Mitchell-Hedges, Frederick Albert *
Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges (1882-1959) is famous for a number of matters, including the alleged discovery of the most perfect of crystal skulls ever found and the removal without permission of three boxes of pirate booty from Roatan Island, off Honduras, and its sale in New York for $6,000,000(a).
Mitchell-Hedges promoted the idea that Roatan Island or more specifically the smaller island, Helene, at its eastern end, which he described as “the highlands of a vast continent submerged by the Flood”(d) and was a remnant of Atlantis and that its original inhabitants were survivors of its destruction.
The Milwaukee Sentinel of February 10, 1935, regaled the world with the claim by Mitchell-Hedges that “I found the cradle of civilization in Central America.” He also speculated that it might be “possible that the light of civilization did not travel west but east – and from that supposedly mythical land ‘Atlantis’?” He added that “I hesitate to estimate the age of this civilization. My own “speculations” – I call them that, even though certain bases for a calculation exist – lead me to the view, certainly no later than 15,000 BC. flourished, or that they may have flourished beyond 25,000 B.C.”
His daughter Anna (1907-2007), went even further, with a claim that the crystal skull, which she owned until her death in 2007, had an extraterrestrial origin from where it was brought to Atlantis and from there to Belize where it was finally unearthed. In 1970, Anna was reported, in Sykes’ Atlantis magazine(f), to have written that her father had discovered the skull in a Maya temple in Lubaantun in what was then British Honduras, now Belize!
Therefore, it is obvious that the provenance of the skull is not clear-cut, with claims that it was in fact purchased by Mitchell-Hedges in the 1940s at a Sotheby’s auction in London(b).
Another reasonably objective article on the subject can also be accessed on the internet(c).
Apart from all this, in 2008, an investigation led by the Smithsonian Institute concluded that all 13 life-size skulls, including the Mitchell-Hedges one, were Victorian fakes(e). A 2010 article in Archaeology magazine by anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh concluded that “The Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull is not ancient; not even very old.”(g)
(a) Mitchell Hedges and the Lost Treasure of Roatan – Ancient Lost Treasures (tapatalk.com)
(b) Archive 2328 | (atlantipedia.ie)
(c) Archaeology Magazine – The Skull of Doom – Archaeology Magazine Archive *
(d) https://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/55569660?searchTerm=Atlantis discovered&searchLimits=
(f) Atlantis, Vol. 24, No. 1/2, Jan-March, 1971.
(g) Archaeology Magazine – The Skull of Doom – Archaeology Magazine Archive