Mayan Crystal Skull Apocalypse (TQP0012)
posted by Chris Braak
Last night, I watched a television show on the SciFi Channel about Mayan Crystal Skulls. The Crystal Skulls are a fancy new age phenomenon, and are to be featured in the new Indiana Jones movie, so I guess that SciFi thought it’d be cool if folks wanted to learn about them and their terrible secrets.
Here, wait, let me get a picture.
There we go. Man, I love a good crystal skull. So, anyway, this show, The Mysteries of the Crystal Skulls, was the most amazingly retarded thing I’ve ever seen in my life. This is saying something, because I remember, in my youth, watching specials about Atlantis, and the Chupacabra, and the Tunguska Blast, and none of them were as ridiculous as this.
The SciFi Channel apparently convened a panel of “experts”–four fifty-year-old men with either a) outlandish beards, or b) that kind of gray ponytail that you make when your hairline is receding but you grow the rest of your hair long. They have jobs like, “Author,” “Lecturer,” “Explorer.”
These guys provide commentary while Bill Holdman, Man of Action (you know he’s a man of action because the narrator said so, and then they cut to a scene of Bill Holdman doing karate), chooses locations APPARENTLY AT RANDOM from the life of a South American explorer from the thirties, and tries to find more crystal skulls.
The explanations get gradually more insane. The narrator begins by telling us, “Some scientists don’t believe in the power of the crystal skulls”–cleverly covering their asses in anticipation of the insane delusions they’re about to foist on us–”But all the experts we spoke with believe that the crystal skulls are artifacts of an advanced Mayan civilization, and the general consensus is that there are thirteen crystal skulls…” That’s, “the general consensus” of the experts that they spoke with–not the general consensus of people who know what the fuck they’re talking about.
One of these characters tries to explain the skull. “The theory may sound far-fetched, at first,” he says, and this is misleading, because it implies that the more you hear about it, the LESS far-fetched it will sound, “But the crystal skulls are made from quartz, which is what we make our modern microchips from. Imagine how much information is stored on a microchip–now, think of how much information could be stored in a crystal skull.” Which is crazy, because beaches are made out of quartz, too, and all they store is sand crabs and used heroin needles.
Oh, here’s the guy, Chris Morton. You can’t really see his ponytail in this picture.
I wish that this was outlandish as it gets. But it’s NOT. Somehow, the Crystal Skulls have become the lynchpin upon which crazy men hang their crazy theories.
Here’s how it goes: obviously, the thirteen crystal skulls need to be brought together in order to prevent the Mayan apocalypse in 2012. We know that catastrophe is coming because the Mayans are actually descended from the Atlanteans (you can tell, because their ruined port cities look like old Phoenician port cities), and it was one of the Mayan apocalypses that destroyed Atlantean civilization. But! Atlantis was actually a colony from an alien civilization that was spread throughout the solar system–a civilization that was ALSO destroyed by a terrible cataclysm, leaving only the crystal skulls behind as remnants.
And how do we know all this? One of the experts used to consult 
for NASA (consult in what field? They don’t say. Skullography, maybe). He believes that CalTech scientists working at Area 51 were able to extract the secrets of the aliens from a robotic head that they FOUND ON THE MOON.
About an hour and fifteen minutes into the show, they do a bit with this little old lady who tells us about the guy that found the first skull: she says he bought it at an auction, which she has the records of. Also, the skull was made in the 19th century, using a diamond rotary saw, which you can tell if you look at it under a scanning electron microscope.
Whatever, old lady. Three minutes of this, and it’s time to get back to Bill Holdman, Man of Action, as he goes scuba diving (maybe there’s another skull underwater!), spelunking (maybe there’s a skull in this cave!), and hacking through the jungles of Belize (maybe there’s a skull in the jungle!).
Lester Holt–the narrator–tries to drive home how important it is that we find the skulls, because only they can prevent the Mayan apocalypse. (Whenever he says “apocalypse,” they cut to scenes of Bad Things–volcanoes, earthquakes, tanks pointing their cannons at things, dead cows covered in flies, etc…) Unfortunately, Bill Holdman, Man of Action, does not find any of the crystal skulls–primarily because of Belize’s stupid laws about digging up archaeological sites without a permit.
I guess this whole thing is just an illustration of how people can believe some dumb shit. Every piece of information that doesn’t involve the words “records” or “scanning electron microscope” is third-hand–from a report that a guy made about an experiment on the skull that someone did at Hewlett-Packard fifty years ago, but it was a secret so there aren’t any other records. Or else, from some mission that NASA undertook in the seventies, but it was also a secret AND the government is trying to hide it, so don’t expect to find any corroboration anywhere.
Also, apparently as long as you say, “according to legends,” you can make any outrageous claims that you want and not have to explain how you know (you don’t even have to say according to which legends, leaving the average layman to believe that “legends” constitute a single, consistent body of information that tells us accurately about Atlantis and the Chupacabra).
What’s the point of all this? I guess just that in thousands of years of human civilization, one thing remains constant: human beings like believing in things that are RETARDED.
May 19, 2008 at 2:59 pm
And George Lucas was INSISTENT on using this for Indy IV’s plot. So…there you are.
Still, I think the fifth installment, “Indiana Jones and the Very Convincing Fiji Mermaid” will definitely get it right.
And the related SciFi special will be AWESOME.
-jkh
May 19, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Sadly, in typical Lucas style, it will be followed by “Indiana Jones and the Extremely Plausible Crop Circles of Wiltdown-Bently-Shropshire.”
It will be Indiana Jones and his grandchildren, and they will discover the secret link between the crop circles, British Parliament, and the Loch Ness Monster.
There will be a little dance number, such as might occur at a fair with Morris-Dancers.
May 20, 2008 at 2:09 am
I immediately knew that Bill Holdman was a Man of Action from his hat. It was obviously a Man of Action’s hat and I’m pretty sure his hat could take Indiana Jones’ hat.
Thanks for taking one for the team and watching the entire show.
I was channel surfing and came upon the scene where someone was explaining how, against all odds, he was able to photograph a skull in such a way as to capture the image of an alien trapped in the skull. Or something. That was all I could take.
May 20, 2008 at 2:16 am
Oh, yeah, that guy. He was the head of the Crystal Awareness Institute, and he had *several* pictures of images contained within the skull, which were totally NOT just distortions of things that were on the other side, seriously, they weren’t, they were like holographic history books stored in the skull…
Dr. Braak wades through the madness so the rest of you don’t have to.
May 20, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Oooooooo run with pseudo science, my FAVORITE. Also, your post rocked socks. I laughed my ASS off
May 20, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Erm, that should say FUN with psuedo science. Sorry *hides*
May 21, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I saw the trailer to this while my son was watching the Indian Jones marketing/reruns, and I knew it was going to be a load of crap.
By the way, Brian Dunning of Skeptoid fame did an excellent podcast debuking the myths associated on the crystal skulls here: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4098
May 21, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Hey, it’s Indiana Jones, not a movie about archaeology.He’s going to destroy the meticulous digs of some real (but “enemy” archaeologist in order to get the prize, and there will be magic and death traps that still manage to reset themselves for the next guy, even thousands of years after they were first set.
The only thing about this that I find breaks tradition is the introduction of aliens. Still, I’ll watch it and have fun.
May 21, 2008 at 1:46 pm
All Things Considered did a piece on this recently. The (real) experts have determined that the technology used to create the skulls dates from the mid nineteenth century.
May 21, 2008 at 5:38 pm
There’s a person in my office that is absolutely convinced that the world is going to end in 2012. She’s bat shit insane, but I have to give her some credit for totally ignoring all reasonable assumptions about the near future and just running with it.
May 31, 2008 at 8:32 pm
I also watched this and I completely agree with you. The “images inside the skull” is also what made me stop watching. It turned into a background noise show while I was doing the laundry after that point.
June 8, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Hmmm… I saw the same show, and it all seems somewhat suspicious. There is always too little proof for all these things. I believe it’s too far fetched to be true.
January 13, 2009 at 2:10 pm
I do not believe that the crystal sculls have anything to do with the apocalypse. However I believe that I must be prepared to defend myself from the end of days. I have been stockpiling food and supplies at my vacation home in New York. The Mayans were more advanced than we will ever be and anyone who does not believe in the apocalypse should look over their shoulder and see if anyone is behind you.
January 13, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Dobhran: Presently, there is no one behind me.
And if the Mayans were so smart, how come they couldn’t figure out how to invent wheeled carts, or how not to build all of their buildings on their only arable soil?
Aside from the fact that their civilization collapsed, what makes you think they were advanced at all?
January 14, 2009 at 11:33 am
They had the most advanced calendar. They were able to predict the next lunar eclipse, without any instruments to within .006 of a second forward and backwards a century while we were just getting out of our caves. At the time we could not even figure out how to make a calendar that would stop us from ending up with Christmas ending up in the middle of July!
January 14, 2009 at 11:48 am
I don’t even know how you can say that they predicted the lunar eclipse to within .006 of a second. I’ve seen the Mayan calendar, and it is not precise to the thousandth of a second. It is precise to the day, which is about how precise you’d expect a calendar to be. And it’s kind of ridiculous to measure the height of the Mayan civilization with the collapse of Classical civilization, and sort of doubly ridiculous to say that the Mayans were advanced because they could predict a lunar eclipse, despite the fact that the Greeks (who predated the Mayans by nearly a thousand years) could build both boats and catapults and knew how to make things with WHEELS ON THEM.
But, even if you want to say this, this doesn’t say anything about Mayans being more advanced then than we ever will be, because NOWADAYS we can do anything the Mayans could do back then (including predicting lunar eclipses!) AND we can build a hundred mile long nuclear supercollider.
And, let’s be real: you can say that you’re advanced because you can predict a lunar eclipse a century from now, but you can’t predict the drought that’s coming in a year and is going to gut your civilization? Why wasn’t that marked on the calendar?
Either the Mayans weren’t as advanced as we think they were, or else they were really advanced in terms of lunar eclipsology, and utter morons when it came to actually preserving their civilization.
February 23, 2009 at 7:44 pm
ok wats up im guessing that sounds cool but i still want to grow up. why couldn’t the mayans put an apacolypse in 50000 illion yeas from now. ant then if this does happen will the world put them together ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
February 28, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Ever hear of spell check?