City Laid Out Like Lizard

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Last week, Josh Williams, formerly of Curbed LA, emailed with an amazing link to an article, reportedly published back in 1934 by the L.A. Times, about a race of "lizard people" who once lived beneath the city.

"Did strange people live under site of Los Angeles 5000 years ago?" the article asks, supplying a bizarre treasure map through the city's undersides in the process.

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Although you can read the article in full through these links, I wanted to give you a taste of the story's strange mix of gonzo archaeology, Poltergeist-like pre-Columbian cultural anxiety, and start-up geophysical investigation squad:

So firmly does [a "geophysical mining engineer" named G. Warren Shufelt] believe that a maze of catacombs and priceless golden tablets are to be found beneath downtown Los Angeles that the engineer and his aides have already driven a shaft 250 feet into the ground, the mouth of the shaft behind on the the old Banning property on North Hill Street overlooking Sunset Boulevard, Spring Street and North Broadway.

And so convinced is the engineer of the infallibility of a radio X-ray perfected by him for detecting the presence of minerals and tunnels below the surface of the ground, an apparatus with which he says he has traced a pattern of catacombs and vaults forming the lost city, that he plans to continue sending his shaft downward until he has reached a depth of 1000 feet before discontinuing operations.

The article goes on to suggest that this ancient subterranean city was "laid out like [a] lizard"; we visit a Hopi "medicine lodge," wherein geophysical secrets are told; there are lost gold hoards; and, all along, the engineer's "radio X-ray" apparatus continues to detect inhabitable voids beneath the metropolis.

"I knew I was over a pattern of tunnels," Shufelt is quoted, "and I had mapped out the course of the tunnels, the position of large rooms scattered along the tunnel route, as well as the position of the deposits of gold, but I couldn't understand the meaning of it."

Perhaps this is what we'd get if Steven Spielberg hired Mike Mignola to write the next installment of Indiana Jones.

(Thanks to Josh Williams, and to vokoban, who originally uploaded the scan. Vaguely related: The Hollow Hills and Mysterious Chinese Tunnels).