The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls Finally Solved | Legend of the Crystal Skulls | Full Documentary

This is one of the most mysterious and controversial objects in the world. A crystal skull called the Skull of Doom. It's the inspiration for the latest Indiana Jones movie and the man who made it famous was a real life Indiana Jones, a flamboyant adventurer and buccaneering archaeologist. His crystal skull and a handful of others like it have given birth to a legend that has caught the imagination of millions worldwide. According to the legend, 13 ancient crystal skulls from a lost civilization when united will unlock the secrets of universal knowledge. But who made these skulls and when? What is the truth about how they were found? It's a mystery that's obsessed archaeologists, scientists and believers for over a hundred years. Now state-of-the-art technology will finally reveal their secrets. In Paris, one crystal skull goes back on display after months of scientific testing. In London, scientists try to establish the origins of a second crystal skull in the British Museum. In Washington DC, a 16-year-old investigation into a third crystal skull by the Smithsonian Institution reaches its climax. But this skull, perhaps the most famous of all, has been in private hands ever since it was discovered. It is the Skull of Doom, fashioned from solid quartz crystal. It has spawned a global movement of devotees who believe it has extraordinary powers. It's a computer, it's already programmed and you don't have to type on little keys, all you do is put your hand on it. If people will accept the possibility of past life, I have a memory of working in the temples in Atlantis where they had crystal skulls. When you see it in a picture, it's beautiful. But when you see it in person, there's a beauty that you could really feel inside. Its supporters believe that the Skull of Doom was created three and a half thousand years ago by an ancient American civilization obsessed with human sacrifice, and that for centuries it lay undisturbed. Until the arrival of this man, Frederick Mitchell Hedges, an exotic English adventurer who some claim was a real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones. Mitchell Hedges was a lifelong rebel. In 1898, he dropped out of school at the age of 16 to travel to the Arctic. He claimed he fought alongside the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. He was alleged to be a spy for British naval intelligence, and later he roamed the jungles of Central America in search of ancient remains. He was a man of action. He believed that you could not make great discoveries, you could not really understand what was going on unless you were out there, unless you were getting dirty, you were sweating, you were taking risks. And so he was at odds with a lot of the archaeological community for that reason. Mitchell Hedges had an eye for the giant catch, and for the ladies too, especially if they were rich and aristocratic. He traveled with a number of lady companions, most notably Mabel Richmond Brown, who was the estranged wife of a mad baronet and who had money. You know, most women particularly, they found Mitchell Hedges a very attractive person. He lived a dashing life. He was the ultimate swashbuckling, you know, adventurer. In the 1920s, Mitchell Hedges embarked on the adventure that would make his name. He traveled to Central America to explore the thousand-year-old ruins of the Mayan civilization. He made an extraordinary claim about the Mayan connection with the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. I believe that Atlantis did exist, and when the earth moved and the waters came rushing in upon it, a continent was submerged and that a remnant survived, and that from these evolved the great Maya civilization. Mitchell Hedges was unable to furnish any evidence of this remnant of Atlantis, but he made a further claim that he'd come across a unique object used during ancient death rituals, a life-sized skull of pure quartz crystal. He named it the Skull of Doom. It is at least 3,600 years old, and according to legend, was used by the high priests of the Maya. It is said that when Will death with the help of the skull, death invariably followed. It has been described as the embodiment of all evil. How it came into my possession, I have reason for not revealing. Exactly how he discovered the Skull of Doom was a secret Frederick Mitchell Hedges would take to his grave. It would be someone else, his adopted daughter Anna, who would tell the world and make the skull a global sensation. Their relationship was intriguing. Anna told of how she'd been orphaned as a child and looked after by an uncle who lived opposite a hotel by Lake Niagara in Canada. Mitchell Hedges, 26 years her senior, often came to stay there to fish and became fond of her. According to her story, she was adopted by Mitchell Hedges when she was 10, I think. Anna Mitchell Hedges would later state that in 1924, when she was 17, she accompanied Frederick Mitchell Hedges on an expedition to the ancient Mayan site of Lubantun in British Honduras, modern-day Belize. She claims to have been with him on the Lubantun excavations in 24 and 25. She became a sort of a companion of his. He hobnobbed with very exciting people. He was a fun guy to be around. She was always, a lot of times, in the right place at the right time. She was like his luck, as his whole luck and life changed, and they were like a major team together. Frederick and Anna Mitchell Hedges each recorded how at Lubantun, they became caught up in the adventure that would bring them fame. Lubantun was almost unexplored and a potential treasure chest of Mayan relics. Mitchell Hedges, who'd had no formal training in the fragile science of archaeology, stumbled into action. They hired local Maya who simply dug trenches into house mounds and collected the artifacts that came up. There was no sense of scientific excavation, there was no recording taking place. This wasn't archaeology, it was Sunday afternoon looting. There's a wonderful picture of Mitchell Hedges and Lady Richmond Brown sitting side by side on the steps of one of the pyramids at Lubantun, from which they had just removed the top with dynamite in order to see if there was a tomb inside. Now, not surprisingly, there wasn't a tomb by the time they got inside it. At the time, Mitchell Hedges reported only minor finds at Lubantun. But decades later, Anna claimed they'd made a remarkable discovery. I was 16 when I spotted it. It was New Year's Day, 1st of January, 1924. I heard two of the Maya 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. The stones covered a large hole. Anna said that soon after, they were cleared by her father. It was her 17th birthday. I was let down by two ropes. As I was going down, there were big snakes. I looked around and I saw something shiny. It was the top of a skull. The object Anna found was of magnificent workmanship, carved from a single block of almost flawless quartz. Mayan artifacts made of crystal were extremely rare. A Mayan crystal skull was unique. It was a world first. Yet Frederick Mitchell Hedges said nothing publicly about it when he left Lubantun in 1926. The skull of Doom was secretly stored in England, where he returned to live with Anna. For such a showman, Mitchell Hedges' reticence was uncharacteristic. One commonly held reason was that he needed to hide the skull from the benefactors who had funded his digs. Basically, Mitchell Hedges never said a word about it publicly. The crystal skull was a footnote in his career. Mitchell Hedges slipped into a more sedate middle age as a radio personality telling his stories of adventure. He died in 1959, and soon all those who might have witnessed the discovery of the skull of Doom were dead too, except Anna. Now in her 50s, she started going public with the extraordinary events she said took place at Lubantun 40 years before. And what did he find on these expeditions? Can you tell us something about that? Well, he found a lot of potteries and jades and the skull of Doom. And did he find a sort of sunken cities? Yes, he found the lost city. Which was? The Maya. Anna had chosen a good time to publicise the discoveries. The 1970s brought a new fascination with ancient Americans, and sites like Chichen Itza provided new evidence and insights into the Mayan civilisation that seemed to tie in with the idea of a skull of Doom. The skull rack at Chichen Itza was actually a war memorial. It is likely to have been a platform on which the skulls of sacrificed victims were piled. We have evidence for human sacrifice among the Maya, not just artistic evidence, but we actually have the human remains showing the effects of this. After her adoptive father's death, Anna considered selling the skull. But experts doubted its authenticity. Its discovery had not been documented, and to some her story sounded suspicious. In an attempt to authenticate the skull, Anna took it to a sympathetic art expert, Frank Dorland. Dorland arranged for it to be examined at Hewlett-Packard in California. Quartz crystal was an important part of consumer electronics, and HP had a crystal laboratory. First, the skull was lowered into benzyl alcohol to test that it was quartz crystal. If it was quartz, it would look as if it had disappeared. It did. Then, to see if the separate jaw was from the same piece of quartz as the main skull, the Hewlett-Packard scientists drew upon the law of crystal. This is a natural quartz crystal. This is just the way it came out of the ground. It's just the law of crystals that they always have to show the same symmetry, the same basic shape. Hewlett-Packard scientists observed that both pieces were from the same solid block of quartz. The next and most crucial question was its age. This presented a huge problem. Crystal contains no carbon, the standard means of dating ancient objects. Instead, the scientists looked for clues on the skull's surface, such as marks made by the tools that carved it. But the skull would defy their efforts. The polish of the Mitchell-Hedges skull is so high, it's almost hard to look at under a light microscope, because it just bounces back at you, because it's so highly polished. It's like looking at a mirror. The Hewlett-Packard scientists detected no signs of modern tool marks. For Frank Dorland and Anna Mitchell-Hedges, this supported her father's claim that the incredibly polished quartz could only have resulted from hand rubbing with sand and water over many generations. There was a further revelation from the Hewlett-Packard tests that would add to the skull's mystique. It displayed so-called piezoelectric properties. Well, piezoelectric, it's a great word, isn't it? But piezoelectric properties of quartz is one of the properties that has made quartz a very important technological material. If I take a quartz crystal and I apply pressure to it, I squeeze on it really hard, I essentially induce an electric charge on this crystal. Some of the electrons move to one end, some to the other, and we now have an electric charge on this crystal. Scientists were well aware that quartz crystal contained electric properties, but Frank Dorland believed that crystal, through piezoelectric properties, could store consciousness, which he now claimed for the Skull of Doom. Anna Mitchell-Hedges paraded the Hewlett-Packard tests as a triumphant vindication of her account of the skull. She kept the skull and began to make startling claims for its powers. One was that it could predict global disasters by sweating. Well, it's predicted the one that the two girls were killed in Rhodesia accidentally, and it predicted that catastrophe that happened in Mexico with all the earthquake. It's a world disaster usually it presents, not a small thing like an airplane, but when it's a tremendous one, then it'll show us sweat. Anna toured with the Skull of Doom, and in 1980 was the star of an episode of the TV series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. Heathrow Airport, London. Miss Anna Mitchell-Hedges, newly arrived from Toronto, Canada. Anna told her favorite story of how she'd found the skull. 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. As you see, it's got all the little lumps that you have on your own head, and all the, if you look deep down in the eyes, you'll see sockets down in the eyes, and the jaw moves like a human jaw. In the new age world of alternative lifestyles and spiritualism, the Skull of Doom began to be revered. Behind it, the inspiring figure of Anna Mitchell-Hedges. Chicago, 2008. The Body Mind Spirit Expo. A chance for crystal skull devotees from all over the world to get connected, and to get a glimpse of the most legendary skull of all. I'm hoping to feel the energy that the skull has, and I'd like to witness its beauty. How are we doing? The heir to the Skull of Doom and its current keeper is Bill Homan, who became Anna Mitchell-Hedges' companion in her old age. Solid quartz. Crystal skull has so many different faces to it, and once you think you know it or understand it, all of a sudden it changes and it comes with a whole new array of feelings and beliefs and everything too. The Body Mind Spirit Expo offers a feast of modern skulls carved from old age quartz, and for some, the bigger the better. This is Star Sirius, 67 pounds of quartz. It is a shortwave for spirituality. When a person touches it like this, it's making a connection. It's making a circuit. The skull is giving me information I need to know. As I'm giving it information it needs to know. Today, at the heart of many devotees' belief, is the story of the 13 skulls. Now, according to legend, there are 13 ancient crystal skulls that were made by beings not from this planet to communicate with us, humans, and give us knowledge of the ages. The legend says aliens made the 13 skulls and handed them to the people of Atlantis, who passed them on to the Maya. Once united, the skulls would reveal the full mysteries of the universe and the sum of all human knowledge. This will happen in the year 2012, the end of a 5,000-year cycle in the Mayan calendar. Some followers claim it's possible to communicate with the Skull of Doom about the other 12 skulls. Carol Wilson is a well-known medium in Ontario, Canada, where police have used her to help solve crimes. She has conducted seances with the Skull of Doom, in which she says it speaks through her. Thirteen, thirteen, this is the oral traditions of many of your native peoples. My concept of the skull is that it's, and I didn't have a word for it then, but it's a computer without having to, it's already programmed and you don't have to type on little keys, all you do is put your hand on it and it will answer any question you pose to it. Anna Mitchell Hedges died in April 2007. She was 100 years old. She, far more than her adoptive father Frederick, had created the legend of the crystal skulls. She'd helped to inspire the movie that grossed over 120 million dollars the first weekend it was released. Anna insisted till her dying day that her story of the Skull of Doom's discovery was true. You all want to know how we found the skull? Well, I was only 16 when I heard, after we cleared the jungle, and I heard Judith Meyer say, if you go on top of that building, you'll have a most wonderful view. Anna Mitchell Hedges had done more than anyone to promote the legend of the crystal skulls, and because quartz crystal is impossible to carbon date, it seemed no hard scientific evidence could ever refute her story. But even as Anna was dying, a new generation of scientists using state-of-the-art techniques subjected her claims to a more rigorous scrutiny than ever before. In 1992, an anonymous package arrived at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Inside was a previously unknown crystal skull. I got a call from the curator of the Museum of American History, and he asked me if I knew anything about crystal skulls, and I said, yeah, a little. Why? And he said, well, we just got one in the mail. Jane Walsh went to collect the skull, and was given a dire warning. Because he had said it was very heavy, I stopped off and asked for a cart, and they asked me what I needed it for, and I said, well, actually for, I'm picking up a crystal skull. So the person who gave me the cart said, well, don't look it in the eye, and I said, why? And he said, because they're cursed. The only evidence about the Smithsonian skull was an accompanying note saying it had been bought in Mexico City in 1960. But it propelled Jane Walsh on a 16-year-long quest for the truth of the crystal skulls. She knew that the British Museum in London had a similar crystal skull. The museum had bought it in 1897, believing it to have been made by the Aztecs, the Central American neighbors of the Maya. In the late 19th century, it certainly would have aroused interest and comfortably fallen with what people would have imagined to be something possibly Aztec or Mexican. For today's devotees, the London skull is considered to be one of the So too is a crystal skull in a Paris museum, acquired in 1878, again on the understanding that it was an Aztec object. In the archives, Jane Walsh discovered a striking coincidence. Both skulls originally came from the collection of one man, a 19th century French dealer in antiquities called Eugène Bobin. Bobin's story would prove the key to unraveling the mystery of the London and Paris skulls. For Jane Walsh, the name Bobin rang an immediate bell. The Smithsonian houses some of his collection. We have a few pieces from Eugène Bobin in this cabinet. As you can see, this is a very typical Aztec chili grinder, and it also has Eugène Bobin's tags on it. Walsh headed for Mexico City, where Eugène Bobin lived in the mid-19th century. Her initial inquiries suggested that Bobin had set out as a purely amateur collector. He found a lot of things. He found potsherds, he probably found bones, but I also think at some point he started to buy things because he became a dealer. Bobin began to specialize in the Aztecs, a Central American civilization which, like the Maya, had been obsessed with skulls. By the mid-19th century, more and more Europeans were becoming interested in these ancient American sites, and had a growing appetite for Mayan and Aztec relics. Not surprisingly, local craftsmen were soon producing them by request, using the grinding wheel, the key invention of modern carving. The more people came in, the larger the demand was, so people started fabricating things to sell to these collectors. Although these people aren't trying to fool anybody, they're making reproductions, and they're not saying that they dug them up out of the ground. Around 1869, Bobin, now with a reputation as a leading authority in Mexican antiquities, returned to Paris, where he set up shop in the 5th arrondissement. It was at this time that the Paris crystal skull first appeared on the scene, as part of Bobin's collection. He sold it to a French explorer, who donated it to the Trocadero Museum. It was the first large crystal skull to go on public display, and created a sensation. His skull was greeted as an extraordinary discovery, dating back to the great ancient civilization of the Aztecs. In 1881, a second large crystal skull went on show in Bobin's Paris shop. It was listed for three and a half thousand francs, then worth seven hundred dollars, but failed to sell. Bobin moved to New York, and finally sold his second crystal skull to the jewelers Tiffany's for nine hundred and fifty dollars. Ten years later, Tiffany's sold it to the British Museum. Both of Bobin's skulls were now in prestigious museums in Paris and London, and labelled Aztec. We have the museum's display labels of the time, which describe the two skulls as great masterpieces from the Aztec era. The crystal death masks, as they were called, both in London and in Paris. It seemed to fit in with what was generally known about skull iconography in the Americas. The fact that two great museums both had these objects, meant that each endorsed the other's antiquity. Paris said the British Museum has got one, and the British said, well, Paris has got one too. As the decades passed, and archaeologists learnt more about the Aztecs and Maya, the idea that they made crystal skulls began to seem less and less credible, principally because their sites contained almost no other crystal objects. Finally, Jane Walsh teamed up with a British Museum scientist, Margaret Sachs. She would apply state-of-the-art science, using electron microscopes that can detect even the tiniest tool marks. First, to understand ancient American carving techniques, Margaret Sachs examines a crystal goblet that was hand-carved by the Mixtecs, the Aztec's neighbours. We wanted to look at objects from well provenance excavation, and this is the largest rock crystal object that's been excavated. The tool marks are linear, and they occur in random orientations, and they're clearly been made with hand-held tools. For example, a file rubbed repeatedly backwards and forwards over the surface. If the London skull is truly ancient, it should have similar marks to those on the Mixtec crystal goblet. She takes a small plastic mould from a part of the skull, in this case, the corner of the mouth. Now magnified up to a hundred times, two marks on the mould are clearly visible. We see here the curvature along the depth of the mouth, which is characteristic of a wheel, a disc-shaped tool like this. So we can imagine the wheel moving along like this and cutting that feature. The earliest carving wheels only arrived in America long after the Europeans invaded. So the Maya and Aztecs never possessed any such tools. There is only one certain conclusion. The ancient Americans could not have made the London crystal skull. Modern technology can also reveal where the crystal came from. Rock crystal usually has small impurities known as inclusions, which are specific to the region where the crystal grew. And the inclusions in the British Museum skull show that its origin is nowhere near Central America and the Aztecs and Maya. These particular types of inclusions have been reported from courts, from Madagascar and from Brazil. The best examples that I've seen in the literature of this type of habit, this verniform habit, have been from Madagascar. Madagascar started to export rock crystal to France in the late 19th century, as did Brazil. No crystal like this has ever been found in Central America. The evidence of the inclusions allows us to rule out Mexico as a source for the rock crystal. The historical facts point to a date of manufacture for the British Museum skull in the second half of the 19th century. Recent tests on the Paris skull also show modern tool marks. Both the London and Paris skulls have now been proved to be fakes, almost certainly carved in 19th century Europe and brought onto the market by Eugene Bobin, the man who set the crystal skull ball rolling. Jane Walsh now turned to her Smithsonian skull, delivered in its anonymous package back in 1992, and took it across the Atlantic for testing by Margaret Sachs. Like the London and Paris skulls, it shows the marks of a modern carving wheel. But there is something even more precise. And we found a further clue to the dating of this skull, the date of its manufacture, is that some minute particles are trapped in the natural cavities in the material. And one of those we were able to identify by using x-ray diffraction analysis as being composed of silicon carbide. Silicon carbide is a sludgy substance that can be coated onto a carving wheel to give a brilliantly smooth finish. The bonded silicon carbide of which traces were found on the Smithsonian skull only came into use in the 1950s. This sets the date of manufacture in the 1950s, a mere 10 years perhaps before the skull was bought in Mexico City. Washington, London, Paris. All three skulls of modern origin. All three have no connection to the ancient civilizations of Central America, which leaves the Skull of Doom. Today's guardian of the skull is Bill Homan, who became Anna Mitchell Hedge's longtime companion in her old age. He still endows the skull with special ancient properties. The crystal skull is giving, if we believe it, from the higher civilization, giving us this knowledge and this blessing. And how we use it and how it's used today is, you know, for either our good or our deferment. And hopefully it's for our good. Anna Mitchell Hedges claimed she found the skull inside a Mayan pyramid during the excavations of the 1920s. But in the archives, Jane Walsh found a smoking gun. This is an article that was published in the British journal Man in July of 1936. And it describes a study that was done in the British Museum on their own crystal skull, comparing it to a crystal skull in a private collection. That privately owned skull seemed oddly familiar. As Jane Walsh looked at the photograph more closely, she realized it was exactly the same as another skull she'd seen. The Skull of Doom. You can see that it's identical to the Mitchell Hedges skull. And in fact, it is the Mitchell Hedges skull. But in this 1936 article, the skull is not attributed to Frederick Mitchell Hedges. And it's not called the Skull of Doom. It's called the Burney skull, after the man who then owned it, an art dealer named Sidney Burney. Burney kept it at his gallery here in central London. In 1943, he took it around the corner to Sotheby's auction house. The Sotheby's auction catalogue lists the skull. It was withdrawn before the auction and sold for 400 pounds to one Frederick Mitchell Hedges, nearly 20 years after Anna claimed to have discovered it. Anna tried to explain this inconsistency, saying that her father, after bringing the skull back to England, had given it to Burney as security for a loan. But when I asked Anna Mitchell Hedges to clarify this, she said, well, what happened is Mr. Burney was a friend of her father. Mr. Burney promised that he would hold the skull until her father could pay back the loan. According to Anna, her father repaid the loan just before the auction started and retrieved the skull. But there are further oddities about Anna Mitchell Hedges' story, notably the variation in the dates she gave for her discovery. This letter, her statement of fact, that she found the skull in the 1926-27 season, is in conflict with various other statements she's made in letters, in publications, on websites. Something kept shining in my face and I couldn't make out what it was. I've seen the date 1927, 1926, 1928, 1924 mentioned. And there's even a newspaper article quoting Mitchell Hedges himself, saying that he found it in the 1930s. The ultimate test for the Skull of Doom is to subject it to the same examination as the London, Paris and Washington skulls. After Anna's death, Bill Homan decides to put it under the microscope. Upon the outcome, a legend will stand or fall. So in April 2008, the Skull of Doom's keeper brings the skull to the Smithsonian Institution for testing by the latest microscope technology. First, Walsh takes moulds from intricate parts of the skull. We were trying to see the sides of this hole to see if we can see what kind of tool was used to cut through that. And that may be a little problematic to mount. What do you think, Scott? The electron microscope analysis is finally about to reveal the truth of the Skull of Doom. Where you see fairly cleanly, sharply defined marks with these beautifully parallel striations that I would think are permanently adhered diamond abrasive because quartz is very hard. In order to cut through it very cleanly and sharply, you need some very hard abrasive. This is not cutting, this is more polishing we're seeing? Or is this cutting? That's cutting. OK, those marks right here. The tools that made these marks did not exist until the end of the 19th century. Probably the kinds of very fine carving tools that artists use, but also the kind of mechanised tools that were available even to dentists by the turn of the century. The discovery of modern tool marks is powerful scientific evidence that Anna Mitchell Hedges fabricated her famous story. But for true believers like Bill Homan, it proves only how the skull was made, not by whom or when. He believes the marks indicate tools so sophisticated that they could not have been in use before the skull's first documented appearance in the 1930s. Maybe in some people's minds it looks like, you know, that it's putting in a period of being modern, but when you look at the real, what it really shows, the quality, the workmanship, the time that went into it, it shows that in 1920s there would be no-one around that would put the time into it or have the ability or the equipment to do that. If Homan is right, then believers in the legend of the crystal skulls can continue to point to some extraterrestrial origin as the only explanation. If these primitive cultures could not possibly duplicate what we're seeing with the ancient skulls, then where did they come from? Maybe they were done by some advanced culture that used lasers to precisely cut the skulls, which would be in Atlantis. But could it possibly be that they were the gifts from the gods? Because this is what the Mayans talk about. They say the grandfathers from the Pleiades brought them the crystal skulls. Well, this is implying a contact with an extraterrestrial race that's not native to the earth. But the science is certain. The skull of Doom was made by humans in the early 20th century. So why did Anna Mitchell Hedges invent her story and continue to embellish it? Well, he found a lot of potteries and jades and the skull of Doom. We excavated for about seven years, clearing the ground, and then one day we spotted something shining through the stones, and that was my 17th birthday. And it predicted that catastrophe that happened in Mexico with all the earthquake, and there we had our skull. When she was 89, Anna went back to Lubantun. By then, she had perhaps convinced herself that her story of the skull's discovery was indeed true. I wish I was back doing it again. It was the nicest part of my life. I dream a lot about it. I don't know how I got there. I still wonder. Yeah, there's always people saying, did she find her, didn't she find it? It might not have been exactly as she says, only for the fact is that, you know, I tried to remember something back 10 years and try to put it in the right order and the time, and it's really hard to do. Some days you never forget her. Yeah, I believe Anna Mitchell-Hedges always believed what she said. Her father loved playing practical jokes on people, and if there was any delusion in all of this, it might have been perpetrated by her father just as part of his way with her, but she believed it was real. Could Frederick Mitchell-Hedges have planted the skull in the Mayan pyramid for Anna to find, perhaps as a birthday present? That theory now seems highly unlikely. The combined evidence of the tools that shaped the skull and the date of its first documented appearance suggest it must have been made after Anna claimed to have found it in Lubantun. Jane Walsh has another interpretation for Anna's inventiveness. It goes back to the period just after Frederick's death when Anna was trying to export the skull, along with other pieces from his collection, from Britain to North America to sell them. She was trying to support herself. She had these objects that may or may not have been valuable, and there's a point at which she's already applied for some kind of a permit from the British government to take this piece out of the country for research, and I suspect she had to say that it belonged to her. So I think that may be where she started to say that she found it. For over a century, the legend of the crystal skulls has intrigued millions and inspired Hollywood. The evidence now shows that the famous skulls in three of the world's great museums and the Skull of Doom itself were part of one of archaeology's greatest frauds. Anna Mitchell Hedge's story was one of its greatest fabrications. Science has revealed how the skulls were made, but we may never know exactly why or by whom. For crystal skulls devotees, their supernatural power remains. Exquisite carvings, mysterious to the end.