[HELICOPTER HOVERING]
NARRATOR: When you go into a jungle looking for something,
the odds are you won't find it.
But every once in a while, a long shot pays off.
CHRISTOPHER FISHER: Whoa, whoa, whoa!
Everybody stop, back off, don't touch anything,
don't clear anything, please!
NARRATOR: For hundreds of years,
people have disappeared into the jungles of Central America
looking for lost cities.
There have been some eye-opening discoveries.
And some head-slapping ones.
Over the years,
the ways of seeing into the unknown have changed.
MALE: Look at that. Wow.
What looks like rectangular structure.
NARRATOR: What hasn't changed is the thrill of discovery.
* [MUSIC]
The search for a city lost in the jungle is a staple
of the Western imagination.
So is the intrepid explorer who goes looking for it.
Indiana Jones is the fictional archetype,
but there's never been a shortage of real adventurers
who disappear into the jungle,
and emerge with a tale of what they've found
that sinks its hook into you and won't let go.
STEVE ELKINS: I became almost obsessed with it.
NARRATOR: Two decades ago, it happened to Steve Elkins.
STEVE ELKINS: Back in about 1993
I was in the production business.
I'd been a cinematographer and an occasional producer.
So I had this idea about doing a series about adventures
in science.
I was introduced to an adventurer who said, oh,
here's 50 stories that I just wrote about things I've done
and things I'd like to do.
So I started reading the stories and the one that captured
my attention was about the Lost City of the Monkey God,
the legend of Ciudad Blanca in Honduras.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: The legend of Ciudad Blanca, the White City,
has been around for generations of indigenous people in Honduras
DOUG PRESTON: The Pech and Tawaka Indians have stories
about a white house or a white city.
There were all these rumors about seeing the ramparts
of a ruined city, always rising in the jungle in the distance
too far to get to.
* [MUSIC]
JOHN HOOPES: There were also accounts that Charles Lindberg
reported seeing ruins beneath him as he flew the Spirit
of St. Louis over Eastern Honduras.
And that in 1927 said that he had seen a white city.
NARRATOR: A white city, where people long dead had lived
their mysterious lives.
An American hero who might have caught a glimpse of it
from the air.
And to top it off, a bizarre story from 1940 about a city
ruled by a monkey god in the jungles of Honduras.
Steve Elkins was hooked.
STEVE ELKINS: I really can't say what it is,
I guess it's the mystery.
People just like these kinds of things and
it certainly appealed to me.
I have an insatiable curiosity, always have,
and I guess I'm very persistent too,
because this has been a very long and difficult road
and everybody in my family and my friends have thought
I was crazy for pursuing this for so long.
I guess you could say I did become totally obsessed.
I think my wife would agree with you 100 percent.
NARRATOR: Other explorers have gone looking
for the lost White City,
but Steve is determined to be the one who finds it.
STEVE ELKINS: I loved that kind of stuff.
I said this is great, Honduras is not an expensive place to go.
It's not that far away, so let's do it.
So we put together an expedition with about 18 people.
We flew to Honduras with all of our camera gear.
We hired some local people,
some indigenous people to be our guides
and we started heading off in the dugout canoes
up into the swamps of Mosquitia.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: Mosquitia is the largest tropical wilderness
in Central America, 20,000 square miles of mountainous,
disease -ridden, snake-infested jungle.
* [MUSIC]
CHRISTOPHER FISHER: It is an incredibly densely
vegetated area.
Triple canopy and it's very rugged.
No roads, no electricity, no permanent settlements.
Some people call it the Little Amazon.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: Outside of the local guides,
no one on the Elkins team has much experience with the jungle.
They find the going slow.
And then slower.
[ONE, TWO, THREE...]
STEVE ELKINS: First we couldn't use the motors.
Then they had poles and we had to uh, pole like this.
It was quite an experience.
We first, we saw people, then there were no people,
then there were animals, and in fact I believe at one point,
the local people said that there were jaguars tracking us,
and one of them would sit in the back of the canoe
with a rifle saying he was watching out.
NARRATOR: Elkins is actually retracing a journey made
a half century earlier by another amateur explorer
obsessed with the White City,
a journalist named Theodore Morde.
After disappearing into the jungle for months,
Morde emerged with a gripping tale of discovery,
and a catchy new nickname for the White City.
He called it the Lost City of the Monkey God and it became
an overnight sensation in the 1940's.
DOUGLAS PRESTON: Theodore Morde was an adventurer,
a journalist and a fabulist, I think.
Very handsome, dashing.
He'd covered the Spanish Civil War, very intrepid guy.
STEVE ELKINS: I did hear the stories of Theodore Morde,
they are pretty well known and I read it with fascination
like everybody else.
He was an adventurer and he obviously had an innate
curiosity and he wanted to seek an answer.
So, that was the same for me.
I had that same curiosity and that same desire
to find the answer.
To look over the next ridge, around the next corner.
Maybe the answer is there, and I think all adventurers or seekers
of unknown places have that same obsession to do that.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: In May 1940, with nothing more than a few dubious
stories to guide them, Morde and a college friend set off
into the jungles of Mosquitia.
CHISTOPHER STEWART: They managed to convince Indians
to go along with them and help them navigate the river.
And they strike out and continue upstream,
and for days they go like this.
MORDE: Friday, May 17 1940:
Part of our job was charting rivers and streams
which no white man had ever traversed before.
When we could go no further we started hacking a path
through the jungle.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: At night, they camp on river beaches,
where the guides tell tantalizing stories
about a city built long ago by their forefathers.
MORDE: Indians had spoken to us of vast ruins,
now blanketed by jungle, yet they were able to describe some
of its features, with curiously explicit detail, which they said
had been handed down to them by their ancestors who had seen it.
We would uncover, they said, a longstaired approach to it.
Stone effigies of monkeys would line this approach.
The heart of the temple was the statue
of the Monkey God himself.
NARRATOR: But after a few weeks of travelling into the interior,
the guides refuse to go any further.
CHRISTOPHER STEWART: The way that the Indians described it
is this is a sacred place, and nobody's allowed to go here.
So they turned around and went home.
NARRATOR: With the river behind them,
Morde's party strikes out on foot,
pushing through tangled undergrowth
that never seems to end.
MORDE: We have met our match in the jungle.
How infinitesimal we white men are here in the green vastness.
[BIRDS SOUND]
NARRATOR: 50 years later,
Steve Elkins is feeling much the same thing.
STEVE ELIKNS: So after a period of time we then
ditched the canoes and we started walking.
[...GOING AROUND HERE]
[UGH!]
* [MUSIC]
[NO, NO NO... HOLD HIM, HOLD HIM!]
We walked, and walked and went up down, up down and around.
I really, it would be very difficult for me to tell you
exactly where we went.
CHRISTOPHER STEWART: Mosquitia is a dense place.
You can't see anything.
There are plenty of places in the jungle,
where it just feels like evening all day long
because the day is completely shut out.
There is no sunlight.
STEVE ELKINS: There's a lot of people who have been looking for
it for a very long time and some have gone in and not come back.
Some are credible well-educated people
who knew what they were doing.
Others are just adventurers, but the bottom line is
they are all driven by the same thing.
They all have the quest to find out if there's something there.
And that's what drives everybody.
NARRATOR: But even a driven man needs to find something
to keep his hopes alive.
And after days and days of unproductive searching,
it happens to Steve Elkins.
STEVE ELIKNS: I would say that the seminal moment for me
that really set the obsession with trying to prove
or disprove the legend of Ciudad Blanca
happened when we were in the highlands on this trip
and I remember walking along this ridge
and when there was this beautiful mountain stream,
it was very idyllic looking place, and deep jungle,
babbling stream.
And there's this huge boulder.
* [MUSIC]
And in this boulder was this wonderful carving of a man
with some kind of a fancy headdress
and he had a stick and it looked like he had a bag with seeds
or something over his shoulder
and seeds were falling out of it.
And that was the moment that clicked in my head. And it went.
There's more to this story then meets the eye.
NARRATOR: But stumbling across a few ancient artifacts isn't
the same as finding a city, and after weeks spent wandering
through heavy underbrush, Elkins begins to have second thoughts.
STEVE ELIKNS: Walking aimlessly through the jungle
to me is a fool's errand.
Many times you're lucky if you do a mile or two a day,
because you run into stands of bamboo and the terrain is tough.
It is really tough slow going.
And also you can't see much,
when you are looking at all this vegetation,
you're lucky if you can see ten meters in front of you.
You can be in front of a pyramid and you just go oh,
just another hill I've got to walk up,
and you have no idea because it's covered in vegetation,
trees and mud.
NARRATOR: Finally, time and money run out.
* [MUSIC]
Everyone is exhausted.
* [MUSIC]
Elkins has to admit
this mission to find the White City has failed.
But he's already dreaming about the next one.
* [MUSIC]
STEVE ELKINS: And kept thinking well one day
maybe I'm gonna figure out a way to try and find this lost city,
if in fact it exists.
NARRATOR: Steve tells himself that someday he'll return
to finish the job.
STEVE ELKINS: You know, once bitten with that virus
it comes back roaring and you can't stop.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: A half century earlier,
adventurer Theodore Morde and his friends were wandering
through the same jungle with the same obsession,
and the same lack of results.
CHRISTOPHER STEWART: And days turned into weeks,
they got tired, they got hungry, they got beaten up
by just being out in the jungle for a long time.
NARRATOR: They do find a few artifacts of unknown origin
here and there, but no lost city.
JOHN HOOPES: The details are unclear.
Morde clearly travels well into the interior of Eastern Honduras
and he actually finds archaeological sites
from which he makes collections.
In fact, those objects are now in the Smithsonian collections.
NARRATOR: At some point, the hopelessness of their situation
begins to dawn on them.
MORDE: We are cut and bruised and tired and hungry.
There are moments of wrath, despair and disgust all at once,
an inexorable lassitude that sucks out a man's guts.
CHRISTOPHER STEWART: After weeks out there,
reality tends to blur.
It's like you are living in this sort of fever dream.
NARRATOR: Then, a change, either on the ground,
or in Morde's mind.
Whichever it was, months after entering the jungle,
Morde emerges with a story that will make him famous.
* [MUSIC]
He's found Ciudad Blanca,
and it's even stranger than anyone could have imagined.
CHRISTOPHER STEWART: So Morde comes back and he has this great
press conference in New York City.
Everybody is there, New York Times is there,
all the great newspapers were there to hear these stories
of this lost White City.
And he tells a great story.
And people are totally enamored by this guy.
The one great question is, where is it?
Of course Morde doesn't tell them.
NARRATOR: Morde's discovery comes at a time
when the public is flocking to movies about jungles,
and the strange creatures who live there.
So it's no surprise that when Morde writes an article
about finding the White City, he highlights the Monkey God.
JOHN HOOPES: Well the article is written for a publication called
the American Weekly, which is literally a Sunday newspaper
tabloid, published by the Hearst newspapers which is edited
by a well-known fantasy and science fiction writer.
The fact that King Kong had been a blockbuster hit in 1933
just seven years before the publication of Morde's story
suggests that a great deal of the inspiration for Morde
was coming from King Kong.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: Morde is vague about the exact location
of the lost city.
* [MUSIC]
MORDE: Towering mountains form the backdrop of the scene.
Nearby a rushing cataract.
More definite location than this I cannot give
because many are those who have sought the Monkey God's city,
attracted by its tales of treasure,
and we want to find it untouched on our return next January.
JOHN HOOPES: He says that he found the White City,
but provides no plans, no photographs and so it becomes
a rumor or a legend.
He vows to go back and document it better,
but never has the opportunity.
CHRISTOPHER STEWART: As Morde is talking about going
to the lost city, World War II,
is worsening and Morde becomes a spy for the United States.
NARRATOR: When Morde comes home from the war,
he's unhappy to learn that his claim about finding
the White City is being greeted with skepticism, and in 1954,
for reasons we can only guess at, Morde hangs himself.
JOHN HOOPES: He died by his own hand without ever having
returned to Honduras, or having said anything more about
the White City.
CHRISTOPHER STEWART: I am sure he embroidered some of it.
He wanted to be a part of some great historical narrative
of this place.
He wanted to come back with a story that no one would ever
forget and that would live long after his own death.
NARRATOR: Although his first expedition in search
of the White City has ended in failure,
Steve Elkins continues to believe that an ancient city
lies hidden somewhere in the Honduran jungle.
Finding it has become his obsession.
STEVE ELKINS: After I returned from the first trip
and was thoroughly bitten by the bug to try and go solve
this mystery and see if I could find the lost city.
I actually made a few trips back.
And then Hurricane Mitch came in 1998 which pretty much
devastated the country.
At that point I said, Ok, I've had enough, I'm done.
Maybe this will be one mystery I can't solve.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: But Elkins reminds himself
that not every expedition into the jungles of Honduras
has ended in disappointment.
Nearly 100 years before Morde went exploring,
another lost city was found in the jungle,
a discovery that changed our understanding of the New World
forever.
The year is 1839.
American diplomat John Lloyd Stevens and English painter
Frederick Catherwood make their way through the Honduran jungle.
They're already aware of the cities built by the Maya
and the Aztecs in more open landscapes.
But few believed anyone had ever built a city in the jungle.
DOUG PRESTON: The Americans back in the early 19th century
had the idea that only savages lived in the jungle.
[SPANISH DIALOGUE]
OSCAR CRUZ: At the time, nobody knew who had created
these ancient cities.
Archaeology didn't exist.
People thought it must have been some lost civilization
from Europe or Asia.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: After weeks in the jungle,
Stevens and Catherwood have found no trace of a lost city.
* [MUSIC]
Stevens writes in his journal and Catherwood sketches,
but they don't seem to be getting anywhere.
What keeps them going is the persistent rumor that a large
city made of stone lies just a day or two or three ahead.
* [MUSIC]
And one day, there it is.
* [MUSIC]
DOUG PRESTON: What an extraordinary moment to see
peeking through the jungle these enormous temples, and stelae,
and sculptures, and pyramids and so forth.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: The city is called Copan.
* [MUSIC]
We know it was constructed by the Maya
because its carvings and hieroglyphs are filled
with the names and dates that tell the story of the royal line
that built it.
* [MUSIC]
As a place to live and to worship.
* [MUSIC]
For Stevens, Copan is a revelation.
* [MUSIC]
STEVENS: The sight of these unexpected monuments put at rest
at once and forever, all uncertainty in regard
to the character of American antiquities,
and gave us the assurance that the people who once occupied
the Continent of America were not savages.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: Today we know that the Maya were building pyramids
at the time of Christ, and that Mayan civilization was at its
height when Europe was still living in the Dark Ages.
* [MUSIC]
STEVENS: Architecture, sculpture and painting,
all the arts that embellish life,
had flourished in this overgrown forest.
Orators, warriors and statesmen, beauty,
ambition and glory had lived and passed away.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: No one knows exactly why Mayan civilization crumbled,
but by the time the Spanish arrived in the 16th century,
most of its great cities had been abandoned,
places like Tikal, Chichen Itza, and Palenque.
But most Westerners had no idea that a city like Copan
had ever been built in such dense jungle,
until Stevens and Catherwood stumbled on it.
OSCAR CRUZ: They bravely set off to remote areas with only
their hearts and the hope of finding something nobody
had ever seen before.
They took the first steps that led to modern archaeology.
NARRATOR: When they return to the United States,
Stevens and Catherwood share their discovery with a series
of beautifully illustrated books.
DOUG PRESTON: Catherwood's engravings were phenomenal,
people looked at them and said, My God,
these are equal to the pyramids of Egypt,
these are equal to the Parthenon,
in no way could savages have built these great cities
and it totally transformed Americans' thinking
about the New World.
These were the largest bestselling books,
non-fiction books of the 19th Century.
Totally captured the American imagination.
These books were read by everybody.
NARRATOR: In 2012 Steve Elkins is back in Honduras for another
crack at finding the Lost White City of the Monkey God.
And this time he has a revolutionary new search tool
to help him.
It's called LIDAR.
LIDAR is a fairly simple technology.
An airplane flies over the target zone carrying
an instrument that fires a grid of infra-red beams
down to the ground.
When they strike an object, the beams bounce back to the sensor
and the distance is recorded.
What you end up with is a cloud of points that can be measured
and manipulated.
CHRISTOPHER FISHER: By filtering that cloud of points
you can reveal certain features that are on the earth's surface.
Archaeological features, ecological features,
whatever you want.
STEVE ELKINS: They called me out of the blue, and said,
Hey Steve would you want to go look for the lost city again?
And I went oh no, not this again.
But coincidentally I had just read an archaeology magazine
about airborne LIDAR.
And I went boom!
If I'm gonna do it, this is the way to do it.
I got to get a hold of this airborne LIDAR technology
and this way I don't have to walk through the jungle.
I can sit in an airplane and just go back and forth
and back and forth and scan the jungle and we'll see
if something's there and worthwhile going down
into the jungle for.
And that's what I did.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: But it didn't happen right away.
There was money to raise, and a team of experts to assemble.
* [MUSIC]
STEVE ELKINS: I initially wanted to LIDAR scan
the entire Mosquitia jungle.
If I'd did that I'd know once and for all what was under
the jungle canopy and what wasn't.
Of course then reality came in and I found out
it was gonna cost millions of dollars
and take a very long time, so that was beyond my reach.
So I concentrated the search area into places that had been
either not explored or the least explored
according to my research.
And I went this place looks good, this place looks good,
and this place looks good.
I just called them T1, T2, T3, T for target, and target 1,
target 2, and target 3.
And that's where we went.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: In 2012, they are finally ready to start looking.
* [MUSIC]
STEVE ELKINS: We went down to Honduras,
and we brought down a plane with this million dollar LIDAR gear
in it and the crew and every morning we'd get up,
go to the airport get in the airplane.
I didn't go in the plane, there was only room for two people,
the LIDAR engineer and the pilot.
We'd plot out where they were going to go and they would fly.
Kind of like mowing the lawn.
They would just go back and forth, and back and forth,
having no idea whether or not if this was going to work.
This was really a crapshoot.
NARRATOR: The scan begins.
* [MUSIC]
Days go by with no results.
* [MUSIC]
Time and money are ticking away.
* [MUSIC]
And then it happens.
STEVE ELKINS: I'm having breakfast with Doug Preston
who was writing an article about it for The New Yorker
and all of a sudden one of the LIDAR engineers comes
bounding out of his room.
DOUG PRESTON: The scientist who was analyzing these images came
racing out of his bungalow in his flip-flops waving his arms
and screaming.
STEVE ELKINS: He grabs me by the neck going Steve, Steve, Steve!
This is it, this is it!
This is the oh [bleep] moment.
DOUG PRESTON: There's something in the valley!
STEVE ELKINS: He said, it's here, it's here.
His eyes were bulging out.
And bingo.
Right where we thought it would be were these rectangular
features that you know, you had to be an idiot not to know
these were man-made.
I couldn't believe it, and at that moment it was all tingly.
I was like a little kid, I said I can't believe this actually
really worked.
But how can you stop there?
Now we have to go on the ground and actually prove 100 percent
like hold up a stone or something and say
this is what we saw on LIDAR, this is it.
So that was the next move.
NARRATOR: It will take Elkins three years to see for himself
what the LIDAR imaging has uncovered.
But in early 2015, that day finally arrives,
and it turns out to have been worth the wait.
STEVE ELKINS: So we're down in Honduras and on the first day
I go in the helicopter to do a recce flight.
I'll never forget that moment.
We're flying 10 to 20 miles in the helicopter and it's starting
to get greener and greener,
and all of a sudden we're in the rainforest.
It just changes like that.
And we're flying over these really gnarly ridges
and then we see this one massive ridge.
We go over the top and then just as I'd dreamed it,
there's this beautiful bowl.
This beautiful valley.
I was like, again like a little kid.
I could not believe it.
DOUG PRESTON: And we flew through a notch
in these mountains and suddenly came out over this valley,
which was like a vision of tropical paradise,
these two rivers winding through it,
this beautiful gentle landscape below with egrets flying.
STEVE ELKINS: And sure enough we were able to put
the helicopter in.
So that was quite exciting going wow, all this study,
all this research, all this thinking about
it is really paying off.
It is working, one thing after another is working
according to plan.
So after doing the recce we went back,
got everybody and we started going in there.
DOUG PRESTON: The helicopter had to make a number of trips
bringing in personnel.
The camp had not been set up; it was still just jungle.
And the chief of the expedition said no one is leaving camp
without an escort because this is very dangerous.
MALE: We're going to use this point that we've already mark...
NARRATOR: But with the LIDAR site only a few hundred yards
away, no one wants to wait a minute longer.
DOUG PRESTON: So finally the expedition chief said
alright, alright, alright, I'll take you up there.
NARRATOR: In his search for the lost White City,
Steve Elkins and his team have set up camp just a few hundred
yards from the site LIDAR has identified from the air
as being man-made.
After lead archaeologist Chris Fisher has prepped the team
on how to document any artifacts they might find,
the team crosses the river to the site.
And they aren't disappointed when they get there.
STEVE ELKINS: We went up with the archaeologists to the site
and lo and behold everything we saw on LIDAR was there,
exactly as we saw and more.
Another holy [bleep] moment,
and another beautiful moment for technology
because we had a GPS device that had the LIDAR images
and coordinates in it,
the little device would say 20 meters this way,
30 meters that way, and boom here's a pyramid.
Here's the plaza, here's some mound.
Here's this, here's that.
It's right there.
There's no screwing around, there's no wandering around
aimlessly looking for stuff.
We knew exactly where to go.
DOUG PRESTON: And then we came to the base of an earthen
pyramid from the LIDAR images, but you couldn't see anything.
You are in completely dense jungle.
You couldn't even see that it was a hill really.
It was just a slope that went upward,
so we finally got to the top and there at the top was,
were the outlines, the rectangular outline
of what was apparently a ruined temple.
And that was the beginning of our entry into the lost city.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: The site is so covered in dense jungle that it's hard
to make out the contours of the structures.
[but in here maybe they chipped away like you said it...]
But the more they explore, the more they find.
STEVE ELKINS: All of a sudden Lucien, our DP,
yells hey there's a bunch of funny looking rocks over here.
I run over there and there's this cache,
which turns out to be 52 beautiful carved stone objects
just sitting there.
Mostly buried, little pieces sticking out of the ground.
We hit pay dirt, guys.
We're celebrating tonight!
DOUG PRESTON: There was complete pandemonium,
because poking out of the ground were stone jars decorated
with snakes and vulture heads and there was this head coming
out of the ground that was obviously part of a decorated
throne, all in stone, beautifully carved,
all perfectly preserved.
STEVE ELKINS: The archaeologists went crazy.
DOUG PRESTON: It was quite remarkable.
I have been on many archaeological digs
and I've seen many discoveries,
and I have never seen anything like that found.
DOUG: There are inscriptions right here!
STEVE: There are? DOUG: Yes!
[...oh my God...]
DOUG PRESTON: It was just total pandemonium and Chris Fisher
started to shout: Get back, stop tramping around,
he was really mad.
CHRISTOPHER FISHER: Whoa, whoa, whoa!
Everybody stop, back off, don't touch anything,
don't clear anything, please.
DOUG PRESTON: And he finally cleared everyone out of the area
and surrounded it with police tape,
and he said don't cross the tape, ha-ha,
you know he was protecting the site.
* [MUSIC]
JOHN HOOPES: Something that I admire about the Elkin's
expedition is that it was a multi-disciplinary effort.
They brought in an ethno botanist,
they had an anthropologist,
they had experts in LIDAR interpretation,
they had individuals who could communicate
with the local populations
and even the security forces that they took
were constituted by indigenous people form the region.
NARRATOR: As the significance of their discovery dawns on them,
protecting the site becomes a paramount concern.
* [MUSIC]
And what should they do with all the artifacts they'd found?
STEVE ELKINS: It is a moral question.
So we found these 52 objects that appear according to all
the scientists who were with us, untouched for centuries.
Right, the odds of coming back, coming back to this place
could be very expensive, very difficult,
and once word got out maybe it will get looted.
So what do we do?
Do we take one or two of these more intricate objects out
and bring them back to the museum in Tegucigalpa
to be studied or displayed?
Or do we leave them in place?
NARRATOR: In the end the decision is made to take
photographs and to leave every single object in place until
another team with more people and equipment can be formed
to excavate it properly.
* [MUSIC]
DOUG PRESTON: The next step was informing
the Honduran government
and they were very excited.
And they all came down to Roatán and we had a big dinner
with the Minister of the Interior and then Steve went
to the Presidential Palace and they had a press conference
and of course it was announced
that the White City had been found.
CHRISTOPHER FISHER: Honestly I think part of it is that people
are surprised that in the 21st Century there are still things
to discover.
We're celebrating tonight!
DOUG PRESTON: Not only did they find a statue that was unknown
or a temple that was unknown but they found and entire city
that was in an unexplored region of the globe which most people
have never heard of and I think that really excited people
to think, wow, you know maybe all the mystery of the world
isn't gone after all.
STEVE ELKINS: I mean in a way I felt that I opened Pandora's
Box.
NARRATOR: The backlash is not long in coming.
Press reports that Steve has discovered the legendary
White City are quickly derided by several archaeologists,
though no one on Elkins' team has ever made that claim.
* [MUSIC]
DOUG PRESTON: Now they had not found the White City.
The White City is a legend.
But what they had found was a very large ancient city
belonging to a culture that is one of the most mysterious
and unstudied cultures in the America's.
It doesn't even have a formal name.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists did know that the area was settled
by a people, unrelated to the Maya,
who flourished around the 10th century AD.
* [MUSIC]
We also knew that they built settlements,
and domesticated the land around them.
But we had never located such a complete site,
with LIDAR imagery to help us imagine
what it might have looked like a thousand years ago.
CHRISTOPHER FISHER: My vision of what the Mosquitia landscape
looked like was something like a garden,
a landscape filled with orchards, maybe managed forests,
farm fields, human settlements, roads, um,
a managed urban kind of garden countryside.
JOHN HOOPES: They may have very well been cultivating maize
or corn, which would of allowed for populations to grow
to fairly substantial agricultural societies.
CHRISTOPHER FISHER: That to me is fairly fascinating in that
we have these areas that today we see as these pristine,
tropical wilderness that is in fact an abandoned garden
essentially.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: Another criticism of the Elkins expedition is that
it's a throwback to old-fashioned narratives about
white men discovering lost cities in the jungle.
* [MUSIC]
JOHN HOOPES: From the time of Christopher Columbus,
white Europeans claiming to have discovered something when people
were already living there and had known it all of their lives,
becomes a problem in the narrative of discovery today,
just because a European has not visited someplace
doesn't mean that it's unknown.
* [MUSIC]
What I would like to do before you go wandering off is I'd like
to go back up there and go down what looks like that little...
NARRATOR: No one knows just how many people might have lived
in the jungle before the Europeans arrived.
But Elkins' discovery confirms that there are lost cities
buried in Honduras, that they played an essential role
in the country's past, and could play a vital role in its future.
* [MUSIC]
STEVE ELKINS: Honduras, as most people know,
is a country with a lot of problems.
Problems with narco-trafficking, poverty,
there's been wars there,
it's just been difficult for most people.
And they've gotten a bad rep.
And I'm a strong believer that Honduras has a lot to offer and
I think by our project, we're hoping to be able to showcase
the fact that the Mosquitia jungle is a rare jewel
for the whole world.
NARRATOR: Fortunately, the Honduran government has embraced
the find, and is involved in preparations for another
expedition to excavate the site.
Elkins hopes that will happen soon,
the perfect ending to a story that's not quite over.
MAN: Welcome to the Four Seasons Mosquitia.
[LAUGHTER]
[...INAUDIBLE... JUST A FEW DAY AGO]
STEVE ELKINS: In the end after all these years,
all these trials and tribulations I sometimes have
to sit back and hit myself and go I can't believe
all that's been accomplished.
What started out almost as a lark to try and find
the lost city, turned out to be a great scientific endeavor
to prove the usefulness of the new technology of LIDAR,
upend the archaeological world in terms of how they do
discoveries in jungles and even in the ground and then even more
importantly change the world in a small way for the positive.
* [MUSIC]
NARRATOR: Steve Elkins realizes that the legend
of the Monkey God that first compelled him to dive
into the unknown is probably as insubstantial as the mist
that hovers over Mosquitia.
But there were cities here. Built by an unknown people.
They were lived in and then they were empty,
and what happened to the people who lived there
remains a mystery to this day.
* [MUSIC]