CHESTERTON | In 1968, while stationed in Panama with the U.S. Air Force, Bill Homann stumbled onto a magazine article about British adventurer F.A. Mitchell-Hedges and a mysterious crystal skull found among the Mayan ruins of Central America.

Forty years later, Homann, a Crown Point business owner and Chesterton resident, places that same crystal skull on a Lazy Susan covered in black velvet on the coffee table of his rural home.

"Some things just catch your eye and imagination," he said, slowly turning the artifact. "You can see it in a book or magazine, but it's nothing like seeing the real thing."

As the fourth installment of the "Indiana Jones" film franchise, which bases its story on crystal skull mythology, begins to hit theaters today and Friday, Homann, a modern-day adventurer with an eighth-degree black belt in karate, has seen increasing interest in the Mitchell-Hedges piece.

Homann was featured Sunday in the two-hour documentary, "Mystery of the Crystal Skulls," on the SciFi Channel.

"It's never dull around the crystal skull," Homann says.

The LaPorte native -- who owns Homann Karate Do with his son, Brett, in Crown Point -- became caretaker of the world's most famous crystal skull after Anna Mitchell-Hedges, the adopted daughter of F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, died last year.

Homann met Anna Mitchell-Hedges in 1981 through a Chicago friend. The two became so close that Homann cared for her at his home during the final years of her life. She entrusted the skull to him shortly before her April 11, 2007, death, which also was Homann's birthday.

"She was my teacher," he said. "My best friend."

Carved out of a single piece of clear quartz, the life-sized skull features smoothly contoured cheekbones and a detachable jaw that sets perfectly into the cranium. It is so scientifically accurate that a face of a young Mesoamerican woman can be reconstructed from it. But how it was made and by whom remains a mystery.

The SciFi special followed Homann and host Lester Holt as they retraced F. A. Mitchell-Hedges' steps through Belize and Honduras in search of the skull's origins. It also explored the history, legend and controversies that surround crystal skulls found throughout the world.

"I tried to shake him," Holt says of Homann. "I asked him a lot of pointed questions, and I came away at least with the conclusion that he's a true believer. He'd lived with Anna Mitchell-Hedges, knows the skull and has heard her story, has asked her many of the same questions that I asked him."

The skull, which F.A. Mitchell-Hedges dubbed the Skull of Doom and his daughter called the Skull of Love, reportedly was discovered in 1924 by the young Anna Mitchell-Hedges in a Mayan pyramid in Lubaantun, British Honduras, now Belize.

"She was on top of this pyramid that she wasn't supposed to be on when she saw this glimmer of light," Homann says. "She came down and told her dad that someone was in (the ruins) with a flashlight. That's when they found the skull."

Because the Mayan civilization peaked between A.D. 300 and 900 and no other crystal skull has been excavated from a documented archaeological site, many experts discount Anna Mitchell-Hedges' account.