before. Her eyes were immediately drawn towards the red altar at one end of the room, ‘where in the flickering candlelight was the most awesome sight I had ever seen. In the centre of the altar was a crystal skull. Nothing in my God-fearing Christian upbringing had prepared me for anything like the sight of that skull.’
Despite the unorthodox appearance of Norbu Chen’s ‘doctor’s surgery’, something inspired JoAnn’s trust and she took her daughter to see him. With the help of Norbu and the crystal skull, she says, ‘My daughter lived very well for three years before she finally did pass on.’
Sometime after Diana died, Norbu Chen told JoAnn that he was looking for a secretary and so she offered to help out. She worked for Norbu for several years, but during this time learned little about the crystal skull. All Norbu told her was that the skull had been given to him as a gift from a Guatemalan shaman. However, as JoAnn explained:
I saw many Tibetan monks. They lived in a small building behind Norbu’s house. They studied from ancient Tibetan books, conducting healing ceremonies and prayer sessions every morning in the healing room. They burned incense, chanted and rang bells.
‘The monks honoured the crystal skull reverently. They would chant and talk Tibetan to it. It was used by the monks to direct energy into the bodies of the people who came to be healed. They would tap into the energy of the skull and run it through the meridian of the patient’s body to assist their healings.’
During her time at the foundation JoAnn says she ‘witnessed many miracles emerging from that healing room’, including the help it gave to her daughter, and over the years Norbu Chen became a close friend of the Parks. In 1980, he too died, but just before his death he gave JoAnn and Carl the crystal skull, telling them nothing more about it ‘except “One day you will know what it is for.” ’ Norbu explained that when he died it was the Tibetan belief that he would have another body waiting for him to move into and that he would begin another life. The crystal skull, he said, was part of his life, but it too needed to reach its next stage and that was why he was giving it to JoAnn and Carl.
JoAnn and Carl took the skull home, but they had no idea what to do with it, so it ended up at the bottom of their wardrobe.
About a year later the crystal skull started to come to JoAnn in her dreams. At first its image would appear just occasionally. Then, about two years further on, it started ‘talking’ to her. ‘It wasn’t an actual voice,’ she explained. ‘It was telepathic.’
JoAnn had never experienced anything like it before. She had always considered herself a rational person ‘with both feet planted firmly on the ground’. At first, the telepathic communication was infrequent enough just to dismiss it, but gradually it started to happen more often and at odd times of day, when JoAnn would be fixing lunch for her grandchildren, for instance, or doing the books for Carl’s business. The skull would even come and speak to her while she was out driving the car. It kept saying, ‘I want out of this closet.’
As JoAnn explained, ‘I began to wonder if I was losing my mind. I even thought about visiting our family doctor.’ But things got even more bizarre when the skull started repeatedly telling her that she had to ‘contact the man’ without giving any details of who ‘the man’ was. Finally, one afternoon, ‘I found myself sat in my bedroom closet having conversations with this rock.’ She told it firmly, ‘Leave me alone, I don’t want anything more to do with you, just get out of my life!’ She slammed shut the vanity case in which it was stored and pushed it to the back of the wardrobe, covering it with other boxes and cases and shutting the wardrobe door after it.
‘But the skull was persistent. He was not about to give up. As I ran down the stairs he continued, “The world is going to know about me. I am important to mankind. And, by the way, my name isn’t ‘Skull’, it’s ‘Max’!”
‘Well, now we were on first name terms, we could really talk!’
Some time later JoAnn was to see a TV programme about UFOs that showed a photograph of the Mitchell-Hedges skull. The only information that she had had on crystal skulls prior to this had been Chen’s brief parting words over seven years previously. Now she was thrilled to discover that there were other people with ‘these extraordinary talking rocks’.
When JoAnn rang the TV station for more information, they gave her the number of a man called Nick Nocerino, who they thought might be able to help. Max, who was as conversational as ever, assured JoAnn that this was the man he had been talking about, the man he had wanted JoAnn to contact.
JoAnn called Nick, who, in gravelly tones, assured her that he had been looking for Max since 1949. He ‘tuned into’ him and was surprised to see Tibetan monks. JoAnn was amazed. She had only given Nick the description of the skull over the telephone and here he was telling her some of its history! She quickly arranged to meet Nick at Houston airport the following week.
Cutting a mysterious figure in a black beret and trenchcoat, Nick Nocerino turned out to be the world’s foremost expert on crystal skulls, a man who had spent a lifetime researching the subject and director of the Society of Crystal Skulls International. After the Second World War he had been sent to Central America to carry out intelligence work on behalf of the US government. It was in a remote village in Guatemala that he had seen a rose quartz crystal skull with a detachable jaw-bone and heard of another fitting Max’s description. He was told that this other skull was used for healing, was not as beautiful as the rose quartz skull and didn’t have a separate jaw. It was made of crystal that was both cloudy and clear and had a white patch, like a cap, on the top of its head. This skull was believed to have been found in a Mayan tomb in Guatemala in 1924 and to have been given away by a local shaman for unknown reasons.
Nick was delighted to have finally tracked Max down and JoAnn was flabbergasted to find that the man that Max had been telling her to find was not just a figment of her imagination. In fact, it was a great relief to her to finally get confirmation that she had not gone completely mad.
Nick Nocerino assured JoAnn that the crystal skulls did have the ability to communicate telepathically with people they were close to. He explained that during the course of his research he discovered that the skulls did have many attributes that did not seem to make rational sense and that seeing visions in the skull or hearing the skull ‘speak’ was perfectly normal. He said he knew how frightened people were by the idea of psychic experiences, or any interior, non-rational experiences. But he believed that psychic phenomena had actually been experienced by the vast majority of the population. For instance, many people often ‘get a feeling’ that something may be about to happen just before it does. As Nick explained, such experiences often frighten people, who usually dismiss them for fear of going mad or being thought ‘abnormal’. But such experiences were very normal to Nick and he was not afraid to say so.
Nick suggested that perhaps the best way for JoAnn to realize that she was not crazy was to see other people with the skull, to see what their experiences were. He assured her that Max talking to her was nothing besides what other people would experience with him. Nick himself was something of a veteran when it came to weird experiences with the skulls, as we were to find out for ourselves. So JoAnn opened her home to people who were curious about crystal skulls. First of all, only one or two came, then over time, more and more arrived, until people were coming from all over the world to see Max, just as with Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ crystal skull.
‘Max has brought me such joy,’ says JoAnn, ‘and he also brings happiness and laughter to others.’ JoAnn now regularly tours around the USA taking Max to different cities to ‘meet the people’, which she says he ‘absolutely adores’, adding, ‘You could say that he has become a bit of a star.’ She has heard many people say that they have extraordinary experiences with him. What is most often reported back to her by people who have sat with Max is the feeling of well-being that he gives them. JoAnn feels that at last she understands the words Norbu Chen spoke to her just before he died. Now she says she thinks she has found out what Max is for and, ‘He is doing what he should be doing.’
So, was healing the real purpose of the crystal skulls? Was this why they were created? After all, JoAnn claimed