Original subtitles

(tense music)

- Tonight, a lost city deep in the Amazon jungle

and the man who vanished trying to find it.

- In the 1920s,

Percy Fawcett was one of the most

famous explorers in the world.

- He became obsessed with this place he named the city of Z.

- He writes a letter from his camp in the jungle,

and that's the last we hear from him.

(dramatic music)

- Millions around the world

await the news of Fawcett's fate,

inspiring numerous missions to find him.

- At this point, he begins to suspect

that not only did they murder Fawcett and his men,

but they're the next ones in line to be killed.

- If you die in the jungle, in a few days,

your body can completely disappear.

- Now, we'll explore the top

theory surrounding Fawcett's disappearance

and the location of his legendary lost city.

- Everyone knew when he was coming

and vaguely where he was going,

so it wouldn't have been very hard to follow him.

- Because the jungle is so thick,

he might have reached Z

and walked right by it.

- They've only uncovered maybe 10%

of this massive civilization.

This could be exactly what Fawcett was seeking.

- What happened to Percy Fawcett

and where is the Lost City of Z?

(suspenseful music)

(suspenseful music continues)

(ominous music)

(tense music)

Around 1500,

Portuguese explorers begin arriving on the coast

of a place they name

Vera Cruz,

which means true cross.

Today, we know it as Brazil.

- At the time, they think it's an island.

They don't know yet that it's part of this giant continent.

And what they find there

is this massive, massive river

emptying into the Atlantic Ocean.

They name the river and the rainforest that surrounds it

the Amazon,

and this is the largest rainforest in the entire world.

It's over 2.3 million square miles.

That's over half of the United States.

(dramatic music)

- It's still a mostly unexplored frontier

because it's incredibly dense.

The canopy makes the forest floor very dark,

so it's not like you can grow a lot of food there.

There are several diseases.

It's full of dangerous wild animals

like jaguars and anacondas,

so it's not easy to survive there at all.

(dramatic music)

- Over the next couple hundred years,

as people are exploring deeper and deeper into the Amazon,

well, they're constantly questioning

the local indigenous people,

and they're hearing stories and rumors and myths

of these ancient lost cities of gold

that are just beyond the horizon

or just beyond the mountain.

And these stories are spreading

all across Western Europe at the time.

So by the 19th century,

printing presses have been built

on the backs of these stories

of European explorers going off into the Amazon in search of

ancient lost cities of gold and untold riches.

(dramatic music)

- [Laurence] One man long intrigued by these tales

is British explorer Percy Fawcett.

- Percy Fawcett attended the Royal Geographical Society

to learn to be a cartographer and make maps,

and he also served as an artillery officer

in the British Army.

Those skills combined,

his military experience,

his cartography skills,

get him sent to the newest frontier,

to the borders of Brazil

to start mapping this dense, unknown area.

- He leaves the British Army

and basically becomes a professional explorer.

And by 1911, his exploits become very popular

his exploits become very popular

for the newspapers back in England.

Stories like killing poisonous snakes

or dealing with extremely hostile tribes.

- So during his time in the Amazon,

Fawcett begins to really cultivate this obsession.

He's hearing stories about these lost cities,

lost civilizations,

and he zeroes in on one that he writes about

using just the letter Z.

(intense music)

- [Laurence] He even travels to

Brazil's capital city to learn more.

And while researching at the

National Library of Rio de Janeiro,

Fawcett uncovers a mysterious 10-page document

now known as Manuscript 512.

- And this 10-page document

written by a Portuguese explorer back in the 1750s

describes this lost city

as sitting directly inside three archways

and opening up into a plaza

that had language written on the wall

in what looked like Ancient Greek.

For Percy Fawcett, this is the confirmation that he needs.

The stories that he's heard from the indigenous tribe

are now matching up with a manuscript in the library,

and he knows it's now his time to find the Lost City of Z.

(intense music)

- Based on the descriptions in Manuscript 512,

Fawcett decides to focus his search,

on the area between two rivers,

the Tapajos and the Xingu River.

There were previous explorers

that had tried to penetrate the area,

including Theodore Roosevelt,

but no Westerner had ever fully penetrated

the thick jungle in that area before.

So Fawcett decides that this is

where the Lost City of Z has to be located,

and he decides he's going to be the one to explore it.

(intense music)

- So in 1920, Fawcett mounts an expedition,

and it is a total disaster.

Everything goes wrong,

he gets sick, the ox dies,

he has to shoot his own horse.

He basically ends up going home

with his tail tucked between his legs.

And of course after that,

no one's really interested in funding a follow up.

So this is where Fawcett's self-promotion

really serves him well.

He gets funding from a group of publishers

who he promises an ongoing story of his adventures,

where, along the way as he travels,

runners are going to be carrying

regular updates to the media

(tense music)

(suspenseful music)

- [Laurence] Fawcett's second expedition in search of Z

launches on April 20th, 1925.

He's joined by his 21-year-old son, Jack,

Jack's friend, Raleigh Rimell,

two Brazilian laborers,

and a team of pack animals.

- Everyone seems to be in good spirits.

For the last month, he and his party

have been hacking their way through the forest,

and on May 29th, 1925, he's at a camp called Dead Horse Camp

which is unfortunately where he had to shoot his horse

on his last expedition.

And he writes to his wife telling her

that he's now going to be leaving behind

his local indigenous guides

as well as their pack mules

and going totally on foot

because he wants to be able to move quickly, stealthily

into unknown dangerous territory of the Mato Grosso,

one of the most formidable regions of the Amazon.

And the word Mato Grosso means thick forest.

It's extremely treacherous territory just to navigate,

let alone the wide plethora of

dangers that await you in the Amazon.

(dramatic booming sound)

- Going into the jungle, Percy knows he's on his own

and there's gonna be no way to get any information out

or, frankly, no way to ask for help.

So, he warns his wife in advance, he tells her,

"It might be a year before you hear from me."

(ominous music)

- [Laurence] This is the last communication

ever received from Percy Fawcett.

(intense music)

- By the spring of 1927,

Fawcett has been gone for two years

and the newspapers haven't heard any more from him.

There's absolutely no word.

At this point,

Fawcett's wife, Nina, and his younger son, Brian,

believe that Fawcett is still alive in the rainforest

somewhere, and this is one of the reasons why they support

sending somebody after him.

- But that's complicated by a number of things.

One, the same thing it's complicated by for Fawcett,

the density and harshness of the jungle environment.

But it's complicated by another thing too,

and that's that Fawcett tried to keep secret

the exact location of where he was headed.

He could have been doing that for safety,

not wanting other people to follow in his footsteps

or to come looking for him and risk their own lives,

but he was probably also doing it for

the sake of keeping the secret for himself.

He didn't want anyone else following his path

and getting there first.

(intense music)

- So by 1928,

countless expeditions are being launched

and people are even funding their own trips

to go and try to find some remnants of Percy Fawcett

left in the jungles of the Mato Grosso region.

But Fawcett's worries about people trying to follow him

were totally correct.

And estimates range

that even as many as a hundred explorers

looking for Percy Fawcett

never returned from the Mato Grosso region.

(dramatic music)

- [Laurence] To date, no one has found him or

hard evidence of his death.

There's now a centuries worth of speculation

on what became of Percy Fawcett.

- The region that Fawcett was exploring

is beset with dangers.

It's easy to get lost, to become disoriented,

to lose one sense of direction,

to fall prey to one of the many dangers of the Amazon.

- You would think that a jungle

would have plenty of food and plenty of water,

but, in fact, there are so many competing species

that live in a jungle.

Finding food is actually difficult.

- You think, "Oh, it's the most diverse of species,"

but you don't see a single thing.

You only hear these things

'cause it's like walking into a closet.

It's black.

They all see you

and they're all hunting you,

but you're just blind in the jungle.

(dramatic music)

(graphic whooshing) (suspenseful music)

- On one of Percy Fawcett's previous expeditions,

he himself as well as the rest of the crew

almost starved to death.

There's even a point where he seizes the guns from his men

to prevent them from cannibalizing each other.

- And in the Amazon,

exhaustion, starvation, dehydration,

those are not the only things that could kill you.

There are a lot of other things as well.

There's insects.

There's tiny little bees that are called 'eye lickers'

that can work their way into your tear ducts.

There's a small species of eel fish

that's known to swim up people's urethras

and inhabit their bodies.

(drmatic booming sound) (bugs chirping and buzzing)

- There are venomous spiders

that can kill a human being with a single bite.

There are anacondas that can easily kill a human.

In fact, Fawcett had shot an anaconda

that had attacked him

during a previous trip into the Amazon,

so this is not a safe place.

- If something dies in the desert,

you can find that skeleton for hundreds of years.

Whereas in the jungle,

it is so rich with everything trying to live,

and turn the next thing into fertilizer,

if you die there, in a few days,

your body can completely disappear.

(tense rhythmic music)

- [Laurence] But by 1925,

Percy Fawcett has faced these dangers numerous times

and survived.

- So, in many people's mind,

if there is anyone that could still be surviving somewhere

deep within the Amazon, it was Percy Fawcett.

He was notorious for escaping the most perilous situations and

somehow making it out on the other side.

- He's experienced starvation.

He's walked for days without food.

He fought off a giant anaconda

and lived to tell the story.

So if the jungle didn't kill him,

it's possible that something else did.

- [Laurence] In the spring of 1927,

2 years after explorer,

Percy Fawcett, sent his last message, from the remote Amazon,

he's officially declared missing.

- At this point,

Fawcett and his team have been missing so long

most people think they're dead.

So, George Dyott

is an acquaintance of Fawcetts,

he's a wealthy businessman,

and he decides that,

he's going to mount an expedition

to do exactly what Percy Fawcett didn't want anyone to do,

which is follow in his footsteps and find him.

- George Dyott is considered an extreme daredevil.

He was a test pilot shortly after the Wright Brothers.

He was one of the first people to fly at night.

He'd gone to the Amazon before,

got captured by locals,

and barely escapes.

So he's pretty experienced in this realm.

- George Dyott advertises in newspapers

looking for a partner for his expedition

to find or to at least solve the mystery

of Percy Fawcett's disappearance.

- [Laurence] Some 20,000 individuals, from

all over the world respond.

(tense music)

- He puts together a team of 26 people,

including indigenous guides,

and also brings with him a film crew

because he wants to document this whole thing for posterity.

He has three tons of gear and supplies

to help his team survive.

- By June 1928,

George Dyott reaches the region of Mato Grosso,

that area where Percy Fawcett

sent his last letter to his family from.

And he has a huge stroke of luck

because he makes camp in a native settlement, where

he meets this guy Bernardino, who claims that he was the guide

for Percy Fawcett back in 1925.

- Bernardino leads Dyott and some of the others

to this place, where he had guided Fawcett,

down on Fawcett's previous expedition.

And he shows them these trees

that have these markings of Ys in their bark.

And Dyott posits that Fawcett had made these marks

so that he would be able to find his way back out

after he discovered the Lost City of Z.

(soft tense music)

- One of the things that makes Dyott's team

a little bit different from Fawcett's team before

is that they're using radio

to relay messages back to the home base.

Amateur radio operators are picking up Dyott's messages

and relaying them back to the rest of the world.

(intense music)

- [Laurence] Shortly after arriving in Mato Grosso,

Dyott's expedition

takes a dark turn.

- Despite all the people and supplies that Dyott brings

with him, he left out one really key necessity:

a translator.

(dramatic music)

This becomes really problematic.

When they run into a local tribe,

the Nahukua,

they have only basic pantomime

to understand what they're trying to say

about the final fate of Percy Fawcett.

- He thinks that the Nahukua are telling him

that Fawcett and his men were murdered

by another indigenous group known as the Suyas

because the Nahukua keeps saying, "Suyas! Suyas!"

and then falling over as though dead.

(tense music)

(whooshing sound) (dramatic rhythmic music)

- Dyott is aware of how dangerous it can be

to survive in the jungle.

Dozens of tribes live in the region

and it's known that they have terrible, gruesome fights

between different tribes or with the outsiders.

And there is a story, for example,

about this one tribe that attacked a village,

killed almost everybody in it,

and then they spent three days

dancing and making music

among the rotten corpses.

- [Laurence] But Dyott starts to wonder

if this is a deliberate misdirect.

- As Dyott is negotiating with the Nahukua,

in one of the huts, he sees a small girl

who's wearing what looks like a necklace

and it's actually a name plate

that says WS Silver Company.

Dyott knows that Fawcett had purchased

a lot of his gear from that company, So he's thinking,

Fawcett's been here,

this girl has this nameplate,

how did it get there?

- At this point, Dyott begins to suspect

that not only did the Nahukua murder Fawcett and his men,

but that he and his men

are the next ones in line to be killed.

Many of his men are sick and starving.

They have been infected by diseases

like malaria and yellow fever.

Things are not going well for him at all.

(tense rhythmic music)

- At this point, Dyott and his team are pretty dispirited.

And then one night at camp,

rumors start to go around that the chief of the Nahukua

is planning to kill them all like they killed Fawcett.

- [Laurence] The next morning,

the Nahukua men are nowhere to be found.

- Until suddenly, the entire party is surrounded,

not just by the Nahukua,

but by lots of different tribes

all pointing weapons at them.

(dramatic music)

- Dyott decides that his only choice here is to pacify

the Nahukua, with as many gifts as they still have.

After a little while,

the conversation is completely breaking down

and they start to decide

it might be time for us to figure out a way out of here.

Dyott decides my best chance is to promise

more gifts in the morning.

(intense music)

- So at night, they decide to escape.

They sneak out from the camp, very, very quietly,

they go to their boats,

and they drift off making no sound,

going away with the current.

The indigenous people chase after them,

but they manage to escape.

(dramatic music)

(intense music)

- Remarkably, after six months

of originally landing in Brazil,

George Dyott surfaces from the jungle

with an amazing story to tell.

He hasn't found Percy Fawcett,

but he's found some evidence

that Fawcett was with the Nahukua,

and he says that the Nahukua killed Fawcett.

(dramatic music)

- People find that pretty plausible,

but it's also clear that Dyott really likes the attention.

He stars in a B movie about his

own expedition into the Amazon.

And there's others who think that Fawcett

wouldn't have been quite so socially inept.

He'd had interactions with the indigenous people of the

Amazon before and none of them had gone that far south.

- Many people don't believe the story

that Fawcett was murdered by indigenous people

because they had confidence in his diplomatic skills.

He had always had a very fine ability to make peace, with the

people that he came into contact with, and they find it hard

to believe that his diplomatic skills would fail him.

That means that it's possible that something else

was responsible for his demise.

- [Laurence] Some experts believe Percy Fawcett's 1925

quest for the Lost City of Z

ended with his murder by an indigenous tribe.

But these weren't the only dangerous people

lurking in the Amazon rainforest.

- In 1924, just before Fawcett arrived,

there was an attempted military coup in Brazil,

which was put down.

The rebels dispersed throughout the country.

A large number of them settling in the Cuiaba region

in the Mato Grosso

right about the time that Percy Fawcett arrived.

These rebels were armed,

they were dangerous,

they were known to attack any foreigners

who were in the region.

They not only would rob them,

but they sometimes

just murdered them.

(dramatic music)

- These Brazilian rebels,

they knew who Percy Fawcett was.

He was a celebrity in these areas.

Everyone knew when he was coming

and vaguely where he was going,

so it wouldn't have been very hard to follow him.

All you have to do is wait until his local Brazilian guides

return and send Percy off down the jungle, and then follow

the trail that they had cut, and thus you have Percy Fawcett,

his son, and his son's friend

sitting in the jungle by themselves

waiting to be ambushed.

- [Laurence] There's little hard evidence to prove this theory

until a surprising discovery

over 50 years after Percy Fawcett's disappearance.

- In 1979,

this British biologist is in the Amazon

making a wildlife film.

And he hears about this interesting ring

at a local pawn shop in Cuiaba.

When he goes to check it out,

the owner is long since dead,

but his wife is still there,

and she hands him a ring

with a motto written on it in Latin,

and the translation is 'difficulties be damned.'

The Fawcett family motto.

- Fawcett's family confirms without doubt that, that was the

very ring that Percy Fawcett took on the expedition.

It's possible that he was murdered

and that ring was sold at the pawn shop.

It's also possible that Fawcett used this ring as a gift

to get either food, or guidance,

or something to help him along the way.

So the existence of this signet ring in the pawn shop doesn't

necessarily mean that Fawcett was killed

or it doesn't even mean the end of the story.

- [Laurence] In the early 2000s,

some old evidence is uncovered

that suggests a different fate.

- TV writer and director Misha Williams

reaches out to Fawcett's family

and in return, he gets an entire trunk

of materials of Fawcetts

not previously released to the public,

and what he finds is a lot of material

gathered by Fawcett's son, Brian.

The one who didn't go with him,

who basically spent his entire life

until he died in the 1980s

researching his own father.

(intense music)

- According to his son, Brian,

Percy Fawcett isn't just looking for the Lost City of Z

just to say he found it.

He thinks if he can find this city,

he'll be able to find lost science

and, possibly, unheard of technology

to set up his own civilization

in the middle of the Amazonian jungle.

(lound deep tone)

(graphic whooshing) (inquisitive upbeat music)

- According to Brian Fawcett,

his father, Percy,

thought that the Lost City of Z

could have been a refuge

for people escaping

the lost city of Atlantis.

He believed that Atlantis may have been located in the

Atlantic Ocean, and then when it famously

was lost under the water,

people leaving that place

sought refuge in the Amazon Forest and established

that civilized utopian community

in the Lost City of Z.

(mysterious music)

- And as farfetched as a lost Atlantian continent

somewhere off the coast of South America may seem,

in 2013, the Brazilian geology service actually

located a huge sunken landmass continent

off the coast of South America.

- Fawcett's goal might have been to create a utopian society

with the technological advances

from the lost city of Atlantis, and I have to say,

there's something intriguing to me about that theory.

After Fawcett experienced World War I,

he was incredibly disillusioned

with what humanity was capable of.

He spent so much time in the Amazon

seeing tribal peoples live in a kind of harmony

with the natural world.

It would not surprise me completely

if he wanted to escape into the jungle

and live out the rest of his days, in this kind of

resurrection of the lost city of Atlantis.

- The question still remains,

did Fawcett ever find what he was looking for?

And if he did, or if he created, his own enlightened

civilization in the middle of the forest,

why hasn't anyone else found it yet?

It seems clear to some researchers

that if we wanna answer these questions

about Percy Fawcett,

what we need to do is find the Lost City of Z itself.

- Whether explorer Percy Fawcett was killed,

succumbed to the elements,

or simply chose to stay in the Amazon jungle,

one thing is clear:

he never came back.

It's one of the great puzzles

in the history of archeology.

Since the 1920s, there have been

countless attempts to figure out

exactly what happened to him.

Some believe that the best way to try and find him

is to try and find the place he was supposedly looking for:

the Lost City of Z.

(rhythmic music)

- It's hard to say that there

could ever be a silver lining

to the fact that the rainforest

is regularly and consistently shrinking.

But since the 1920s, it's gotten a lot easier

to search around that region

because of that very fact:

the rainforest is getting smaller.

(suspenseful music)

- The last few decades have been really compelling

in terms of what we are uncovering in

the Amazon rainforest.

Significantly, a researcher from the University of Florida

named Michael Heckenberger

published a book in 2005 called "The Ecology of Power"

that chronicles his research

and some of his expeditions in the region

very near where Percy Fawcett was looking.

- [Laurence] Heckenberger makes a jaw dropping discovery.

- The Xingu River travels all the way through the Amazon,

but at the headwaters of it, Heckenberger

found evidence of over

20 cities,

an entire population

that had been overgrown by the jungle.

These villages are pre-Columbian,

dating back possibly as far as 800 CE.

- However, we don't know

the ancient indigenous name of this site.

The only name that we have for it

is an adoption of a local Brazilian site called Kuhikugu.

This site lines up almost perfectly with Fawcett's idea

of what his Lost City of Z would've looked like,

with massive monumental architecture,

wide open plazas,

as well as geometrically aligned monuments

and highways that extend often in the jungle

that connect to other settlements,

as well as aqueducts running underneath the city

as far exceeding anything that existed in Europe

at the same time.

- Researchers estimate that they've only uncovered

maybe 10% of this massive civilization,

which means there's even more yet to be found.

This could be exactly what Fawcett was seeking.

(whooshing sound) (dramatic music)

(ominous tone)

- Kuhikugu is similar to some of the things

that Percy Fawcett believed about the Lost City of Z.

There is the broad road.

There are bridges and moats

and sophisticated architectural features.

It is more or less in

the area where Fawcett thought

that the Lost City of Z might be located.

- [Laurence] But if these ruins match Fawcett's description of Z

and they're located where he was looking,

why didn't he find them?

- It took Michael Heckenberger

13 years

of living right next to these archeological sites

before he even discovered them

due to the fact that they have been covered up

by centuries upon centuries of jungle growth.

Even if Percy Fawcett did discover the site of Kuhikugu,

his expedition could have been thwarted by the

extremely fierce and dangerous tribes, who live in

that area even today.

(suspenseful music)

- It's entirely possible

that Percy Fawcett could have walked right by Kuhikugu

and never seen it.

The jungle could have completely obscured

any clue that he could have found

to the existence of this civilization.

- Explorers continue to find this out the hard way

as recently as 1996.

- In 1996, the explorer James Lynch

leads a party looking for Fawcett

into the Amazon rainforest,

accompanied, among other people,

by his 16-year-old son.

They run into some indigenous people

who are very upset about seeing them there.

- Lynch and his crew were kidnapped

and held hostage for three days,

and they were threatened with a horrible and painful death.

They say, "If you don't give us everything we want,

we will tie you over the river

and dip you into the water

while piranhas chew away your flesh.

Alternatively, we will

slather you completely from head to toe with honey

and lay you on the ground

and let the bees sting you to death."

- They only escape because he basically hands over

all of his belongings,

all his equipment and his boats,

and that's when they finally let him leave.

So it's clear that Fawcett might even have found this city

and still wasn't able to explore it.

Excavation is ongoing at Kuhikugu,

and it's going to take a lot more work

to really uncover the full extent

of what there is to be found there.

New sites are being discovered in the Amazon regularly,

and they're not just in Brazil.

- [Laurence] Percy Fawcett's 1925 expedition, and subsequent

missions to find him,

all focused on the Brazilian Amazon,

but the entire rainforest covers 5.5 million square miles

and eight countries,

leading some to look for the city of Z

far beyond Brazil.

- One of the ongoing obstacles to exploration of

the Amazon rainforest is its density.

It's hard to move through

and it's also hard to see through.

Even when we can fly planes over it

and take pictures,

the canopy is so dense

that light doesn't even make it through.

So pictures certainly aren't going to help.

Over the last few decades,

new technology has been able to use LiDAR,

light detection and ranging,

to actually see through the canopy

to what lies below.

- So LiDAR technology has really revolutionized archeology

because it allows archeologists to get a picture

of what is under the ground in an area in

a way that you couldn't

if you went in with machetes

and hacked your way through.

Basically, they fly over an area in a plane,

they shoot these infrared lasers down

onto the ground in a grid format,

and then that grid reveals things

that exist underneath the earth.

LiDAR technology tells us

when there are things under the ground that

merit archeological attention.

(dramatic music)

- Scientists quickly latched onto this technology

because it allows them to map large areas

in these archeological sites.

And in the Amazon jungle,

it's extremely important

because they can not only map them,

but it gives them a perfect

three dimensional model, if you will, to see

what lies below the jungle

with the vegetation removed,

and it allows them to zoom in

and actually see very fine detail.

(tense music)

- In 2018, a team of German researchers

use LiDAR in Northern Bolivia

and discover a massive urban settlement

in a region known as Llanos de Mojos.

The digital images reveal this massive network of structures

that they think dates back anywhere from 500 to 1400 CE.

Compared to the sites in Brazil,

this site in Bolivia might actually be a better match

for Fawcett's Lost City of Z.

If that's the case,

then Fawcett was about a thousand miles off target.

(whooshing sound) (tense music)

(whooshing sound) (rhythmic music)

- Llanos de Mojos is one of the largest archeological sites

ever discovered in the Amazon.

It is complete with colossal step pyramid,

large, wide, open plazas

that are oriented to astronomical bodies in the sky

and geometrically aligned to one another,

with aqueducts used to funnel water

from the local rivers into the city

and large highway systems extending off into the Amazon

likely to connect to other cities

that are in arguable size,

somewhere that we haven't even discovered yet.

And the estimated population of Llanos de Mojos

is over 1 million people.

To put that in perspective, the estimated population size of

Ancient Rome, at its height, was also 1 million people.

(intense music)

- Llanos de Mojos might be a better fit than Kuhikugu

for something like

the Lost City of Z because it is massive.

Remember, Kuhikugu is a series

of interconnected settlements.

There's about 20 interconnected settlements.

But Llanos de Mojos is a huge city of a million people

with monumental architecture and pyramids.

It's massive.

Attesting to sophisticated

civilizations that existed in the new world

long before European contact.

(suspenseful music)

- Archeological evidence does point towards the fact

that the Amazon was much, much more densely inhabited than

anybody has previously thought over the last 500 years,

and it's very likely that

cities as big or bigger are still waiting to be rediscovered

somewhere deep in the heart of the Amazon.

(suspenseful music) (whooshing sound)

- [Laurence] Some Percy Fawcett researchers believe locating the

actual Lost City of Z

could shed light on the explorer's fate.

Others contend that finding it is highly unlikely.

- This takes us back to Manuscript 512.

This is the document

that sets Fawcett

on his journey, and it's been verified

as coming from the 1700s,

but we still don't know who authored it or why.

(intense music)

- We'll never know if the original document

that sent Percy Fawcett in the jungle,

Manuscript 512, was actually factual.

This could have been an earlier explorer

using his imagination, to help raise money.

- When explorers were making inroads into the Americas,

they went to great lengths to convince their funders

to give them money.

They promised them endless amounts of gold

and other precious metals

in order to entice them to support these expeditions.

(dramatic music)

- Percy Fawcett did this himself.

When he needed funding,

he sold his story of adventure to the news.

That could be what's happening here.

Manuscript 512 could basically be a sales pitch

looking for someone to be willing to fund the exploration.

- So maybe Fawcett devoted his entire life

to something that wasn't even real.

(whooshing sound) (dramatic booming sound)

(whooshing sound) (intense music)

- Another issue is that there were many civilizations

hidden in the jungle as we know now.

So how do we know that this document

was describing not one city,

but many other civilizations or cities

that somebody encountered

and it was just a mixture of them?

(water rushing) (suspenseful music)

- We know that Hernan Cortez

found Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital.

We know that Francisco Pizarro found Cuzco,

a city that at one point housed

potentially 10 million people.

The realities of places like this fuel the rumors

of places like the Lost City of Z.

(tense music fading)

(dramatic booming sound)

- [Laurence] Details from the Fawcett family papers

have convinced some historians

that the Lost City of Z

is more of an idea than an actual place.

- Fawcett's youngest son, Brian,

spends his whole life trying to figure out

what happened to his father and older brother.

He goes through reams of documents,

does lots of historical research,

even travels to the Amazon

to try to find out the truth.

And at the end, he begins to suspect

that the Lost City of Z

was more of a spiritual or metaphysical quest

than a quest for gold and ruins.

(booming sound) (soft high-pitch note)

- We know from his family's explanations

that he was leaning heavily into mysticism.

He was using Ouija boards

and psychic mediums

as part of his journey of discovery, and it may be that

his goal in the end wasn't to find

the Lost City of Z.

His goal may have been to found his own city.

- [Laurence] Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Z

remains one of the biggest puzzles

in the history of exploration.

- [Sabina] Percy Fawcett feeds into our fantasies of

what an explorer is like

because of his bravery and character.

I think whenever you have a mystery,

whenever you have someone who disappears

and is never heard from again,

whenever you don't have an answer,

that creates fodder for uncertainty,

and out of uncertainty come legends

and rumors and attempts to solve the mystery.

So I think that the Percy Fawcett story

is one of these that will always inspire

more speculation, more stories.

- All of these finds, Heckenberger's,

this German research teams in Northern Bolivia,

I think they're just the tip of

of what we're going to begin finding, and it's

really turning on its head the

beliefs that people have held for a really long time,

that there were never large populations

of people living in the Amazonian Basin.

That whole notion is being completely upended

by these finds.

The suggestion to me is that time will reveal more

cities, more lost cities,

and very likely

the Lost City of Z.

(tense music)

- Whatever Percy Fawcett was searching for,

he didn't find it,

at least as far as we know.

The city itself may be waiting

for someone else to locate it,

and that means a new generation

of explorers are likely to

continue to search for Fawcett

and the infamous Lost City of Z.

I'm Laurence Fishburne.

Thank you for watching,

"History's Greatest Mysteries."

(tense music)