The Ancient Alien Question (21 page)

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.

Mica is a substance containing different metals, depending on the kind of rock formation in which it is found. The type of mica found at Teotihuacán indicates a type that is only found in Brazil, more than 2,000 miles away. The same South American mica was found in Olmec sites. The Olmecs are often seen as a civilization separate from the Mayans, preceding them, but new thinking suggests that
Olmec
is a misnomer and they should really be seen as an early stage of the Mayan civilization of Central America. It is clear that the mica’s presence in Teotihuacán involved a lot of effort—and it thus must have played an important role—but what was that role? Archaeology has been unable to provide a consistent answer. Alternative historians have outlined Teotihuacán’s clear parallels to other pyramid complexes, such as Giza, but both sides of the debate fail to identify the purpose of the site. As we shall see, the answer fits in with the Ancient Alien Question, and reveals the true framework in which the question needs to be asked.

The Nazca Lines

However interesting and important Teotihuacán is, nothing in the New World is as famous as the Nazca lines when it comes to the Ancient Alien Question. Nazca is approximately 250 miles south of the Peruvian capital of Lima. It is home to enigmatic lines, some measuring 5 miles in length, with one line even continuing for 40 miles. Situated in an area where it almost never rains—a few drops per year on average—the lines have been impressively preserved since they were created almost
2,000 years ago by removing the top soil, thus revealing the white soil underneath.