The Mitchell-Hedges Skull
The most famous of the crystal skulls: by the family's account Anna Mitchell-Hedges found it in 1924 in the ruins of the Maya city of Lubaantun in British Honduras, on her seventeenth birthday. It was called an instrument of ancient priests and an object that stops the heart. The documents say otherwise: Anna's adoptive father Frederick Mitchell-Hedges bought it at Sotheby's in London in 1943 from the collector Sydney Burney, and it appears in Burney's correspondence before that. In 2008 Jane Walsh and the Smithsonian's laboratory examined it under an electron microscope: the surface was worked with a rotary abrasive tool, which pre-Columbian America did not have.
The Great Moon Hoax
From 25 August 1835 the New York Sun ran a series of six articles reporting that Sir John Herschel, from the Cape of Good Hope, had seen life on the Moon through a new telescope: forests, herds of bison, temples of sapphire and intelligent winged people four feet tall, which he called Vespertilio-homo. The material was presented as a reprint from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, which had by then been out of print for years. The Sun's circulation rose to fifteen thousand, the largest in the world. The author was the reporter Richard Adams Locke, writing satire on the fashionable speculation about inhabitants of the planets; the paper never printed a retraction, and Herschel learned of his discovery by post.
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first.