Speaker 1: Welcome to the deep dive. Today, we're looking at this
single object, an artifact that seems to just defy physics
as we know it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a story that honestly connects Mayan Jungles, believe
it or not, to the CIA's top secret psychic spying program.
Speaker 1: It really forces you to think about well, about things
like interplanetary knowledge transfer. Sounds wild, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: It really does like something straight out of a movie.
But the fascinating part is how much of it is
rooted in, you know, actual reports, scientific tests, things like
that exactly.
Speaker 1: And we're not starting in some dusty tune. We're starting
somewhere very modern. The research labs at Hewlett Packard High
Tech Place right HP labs.
Speaker 2: These are the engineers who basically live and breathe QURTS technology.
They practically invented a lot of it.
Speaker 1: And our source material kicks off with this scene. These scientists,
these experts are examining this ancient artifact supposedly what ten
thousand years old.
Speaker 2: At least that was the claim. This was the famous
Mitchell Hedge's Crystal skull.
Speaker 1: And the whole point today is to figure out why
these top HP scientists just couldn't explain how it was made.
It baffled them.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, it was like a scientific puzzle they couldn't solve.
I mean, think about quartz, crystal, It's everywhere in modern tech, right.
Speaker 1: Lolots, computers, communications, exactly.
Speaker 2: These guys knew quarts inside and out. They compared the
skull to thousands, literally thousands of crystals used in their
own tech.
Speaker 1: And right away the results were just confusing.
Speaker 2: Is that the word utterly confusing? They did this test,
submerged it in benzyl alcohol, used polarized light, standard procedure.
Speaker 1: Really okay, what does that test normally show?
Speaker 2: It reveals the internal structure, stress, fractures, inclusions, how it
was formed, or importantly how it was cut.
Speaker 1: And with something supposedly ancient and handcarved.
Speaker 2: You'd expect to see tons of imperfections, right, little flaws,
maybe marks from tools, definitely internal stress from the carving process.
Friction causes heat, heat causes fractures.
Speaker 1: But the Mitchell Hedges skull.
Speaker 2: Pristine, absolutely flawless. The polarized test showed zero internal stress marks. Zero.
Speaker 1: I mean, making something that big out of courts that clear.
Speaker 2: That's hard, now, extremely hard, But to do it without
leaving any trace of tooling, any internal strain. That just
shouldn't be possible, not naturally, not with ancient methods.
Speaker 1: So it just flew in the face of everything they knew, physics, geology, engineering, optics,
even all of it.
Speaker 2: That's the mystery right there. The source material really hammers
this point. Yeah, the level of precision needed, especially cutting
it against its natural access. We'll get into that more.
It seemed like a technology we don't even.
Speaker 1: Have now, let alone thousands of years ago.
Speaker 2: Right. It felt genuinely impossible. It shouldn't exist.
Speaker 1: So okay, we start with this impossible object, and as
we dig into the legends around it, I mean, the
claims just get bigger and crazier.
Speaker 2: They really do.
Speaker 1: So our mission, our deep dive here, is to unpack
this whole tangled story, lost technology, alleged messages from space,
even a huge deception, and.
Speaker 2: Maybe find out that the real potential, the real power,
isn't in some ancient relic after all. Maybe it's closer
than we think.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's try to connect the dots here. An
ancient skull from like Central America and Mars and Cold
War psychic spies. That's quite a leak.
Speaker 2: It is a wild one. Yeah. This is where the
CIA's Project Stargate comes into the picture. Very hush hush.
Speaker 1: Program, right, Stargate, that was their their psychic research. You
it wasn't it Remote viewing and all that.
Speaker 2: Exactly ran for over twenty years from the early seventies
to the mid nineties. The government poured millions into trying
to use psychics for intelligence. It sounds fringe now, but
they took it seriously.
Speaker 1: And when those files finally got declassified, I mean, the
targets were mostly what you'd expect, right, Soviet missile sites,
Chinese subs.
Speaker 2: Standard Cold War stuff, tracking enemies, finding hostages in the
Middle East, military intelligence.
Speaker 1: But then buried in those files was this really weird target.
Speaker 2: Extremely weird. It wasn't about earthly enemies. It was about
ancient Mars.
Speaker 1: Ancient Mars.
Speaker 2: Why well, specifically, in nineteen eighty four, they tasked one
of their viewers to look at a set of coordinates
on Mars four point eight nine degrees north, nine point
five to five degrees west, just.
Speaker 1: Specific coordinates on a dead planet. It shows how far
they were pushing this remote viewing idea, doesn't it. Testing
the limits.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. The sources don't really spell out why those exact
coordinates were chosen. Maybe it was random, maybe not, but
they give us the result.
Speaker 1: They use their best guy, right, Joe McMoneagle.
Speaker 2: That's him. He was considered their most talented remote viewer.
They asked him to look at that spot, but not
Mars now, Mars in its deep past, like a million
years ago.
Speaker 1: And what he described seeing, I mean, it's pure science
fiction pretty much.
Speaker 2: He reported seeing these tall, thin beings, very advanced, but
also a civilization that knew it was dying, facing extinction,
and their structures.
Speaker 1: This links back to the crystal right directly.
Speaker 2: Mcmonagle described seeing these massive towers, huge structures made entirely
of pure crystal.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And they weren't just buildings, he said, they were functioning
as like giant computers designed for storing and transmitting huge
amounts of information, maybe even across space.
Speaker 1: So the Martians basically built their world out of technology
using crystals.
Speaker 2: It sounds like it, but they were facing this unavoidable catastrophe.
Their atmosphere is getting stripped away. They knew time was up, so.
Speaker 1: They needed a backup plan, a way to save their knowledge.
Speaker 2: The ultimate Archive, and according to the legend, that sort
of grew out of these viewing sessions. Their solution was
thirteen crystal skulls. Okay, to preserve everything, their entire history,
their science, all their wisdom, a galactic library basically designed
to outlast their planet.
Speaker 1: And there was a system to it, not just thirteen
random skulls.
Speaker 2: Highly organized. According to the story, twelve of the skulls
were individual archives. Each one supposedly held the complete history
of a different inhabited world somewhere in the.
Speaker 1: Galaxy, a cosmic encyclopedia set.
Speaker 2: Kind of yeah, But the thirteenth skull that was the key,
the master archive. It held the combined knowledge of all
galactic civilizations, including their own Martian ie.
Speaker 1: So you needed the thirteenth skull to unlock or connect
all the others.
Speaker 2: That was the idea. It was the central node, the
integrator for this vast library of cosmic knowledge.
Speaker 1: So as their world is literally dying around them, these
Martians create this crystal hard drive of galactic secrets, and
then they need someone to give it to.
Speaker 2: Right, So it's the next link in this legendary chain.
The Martians needed to pass this incredibly valuable data cash
to another civilization, one that could handle it, and.
Speaker 1: The legend says they picked Atlantis.
Speaker 2: Atlantis, which you know, suggests that Atlantis, if it existed,
must have been incredibly advanced itself, maybe nearly as advanced
as the Martians, or at least worthy of receiving this
cosmic inheritance.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just like leaving a package on the doorstep, then, No.
Speaker 2: Definitely not. This was meant to be a sacred trust.
The story goes that in Atlantis they had specific priests
guardians for each of the thirteen skulls, and.
Speaker 1: They knew how powerful this knowledge was.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they were acutely aware. The sources say they
understood this knowledge could quote destroy worlds if it was
misused or fell into the wrong hands.
Speaker 1: That raises the stakes quite a bit. But then history
or myth seems to repeat itself. Atlanta's had its own disaster, right,
the Great Flood.
Speaker 2: The second extinction event in our story exactly the continent sinks,
total catastrophe.
Speaker 1: So the Alantean priest had to act fast.
Speaker 2: Just like the Martians before them. Before the final disaster,
they supposedly transported the thirteen skulls out of Atlantis scattered
them across the globe for safety, hiding them in different places.
Speaker 1: Pure distribution, hoping some would survive.
Speaker 2: Right, And according to the specific Myya legend that our
adventurer Mitchell Hedges was so obsessed with, Yeah, the most
powerful skull, the thirteenth one, the master key that was
given directly to the Maya civilization.
Speaker 1: Ah okay, so that's the artifact Hedges thought was hidden
somewhere in Central America.
Speaker 2: That's the one. And the powers attributed to this skull
in the lore are just incredible. It wasn't just a
storage device.
Speaker 1: What could it do?
Speaker 2: It could supposedly communicate telepathically. It could answer any question,
but only you know if the person asking how to
pure heart?
Speaker 1: And we're talking the big questions, right, where did we
come from? What's the point of the universe exactly?
Speaker 2: The origin of humanity, the purpose of existence, the secrets
behind the Pyramids, Stonehenge, even what really happened to Atlantis.
It was like the ultimate cosmic Google.
Speaker 1: So the myth ties this powerful tech to a kind
of spiritual readiness.
Speaker 2: Very much so there was this prophecy attached to it.
When all thirteen skulls were finally brought together again. Ah,
the power of the gods would be unleashed, Humanity's true
destiny would be revealed.
Speaker 1: But there was a catch. Wasn't there something about being worthy?
Speaker 2: Yes, a crucial catch. The prophecy said the skulls would
only be found when humankind was finally ready, when we
were quote worthy, ethically mature enough.
Speaker 1: Maybe so they were meant to stay hidden from millennia,
basically waiting for us to grow up.
Speaker 2: It's a compelling idea, isn't it that the ultimate secrets
are out there, but we can't access them because of
our own well immaturity.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's jump forward thousands of years past empires rising
and falling, past the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, right into
the nineteen.
Speaker 2: Twenties, the Roaring twenties, and this is where Frederick Mitchell
Hedges enters the story. Fa Mitchell Hedges quite.
Speaker 1: A character from what I gather real life Indiana Jones type.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, he was a celebrity in England back then, adventure
soldier Explore. His autobiography was called danger My Ally that
says a lot.
Speaker 1: So he wasn't just some academic. He was out there,
you know, facing down dangers.
Speaker 2: Oh, Yeah, captured by tribes, fought wild animals, hacked through
jungles looking for ruins and treasure. He lived it, and
he had.
Speaker 1: This specific interest in the Maya. Right, there's sudden knowledge.
Speaker 2: He was obsessed with it. How did the Maya suddenly
develop such sophisticated math, astronomy, these incredible calendars. It seemed
to pop up out of nowhere in the historical record.
Speaker 1: And his theory connected back to Atlantis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he believed advanced survivors from Atlantis. Maybe those priests
we talked about fled the flood, ended up in Central
America and basically jump started Maya civilization by sharing their knowledge.
Speaker 1: Which tied into local stories. He was hearing.
Speaker 2: Perfectly stories from people in British Honduras, which is now
belieze about the Star people. These beings who supposedly appeared
taught the early Maya amazing things, left behind some artifacts,
and then just vanished.
Speaker 1: So Hedges had his quest, Yeah, find evidence that these
Atlantean teachers maybe find one of those artifacts.
Speaker 2: Precisely so, January nineteen twenty four, he gets local guides
heads deep into the Honduran jungle looking for a specific
lost city people whispered about.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't a walk in the park, no way.
Speaker 2: Weeks of incredibly tough travel, dense jungle, malaria, snakes, the works,
but he kept pushing and eventually his guides led him
to this overgrown area, a huge mound hidden by vegetation.
He starts digging, just scraping away the top soil, and
about six inches down he hit stone, gleaming white stone.
Speaker 1: He found it.
Speaker 2: He'd found the lost city of Lubantun, which translates to
place of the Fallen Stones. Quite fitting, and.
Speaker 1: The construction there it struck him as unusual.
Speaker 2: Very unusual for the region. The stones were cut perfectly,
fitted together without any mortar at all, super precise. He
thought it looked like stonework he'd seen.
Speaker 1: In Egypt, which supported his idea of a global advanced
civilization exactly.
Speaker 2: It fueled his theory that there was this worldwide network
long before recorded history.
Speaker 1: So they excavate Lubon tune. Yeah, and the big fine
comes the main pyramid.
Speaker 2: Right after weeks of clearing rubble, they uncovered this small
dark opening right at the top of the great pyramid,
a shaft leading straight down about forty feet into the
pyramid's core Boogie Very and the local workers they flat
out refused to go down. They were terrified, believe the
place was cursed, that something dangerous was in that chamber.
Speaker 1: Hedges couldn't persuade them.
Speaker 2: Nope, their fear was too real.
Speaker 1: So enter his daughter, Anna, Anna Mitchell Hedges.
Speaker 2: She'd been traveling with him since she was a kid,
about ten. By nineteen twenty four, she's seventeen, and apparently
this all happened on her seventeenth birthday, where so the
story goes.
Speaker 1: Quite a birthday present, right.
Speaker 2: She was as adventurous as her dad. So with the
workers refusing, Anna says, I'll go wow. They lower her
down into the darkness pitch black. She describes reaching an altar,
digging around in the dirt with her hands in fight.
She comes back up, supposedly holding something wrapped in her shirt,
and it's the skull, a human skull perfectly carved from
a single piece of flawless quartz crystal.
Speaker 1: The Mitchell Hedges crystal skull, that's.
Speaker 2: The one, and later Hedges claimed a local maya elder
told him their high priest used such a skull to
quote will someone to death. So he dramatically named it
the Skull of Doom.
Speaker 1: Okay, so he finds this incredible, possibly deadly artifact. You'd
think you'd be shouting about it from the rooftops, right,
you would think.
Speaker 2: But strangely, no, he basically packed it away, kept it
pretty quiet for almost thirty years, only mentioned it publicly
like once before he died in nineteen fifty nine.
Speaker 1: Weird. So it wasn't until Annae inherited it that the
story really took off.
Speaker 2: Exactly nineteen fifty nine. Anna gets the skull, she takes
it out of storage, and she's the one who starts
claiming it has these strange powers. She said it started talking.
Speaker 1: To it talking okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: Which led her in nineteen sixty three to contact Frank Dorlund.
He was a well respected art restorer but also a
crystal expert based in California. She wanted him to analyze it,
figure out what was going on.
Speaker 1: And Dorlan starts experiencing things too.
Speaker 2: He and his wife. Yeah, this is where the legend
gets really cemented. They reported hearing things when the skull
was out of its vault, soft voices, sometimes music, even
what they described as singing, singing from a crystal skull right,
and other weird sensory stuff like sometimes the air around
it would smell like apple blossoms, other times like sharp
vinegar Okay, and people looking into the left eye socket.
Some reported getting vivid visions like watching movies of ancient temples,
forgotten rituals just playing out in their minds.
Speaker 1: Wow. Poltergeist activity too, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Reports of objects moving on their own overnight, things getting scattered,
classic spooky stuff.
Speaker 1: Sounds completely paranormal. But Dorelyn had a different idea he did.
Speaker 2: He wasn't thinking ghosts through magic. He actually believed the
skull was a machine, a highly complex, incredibly advanced piece
of technology.
Speaker 1: A machine made of crystal. Wow.
Speaker 2: He theorized it interacted with human thought, with consciousness, maybe
through crystallography, like it could pick up electromagnetic signals from
the brain or perhaps convert thoughts into sound or images.
Speaker 1: Which is why he took it to Hewlett Packard for
some hard science.
Speaker 2: Exactly he needed technical validation and those HP tests we
need to dig into why they were so stunning at
the time. Okay, First, the scientists confirmed skull and jaw
carved from one single piece of quartz that alone is
a master work of carving.
Speaker 1: But the really mind blowing part was how it was carved.
Speaker 2: That was the kicker. The axis. See, crystals have a
natural grain and axis. You cut with the axis to
avoid shattering it. It's fundamental, like cutting wood with the
grain precisely. But the HP test apparently showed this skull
was carved against the natural axis of the quartz.
Speaker 1: How is that even possible.
Speaker 2: Well with any known tool back then or even now. Really,
cutting against the axis generates immense friction and pressure. It
should cause fractures, it should shatter the crystal, especially the
piece that large.
Speaker 1: So to do it successfully you'd need.
Speaker 2: Some way to counteract the basic physics of the material,
maybe alter its molecular structure while carving. That's way beyond
even our current tech. Firmly in the realm of like
sci fi.
Speaker 1: And dorelynd ran with this, Oh yeah.
Speaker 2: He pointed to other physical clues from the microscopic analysis,
evidence of what looked like tiny ribbon prisms inside engineered
light tunnels, the eye sockets shaped like perfect lenses.
Speaker 1: So intentional engineering, not just carving.
Speaker 2: That was his argument. Sophisticated design meant to focus energy
or information. He speculated they used ultrasonics or maybe some
kind of crystal resonance tech to shape it molecule by molecule,
which would explain the lack of tool marks too.
Speaker 1: So the HP tests, combined with Dorelyn's interpretation, made the
skull seem genuinely impossible by earthly standards exactly.
Speaker 2: It gave the whole wild legend this veneer of scientific credibility.
Suddenly Martians in Atlantis didn't seem quite so crazy because
the object itself appeared to be proof of non human technology.
Speaker 1: Okay, So the Mitchell Hedges skull, backed by these HP
results in Dorelyn's stories, becomes this huge sensation.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and it immediately sparks this quest where are the
other twelve skulls from the legend? If one is this amazing,
what about the whole set?
Speaker 1: People started looking seriously, not just like New age enthusiasts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, serious researchers. Museum curators started digging into it, trying
to track down any reported crystal skull, especially in established collections.
This really picked up steam in the nineties.
Speaker 1: Wasn't there a big one that turned up at the Smithsonian.
Speaker 2: There was nineteen ninety two a massive, thirty one pound
skull just arrived anonymously in the mail, no note, nothing weird,
very and that prompted doctor Jane Walsh at the Smithsonian
to really lead the investigation into the origins of these things.
Speaker 1: And she found skulls that existed before Mitchell Hedge's claim
to find his.
Speaker 2: That was a key breakthrough. Her research uncovered two important
skulls that were known long before nineteen twenty four, one
in Paris acquired by a museum there way back in.
Speaker 1: Eighteen seventy eight eighteen seventy eight wo.
Speaker 2: And another one in London at the British Museum, acquired
in eighteen ninety seven. It had been sold through Tiffany's
the Jewelers, So.
Speaker 1: Crystal skulls were already being traded in the nineteenth century exactly.
Speaker 2: This wasn't something that just appeared with Mitchell Hedges. There
was a market for them decades earlier.
Speaker 1: And was there a connection between those early skulls.
Speaker 2: A very important one a French guy named Eugene Bobon.
He started out as an archaeologist in Mexico around the
eighteen fifties, but realized selling artifacts.
Speaker 1: Was more profitable, so he became an antiquities dealer.
Speaker 2: A major one he set up shot back in France
in eighteen sixty nine. And it turns out Bobon was
the source for both the Paris skull and indirectly the
London skull. He basically created the European market for these
ancient Aztec crystal skulls.
Speaker 1: Okay, so Bobun's the link. How did they figure out
his skulls weren't ancient?
Speaker 2: Modern science? Doctor Walsh and other scientists got permission to
examine the Boben skulls Paris, London and that anonymous Smithsonian
one using electron.
Speaker 1: Microscopes and under the microscope.
Speaker 2: Tool marks unistakable modern tool marks, specific grooves, rotational patterns
consistent with industrial grinding wheels used in the late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: Not ancient hand tools, definitely not.
Speaker 2: These were machine marks from industrial gem cutting.
Speaker 1: And the crystal itself. Was it from Mexico or Central America?
Speaker 2: Nope. Chemical analysis traced the courts not to anywhere near
the Maya or Aztecs, but to Brazil or possibly Madagascar Brazil.
Speaker 1: How did Brazilian courts end up in skulls sold in Europe?
As as tech relics.
Speaker 2: Well, you follow the supply chain, it leads straight to
a specific village in Germany, ader.
Speaker 1: Oberstein ater Oberstein.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in the late eighteen hundreds it was the world
center for gem cutting. They had perfected using large water
powered grinding wheels, rotary tools, the exact kind of tools
that would leave the marks found on the skulls, and.
Speaker 1: They got quarts from Brazil.
Speaker 2: Records show huge shipments of Brazilian courts arriving right there
in eeder Oberstein around the eighteen seventies eighteen eighties.
Speaker 1: Perfect timing, so the picture becomes clear.
Speaker 2: Painfully clear. These supposedly sacred ancient artifacts, they were modern fakes,
made in Germany, probably between eighteen seventy and eighteen ninety,
using industrial tools on Brazilian quartz.
Speaker 1: And sold by dealers like Boban who passed them off
as genuine pre Columbian.
Speaker 2: Treasures, exactly cashing in on the Victorian fascination with exotic antiquities.
The whole ancient crystal skull legend. It wasn't born in
Maya temples or on Mars. It was born in a
German workshop and marketed by a clever French.
Speaker 1: Dealer Okay, So the Paris skull, the London skull, the
Smithsonian one, all fakes from Boban's network exposed by science, right.
Speaker 2: But the Mitchell Hedges skull, the skull of doom, that
was still the big one, the legend, the one with
the impossible HP test, the amazing discovery story.
Speaker 1: Anna Mitchell Hedges held onto that story tightly, didn't.
Speaker 2: She She did. She always refused to let her skull
undergo the same kind of rigorous modern testing that debunked
the others. She maintained it was different, genuinely ancient, right
up until she died in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 1: After she passed away.
Speaker 2: Her husband, Bill Homan, inherited it. He still seemed to
believe the legend, but maybe he wanted to prove it
or silence the doubters. So in two thousand and eight
he finally agreed to let the Smithsonian scientists test it.
Speaker 1: The same kind of test, Yeah, electron microscopes and all.
Speaker 2: That exactly, and the result.
Speaker 1: Guess tool marks bingo.
Speaker 2: The Mitchell Hedges skull showed the exact same kind of
characteristic marks from nineteenth century rotary grinding wheels, identical to
the other fakes.
Speaker 1: It wasn't impossible, It wasn't ancient.
Speaker 2: It was just another one of a German made carvings,
probably from the same workshops as Bobon's skulls. Skillful carving, yes,
but definitely modern, definitely man made. The impossible object was
well possible.
Speaker 1: That just demolishes the whole foundation. And what about Anna's
dramatic discovery story finding it on her seventeenth birthday?
Speaker 2: That completely fell apart under scrutiny too. Turns out she
gave conflicting dates for the discovery all the time, nineteen
twenty four, twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven, twenty eight,
but always insisted it was her seventeenth birthday. It just
didn't add up.
Speaker 1: And her father didn't even discover the city.
Speaker 2: No, lu Bontun was known before him. Doctor Thomas Gone
explored it back in nineteen oh three. Hedges was there
in twenty four, yes, but he didn't discover it in
the way annacclaimed.
Speaker 1: But the most damaging thing, how did Hedges actually get
the skull?
Speaker 2: This is the real nail in the coffin they found
the records. He didn't pull it out of a tomb
in nineteen twenty four whenever he.
Speaker 1: Bought it, bought it when.
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty three, nineteen years after the supposed discovery,
he bought it at a Sotheby's auction in London. There's
a receipt.
Speaker 1: Wow? Okay? And who sold it at auction? Does that
connect back?
Speaker 2: It connects perfectly. The seller listed was a London art
dealer named Sidney Bernie. And where did Bernie get it from?
A collection that was previously owned by.
Speaker 1: Drum Roll Eugene Bobon.
Speaker 2: Eugene Boben himself. The Skull of Doom wasn't just like
the other fakes. It was one of the other fakes,
originating from the same nineteenth century source.
Speaker 1: So Hedges bought a known fake, or at least a
modern carving, and then concocted this elaborate discovery story around it.
Speaker 2: It certainly looks that way. He was a known self
promoter and adventurer who loved a good story, and sources
suggest he might have borrowed heavily from popular fiction at
the time, like that novel Yeah, a nineteen thirty six
novel called The Crystal Skull by Jack McLaren. It features
a scientist finding a crystal skull that shows the future
sounds familiar.
Speaker 1: Right, very Okay, so the discovery story is fake. What
about all the supernatural stuff, the singing, the smells, the
ghosts that Dorlan reported.
Speaker 2: Also seems to be let's say, highly embellished, if not
outright fabricated by Dorlan. Jarl made it up, it appears,
so there's evidence he admitted to or at least greatly
exaggerated the voices and poltergeist stuff. Ironically, Anna apparently got
really annoyed by it.
Speaker 1: Why wasn't the good publicity not if.
Speaker 2: You're trying to sell the skull for a lot of money,
Dorelyn's spooky stories about doom and curses were scaring off
potential buyers. It actually caused a big falling out between
Anna and Dorlyn.
Speaker 1: Huh okay. Last piece, the impossible HP tests cut against
the axes molecular alteration.
Speaker 2: That seems to be a case of interpretation being stretched
way beyond the actual data. The initial HP reports were
quite limited. They confirmed it was quartz, a single piece
and yeah, impressively carved for the time, A great feat
of nineteenth century German.
Speaker 1: Craftsmanship, but not impossible technology.
Speaker 2: Not evidence of impossible tech. The truly wild claims cutting
against the axis being impossible altering molecules. That was mostly
Dorelyn's interpretation, fitting the object to his advanced machine theory.
HP themselves later clarified they never tested or confirmed any
paranormal aspects.
Speaker 1: So the entire epic saga Martians Atlantis, Maya prophecy thirteen Skulls.
Speaker 2: It's basically a modern myth. It wasn't an ancient Maya
or Aztec legend at all. It was largely constructed and
popularized during the New Age boom of the nineteen seventies
and eighties, latching onto these intriguing but ultimately fake artifacts.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay, So the whole thing, the skull of Doomed,
the thirteen Skulls legend, it's basically a century long story
built on a foundation of well nineteenth century German fakes.
It's easy to feel a bit deflated.
Speaker 2: Maybe yeah, you hear cosmic conspiracy, ancient aliens, and then
it turns out to be a Victorian marketing scheme, a
bit of a letdown.
Speaker 1: But and this is important, the story isn't entirely pointless,
is it. There's an unexpected twist.
Speaker 2: Here, There really is, because While the legend was a fraud,
the focus of the legend crystal technology. That wasn't a
waste of time.
Speaker 1: At all, because quartz crystal itself, it actually is kind
of amazing.
Speaker 2: It really is. Scientifically speaking, it's about as close to
a genuine magic material as we have. Forget the fake skulls.
The real substance is incredibly powerful.
Speaker 1: So debunking the myth actually it leads us back to
appreciating the real science exactly.
Speaker 2: Look at what crystals, especially quarts, actually do in modern tech.
They're fundamental to so much measuring time with incredible precision,
and watches and.
Speaker 1: Computers, communications, radios transmitting.
Speaker 2: Signals right manipulating light frequencies. That's the basis for lasers
generating electricity when you put pressure on them, the piece
of electric effect, storing electricity efficiently.
Speaker 1: That piece of electric thing that connects back to some
other ancient mysteries, doesn't it like the mid power plant theories.
Speaker 2: It does the idea that certain crystal structures could conduct
or even generate energy with near perfect efficiency that touches
on concepts like zero point energy. The physics isn't crazy,
even if this specific ancient application is speculative crystals do
have amazing energy properties.
Speaker 1: And they're used in cutting edge stuff now too.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, quantum computing relies on specialized crystals to hold quantum
states entangled particles. They're looking at self healing materials based
on crystal lattices. Some theorists even connect the highly organized
structure of crystals to really out their ideas like consciousness
or even teleportation, though that's way more theoretical.
Speaker 1: Okay, but let's circle back to the original Martian idea,
preserving knowledge forever. If you were an advanced civilization facing extinction,
crystal will be.
Speaker 2: The perfect medium. The science totally backs that up.
Speaker 1: Why what makes it so good for long term storage?
Speaker 2: It's incredibly durable, harder than steel. It can withstand extreme
keat extreme pressure. It doesn't really corrode or decay over
geological time data encoded in a crystal structure because theoretically
last for billions of years.
Speaker 1: Billions, like longer than the Earth has existed.
Speaker 2: Longer than the current age of the universe. Potentially we're
talking thirteen billion years plus. It's about as permanent as
you can get.
Speaker 1: In the storage capacity. Is it actually feasible to store
vast amounts of data.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it blows conventional methods out of the water.
Scientists recently managed to encode the entire human genome. That's
a massive amount of complex data onto a piece of
crystal smaller than a.
Speaker 1: Coin, smaller than a quarter. Wow. Okay, so apply that
potential to the Mitchell Hedges skull. It was what thirty.
Speaker 2: Pounds of quarts, right, a thirty pound block. If you
engineered that purely for data storage using techniques we're only
just starting to develop. You're talking about storing exabotites of
information exably.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a lot. Can you put that in
perspective for us?
Speaker 2: It's almost incomprehensible and exabit Okay, imagine the full text
of every single book ever written, every scientific paper, every journal,
every newspaper, every record now at, every photograph ever taken,
every video ever recorded, every song, and then maybe even
the words spoken in every single conversation by every human
who ever lived.
Speaker 1: All that could fit in a skull size crystal.
Speaker 2: Theoretically, Yes, that's the kind of data density we're talking
about with advanced crystal storage. It's mind boggling.
Speaker 1: So the real magic wasn't the fake skull itself. It's
the potential locked inside the actual material science, precisely.
Speaker 2: The potential that we are now starting to unlock, not Martians,
not Atlanteans us.
Speaker 1: So, when you boil it all down, the legend of
the Crystal Skull, even though it's built on forgery and fantasy,
it still serves a purpose, doesn't it Like a powerful metaphor?
Speaker 2: I think so. Yeah. It's a reminder maybe that the
amazing things described in those myths, interstellar travel, tapping into
universal knowledge, maybe even telepathy or anti gravity, we don't
necessarily need to wait for lost secrets from Atlantis or
messages from Mars.
Speaker 1: We're capable of figuring this stuff out ourselves.
Speaker 2: We are the capacity for that kind of breakthrough, that
kind of reality bending technology. It isn't hidden in some
ancient artifact we have to find. It's inherent in human
ingenuity in scientific discovery. We're building that future right now.
Speaker 1: So the ultimate power, the kind the legend attributed to
that flawless ancient skull, it's not.
Speaker 2: Going to come from finding a relic in a jungle.
It's going to come from using the machine that's far
more advanced, far more complex, and ultimately far more important.
Speaker 1: The one we all carry around with.
Speaker 2: Us exactly, the one sitting right on our shoulders. The
power is in us, and our ability to think, to discover,
to build the universe of knowledge is there for the taking,
not when a prophecy says we're worthy, but when we
apply our own minds rigorously enough to understand it.
Speaker 1: The fascinating journey from impossible artifact to human potential.
Speaker 2: Indeed, the truth was hidden in plain sight all along,
just not in the way the legend suggested.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into
the many layers behind the skull of doom.