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.