The Ancient Alien Question

by Philip Coppens

  In December 1970, Dorland took the skull to the laboratories of Hewlett-Packard in Santa Clara, California, which was at the time one of the world’s most advanced centers for computers and electronics. The lab technicians there were specialists in the production of precision quartz crystals, which were used in various high-tech instruments. They were perfectly suited to figuring out how the skull could have been made. One of their tests revealed that the skull was made out of one piece of quartz—including the detached jawbone. The lab technicians stated that they were unable to create a skull like that with the technology available to them. In 1970.

  Their analysis further showed that the skull exhibited three different types of workmanship, and hence they suggested that work on it was carried out over three generations, or a period of 60 to 70 years—about half the time Mitchell-Hedges argued it would have taken to make. The idea that three generations would have worked day in and day out on creating one skull was an unlikely scenario, and thus the skull was proposed to have been created with “unknown technology”—which soon became interpreted as “of alien origin,” or from a previous civilization that was technologically superior to ours, which quickly got linked with Atlantis. This was what Mitchell-Hedges had always claimed: that this skull was physical evidence of a lost advanced civilization.

  Larry LaBarre, one of the testers at Hewlett-Packard, added to his observations a decade after the 1970 tests. He said that the quartz of which the skull was made was very hard, measuring nine out of a possible 10 on Moh’s scale, meaning that only a diamond would be able to cut it. The quartz, though of one piece, was furthermore composed of three or four growth phases, each with a different axis. Cutting it would have been extremely difficult, as hitting upon a new axis might shatter the crystal if the cutter was not careful. In short, whereas it was easy to say it would have taken 60 to 70 years to make, it could only have been made with diamond tools, and the slightest error would have shattered the entire object! That some form of unknown technology was therefore involved in the creation of the Mitchell-Hedges skull was evident.

  But one vital question remained: How did Mitchell-Hedges get it? The skull’s owner, English adventurer Frederick A. “Mike” Mitchell-Hedges, writes in his autobiography, “How it came into my possession I have reason for not revealing”—and he never did. But Mike’s secrecy was not shared by his adopted daughter, Anna, who inherited the skull from her father upon his death in 1959. She would state that it was she who found it, in the Mayan city of Lubaantun (in British Honduras/Belize), on the occasion of her 17th birthday, January 1, 1924. If true, it begs the question as to why her father was so reluctant to reveal this rather mundane and innocent discovery.

  An analysis of Mitchell-Hedges’ autobiography reveals—very much like a polygraph test—one area of his life about which he lied. He states that in 1913, when working for Mike Meyerowitz, a diamond merchant in New York, he announced that he was leaving for Mexico, and by November 1913, he had made it to a tiny village a few miles inside the Mexican border, where he was taken captive by General Pancho Villa’s troops on suspicion of espionage and taken to the general himself. This account suggests that Mitchell-Hedges must have been one of the most unfortunate men ever. But his fortune soon changed, for the general believed Mitchell-Hedges when he said he was not a spy. Indeed, soon he became a member of Villa’s army, for a period of 10 months.

  Already the story is somewhat unbelievable, but some people do have a run of bad luck, and Mitchell-Hedges may have suffered from a form of Stockholm syndrome. Then again—imagining the impossible—could he have gone to Mexico expressly to be captured and to spend as much time, as closely as possible, with the great Mexican revolutionary? All this theory would require is the acceptance that Mitchell-Hedges was not a man out for adventure—an Indiana Jones—but, instead, a James Bond, sent by his government to provide an insider’s perspective on the Mexican Revolution. Analysts have argued that Mitchell-Hedges lied about this period of his life, and lying is a prime attribute for any intelligence operative. Villa fought 15 battles while Mitchell-Hedges was allegedly with him, yet in Danger My Ally not one of these campaigns is mentioned. Why leave out details of events with which his readership would have been more than impressed, especially as it showed how danger truly was his ally?

  One author, Sibley S. Morrill, in Ambrose Bierce, F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, and the Crystal Skull (1972), has underlined the period of late 1913 to 1914, when Mitchell-Hedges was with Villa, as the likeliest time for him to have acquired the crystal skull. He added, without providing further details, that “some high officials of the Mexican Government are of the unofficial opinion that the skull was acquired by Mitchell-Hedges in Mexico,” and that it was illegally removed from the country. This scenario could explain why Mitchell-Hedges never said how he’d obtained the skull, as well as why his daughter might have felt it prudent to relocate the place of the skull’s discovery to a different country—British Honduras (Belize).

  A fact that is rarely discussed is that Mitchell-Hedges wrote a novel, The White Tiger, published in 1931, which tackles the subject of crystal skulls. The novel is about “White Tiger,” the leader of the Mexican Indians, who turns out to be an Englishman who was unhappy with his existence in England and immigrated to Mexico. Early on in the novel, the main character argues that he met White Tiger when he had discussions with the Mexican president, at which time the chief left him his diary, which he then published as this novel, while changing certain locations mentioned in the diary.

  The most interesting part of the book is when White Tiger recounts how he was elected leader of the Indians—a position that required an initiation involving being shown the lost treasure of the Aztecs in a lost city of pyramids. So White Tiger, now their king, is shown the treasure, which includes “crystal heads”—plural—hidden in an underground cave complex:

  As they passed into the temple, the priest impressively led him to one of the massive walls, placing his hand in a certain manner upon what appeared to be a solid block of stone. At his touch it rolled slowly back, disclosing a flight of steps down which they passed.... On and on down countless steps—into the very bowels of the earth until again the priest pressed the apparently solid rock barring their progress. With scarcely a sound the stone block turned as easily as if on oiled hinges and before them yawned a long tunnel. Passing through this they descended another flight of steps. For a third time the priest touched the wall and a huge stone rolled aside. Then in the dim light of the lantern the White Tiger saw that he was in an immense vault cut out of the living rock.

  Before him, piled in endless confusion, lay the treasure of the Aztecs. Gold chalices, bowls, jars and other vessels of every size and shape; immense plaques and strange ornaments all glittered dully. Of precious stones there were none, but many rare chalchihuitl (jadeite pendants) [sic]. Masks of obsidian and shells beautifully inlaid were all heaped together with heads carved from solid blocks of crystal. Legend had not exaggerated the treasure of the Aztecs. Almost boundless wealth lay at the disposal of the White Tiger.

  The suggestion is that this is not fiction but what really happened to Mitchell-Hedges: He was White Tiger and was given the crystal skull by Mayan priests, just as Nick Nocerino would be offered crystal skulls a few decades later.

  Finally, one of the rumors that circulate around the skull is that the then Mexican president, Porfirio Díaz, owned a secret cache of treasures, among which were two crystal skulls that found their way to Pancho Villa. It is even said that he had two of these skulls on his desk. Though the rumor has never been validated, it is a remarkable story because The White Tiger opens inside the Mexican president’s office, where the main character meets White Tiger. Noting that later on in The White Tiger he is the one who sees crystal skulls inside a cave complex, we can only wonder whether the rumor, the novel, and the truth are all one and the same.

  Interestingly, shortly before his death in August 1975, Sibley Morrill wrote to Ancient Skies,
the newsletter of the Ancient Astronaut Society, stating, “My new book, Ambrose Bierce, Mitchell-Hedges and the Crystal Skull, may interest you because of the very real possibility (not mentioned in the book) that the famous crystal skull either had an extraterrestrial origin or was produced by people who either were extraterrestrials here on Earth or received their extraordinary knowledge from them. It is definitely established that the Maya were remarkable astronomers. It is also completely certain that neither the Maya nor any other ancient race could have made the crystal skull unless they possessed technology and instruments they are no longer known to have had.”

  Today, there are a large number of crystal skulls in circulation, most of which are of modern fabrication, either from China or Brazil. But a century ago, there were hardly any. The likeliest scenario for these skulls is that they were genuine, found during archaeological excavations or given to the likes of Mitchell-Hedges by the native people. In the case of the Mitchell-Hedges skull and some others, it is clear they were not made by a technology we know and their origins have to be found in a lost or unknown—if not alien—civilization. The evidence suggests that these skulls date back to the Mayan world, and that one or two may actually have come from Teotihuacán, the City of the Gods. Is it a coincidence that in Mayan creation mythology, there was a mystical skull said to be that of a god, and that this god—this mysterious skull—spoke to the Mayan people?

  Teotihuacán, the City of the Gods

  According to Mayan mythology, in 3112 BC, the gods convened in Teotihuacán, just outside of Mexico City. However, according to accepted archaeology, the city only existed three millennia later, from AD 300 to 600, and covered 7.7 square miles, holding a massive population of 200,000 people. The name Teotihuacán means “place of the gods” or “where men were transformed into gods,” and was given to the site by the Aztecs.

  The central focus of the complex is a series of pyramids: the Pyramid of the Moon and the Pyramid of the Sun, which, together with the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, are the axis along which the city developed. The actual central axis is the Avenue of the Dead, running from the plaza in front of Pyramid of the Moon past the two other features, and beyond, originally more than two miles long. It was named “Avenue of the Dead” because of archaeological discoveries alongside it. Still, the name may betray a mythical aspect, as ethnographer Stansbury Hagar suggested that the Avenue may be a representation of the Milky Way—normally seen as a Way of the Soul.

  Hagar went further and stated that the entire complex was a map of heaven: “It reproduced on earth a supposed celestial plan of the sky world where dwelt the deities and spirits of the dead.”5 His conclusions were in line with those of Hugh Harleston Jr., who mapped the complex in the 1960s and 1970s and believed that the entire complex was a precise scale model of the solar system.

  If the center line of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl was taken as the position of the sun, markers laid out northward from it along the axis of the Avenue of the Dead indicate the correct orbital distances of the inner planets, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn (the Sun Pyramid), Uranus (the Moon Pyramid), and Neptune and Pluto, represented by two mounds further north. Harleston’s suggestion fueled speculation of extraterrestrial intervention in the Mayan civilization, as the planet Uranus had only been discovered in 1787, and Pluto as late as 1930, with the help of telescopes, a technology officially unknown to the Maya. How did the Mayans therefore acquire this knowledge?

  Harleston also concluded that the entire site was constructed according to a system of measurement that he named the STU, for Standard Teotihuacán Unit, which equals 3.47 feet. This unit features in the length of a side of the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, as well as in the distance between the two pyramids, showing that the entire complex was carefully laid out in a very scientific and mathematical manner. Where have we observed that before?

  Others went beyond even these observations. Alfred E. Schlemmer stated that the Avenue of the Dead might never have been a street, but instead was a series of linked reflecting pools, filled with water that descended through a series of locks from the Pyramid of the Moon, at the northern extreme, to the Citadel in the south. British author Graham Hancock added, “The street was blocked at regular intervals by high partition walls, at the foot of which the remains of well-made sluices could clearly be seen. Moreover, the lie of the land would have facilitated a north-south hydraulic flow since the base of the Moon Pyramid stood on ground that was approximately 100 feet higher than the area in front of the Citadel.”6

  The Teotihuacán mapping project demonstrated that there were a series of canals and waterways that formed a network between the city and ran to Lake Texcoco, currently 10 miles away, but possibly closer in antiquity. Was it purely for economic reasons, or was it part of “religious engineering” involving the Avenue of the Dead?

  These theories have added to the body of evidence, which suggests that the master plan for the site was a visual representation of astronomical knowledge. The Pyramid of the Sun is aligned with a point on the horizon where the sun sets on May 17th and July 25th, the two days of the year in which the sun sits exactly over the peak of the pyramid at noon (zenith), uniting the heavens with the center of the world. This orientation explains the zenith’s 17-degree deviation from the north-south alignment of the Avenue of the Dead.

  At the time of the equinoxes, March 21st and September 21st, the passage of the sun from south to north resulted at noon in a perfectly straight shadow that ran along one of the lower stages of the western façade of the pyramid. The whole process lasts just longer than a minute. It is possible that the spectacle occurred on all sides, but as only the western side now remains somewhat intact, it is impossible to draw any further conclusions. The other sides were excavated up to a depth of 20 feet, by Leopoldo Batres.

  Several authors, including Zecharia Sitchin and Graham Hancock, have repeated each other’s argument that there are major correspondences between the pyramids of Giza and those of Teotihuacán. For example, the Pyramid of the Sun is 225 meters (738 feet) wide and 65 meters (213 feet) high, constructed out of five successive layers of mud. Its ascent is via 242 stairs. This floor plan is rather close to that of the Pyramid of Khufu at Giza. The Pyramid of the Moon is much smaller: 42 meters (138 feet) high and 150 meters (492 feet) wide, yet its summit is as high as that of the Pyramid of the Sun, because it sits on the site’s highest point. This feature can also be seen in Giza, where Khufu’s and Khafre’s pyramids reach an equal height, even though one is taller than the other.

  The most obvious comparison, however, is that the layouts of the three pyramids at Giza and the three main structures of Teotihuacán represent the Belt of Orion. The Pyramid of the Moon compares with the smallest pyramid on the plateau; the Pyramid of the Sun compares with Khafre’s pyramid; and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, which has the largest ground plan but was never built into a full pyramid, compares with that of the Great Pyramid. Though there are individual differences, I would suggest that the same ingredients were used at both sites, answering to the same general ground plan: to represent the Belt of Orion, which in ancient Egypt was linked with their mythology and in the Mayan culture was part of the creation mythology.

  On May 17, circa AD 150, the Pleiades star cluster rose just before the sun in the predawn skies. This synchronization, known as the heliacal rising of the Pleiades, only lasted for a century or so. It is now suggested that this event was the reason why the pyramid complex of Teotihuacán was constructed. The sun and the Pleiades are important in the religious rituals of the Mayans; the Sun-Pleiades zenith conjunction marked what is known as the New Fire ceremony. Bernardino de Sahugun’s Aztec informants stated that the ceremony occurred at the end of every 52-year Calendar Round. The Aztecs and their predecessors had carefully observed the Pleiades, and the ceremony was performed precisely at midnight on the night when the constellation was supposed to pass through the zenith.

  The story is in line with the creation
myth, which states that the gods gathered together at Teotihuacán and wondered anxiously who was to be the next Sun. This conclave occurred at the end of the previous World Age, which had just been destroyed by a flood. Now, only the sacred fire could be seen in the darkness, still quaking following the recent chaos. “Someone will have to sacrifice himself, throw himself into the fire,” they cried; “only then will there be a Sun.” Two deities, Nanahuatzin and Tecciztecatl, both tried the divine sacrifice. One burned quickly, the other roasted slowly. Then Quetzalcoatl manifested himself and was able to survive the fire, ensuring a new World Age. It is this age that began in 3112 BC and that is to end on AD December 21, 2012. It is this creation myth in which the “Hero Twins,” Nanahuatzin and Tecciztecatl, were confronted with a magical skull of the gods that spoke to them. It is known that Mayan ceremonial sites, like Teotihuacán, were three-dimensional renderings of the creation myth. It is therefore logical to conclude that there was a real divine skull present there. A crystal skull? A related question is therefore whether Batres was the man who might have sold such artifacts to Boban.

  Batres was also involved with another sale, namely that of sheets of mica that were found between two of the upper levels of the Pyramid of the Sun. The discovery occurred in 1906, when the complex was restored. But the mica was removed and sold as soon as it had been excavated, by Leopoldo Batres, the man in charge of the project. Its economic value was clearly seen to be much higher than its archaeological value.

  More recently, a “Mica Temple” has been discovered at Teotihuacán, but this time, the mica has remained in situ. The temple sits around a patio about 300 yards south of the west face of the Pyramid of the Sun. Directly under a floor paved with heavy rock slabs, archaeologists found two massive sheets of mica. The sheets are 90 feet square and form two layers, one laid directly on top of the other. As it sits underneath a stone floor, its use was obviously not decorative, but functional. The question is what possible use the builders of Teotihuacán could have had for mica.