Mexico's crystal skulls, British adventurer F.A Mitchell-Hedges and Indiana Jones Movie

PALENQUE, MEXICO -- There is a legend that the ancient Maya possessed 13 crystal skulls which, when united, have the power to save the Earth -- a tale so strange and fantastic that it inspired the latest Indiana Jones movie.

Experts dismiss the hundreds of crystal skulls around as fakes that were probably made by unscrupulous antiquities traders in the 19th century. But even today Mayan priests worship the skulls and real-life treasure hunters still search for them.
The story of the skulls stretches over continents and hundreds of years, and may be even more extraordinary than the tale portrayed in the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise.

Few of today's crystal skulls can be documented any further back than the 1860s, when Europe was swept by a rage for pre-Hispanic "relics." Frenchman Eugene Boban, a colorful antiques dealer with a checkered past and murky political ties, set up a store here to supply the trade after the French invaded Mexico.

Eventually he carted skulls between New York, Paris and Mexico City, selling them to private collectors.

Buyers were often told that the skulls were made by the Mayas, whose civilization peaked between 300 and 900 A.D. But no crystal skull has ever been excavated from a documented archaeological site. Some believe the skulls can emit and focus light, project visions and even influence terrestrial forces.

Today, these beliefs persist in the jungles of southern Mexico among the Lacandon, one of the few isolated Maya peoples, some of whom still worship the skulls.

In the shadow of the Palenque ruins, Lacandon priest K'in Garcia fans incense and holds a heavy crystal skull above his head during ceremonies for Hacha'kyum, the Mayan god of creation.

Garcia, son of the Lancandon's most respected elder, Chan Kin, believes the skull has special powers, including the ability to stave off sickness and deforestation in the rain forest where the last Lacandon live.

"When I am alone at night, at about 2 a.m., it starts to glow, it emits light, and it stays like that for about a minute," said Garcia.

Garcia says the skull was given to him by a local man -- and while he believes it is very old, he doesn't know where it came from.

Thousands of miles away in Washington, Jane MacLaren Walsh keeps one of the skulls in her office at the Smithsonian Institution. She doubts the ancient Mayas ever had any such skulls.

An anthropologist and antiquities sleuth, she has spent more than a decade studying the best-known skulls, such as the ones acquired by the British Museum and Paris' Quai Branly museum more than a century ago, as well as the Smithsonian's own skull.

She says they are stylistically unlike pre-Hispanic depictions of death's heads, and often show microscopic marks from cutting tools unavailable in pre-Hispanic times.

"None of them is ancient," said Walsh, who recently wrote an article for Archaeology magazine examining the legends surrounding the skulls.

About the purported powers, she notes wryly: "I've been sitting in fairly close proximity to one of the skulls for about 16 years, and I have not witnessed anything like what people say."

The British Museum keeps a skull in its collections largely as a curiosity, listing its provenance as "probably European, 19th century."

It's possible that the near-human sized fakes may have been inspired by two real crystal skulls now on display at Mexico City's respected National Anthropology Museum. Much smaller and less perfectly carved than the ones held at the museums in Europe, these jewelry-sized trinkets, about an inch in height, are in the Aztec and Oaxaca collections, where the museum classifies them as either late pre-Hispanic or early colonial.

The skulls' legend has spawned a new breed of followers. New-agers have associated the skulls with the belief that the Mayan "Long Count" calendar runs out on Dec. 21, 2012, when it reaches the end of a 5,126-year cycle. According to this theory, all 13 skulls must be reunited and lined up together to prevent the world from falling off its axis.

"I personally feel that [the skulls] are coming out now because humanity needs the information, their energy and they have probably their own purpose why they're coming out: to help us to create world peace," said Joshua " Illinois" Shapiro, 53, a self-described Crystal Skull Explorer who makes a living touring and lecturing.

Shapiro has traveled the world seeking out skulls, and believes they link us to knowledge of past worlds like the Mayas, the lost civilization of Atlantis, or even extraterrestrials.

"I was wearing the Indiana Jones hat for a very long time," he claims, "far before they ever thought about putting a crystal skull in an Indiana Jones movie."

 The summer blockbuster “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is in large part an example of art imitating life, says Albuquerque author Anthony Conforti. His book “Acalan” involves a real-life prototype of an Indiana Jones character and an actual crystal skull, which Conforti, 56, saw and held on several occasions. That skull is believed to be in — where else? — Indiana. Published in 2001, Conforti's nearly 800-page book was based on more than 15 years of research that included numerous treks to archaeological sites in Central America and Mexico, as well as many visits with Anna Mitchell-Hedges, the adopted daughter of early 20th-century British adventurer F.A. (Frederick Albert) Mitchell-Hedges, a real-life Indiana Jones. Step into Conforti's South Valley home and what you smell is history, not Hollywood. He regularly burns a sweet, aromatic incense called copal, a fragrance that for him connects the ancient past of the Maya with their present-day descendents. Copal is the sap of the ceiba tree, which the Maya consider the tree of life. Where the ceiba tree grows over caverns, large tap roots often drop down and form a root ball. According to a Maya myth, Conforti says, men and women who had died and who were considered enlightened had their heads removed and placed in the cleft of the root balls anchored in the caverns. Over many years the skulls would petrify, some turning into clear crystal. The crystal skulls were believed to possess mystical powers. They could transmit knowledge, be used to heal or to will death, and they served as a portal to see into the past or the future. “Sort of a Mayan crystal ball,” Conforti says. Funny thing about myths, often they contain a shard of truth. “About five years ago a credible archaeological expedition discovered a cave in Honduras in which they found human skeletal remains in various stages of crystallization,” Conforti says. “So here we have science possibly validating ancient myth.” Land of the ancients “Acalan,” which means “land of canoes” in Nahuatl, is about “the ancient cultures of Mesoamerica and how they survived into present day,” he says. Central to the story is Mitchell-Hedges and his many archaeological discoveries. Among them was the crystal skull his adopted daughter Anna allegedly stumbled on on her 17th birthday in 1924 during an excavation at Lubaantun in British Honduras, now Belize. Conforti calls the book a nonfiction novel. “All the characters are real and based on primary and secondary sources, and in many cases the dialogue is in their own words as taken from their own journals,” he says. More recently Conforti produced a film documentary about the skull, and earlier this year he was interviewed by a British TV film crew producing a documentary about Mitchell-Hedges and the crystal skull. A start in local TV That Conforti became something of an amateur archaeologist was quite by accident. Born in Pittsburgh, he relocated to Albuquerque with his family when he was 14. After graduating Sandia High School, he attended the University of New Mexico but took time off to travel abroad before returning to finish his undergraduate degree in 1979 in English and creative writing. Just as he began working on his master's degree in theater and film, he was offered a job at KGGM-TV, Channel 13 (now KRQE). The station's owner wanted Conforti to format screenplays that would be turned into locally produced movies. The station's movie project didn't quite work out, but Conforti was kept on to work as a reporter and producer for KGGM's newscasts and for a new noon magazine show called “Stopwatch.” In about 1986, while producing a segment on an elaborate Maya exhibit at an Albuquerque museum, Conforti met Harriot Topsey, Belize's commissioner of archaeology. Learning that Conforti had been to Belize for vacation and to film a travel piece for a cable TV network, Topsey told him about the ruins at Lubaantun and the myth of the crystal skull. It was also the first time Conforti heard the names of Mitchell-Hedges and his daughter, Anna, who was then living in Canada and reportedly still had the artifact. That was the start of a project that would consume Conforti for the next 15 years, inspiring him to visit pre-Columbian sites throughout Central America and Mexico and to scour newspaper and museum archives as well as public and private libraries. Tracking the skull Finding Anna Mitchell-Hedges was probably the easiest part of his research. After learning where in Canada she lived, “I just showed up at her home, knocked on the door and she answered,” Conforti recalls. “I told her what I was working on and that I wanted to photograph the crystal skull and hear her story.” She welcomed him. The skull was not, as he expected, kept in a vault, a safe or even a secret hiding place. Rather, it was sitting atop a bedroom chest of drawers, like a paperweight, Conforti says. And when she took it out of her house, as she did periodically to show people, such as the time she accepted an invitation to bring it to Albuquerque in the mid-1990s, “she carried it in a bowling ball bag,” Conforti says. Anna Mitchell-Hedges told Conforti that among the visitors to her home was director Steven Spielberg, who wanted to see the skull and hear more about the adventures of her father