found. Mitchell-Hedges says that he felt the object held some special significance and claims that
he didn’t want to take the skull away from the site where it had been found and had offered it to
the local priests but that the Mayans had then given the skull back to him as a gift upon his
departure - a dubious tale at best.
Michael Mitchell-Hedges was born in 1882 and died in 1959. He was known by his friends as a
“charming rogue.” At one stage of his career he was even know as “the British Baron Von
Munchausen.” He was an explorer, an author, a gambler and a soldier with Pancho Villa during
the Mexican Revolution. He was undoubtedly a very colorful and quite ‘roguish’ character, the
rather impressive initials that he had next to his name actually resulted from him having joined
the London Zoological Society and enabled him to enter the zoo on Sundays. Although I think
that he make have actually founded the society to begin with.
Fig. 46aMany people found Mitchell-Hedges story to be ‘questionable’ at the time and evidence now
shows that his tale of the skull's discovery was probably entirely fabricated. There are no known
photographs of the skull among those that were taken during any of his Lubaatun expeditions, and
there is no record of Mitchell-Hedges ever displaying or even acknowledging any existence of the
skull any time prior to 1943. It is also interesting that when he took the skull on a trip to South
Africa in 1947, Mitchell-Hedges himself made this cryptic remark about the skull: “We took with
us the sinister Skull of Doom of which much has been written. How it came into my possession I
have reason for not revealing.” Yet the story he had always maintained was that it was found by
his step-daughter, so why would he have reason for not revealing how he came by the object?