The 13 Crystal Skulls Of The Apocalypse | Myth Hunters on Odyssey

In 1924, a young girl found an extraordinary object deep in the jungles of Central America. It was a beautiful skull made from a single block of pure quartz crystal. Anna Mitchell Hedges claimed that her skull had magical telepathic powers. She felt that he could stare into the left eye socket and see the future. Some say that Anna's crystal skull is part of an ancient legend. That one day, 13 such skulls will come together as one to solve some of the great mysteries of life. But only if we are morally and spiritually ready to receive them. Some of these crystal skulls may have already been discovered. There is one in London. One in Paris. And one in Washington. What is the truth behind the legend of these crystal skulls? Modern science has begun to investigate. And now we can reveal the shocking reality behind the story of Anna and these crystal skulls. Will they really lead to a new dawn for the human race and save our planet from an apocalyptic end? Discover the past with exclusive ancient history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Download the app now to explore everything from the wonders of Pompeii to the rebellion of Boudicca and the mysteries of prehistoric Scotland. Immerse yourself in the captivating stories of this remarkable era by signing up via the link in the description. The story of Anna and the crystal skulls begins with Anna's adopted father, Frederick Albert Mitchell Hedges. A self-made man and adventurer who is said to be one of the inspirations for Hollywood's blockbuster movies, Indiana Jones. Born in Victorian London in 1882, Mitchell Hedges started out as a clerk in London's stock exchange at the age of 16. But he didn't stay long. In his 20s, he sailed to New York and worked on Wall Street, where he made a small fortune. I had left home with a few pounds and no job, and I returned at the age of 23 an assured man of the world, possessor of over 4,000 pounds. He then decided to become an explorer and archaeologist. Supported by rich girlfriends and various newspapers, Mitchell Hedges devoted his life to the exploration of Central America and the Caribbean coast. He took in a number of well-off ladies who travelled with him and, in one case, essentially funded him. I suppose you'd call him a good time boy. Mitchell Hedges believed that a life which is lived without zest and adventure is not a life at all. You can almost hear the biceps rippling under his shirt. He loved to do battle with giant sea fish. Every fish he caught was the largest fish that had ever been caught in that area. I landed sharks of 800, 900 and 1,000 pounds. Then, at three o'clock in the afternoon, I struck into a fish that gave me my hardest fight ever. It was a giant sawfish, 29 feet long, with a girth of 19 feet, and just over two tons. He claimed to have discovered a new race of people in Panama. I now set about the task of discovering Central America. Thousands of square miles were uninhabitable, and there were wide regions of jungle, swamp and mountains where no man had ever set foot. He stated that he excavated 21 sites in Central America and told many tall tales. Every bit of jungle was crawling with poisonous snakes and poisonous plants. He even claimed to have unearthed artefacts as old as 25,000 years from the lost civilisation of Atlantis. Anyone who writes a book called Danger Is My Ally, you know what sort of person you're dealing with. But despite his bravado, Mitchell Hedges was keen to be taken seriously as an archaeologist. Mitchell Hedges certainly collected a lot of exotic archaeological material, some of which he illustrates in his books. I have given to the enrichment of the museums in England and the United States some thousands of ethnological, archaeological and ichthyological specimens. Never have I accepted a penny from a museum or institution either to finance my expeditions or in reward for my endeavours. During the 1920s, Mitchell Hedges explored the Central American country of Belize and it was here that his link to the world's most famous crystal skull began. Accompanying Mitchell Hedges was his 16-year-old adopted daughter, Anna. Anna had lost both her parents by the age of 10. Her mother had died during childbirth and her father in the First World War. Mitchell Hedges had taken the French-Canadian orphan under his wing in 1917 and Anna became his frequent travel companion. At this stage, they weren't looking for crystal skulls. Mitchell Hedges was determined to find one of the lost cities of the ancient Maya civilisation deep inside the jungle. If we could find it, we hoped to be able to add considerably to the knowledge of the Mayan civilisation. The earliest traces of the Maya go back at least to 1500 BC and possibly as much as 2200 to 2500 BC. The Maya were one of the ancient world's most advanced civilisations before their collapse more than a thousand years ago. Their empire stretched across an area from southern Mexico to the Caribbean coast of Belize. The Maya people developed complex writing and mathematical systems. Their astronomers mapped the stars and measured time with calendars as precise as the ones we use today. Great artists created fine sculptures, carvings, paintings, murals, pottery, textiles and jewellery. They constructed monumental cities with intricate temples, plazas, aqueducts, roads and pyramids. It's interesting how much archaeological work in the Maya area is surrounded by a kind of a miasma of romantic quality, you know, the sort of gleaming white temples in the jungle. It was those gleaming white temples that Mitchell Hedges was now hoping to discover. I had repeatedly heard natives talk of great mounds of stone buried in the jungle and I had a rough idea in which area they lay. Like her father, Anna would record their adventures together in great detail and it's her accounts we largely rely on today. We arrived in Belize and went into the jungle which was very difficult and my father stumbled upon a stone and he shouted to the world, we can't be far from this lost city. According to Anna, her father enlisted the help of locals who were direct descendants of the Maya to fell the trees and clear the bush. Eventually, their work revealed something spectacular. In the setting sun, the immensity of the ruins we had uncovered came home to us with overwhelming force. Slowly, the sky crimsoned, a red glow tinged the jungle and the desolate courtyards, the terraces, the pyramids of this great city which we called Lubantun, the Maya word for the city of fallen stones. Lubantun is an absolutely fascinating Maya site. It sits on a dramatic ridgetop between two ravines about 20 miles inland from the coast of Belize and it consists of a series of courtyards and temples and palaces. It was founded about AD 700 and we know that it was abandoned by about AD 850. It was here, at this ancient Maya ruin that Anna claimed she made an astonishing discovery. I was 16 when I spotted it. It was New Year's Day, 1st January 1924. I heard two of the Mayas say, if you go on top of that building, you'll have the most wonderful view. So I sneaked on top and it was very dangerous. Something kept shining in my face. I moved one or two stones carefully. The sun was pouring on it. Way down below, through a crack, I could see something shining back at me. I got very excited. Anna seemed to have discovered a chamber deep inside the pyramid which was now overgrown with jungle vines and trees. What secrets, she thought, might it contain? Anna said how her father and his men cleared the stones away and three weeks later, on her 17th birthday, she was allowed to explore the pyramid chamber. I had a light and I was let down by two ropes around my body. I was terrified of the snakes and scorpions that might be down there. But then, through the gloom, I could see something in the light. It was a skull and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. So I picked it up, wrapped it in my shirt so it wouldn't be hurt and shouted to the men to pull me up as fast as they could. Anna said that her discovery was the size and shape of a human skull and was almost completely transparent. It appeared to be made of crystal and in perfect condition. According to Anna, her father took the skull from her hands and held it high in the air for all the Maya to see. There was a moment of stunned silence then all the Maya helpers went wild with joy kissing the ground and hugging each other. But was the skull a genuine Mayan treasure? And who had placed it deep inside the pyramid chamber? The answer, according to Anna, came two days later when they were visited by a Maya elder from a neighbouring village. He told us the skull was very ancient. It was made after the head of a great high priest many thousands of years ago because the priest was loved very much and they wanted to preserve his truth and wisdom forever. According to legend, it was used by the high priest of the Maya when he was performing esoteric rites. It is said that when he willed death with the help of the skull death invariably followed. My father called it the Skull of Doom. Anna said her father thought the skull was so sacred that he gave it to the Maya, much to Anna's displeasure. I was very angry because I had risked my life to go down and get it. But when their excavations of Lubantun drew to a close Anna said the Maya priests gave Mitchell Hedges the skull for all the good work he had done for their people. The family returned with the skull to England in 1927. Intriguingly, Mitchell Hedges kept the skull entirely secret for the next 27 years when he would write about it in his 1954 autobiography Danger My Ally. How it came into my possession I have reason for not revealing. The Skull of Doom is made of pure rock crystal and according to scientists it must have taken over 150 years generation after generation working all the days of their lives patiently rubbing down with sand an immense block of rock crystal until finally the perfect skull emerged. It has been described as the embodiment of all evil. Several people who have cynically looked at it have died. Others have been stricken and become seriously ill. I do not wish to try and explain the phenomenon. Five years later in 1959 Frederick Mitchell Hedges died of a stroke. No mention of the Skull of Doom appeared in his obituary in the Times but Anna inherited it. It was now the crystal skull went public. Anna contacted a business colleague of her father's San Francisco art dealer and restorer Frank Dorland to promote her crystal skull in the US with a view to a sale for $50,000. Dorland wrote to her in November 1963 The Skull of Doom or perhaps more likely the Skull of Knowledge as I have said many times before I would like to handle this art treasure for you. We can launch a program about the skull and get your price. Keen to make the most of her new possession Anna wanted to prove the skull's authenticity. She flew to New York with it and left it with Dorland to carry out further research. When I come out it is so that I take out the Skull of Doom which was the only thing my father ever kept from any of the expeditions. I hope that it too may one day find a home where it will be revered by all who see it. Dorland spent the next six years exploring the mystical properties of Anna's crystal skull. He worked with various psychics and allowed other people to visit him to experience the many powers he believed the skull possessed. Soon peculiar things started to occur whenever the skull was out of the vault. We noticed that when we were very quiet we could hear soft voices and music. Sometimes there was an odor an elusive sweet-sour wet fragrance that reminded me of apple blossom and vinegar mixed with the unmistakable smell of an icy mountain stream. If we put our hands close to the skull we could feel a tingling like an electric current and there were other times when we clearly saw shapes and shadows moving about inside it. Here was an inanimate object sitting on our research desk singing to us. What was going on? In 1970, Dorland suggested to Anna that her skull should be examined at the Hewlett-Packard Laboratory in Santa Clara, California. One of the people that examined it was Charles Adams. They brought this in and it was quite an amazing piece very well crafted because we were all interested in something like that being quartz people. The Hewlett-Packard scientists were asked to examine the skull to confirm that it really was a thousand-year-old Mayan artifact. We determined that it was a single piece of quartz. It was very clear. We examined portions of the surface with a microscope. There were no any tool marks that would indicate that it was done with modern machinery. No sign of any modern tool marks at all. This proved that the skull had to be ancient. It probably was done by hand over a very long period of time probably more than one person's lifetime where they take stones and rub them together and use sand and water to polish them out. That would seem to be the more likely way that this thing was built. It could have been over several generations these things were carved. All this seemed to fit with what Mitchell Hedges had written about the skull in his autobiography Danger My Ally. It must have taken over 150 years generation after generation working all the days of their lives patiently rubbing down with sand an immense block of rock crystal until finally the perfect skull emerged. But some scientists concluded something even more extraordinary. The crystal skull was so perfect that it was made by no known human process which prompted one team member to remark this skull shouldn't even exist at all. Now Anna asked the scientists to do something even more difficult she wanted them to prove that her skull's mystical powers were real. The people who brought it in really wanted us to verify mystical qualities of these things and there's no way that in science you can verify a mystical apparition so to speak and so we declined on that area of getting involved in any comments. Dorland however wrote a letter for Anna stating that it wards off the evil eye and carries protection from heaven being white crystal and highly polished it defeats all evils and witchcraft. Now Anna appeared to have supporting evidence of her skull's mystical powers and proof that it was a genuine Maya artifact. The 63 year old Anna Mitchell Hedges set about exploiting her skull's mystical powers In the 1960s and early 70s the Western world saw a new social counterculture revolution emerge and with it a new age of spiritualism. This led to a huge interest in quartz for its alleged healing, meditation and energy giving qualities. Crystal skulls were suddenly in fashion. When you think of that attracts people's attention people love mystery. These aren't just skulls they're transparent and they're very very hard and they appear almost flawless you know you handle them you look at them and they are impressive objects. When you got the fusion of the imagery of the skull with the rare and exotic material of massive rock crystal particularly in the new age cults. Over the next 30 years Anna made the most of her skull's mystique and became a minor celebrity. She would take the skull on tour around the United States. Everywhere she went she told people of her discovery of the skull at Lubantu and the amazing qualities it possessed. The Mayan priests told me the skull is important to mankind. They gave us the skull for a definite reason and purpose. I am not exactly sure what that reason is but I know it is something very very important. I lived seven years with the Mayan people as a child and ate and slept the same way they slept on the earth and once you have lived with people who are so down to nature you've got to believe them. She would be preceded by a barrage of publicity to the local papers and television stations which would be told that the rock crystal skull of doom was coming to town. Laugh at this says the Mayan legend simply and you die. The owner is the explorer and the collector is Anna Mitchell Hedges. Why do you believe that one? Yes I do believe that very much so because we've had quite a few accidents happen while we've had it. What sort of accidents are those? A cameraman who came to film it and he laughed at it and when he went to his room in a local hotel and the skull would be put on a black velvet covered plinth with a spotlight on it and she would then charge five dollars for admission to look at it. She would allow people to touch it in some cases actually to lift it up and turn it round and look at it. There's nothing ever good that can come out of the skull of doom. Not to people who would laugh at it but to me it's always been very kind. In what way do you mean? Well I love it because I first found it with my father and it's my first little treasure that I found on my own really. Some people now started to link Anna's crystal skull to an even more extraordinary story. There is said to be an old legend from Central America which says there are only 13 ancient life-size crystal skulls in existence. These 13 skulls are said to contain vital information about the origins, purpose and destiny of mankind and that one day the 13 crystal skulls will all come together to reveal themselves. In 1878 an ancient life-size Aztec crystal skull was donated to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. In January 1898 another life-size Aztec crystal skull went on display at the British Museum in London. Then of course there's the Anna Mitchell Hedges crystal skull found in Belize in 1924. Was it worth the effort to save our planet? If so, where were the other 10? Then in 1992 something strange happened that would alter the world's entire perception of Anna Mitchell Hedges and the legends of the crystal skulls. An enormous skull weighing over 30 pounds turned up anonymously on the doorsteps of the Museum by an unsigned modern note. It said this Aztec crystal skull purported to be part of the former President of Mexico's collection and was purchased in Mexico in 1960. I am offering it to the Smithsonian without consideration. One of the curators there called me and asked me if I knew anything about crystal skulls. So I knew the British Museum had a skull, so I said, well, yes, a little. And he said, well, someone sent us one and I don't know what to do with it. So I said, well, I'll take it. So he said, ooh, don't look it in the eye. They're cursed. They're not skulls. Walsh discovered that human skulls and skull imagery featured in Aztec art and iconography and were often carved by Aztec and Maya engravers, but there was little mention of them using crystal for their skulls. She also noticed that the first crystal skulls only began to surface in public and private collections during the second half of the 19th century and they were all associated with one person. What I discovered about the Paris Museum skull was that their collection had been purchased from a French dealer in the 19th century named Eugène Bobin. Bobin was an antique collector of skulls. He first put on display an Aztec crystal skull in his shop in Paris in the 1870s. He hunted and excavated archaeological sites and sold what he uncovered. In 1878, Bobin's Aztec crystal skull ended up on display at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. It was then sold in Eugène Bobin's Paris shop. Bobin described this skull as a masterpiece of engraving and claimed it was unique in the world. In 1896, it was sold to the world-famous New York jewelers Tiffany's for the asking price of $900. The New York Times reported that in 1987 that skull was on permanent display at the British Museum. Two Aztec crystal skulls, one in Paris and one in London, both linked to Eugène Bobin. In 1996, intrigued by Walsh's discoveries, the British Museum decided to collaborate with the Smithsonian to make a skull. She had been left a large quartz skull and was getting very interested in where it came from and also its relationship to the British Museum skull. Just as the Hewlett-Packard scientists had subjected the Anna Mitchell Hedges skull to a battery of tests, similar tests now took place at the British Museum. The first thing they did was try to date their Aztec skulls. You can't radiocarbon date a quartz crystal. It has no carbon in it. It's impossible. So you have to turn to other methods to date it. Now, the way we nearly always do this is by looking at the way things were made, what you might call dating the technology. So we started on a program of analysis to look at the way the quartz crystal itself had been carved. First, they started looking for tool marks with the most sophisticated technology. So we have to use quite detailed microscopic techniques to look at the way these things have been worked. The first thing faint traces of straight lines on their surfaces. Could a Stone Age technology have created these straight lines? The scientists examined the surface tool markings on several Aztec rock crystal objects from well-documented fossils and sharpened stone and wood combined with sand to craft their materials. The test showed these ancient tools left uneven, ragged lines on the surface. They then compared these ragged, hand-tooled lines with the straight marks found on the British Museum and Smithsonian to create such perfectly straight lines as those on the British and Smithsonian skulls. The only way these straight lines could have been made was by using rotary cutting wheels. These were not introduced in Mexico until after the Spanish conquest in 1521. Further examinations of the two skulls both the London and Smithsonian crystal skulls showed clean rows in arcs across their surfaces. Only one type of tool could have done this, something with an industrial diamond head. Industrial diamond heads were first used in the 19th century. This meant the skulls could not have been made before then. It was a modern fake. The Smithsonian Aztec skull, found on a Washington Museum's doorstep in 1992, was a modern fake. And the Paris crystal skull, labeled Aztec since 1878, also turned out to be a fake. The British Museum skull was probably made not too long before it first appeared in Beaubon's shop in 1881. The testing that the Louvre did on the Paris skull seems to indicate that it was created sometime during the 1850s. And the Smithsonian skull seems to have been polished using a technique that was only available after World War II. So it makes sense that it was created sometime in the 1950s. Three fake skulls in London, Paris and Washington. That only left the Anna Mitchell Hedges skull, found in Belize in 1924. All the while, Dr Jane Walsh had been continuing with her investigation. She came across two records referring to yet another crystal skull. The first was an article published in the journal Man in 1936. This told of a London art dealer named Sidney Burney, who had purchased a crystal skull in 1933. The second stated that Burney had put his crystal skull up for auction at Sotheby's of London in 1943, and that it was sold to none other than a Mr Frederick Albert Mitchell Hedges for 400 pounds. This was 20 years after Anna Mitchell Hedges had claimed she found her crystal skull in the ruins of Louboutin. Anna immediately went on the defensive. According to her, there was a simple explanation. She had indeed found the skull in 1924, but in 1943, her father was experiencing some real hardship. Father was wanting to return to Louboutin, but was short of money. Mr Burney loaned father money, and father left the skull with him as security until he could redeem it. Then he heard that he had placed it in a sale room, and father was livid. He paid Burney with interest and reclaimed the skull. But when Anna was asked if she had any records showing that the skull was owned by her father prior to Burney's acquisition, she said that all his papers had been lost during a cyclone. Anna Mitchell Hedges died at the age of 100 in 2007. She claimed to the end that she discovered her ancient Maya crystal skull in a pyramid tomb in Belize in 1924. Only in 2008, after Anna had died, did Dr Jane Walsh get her chance to examine the Mitchell Hedges skull at the Smithsonian Institute. The first time I saw the Mitchell Hedges skull was in a cupboard container, and I was taken aback by the clarity of the crystal, the gleaming shine and polish of it. It really looked like a jewel. Technology had advanced greatly since the Hewlett-Packard lab tested the Mitchell Hedges skull back in 1970. We decided to try it and examine it in as many ways as possible. So we arranged to have it CAT scanned. We X-rayed it. We took silicon molds of it. After an array of tests under a highly sophisticated scanning electron microscope, Walsh finally arrived at the truth. What we're looking at on the screen now is a mold I took from a 3,000-year-old pre-Columbian carving and it's clear that they're using a sharpened stone that can only go sort of back and forth. It's also a very soft polishing technique that's been used with a lot of the indentations on the stone remaining unpolished. In contrast, this is some of the teeth from the Mitchell Hedges skull. You can see some very tiny wheels that have been used to make indentations on the chewing surface of the teeth. In the final analysis, when we saw these images, there was simply no doubt in our mind that the Mitchell Hedges skull is the creation of a modern stone carver using diamond tools, very small drills and cutting wheels that simply could not and did not exist in pre-Columbian times. There could be no doubt the Mitchell Hedges skull was a fake. Anna's story of finding it at Lubantoon on her 17th birthday in 1924 was simply not true. Suddenly it all fell into place. The reason why Frederick Mitchell Hedges never mentioned the crystal skull when he returned to England after his trip to Belize in the 1920s was because he didn't have it. Instead, he had bought it from Sidney Burney in 1943. He even wrote a letter to his brother in the same year telling him about it. You possibly saw in the papers that I acquired that amazing crystal skull that was formerly in the Sidney Burney collection. There is only one other in the world known like it which is in the British Museum and it is acknowledged to be not so fine as this. This revelation explains why Mitchell Hedges wrote his autobiography Danger My Ally, a reference to his daughter finding the crystal skull in Belize in 1924. In fact, she wasn't even with him that year. According to his autobiography, his daughter didn't join him in Belize until 1926. That's two years after Anna claimed she had found the skull. It has since emerged that there is no record of Anna ever visiting Belize because it's an extremely graphic account. One could easily believe that she had been standing there and yet there's absolutely no evidence that she was there at all. So why did Anna invent such an extraordinary story? The answer may be quite simple. When her father died, she was left with no income. She had to find a way to support herself and she only had one asset. Her father was this great storyteller. He made a living writing stories of enormous fish that got away for the newspapers and I think Anna, maybe having been around him for a long time, picked up on his ability to spin a yarn. It appears that she invented the story, perhaps with her father, of discovering the crystal skull in a pyramid chamber in the Maya ruins of Lubantun in Belize in 1924 to make some money. Through the gloom I could see something in the light. It was a skull and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Anna Mitchell Hedges started as a liar, she became an accomplished liar and she finished as a fantasist. I first found it with my father and it's my first little treasure that I found on my own really. I think over the years, having told the story so many times, she had come to believe it herself. Anna managed to spin the yarn for more than 40 years and most people who came to hear about the skull or had a chance to see it on her pay-per-view roadshow believed it was the genuine article. I'm not really surprised she got away with it for so long because people are always willing to believe the irrationally mysterious over the rationally prosaic. People love mystery and they probably as a result greatly prefer things such as the crystal skull to the average archaeological presentation. They'd far rather that those objects were so mysterious that we couldn't say anything at all about them, that they fit, in other words, the pattern of the crystal skull. So where do these revelations leave the Central American legend of the 13 crystal skulls that says that one day they will come together to solve some of the great mysteries of life? So far, all the famous crystal skulls have been shown to be modern fakes probably made in Europe and science has yet to find any convincing evidence that there ever was a Central American crystal skulls legend. There was no evidence for there being crystal skulls in any of the ancient American civilizations. In fact, the Maya didn't really have rock crystal at all. It's not a native material to the Maya area so archaeology ignored the stories because they seemed irrelevant. The fact that the legend is still a modern invention won't stop many people believing that there are 13 ancient crystal skulls still out there and that one day they will all come together as one to save our planet.