Latest News
NEWS October 2024
OCTOBER 2024 The recent cyber attack on the Internet Archive is deplorable and can be reasonably compared with the repeated burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I have used the Wayback Machine extensively, but, until the full extent of the permanent damage is clear, I am unable to assess its effect on Atlantipedia. At […]Read More »
Joining The Dots
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
F.A. Mitchell-Hedges
Honduras
Honduras or more correctly the islands of Roatan and nearby Helene, part of the Bay Islands were brought to wider attention over a century ago by Broughton Brandenburg, an American magazine writer. In the April 1906 edition of Appleton’s Booklovers Magazine, he suggested that a discovery of submerged artefacts near Islas de Bahia (Bay Islands) off the coast of Honduras might be remnants of Atlantis.
Three decades later, in 1936, F.A. Mitchell-Hedges also claimed that the Bay Islands to have had a possible Atlantean connection(a). Specifically, he announced that on the island of Helene that “we unearthed an ancient city of considerable size.(b) He said that he came to the conclusion that in Helene he had found the highlands of a vast continent which was submerged by the Flood.”
Mitchell-Hedges and his daughter are best known for the claimed discovery there of the most perfect crystal skull ever found. However, question marks still hang over the provenance of the skull and Brandenburg appears to have been something of a fraudster!
(a) https://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/55569660?searchTerm=Atlantis discovered&searchLimits=
(b) Relics of a Small Atlantis – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog) *
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