The Crystal Skull
With the recent premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, residents of the San Luis Valley in north central New Mexico and southern Colorado may find themselves recalling the actual “crystal skull” that once made an appearance in their area.
The San Luis Valley stretches from Colorado south into New Mexico, and from the San Juan Mountains at the valley’s western edge, to the Sangre de Cristo range at its east. The valley is an approximately 150-mile-long by 45-mile-wide alpine basin, and over the years has become notorious for its residents’ abundant reports of Bigfoot, UFOs, green fireballs, and demonic figures. From 1975 through 1978, the area attracted international attention for its large number of unusual livestock deaths, and many eyes turned to it in 1995, when a bizarre, translucent skull turned up on a San Luis Valley ranch.
Discovered outdoors in February of 1995 by an eagle-eyed ranch hand in Moffat, Colorado, the skull was immediately offered to Donna Koch, the ranch’s owner, who doubled back on her ATV to see what it was. What it was was a grimacing glass skull, weighing three pounds, measuring six-and-a-half inches high, and looking asymmetrical and elongated—almost, Koch thought, like the skull of an “ant person.”
It was not the first such crystalline skull to be found on the planet—in fact, there had been at least a dozen similar skulls before it, enough to carve out a wild little niche of New Age subculture, a group composed of people who believe these skulls emanate psychic radiation, are of ancient Central American origin, and can sometimes be used as macabre crystal balls, to foresee the future. No test performed on any of these skulls—including on the famous Mitchell-Hedges skull, said to have been discovered in 1926—has ever shown any of these skulls to date further back than the 1870s or to be anything more than recently manmade artifacts—and yet the movement built around them is undeniable, with many skulls held as objects of veneration and believed to be ancient, and many others used as tools for meditation although accepted as modern. Among those who believe in these skulls’ powers, word soon spread about Koch’s San Luis Valley find—down the valley, and into the world.
One psychic, according to Christopher O’Brien’s 1996 The Mysterious Valley, warned Koch that, “It is very old. It’s not man-made and not of this earth. You must be very careful with it. It can be very detrimental.... You must be balanced, or you will be hurt.”
Another psychic prediction advised her not to sleep by it, and urged her to store the artifact wrapped in silk, in a cedar box. Many people who saw the skull claimed to sense a distinct energy emanating from it, and others felt frightened enough by it to avoid Koch’s property altogether. Koch and her circle of family and friends began noticing odd occurrences around their ranch, claiming that whenever anyone besides Donna tried to take the skull from the property, someone would get hurt; for instance, her son got hit in the head by a hammer, just one day after he volunteered to take the skull to an art appraiser, and her husband got hit by a truck boom. A female friend carried the skull past a truck at the exact moment that truck’s spare tire exploded, and one video camera wouldn’t work when someone tried to film it. Koch also claimed that the skull always remained clean and could not be gotten dirty, and her husband talked of a time when he pulled the skull from out of a cabinet and smelled the overwhelming scent of perfume, a smell he said he had not smelled before or since.
Later that year, more than one hundred people arrived to gather around the skull beneath a full moon, at Colorado’s White Eagle Village Inn, Retreat, and Conference Center, coming from as far away as Minnesota, meditating around the skull for hours, and then recording their impressions.
Joshua Shapiro, co-author of Mysteries of the Crystal Skulls Revealed, wrote in a 1996 online article that “As far as what sensitives have picked up about the skull, some people felt the skull was very young or newly created. Other people felt that it was a projection of some spiritual entity into our world which might explain why its form is so strange...others felt that the shape was solidified from some type of liquid and then others felt the skull had a connection with the Inner Earth.”
One paranormal investigator—mentioned in Christopher O’Brien’s 1999 follow-up, Enter the Valley—spent eight entire days sitting with the object, attempting to channel the spirits of those he believed had shaped it, and claiming to receive messages from it regarding a (mythical) sunken continent known as Lemuria. The investigator spoke of other skulls waiting to be found, ancient settlers, and explorers; others claimed it was made by aliens. A collector of the paranormal offered to buy the celebrated skull for $20,000, and the Rocky Mountain News wrote about the skull and its surrounding phenomena in a November 10, 1996 article.
That article caught the attention of a Mr. and Mrs. Chadez, the absentee owners of the property next to the Kochs’. Their son—Brad Chadez, a young glass blower from Denver’s Blake Street Glass Company—had previously created a batch of glass skulls to sell at a Day of the Dead festival down in Santa Fe, and when one skull had turned out too misshapen to sell, he had given it to his parents to mark the corner of their property with—and to use as “a talisman,” whatever that means. The Chadez family released the truth to the local media, and the psychic channeling of the skull’s ancient spirits rattled to an abrupt and sheepish halt.
Informed of this, Christopher O’Brien wrote in his 1999 Enter the Valley that, “As with most true ‘mysteries,’ there are usually no easy answers. The innocent little ‘ant person skull’ has had quite an effect on people. The reported strange phenomena that seemed to surround the skull still have no obvious explanations.”
But really, they do. They have really obvious explanations.
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