizabeth Carmichael. It was that there were two written records of a crystal skull in the British Museum’s archives from the first part of the twentieth century and neither was specifically related to Lubaantun. The first of these was the article we had already read, which appeared in the July 1936 issue of Man. This article specifically referred to the skull the British Museum themselves did not own as being ‘in the possession of Mr Sydney Burney’ and made no mention of Mitchell-Hedges. It also noted that the skull had ‘the character almost of an anatomical study in a scientific age’, though no sign of any tool markings could be found on it.
The other record was a note handwritten by one of the former museum keepers which said that a rock crystal skull had come up for auction at Sotheby’s of London on 15 September 1943, listed as ‘Lot 54’. The surprising thing about this entry was that it too referred to the skull as apparently having been sent for sale by London art dealer W. Sydney Burney, not Frederick Mitchell-Hedges. In fact the note implied that the British Museum had tried to buy the skull but in vain as it was then ‘bought in by Mr Burney’ and ‘sold subsequently by Mr Burney’ to none other than a ‘Mr Mitchell-Hedges for [only] £400’! This apparently private transaction is thought to have occurred in 1944.16
These, the oldest written records of what one can only assume to be the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull, had led some archaeologists, Elizabeth Carmichael now among them, to speculate that Frederick Mitchell-Hedges did not really find the crystal skull at Lubaantun at all but simply bought it in London in 1944 from a man called Mr Burney, who, it is assumed, was an antique dealer. Indeed, these two written records have led many to speculate that the skull is in fact not ancient at all but of far more modern, possibly European, origin, being made some time towards the end of the nineteenth century or at the beginning of the twentieth.
By now we were obviously beginning to have grave doubts about Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ story. But Anna had a simple answer even to these apparent problems. According to her, Mr Burney was a family friend who loaned her father money and the skull had actually been used as collateral. When Mr Burney proceeded to put it up for sale, her father paid him back and got his crystal skull back. This explains why the mysterious Mr Burney should have withdrawn the skull from auction and sold it privately to Mitchell-Hedges rather than simply selling it off to the highest bidder. Another interesting, perhaps coincidental, consequence of this sale, however, is that legally no one can now dispute that the Mitchell-Hedges family are the rightful and legal owners of the skull.
But was the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull a modern fake or could it really be one of the ancient skulls of legend? The suggestion that it might be modern, and possibly European, had been made by several of the archaeologists we had spoken to, and was now strongly supported by the British Museum files, whatever Anna Mitchell-Hedges might say.
So we asked Anna if she would be willing to let her skull undergo tests so that we could get an answer to this question once and for all. We were somewhat surprised when she explained that ‘he’ had already been scientifically tested. Rigorous tests had been carried out several years before by the world famous computer company and crystal experts Hewlett-Packard. Anna said we would find the results of these tests ‘most interesting’ but that if we wanted full chapter and verse on what the scientists had discovered we had better go and talk to them for ourselves.
That was it, we were off to talk to the scientists at Hewlett-Packard without further delay.
The crystal skull had not only attracted the attention of archaeologists. Scientists too had been fascinated, intrigued by the skull’s mysterious history and all the incredible possibilities it seemed to represent. When Anna Mitchell-Hedges agreed to loan her skull to a team of scientists at state-of-the-art computer and electronics company Hewlett-Packard, they had the chance to examine the skull in detail.
Hewlett-Packard is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of computers and other electronic equipment. They use crystals in a whole range of electronic devices. Their scientists therefore are experts not only on computers but also on the physical, technical and scientific properties of crystal.
The tests on the crystal skull took place in late 1970 in Hewlett-Packard’s crystal laboratories in Santa Clara, California (see plates 34–6). We visited these laboratories, deep in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, to try to find out what the scientists had discovered.
The tests had been overseen by Jim Pruett, components manager of the frequency standards team. By the time we arrived in California, he was long gone, but Ceri and I were able to speak to the current principal scientist at the lab, Jack Kusters, and the former engineering manager for quartz devices, Charles Adams, who had been present during the tests. Between them these two men have over 50 years’ experience of working with crystal.
As Jack and Charles explained, initially the team was not even convinced that the crystal skull was really made of proper quartz. There are in fact several other materials that look almost exactly the same as quartz crystal to the naked eye, including various types of plastics and glass. Even lead crystal, the material from which most glasses, decanters and other decorative objects are now made, is actually a type of glass and not crystal at all. Also, there is a lot of artificially manufactured or ‘synthetic’ quartz crystal around today.
Natural quartz, or rock crystal, on the other hand, is entirely a product of Mother Nature. It actually grows in the ground, taking sometimes billions of years to form. Crystals grow deep within the Earth’s crust, usually around volcanic and earthquake activity. The process requires immense heat and pressure and always a ‘seed’ crystal is needed to start it off. This seed is created when a single silicon atom, under intense heat and pressure, fuses with two oxygen atoms from superheated water or steam trapped in the same space. The atoms fuse to form a single crystalline cell of silicon dioxide, the substance from which all quartz crystal is made. (The by-product is hydrogen.) Over the millennia, if conditions are right, this seed starts to grow. But the surrounding fluid must contain just the right proportions