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Do you feel the love?” asks Bill Homann. He is sitting in an easy chair in the living room of
his modest suburban tract home in Valparaiso, Ind. On a nearby coffee
table, the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull is resting on a towel. The skull
appears strangely luminous, reflecting a piercing blue-white light from its
eye sockets. “There’s some part of the brain it
activates,” Homann says. “The skull is very special, and it has
a very special vibration.”
That vibration has surged into mainstream
consciousness lately, thanks to references to the skull in this
summer’s blockbuster Indiana Jones and
the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Homann has been a denizen of that kingdom for much of
his life. He first heard of British explorer F.A.
Mitchell-Hedges and his fabled crystal skull in Panama in 1968, while on
duty in the Air Force. Since then the skull has become an icon of the New
Age movement, attracting devotees who attribute supernatural powers to the
object. Homann says he became curious about the skull after seeing
photographs of it. In 1981, he contacted its elderly owner, Anna
Mitchell-Hedges, the late explorer’s adopted daughter, who then lived
in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. “I just called up there one day and said
I’d like to see it, and she said, ‘Well, come on up,’
” Homann recalls, “so I hopped up and drove to Canada.”
It was the beginning of a friendship that would last
more than a quarter-century. “For years after that I’d come up to see
her probably three or four times a year,” Homann says. In 1996, he
accompanied Anna to Belize so she could revisit the archaeological site
where she said she discovered the crystal skull in the 1920s while on
expedition with her father. Homann returned to the location earlier this year to
play a role in a Sci-Fi Channel documentary, Mysteries
of the Crystal Skull, that aired in prime time
last month. The two-hour special cast him as a real-life Indiana Jones in
search of an undiscovered crystal skull. His quest took him scuba diving,
spelunking, and on a trek to an ancient Mayan ruins. NBC News weekend anchorman Lester Holt served as
narrator, even going so far as to provide commentary in the water after
diving with Homann in search of the missing skull. In between action
sequences, a parade of self-professed experts ruminated over the
significance of crystal skulls, connecting them to everything from Mayan
apocalyptic prophecies to the origins of the lost continent of Atlantis. Homann, a grandmaster karate instructor, gained his
newfound fame after inheriting the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull from Anna
last year after her death at 100 years of age. During the last eight years
of her life, Anna — a former beautician and motel operator —
lived in Chesterton, Ind., and relied on Homann as her primary caregiver. Porter County, Ind., records indicate that Homann
married Anna on July 9, 2002, when she was 92 years old. Homann, nearly 40
years younger than his late wife, is reluctant to talk about their
marriage. He prefers to refer to Anna as his mentor and spiritual leader.
Though the terms of her estate have not been finalized, he remains in
possession of the crystal skull. “She taught me how to take care of the
skull,” Homann says, whose tousled brown hair and mustache give him a
youthful appearance. “She knew I would take care of it with every
ounce of strength I had.”
Homann looks to his late father-in-law, not Indiana
Jones, for inspiration. “He’s probably one of the greatest
people who nobody knows about,” Homann says. “Mitchell-Hedges
said that a life without adventure is a life without living.”
Homann has taken those words to heart. His business
card describes him as an explorer and adventurer.
DANGER MY ALLY When Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges was born, in
Buckinghamshire, England, in 1882, his father, a Victorian banker, expected
him to follow in his footsteps. But Mike, as he was called, took a
different path. He grew up reading the novels of H. Rider Haggard, Robert
Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle and yearned for adventure in
faraway places. He departed for North America at 18 years of age. In Montreal, Mitchell-Hedges chanced upon a wealthy
Canadian stockbroker, who introduced him to a New York trader. Soon
Mitchell-Hedges found himself keeping the company of Wall Street barons,
playing the stock market by day and high-stakes poker at night. He returned to England in 1906 and married Lilian
“Dolly” Clarke. Though the marriage was never dissolved,
Mitchell-Hedges confessed to his lax martial commitment in Danger My Ally, an
autobiography published in 1954, five years before he died. “I must
certainly be among the leading contenders for the title of ‘The Worst
Husband in the World,’ ” he wrote. “During the years I
have come and gone on my own affairs, racing around the world . . . Dolly
was always there, patiently waiting. . . . ”
Jim Honey, who collaborated with Anna on the 1995
reissue of the book, contends that Mitchell-Hedges’ wife may have
been busy with her own affairs during her husband’s long absences.
“Anna told me that they were man and wife in name only,” says
Honey, “and that Lilian had actually been the mistress of one of his
wealthier friends.”
In any event, Mitchell-Hedges pursued a business
career in England for seven years, ultimately losing a fortune in a dodgy
business deal. Down on his luck, he returned to America, leaving his wife
in a country cottage with just 300 pounds. In New York, he worked for a diamond merchant before
heading south, hoping to reach Central America. During this period,
Mitchell-Hedges claimed, he worked as a cowboy in Texas and a waiter at a
restaurant in New Orleans. When low wages stalled his travel plans, he
resorted to gambling, outwitting a crooked croupier at a casino in rural
Louisiana. Crossing the Mexican border in November 1913, he was
captured by Mexican revolutionaries fighting under bandit Pancho Villa and
presumed to be an American spy. He avoided the firing squad, according to
his autobiography, by belting out an off-key rendition of “God Save
the King.” Instead of freeing the British subject, however, Villa
ordered Mitchell-Hedges to fight for his cause. Mitchell-Hedges wrote that
for the next 10 months he participated in border skirmishes; he was
released only after being wounded twice in the leg. After the British military exempted him from duty in
World War I, Mitchell-Hedges returned to New York in 1917, where he briefly
shared an apartment with a disheveled Russian journalist named Bronstein.
Two years later, an official of the British secret service informed
Mitchell-Hedges that his former roommate had been Bolshevik Leon Trotsky.
The intelligence officer implored him to go to Russia and spy on Trotsky,
who by then was a leader of the Russian Revolution. Mitchell-Hedges
declined the offer, according to his autobiography. But Honey challenges that account. He argues that
Mitchell-Hedges was recruited by the British secret service and sent to New
York to spy on his rich American friends. Another theory holds that
Mitchell-Hedges was already a British agent when he encountered Villa in
Mexico. There is even conjecture that he collaborated in his espionage
efforts with American journalist Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in
northern Mexico in late 1913, after reportedly joining up with Villa.
According to this bizarre tale, Villa presented the crystal skull to
Mitchell-Hedges as a reward for his services. “There are a lot of things in Danger My Ally he
doesn’t say,” says Honey. Those omissions may include the
circumstances surrounding the adoption of Anna. Mitchell-Hedges wrote that
he informally adopted Anne Marie Le Guillon, a 10-year-old orphan, at the
urging of two Americans business associates while visiting Port Colborne,
Ontario, in 1917.
Honey scoffs at that scenario. “[Anna] told me
that Mitchell-Hedges met her mother in France, while she was staying [with
her uncle], who happened to have an antique shop.” The meeting had
occurred, Honey says, while the Frenchwoman’s husband was working in
Canada, saving money to bring over his wife and family. “Anna was
born seven months after her mother arrived in Canada,” says Honey,
who says the evidence suggests that Mitchell-Hedges was Anna’s actual
father. There were other dalliances as well. In 1938, Dorothy
Copp, an American socialite, sued Mitchell-Hedges for divorce even though
he was still married in England. Rumors also circulated about his
relationship with Jane Houlson Harvey, his young secretary. His most
notorious affair was a six-year relationship with Lady Richmond Brown,
which led to her 1931 divorce. Richmond Brown financed and took part in
Mitchell-Hedges’ first two expeditions to British Honduras (now
Belize), which were focused on the exploration of Lubaantun, an ancient
Mayan ruins. The British adventurer believed that his explorations would
ultimately prove a link between the ancient Mayan civilization and a
mythological lost continent, or Atlantis. In British Honduras, colonial authorities granted his
party exclusive rights to excavate Lubaantun and the adjoining 70-square
miles of tropical wilderness. Employing local tribesmen,
Mitchell-Hedges’ team slashed and burned a swath of rainforest to
uncover an ancient city of six square miles, including an elevated citadel,
stone pyramids, terraces, ball courts, burial mounds, and an amphitheater.
The excavations yielded more than 1,000 artifacts, including pottery and
figurines, which the British Museum and the Museum of the American Indian
in New York received in return for their support of the project. But there were no contemporaneous reports of the
crystal skull’s being discovered at Lubaantun. In his autobiography,
Mitchell-Hedges mentions that “Sammy,” his nickname for his
adopted daughter, accompanied him on his final expedition, in 1926 and
1927. Anna herself affirmed in a 1968 letter to an art conservator who was
then studying the object that she had found the skull during that period. But then she changed her story.
SHE WAS JUST 17
According to Anna’s later version, she
discovered the skull at Lubaantun on her 17th birthday, Jan. 1, 1924. “She was told never to go on top of this one
pyramid because the rocks were so loose,” Homann says, “but she
heard if you got on top of it, you could see the sea. When everybody [else]
was taking a siesta in the middle of the afternoon, her and a couple of
Mayan kids climbed up on top of it. The sun was just right and it hit the
top of the skull and she saw a light in there.”
After he reprimanded Anna for her disobedience,
Mitchell-Hedges became curious about her discovery and began excavating the
ruins stone by stone, an arduous task that supposedly took months to
accomplish.
Anna stuck to this final story until she died last
year. She repeated it to a reporter for The Record, a newspaper in Kitchener, as recently as 2005. In that account,
she described descending through a narrow passage to retrieve the skull:
“They lowered me by two ropes,” she said. “They put
towels under the ropes so they wouldn’t hurt me. I was so terrified
— there were scorpions and other awful things down there. I saw the
skull, picked it up, stuffed it in my shirt and they pulled me
out.”
Much to her chagrin, her father promptly gave the
crystal skull to the local Mayan priest. A few months later, a Mayan boy
found the skull’s missing detachable jawbone. In her revised version,
the priest returned the skull to Mitchell-Hedges during the 1926-1927
expedition out of gratitude for supplies and medical assistance he provided
to the tribe. The problem with Anna’s story is there is no
way to confirm it. None of the other expedition members reported the find.
Moreover, there are no known photographs of her with her father at
Lubaantun. Mitchell-Hedges himself didn’t mention the crystal skull
until 1954, when he published his autobiography. Even then, he did not
indicate that Anna found the skull. Instead, he cryptically commented:
“How it came into my possession I have reason for not
revealing.”
In his typically hyperbolic manner, Mitchell-Hedges
referred to the artifact as the Skull of Doom. “It is at least 3,600
years old and according to legend used by the High Priest of the Maya when
performing esoteric rites,” wrote Mitchell-Hedges. “It is said
that when he willed death with the skull, death invariably followed. It has
been described as the embodiment of evil.”
Archaeologist Jane MacClaren Walsh of the Smithsonian
Institution, in Washington, D.C., asserts that the Mitchell-Hedges crystal
skull is far more modern and less lethal. “I am fairly certain that the skull was made in
the early 20th century, with high-speed lapidary tools,” says Walsh,
who analyzed it last November. “We found tool marks left by
high-speed diamond-coated rotary cutting tools, which would not have been
available to pre-Columbian carvers. There are a number of skulls that have
been carved in Europe and in Mexico that are quite similar to the
Mitchell-Hedges skull, and there is no mystery about how they were carved.
I don’t know of any scientific evidence that quartz [crystal] is
imbued with special powers, certainly not supernatural powers.”
A clue to the provenance of the Mitchell-Hedges
crystal skull appears in a July 1936 article published in Man, a British anthropological
journal. One of the two skulls that were analyzed came from the collection
of the British Museum; the other artifact was cited to as being “in
the possession of Mr. Sydney Burney,” a London art dealer. In late 1943, Burney is reported to have put the
skull up for auction at Sotheby’s, the famed London auction house.
The bidding, however, failed to meet Burney’s asking price. A year
later he sold the artifact to Mitchell-Hedges for 400 pounds, according to
a note in the files of the British Museum. Anna explained this discrepancy by saying that her
father had loaned the skull to Burney to help finance one of his Central
American expeditions. In 2005, she told the Kitchener, Ontario, Record: “My father was
livid when he saw the ad in the paper for that auction.” Anna claimed
that Mitchell-Hedges quickly bought the skull back. In the latest issue of Archeology magazine, Walsh describes the Mitchell-Hedges crystal
skull as “a veritable copy of the British Museum skull, with
stylistic and technical flourishes that only an accomplished faker would
devise.” The two skulls are nearly identical in shape, size, weight,
and clarity of the quartz. The main difference is that the teeth of the
British Museum artifact are etched into the crystal, whereas the
Mitchell-Hedges skull has a detachable mandible and its choppers are carved
in precise anatomical fashion. Homann dismisses Walsh’s opinion. He notes that
there is no accurate way to judge the age of quartz sculpture. This leaves
the origin of the artifact shrouded in uncertainty, he says, adding that
the tool marks Walsh found had already been discovered in previous tests
conducted at Hewlett-Packard laboratories in Santa Clara, Calif., in late
1970.
“They found more mystery than not,”
Homann says of the most recent analysis of the skull by the Smithsonian.
“The Mitchell-Hedges skull is an enigma,” he says.
“People say this and people say that — but when it really comes
down to it, how it really got here is a mystery. Somebody made this. How
they did it nobody knows.”
From 1964 to 1970, Anna loaned the skull to Frank
Dorland, a San Francisco-based art conservator. Dorland took numerous
castings of the skull and examined them under a microscope. His other
contributions were less scientific. He speculated that the Mitchell-Hedges
skull would have taken 300 years to carve by hand and that it might date
back to ancient Egypt, Babylon, or Tibet. Dorland also reported witnessing
paranormal phenomena that he attributed to the skull. “The first time I kept the skull in my home
overnight . . . I was awakened by unusual noises in the house,”
Dorland told Richard Garvin, author of The
Crystal Skull. “It sounded like a large
jungle cat was prowling through the house, accompanied by the sound of
chimes and bells. When we got up the next morning, our possessions were
strewn all about the house. Yet, all the doors and windows were still
closed and locked from the inside.”
At Dorland’s urging, scientists at
Hewlett-Packard determined that the detachable jawbone and the cranium were
cut from the same block of quartz, but the experts couldn’t determine
exactly how the skull was created. Regardless of the findings, Anna apparently became
upset when she heard that Dorland had arranged for the skull to undergo
laboratory testing without her permission. According to Garvin’s
account, she rode a Greyhound bus to California to retrieve the skull and
return it to Kitchener, where she then owned and operated a motel. In the years that followed, a stream of pilgrims
visited Anna and the crystal skull in Kitchener, including actors Peter
O’Toole, Shirley MacLaine, and William Shatner. Carol Davis, a Canadian psychic, added to the lore of
the Mitchell-Hedges skull by purportedly channeling its message to the
world. In one session, Davis began emitting a high-pitched hum after
allegedly tuning in to the skull’s transmitting frequency. She then
began speaking in a strange staccato voice: “You seek to know the
origins of this receptacle, which you call the crystal skull,” she
said. “I tell you that it was made, many, many thousands of years ago
by beings of a higher intelligence. It was formed by a civilization which
existed before those you call the Maya. This receptacle contains the minds
of many and minds of one. It was not made using what you call the physical.
. . . It was molded into its present form by thought.”
The Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull has not always been
cast in such a glowing light. In 1962, Anna implied that the skull was more
burden than blessing. “Sometimes I am sorry I did not inter the skull
with my father as he wished,” she told Fate magazine. “I think that may have been the best
place for it. It is a thing of evil in the wrong hands. . . . I believe
that anyone can will another to death through the Skull of Doom. When I
sell it, I want it rather to go to a museum or something like that where it
can do no harm to anyone.”
But in later years Anna changed her mind. In the 2005
interview, she attributed her longevity to the skull. “I take care of
it,” she said, “and it takes care of me.” She also
pooh-poohed the idea of institutionalizing the talisman. “It’s
not for a museum,” she said. “It’s for someone kind, who
has done a lot of good . . . who will do what I did with the skull. At the
time, she intimated that the skull would go to Homann on her death. Since being passed the mantle, Homann has continued
to accentuate the positive, referring to the artifact as the Skull of Love.
According to its new keeper, the skull possesses the power to open
“the heart chakra of man to a universal consciousness of love that
goes between all things, all humans, all mineral life, all animal life,
realizing that we’re all connected, and all one.”
SKULL-SPLITTING CASE Good vibrations, however, have not been enough to
prevent a court battle over the skull. As her spouse, Homann is entitled to
full ownership of the Chesterton, Ind., residence he held jointly with
Anna, but the rights to her other assets — including the crystal
skull — are being contested in probate court in Porter County, Ind. Under the terms of the will she signed in Canada on
April 4, 2001, Anna bequeathed her estate to a dozen family members, mainly
nieces and nephews who live in Ontario. Her holdings include many other objets d’art from
the collection of her father. Besides the skull, they include a mirror
allegedly owned by Marie Antoinette and a goblet that supposedly dates back
to the era of England’s King Henry VIII. Citing state law, Homann has
filed a claim for half of his late wife’s heirlooms. “When Anna died, the only assets she had in her
name alone was this long list of artifacts,” says Richard J. Rupcich,
the Valparaiso attorney who is representing Anna’s Canadian family
members. “The skull is the one with the most notoriety, but it might
not even be the one that’s worth the most. The appraiser who
appraised it — and it is in the court’s records — says
it’s worth $3,000.”
On the other hand, Rupcich reckons that the skull
could fetch millions, judging from the publicity it received in the Indiana
Jones film and because of its sacred status among true believers. The skull
is also valuable because it could generate income through public and
private exhibitions or sponsorships “It’s hard to find a market
value for a [crystal] skull,” Rupcich says. “It’s not
like you can go out and list a house based on comparables in the
neighborhood. There aren’t a lot of skulls around. It makes it
difficult to appraise the value of these things — so who knows what
it is worth?”
To its current keeper, however, the skull is
priceless. “It could be worth a dollar or a billion dollars, but the
thing is, it’s not to be sold,” says Homann. “It’s
Mitchell-Hedges’ wish that it is only to be given to the right person
to carry on this work that it’s supposed to do.”
Because of the approaching end of the Mayan calendar,
on Dec. 21, 2012, Homann believes that it is critical for him to retain
guardianship of the skull. His concerns are based loosely on a 19th-century
German translation of a Mayan sacred text known as the Dresden Codex, which
prophesies that 13 Mayan crystal skulls must be united before that date to
avert a cataclysm of global proportions. “There are people who really believe this
stuff,” says Rupcich. “To me, it’s scary.” Despite
his skepticism, the attorney does not question Homann’s sincerity.
“I think actually he’s a pretty good guy. . . . I don’t
think he’s a con man.”
In court filings, Homann never refers to himself as
the owner of the crystal skull. Instead, he calls himself its
“caretaker” or “keeper.” He declines to talk about
his 2002 marriage to Anna, other than to say that the nuptials were
performed so Anna, a Canadian citizen, could qualify for health-insurance
coverage in Indiana. In the event of his death, Homann has indicated that
custodianship of the skull should pass to his son Brett, who runs the
family-owned karate school in Crown Point, Ind. Rupcich doesn’t know when the probate case will
be settled or whether the crystal skull will ultimately be sold off by
order of the court. Until the estate is settled or the predicted
apocalypse occurs, Homann plans to dutifully protect the crystal skull and
continue to promote its alleged mystical powers. As a part of his efforts,
he wants to help build a cultural center in Belize to preserve the customs
and language of the Mayans. Last month, he says, he traveled to the Cannes
Film Festival with the crystal skull and had a tête-à-tête on a luxury yacht with the French finance minister to
discuss some of these issues. This month, he is scheduled to confer with
Hopi and Mayan spiritual leaders in Sedona, Ariz. “I’m finding that, by following in what I
believe in, things are falling into place,” Homann says.
“It’s just like opening up the doors. I’m just going with
where it goes. I’m going to follow that adventure and exploration and
myself and the world. “It’s fun, too.”
Freelancer C.D. Stelzer is a regular contributor.
This article appears in Jun 5-11, 2008.
