Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

Narrator: Have we really seen everything

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

on the surface of the earth?

Sometimes it seems like the world

keeps getting smaller and smaller.

We've walked every place there is to walk.

We've trod every square inch of the globe.

We've photographed everything...

and we've posted it and we've shared it and we've liked it.

It can seem as if there's no place left on earth

whose mystery we haven't stolen...

but that's not actually true.

We don't know everything.

There are still places on earth that are unknown to us,

indifferent to us...

And even hostile to us.

♪

♪

♪

♪

Matheson: We're a very experienced group.

I don't think there's anybody here that really needs

to be reminded, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

It's very easy in open areas, on the phone,

talking among ourselves, to disclose what we're here doing.

Just try and refrain from it, because what we don't want to do

is raise our profile any more than we are right now.

♪

Preston: Every Honduran knows about the lost white city

hidden deep in the jungle.

The legend is that you can't find the white city,

but if you do find it, you never come back.

Elkins: We've caravanned from Tegucigalpa to Catacamas.

I think it's about 120 miles.

What's most impressive is, the government

provided us with a full-on military escort.

We had to cart some fuel with us for the helicopters.

We had soldiers in front, soldiers in the back,

undercover soldiers, everything,

and we're finally here at what will be headquarters.

Is that okay for the colonel?

[ Speaking in Spanish ]

Wood: Colonel, thank you. It was a great move today.

Very safe move. Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

♪

♪

Elkins: We're trying to find something

that people have been looking for for over 500 years.

♪

Wood: Wow.

Elkins: That's amazing. You cannot see anything through this canopy.

Yeah. You have no clue what's down there.

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

Mabel: Whoever goes in, they cannot make it out alive,

so maybe that's why he has been so secretly safe.

Elkins: Like all legends of this nature,

there's always a curse involved.

Probably some plant that's deadly,

and if you mess with it, you get a bad reaction.

You eat it, you die.

Or get bit by a fer-de-Lance or something else,

or maybe there's a deadly disease.

There's probably some reason why it started.

Preston: Up to this point, this whole lost city had been theoretical.

Elkins: Does it exist or does it not?

♪

♪

I was doing a story

about some lost temples in Cambodia,

and I was at the jet propulsion laboratory

and I met this guy named Ron blom,

who had been doing some work on

finding these lost temples using remote sensing.

They flew a DC-10 with a synthetic aperture radar

over the jungles of Cambodia,

and they found some temples that had never been known to exist.

So I asked him, I said,

"well, Ron, what other lost cities are you looking for?"

And he got very nervous.

You know, scientists are terrible liars.

He was like, "oh, well, uh, nothing really."

And I said, "no, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

You must be must be looking for something, right?"

"Well, I am, but I can't talk about it.

I've signed a non-disclosure agreement."

So I pressed him, and finally, he said,

well, he would ask the guy who had hired him

and see if the guy would be willing to contact me.

So that's when I got a call from Steve Elkins.

He said, "what are you doing

asking Ron blom all these questions?

What's going on here?

And I said, "well, look, I understand

that you're looking for a lost city somewhere in the world,

and I want to write about it."

Elkins: I had this image made up utilizing satellites.

This is the area of the mosquitia

that we think the lost city might be located in.

I had asked the government of Honduras to give me a map

showing me all the places that they know

have been surveyed archeologically in the mosquitia.

The reason being is I don't really want to go places

that have been surveyed already.

There's no point in doing that.

I need to know what places are truly unexplored.

So on this map, they penciled out

in little rectangles of general areas

that have been surveyed and they know about,

and they know they have found sites.

They're almost all on river systems,

which makes sense, because first of all,

that's where people usually made their settlements.

And secondly, it's a heck of a lot easier

to get to a site along a river

as opposed to something deep in the interior, in the mountains.

The area where I believe is totally unexplored

is this big, blank spot on the map right here.

Somewhere in this area here.

Elkins: The first evidence of there being some fabulous lost city

in the jungles of eastern Honduras

dates back to 1526. [ Bells ringing ]

The conquistador hernan cortes wrote in his letters

to the king of Spain, and he says,

"I have received news of a very large and wealthy province

with powerful lords,

and such wonderful news has been received of it

that I marvel at what is said.

For even if two thirds of it proved false,

it must succeed Mexico in riches."

This is the first written record of it,

and it seems to have inspired everybody to try and find out,

does it exist or does it not?

As I delved into the mystery, I found accounts

of all the people who claim to have gone

from as far back as the 1920s, but I could never verify

if they actually found the place.

As time went on,

many of them were found to be exaggerators or liars,

and their claims were refuted.

When I was a kid, I loved the idea of

discovering something no one had ever seen before.

Many of my friends would get irritated with me.

They called me "over-the-Ridge Elkins,"

because we'd be hiking and I'd say,

"oh, we just kind of go over the next Ridge

and see what's there."

So there's an innate curiosity and a drive

that some of us have and some of us don't.

Hello, my name is Steve Morgan,

and I'm your host for this program.

The film that you're about to see

will take you into the uncharted jungles of Central America,

where mysterious ruins and ancient legends

lie hidden by a jungle veil.

Elkins: Steve Morgan used to be a treasure hunter.

I call him an adventurer now, because it's no longer good

to be treasure hunters in the modern world.

I met him in early '94, when I was in the television business.

Morgan: Ever since man first crawled out of his cave,

he wanted to know what was on the other side of the hill.

Well, I like getting out there and knowing what's on --

What's in the jungles of Honduras or South America.

I have his book right here --

"captain Morgan's guide to documentary adventures."

This is the very book that I read in late '93 or early '94,

and got me really fascinated.

One of the stories, "Ciudad blanca -- lost city."

I read this story and I went,

"wow, this is great. I love this kind of stuff."

Steve told me it was really inexpensive

to do productions in Honduras.

He said, "oh, I have a friend named Bruce,

a childhood buddy, Bruce heinicke,

and we used to go looking for civil war artifacts as kids,

growing up in St. Louis,

and we worked on shipwrecks together.

We had all kinds of adventures."

We just never grew up.

Steve still wants to be a pirate,

and I just never made up my mind

what I'm gonna be when I grow up, so...

Elkins: Bruce was the ultimate old-school

central American fixer.

He was a rather large man.

He had a gold chain, a big pinkie ring,

and was the kind of guy

that you didn't want to have angry with you.

Steve told me, Bruce lives in Honduras.

He knows his way around.

When we first got to Tegucigalpa

on the beginning of the expedition,

Bruce met us at the airport

and he made sure that we had no problems, that we were safe,

and he had a whole army of local people.

God knows what he was doing.

Steve had an idea where to go,

and he recruited an indigenous local

to guide us through the jungle, and we wound up going.

[ Indistinct chatter ]

[ Speaking in native language ]

One, two, three.

Elkins: This went on for a couple of days.

Finally, we got to the point to where

we couldn't go by canoe anymore.

We have to put everything on our backs and start walking.

How we all did it, I don't know.

[ Speaking in native language ]

♪

Then eventually, we're going up further up into the highlands,

and there's this big Boulder.

[ Speaking in native language ]

So the archeologist from the government who was with us

outlined the carving in chalk, so we could see it.

[ Speaking in native language ]

Morgan: He has a mask over his face.

[ Speaking in native language ]

He has something like a sack full of corn.

Elkins: I remember seeing that and going,

"why would this carving be in the middle of nowhere,

up in the highlands, in this mountain stream,

if there was nothing going on here in the past?"

Just doesn't make sense.

That, to me, was a moment of epiphany.

I said, "there is something to this legend,"

and it inspired me to go further.

Something told me that there's more to the story

than meets the eye.

One of the stories, "Ciudad blanca -- lost city."

I read this story and I went,

"wow, this is great. I love this kind of stuff,"

and we wound up going.

All throughout the mid-'90s,

myself, as well as one of my friends and associates,

Tom weinberg, and Steve Morgan and some other people,

we didn't want to give up.

Preston: Steve said, "look, all we have to do is organize

an expedition to go in there and verify it on the ground."

He had the expedition all organized.

It was ready to go, and then

hurricane Mitch literally destroyed Honduras in 1998.

Narrator: By the evening of the 29th of October,

Mitch had already reached the northern coast.

The water racing down from the mountains

was funneled into the valleys at terrifying speeds,

wiping out anything in its path.

[ Water roars ]

Residents watched in horror

as friends and neighbors were swept away.

[ Screaming ]

Mitch was the most lethal storm in modern history --

Elkins: I give up, at least for the time being.

We did our lives --

Our professional lives, our personal lives --

And the lost city was just kind of one little speck

somewhere in our consciousness.

Preston: At a certain point, I'm thinking,

"well, this is never gonna happen."

You know, it was a brave effort,

but it's just never gonna happen.

Until 2009.

It's had to have divine intervention.

There was a reason that Mabel was in Honduras

and got to talk to the president.

I believe that. I believe it with all my heart.

Still to today, I don't know how I got there.

I don't know -- I don't know what got into me

that make me go, and --

I mean, "you know, I could have got killed," I say to him,

and he said, "yes, I know."

So many policemen,

so many people with machine guns, bodyguards.

And he say, "I love it. I love the whole thing.

I heard about the story,

and I want this to happen in my time as a president."

Man: At the same time, I had just read an article

in archeology magazine in the New York times

about an evolution of lidar technology,

which is a method of scanning terrestrial features

using laser beams from an airplane

that was successfully used in Belize

at the Maya site of caracol.

I looked at the pictures and I went,

"holy cow, this changes the game."

Narrator: Lidar is a remote-sensing method similar to radar.

It uses laser pulses to measure variable distances

from the lidar scanner to the surface it's measuring.

As the laser pulses bounce back,

they generate data known as a point cloud

that can then be used to create 3-d maps of the scanned areas.

All of this happens in just seconds.

♪

Elkins: Now we have two elements -- the backing of a new government,

and we've got a technology that makes it possible

to see what's in a large area

without really a whole lot of physical effort.

Lidar, as it's used today, is an amazing tool

for finding highly detailed information about structures

and features underneath a very heavy forest cover.

Lidar really has revolutionized the way that archeology is done.

Preston: Lidar is much more well-known now

because of its use in driverless cars and video games,

but back then, it was an evolving technology,

and we really didn't know much about it.

Now, lidar lasers fire at over a million times a second,

but back then, it wasn't that advanced yet,

and it had never been used in this way before,

and it might not work.

There might not be enough laser pulses reaching the ground

in order to scan the terrain.

Well, Steve said, "look, we've got all our permits,

and we're all set to go.

We're going to roatán island,

and we got the plane all lined up,

and we're gonna find the lost city."

Elkins: To provide additional protection for the lidar plane,

we based our operation on roatán,

an island about 40 miles off the northern coast of Honduras.

Preston: Well, lidar technology is just totally cutting-edge here.

It's sophisticated, extremely expensive,

and also used by the military.

It was very difficult for the team to get the permits

to even get it to leave the country

and bring it down here.

Gross: The lidar system has some important

electronic security issues on it,

that in the wrong hands, could be used the wrong way.

Okay.

Okay.

Preston: There's certain parts of this technology that are

actually classified and used in U.S. guided missiles.

All I know is we've always kept it quiet.

Preston: It has to be guarded by soldiers 24/7

to make sure that our enemies don't get their hands on it.

I mean, that's cool. I like that.

Preston: The main question we faced was,

is lidar going to work at all in the jungle?

This was the first time lidar had ever been used

as a tool of pure exploration.

Previously, they were lidaring archeological sites

known to be sites,

and they knew they were gonna find something,

but this was using lidar in a new way.

What we are doing is genuine discovery, modern-day discovery.

Fernandez-Diaz: It was kind of a shot in the dark,

but I was hoping that we were going to get lucky.

Preston: I really thought,

"well, they're not gonna find anything."

♪

♪

Juan Carlos had a laptop computer

that he jacked into the lidar unit,

and that was the controller,

and he had mapped their route on this laptop

which was connected to the lidar machine,

and that was connected to the plane's navigational system.

So we're shooting 100,000 laser pulses per second

out of the bottom of the plane, scanning the jungle below us

and creating an enormous amount of data,

a point cloud that we can turn into a 3-d map of the area.

Theoretically, if something is there, we'll see it.

♪

Whatever's down there, the data that's being collected right now

is of unbelievably important value to science.

♪

♪

Sartori: The plane needs to spend around three days

flying over the target area

to collect enough data to analyze.

So, for the moment, we were all in a holding pattern.

Preston: We weren't really sure when the images

would be fully processed.

There were a lot of problems getting the data

and then uploading it for analysis.

So we're walking back from breakfast,

and this very skeptical engineer --

He was running, and he's shouting,

"there's something in the valley!

There's something in the valley!"

And of course, we're like, "what is it? What is it?"

And then he stops. He says, "I'm not gonna tell you.

I can't even describe it.

You just have to come see for yourselves."

[ Indistinct chatter ]

Elkins: Okay, man. I'm here.

Alright.

Well, I looked at it for only a few moments myself.

I zoomed in to about this level, and I just went, "holy crap."

What looks like a rectangular structure.

Yeah, look at this. Look at that.

I mean, there's two perfectly linear lines,

and that's the right angle, and other stuff inside there.

It's not just one right angle. It is a whole square.

Well, it's open on one side, you can't tell --

But these are two perfect right angles.

Come on. That does not look natural.

I mean, I suppose it could happen, but...

It's a site.

You can see that there's extensive

landscape modification, as, you know --

Here, and it's been leveled out here.

This has been leveled out. There is a repetition.

This feature is similar to that feature, this wall to that wall.

These are, you know, two similar structures.

Right. Here's another -- Looks like another wall here,

and there's another remnants of a square-type situation there.

And then, look, there's -- It seems to me

there's terracing on here. Those are ruins.

Doug Preston went on record saying it's ruins.

I've had to deal with too many scientists

and I've had too many disappointments,

so I will just say the odds are extremely high

that this is some of what we're looking for.

Fernandez-Diaz: I have a 3-d model.

Preston: An average person looking at it

would see that it was not normal,

but they wouldn't see all the details.

The way these ridges have been flattened.

You see these ridges and these ridges have been flattened,

and that's a very unusual feature in this landscape.

Benenson: I'm kind of... Elkins: Blown away?

Yeah, that's the word. Blown away.

I think we have opportunities that didn't exist 24 hours ago,

and we, it's up to us and others to figure out

how to make the best of this very interesting discovery.

I was thinking, "this is gonna be a very funny article.

I can write a hilarious story

about this totally failed search for this lost city.

I can turn this around, as a journalist.

I can make this something worth writing about."

But then when they really found the lost city --

God, I was sending an email to the new yorker the next day.

♪

♪

Well, I looked at it for only a few moments myself.

I zoomed in to about this level, and I just went, "holy crap."

What looks like a rectangular structure.

Yeah, those are ruins.

♪

Elkins: Shortly after we returned from the lidar mission,

Doug Preston published an extensive article

in new yorker magazine about it.

And even though we knew that the lidar definitely showed

the remnants of an ancient city, there was a backlash.

Honestly, I don't think that any archeologists were concerned

about the lidar expedition, specifically.

I think the use of lidar for exploration is a wonderful idea.

The concern became about how it was presented in the media.

The creation of a narrative is very, very important --

But by simply giving the article

the title "the El dorado machine,"

it invoked El dorado, the lost city of gold,

and implied that this high technology

was being used to discover gold,

when in fact that was not the case, I hope.

Anyone can write an adventure story.

We have no objection to that.

But it's being portrayed as archeology, and it's not.

Preston: Rosemary Joyce of the university of California at Berkeley,

who is a very distinguished Honduran expert,

immediately condemned the expedition

on her blog and everywhere else.

She seemed to think that the expedition had claimed

that they had found Ciudad blanca,

and they really hadn't made that claim.

But the Honduran press all said,

"oh, Ciudad Blanca's been found."

[ Speaking in Spanish ]

So I called her up, and she was absolutely furious.

I mean, she was not soft-spoken on the phone.

And she says, you know, "this is an outrage.

These people are adventurers.

There's no archeologist involved."

I said, "well, let me send you an image from t1."

And she said, "well, you can send it to me,

but I may not call you back."

Well, I sent it to her, and she called me back immediately,

and she was -- You know, she said,

"this is quite an archeological site. It's not a small one.

I can see, you know, a public space par excellence.

I can see, you know, potential Mesoamerican ball court

and all this and that -- House mounds."

But then she ended the phone call

with another blast at the expedition.

We don't go out looking for treasure anymore.

We go out looking for knowledge.

We didn't have any archeologists on the lidar mission at all,

'cause we never went on the ground. We didn't need them.

I think explorers do run the risk of

being identified as treasure hunters.

And what is treasure hunting?

Well, it's finding something for financial gain

rather than for advancing scientific knowledge.

Oh, just a plain old filmmaker? How can they make a discovery?

Hate to say it, but that's really,

in my opinion, what it was.

♪

Preston: Honduras is a country that's had

a long and troubled history,

from the banana republic, time up to the present day.

♪

In the late 1990s, anti-drug policies in Colombia

shifted the major cocaine trafficking routes

through Honduras, and specifically through mosquitia.

Could be another reason why he listen to me and trust me,

because I am from Honduras, and I want the best for my country,

and it will give a huge help to the country.

♪

Preston: After a considerable period of time

analyzing the lidar data we'd collected,

we knew we needed to go in on the ground

to verify what was there.

Archeologists call this "ground truthing,"

and it took three years to organize

this next phase of the expedition.

Woody, what I I need to understand

is how you're going to be handling both the camp

and us getting in and out.

We've heard that the military helicopters

don't want to carry us in.

The question is, in an emergency,

if they can carry Americans out.

Elkins: So now we just needed to fly a helicopter 2,000 miles

from Albuquerque to Honduras.

Shier: Here we are in cold and windy Albuquerque.

Myles, the pilot, and Jeff, the mechanic,

heading down to participate

in this amazing project in the jungles of Honduras.

♪

Bringing people in and out to the site --

The safety of that is our concern.

That's the direction we're heading. That's southeast.

Elsing: We've allowed for between 5 and 6 days to get down.

They'll land, their gear will come in,

and then they'll pick a site for me,

and that'll be our helipad, our landing site.

Then we hover over the spot,

and the men repel down one at a time.

A big exploration involving a lot of people dedicated to it,

assistance from government...

When Steve talked about this project, you know --

You give it a maybe 1 in 10 chance of working out,

and here he is, 20 years later, and the guy's making it happen.

♪

Preston: After a considerable period of time

analyzing the lidar data we'd collected,

we knew we needed to go in on the ground

to verify what was there.

Archeologists call this "ground truthing,"

and it took three years to organize

this next phase of the expedition.

Elkins: After securing the team and the financing,

we have 10 days to find something

before the money runs out.

♪

Sadly, my longtime friend and fixer, Bruce heinicke,

passed away before our 2015 trip,

but I knew he was there in spirit.

♪

♪

[ Car horns honk ]

Matheson: I think I've pretty much got 'round to everybody

to introduce myself -- spud.

Obviously, I'm working alongside Stevie,

or "Sully," as he's known.

We've got Woody sat next to him, from the task team.

The risk is very minimal here right now, okay?

It's more the fact that we are exposed to the environment,

as opposed to anything else right now,

purely because of what we're here to do --

Because when a big group of us turn up,

straight away, we are sort of under the spotlight.

"Who are these guys? What are they here for?"

Et cetera, et cetera.

So right now, guys, it's just keeping it in the shadows.

♪

Preston: We're headed to Catacamas,

which was to be our base of operations,

which is kind of halfway across the country

through very dangerous areas, actually,

including areas controlled by drug cartels.

The crew includes anthropologists, archeologists,

filmmakers, journalists,

so there are a lot of logistics involved in our mission,

not to mention ensuring our personal safety.

Elkins: It's amazing. We got helicopters.

We got armed soldiers.

We got the whole -- it's just --

It's like a dream.

♪

Preston: Most Hondurans believe that the white city,

Ciudad blanca, is a place of great riches and treasure,

so we would have been marked as treasure hunters,

maybe coming to steal Honduras's cultural patrimony.

Who knows what kind of ideas

it might have caused in people's minds?

I was talking to a businessman in Catacamas

who said that the cost of a hit,

a professional killing, in Catacamas, is $25.

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

Elsing: Even though the site is only 60 miles from civilization,

you can't get to it by land.

You need to fly in, because the terrain

is extraordinarily difficult.

It is really tough -- it's one of the toughest there is.

It's just too damn hard to go in there on foot.

There's actually one potential landing zone

right in the middle of the place you want to go,

but I'm not sure that the trees are spaced far enough apart

from the helicopter.

It could be rather dicey.

Preston: We're headed to Catacamas,

which was to be our base of operations,

which is kind of halfway across the country

through very dangerous areas, actually,

including areas controlled by drug cartels.

The crew includes anthropologists, archeologists,

filmmakers, journalists,

so there are a lot of logistics involved in our mission,

not to mention ensuring our personal safety.

Preston: While Steve was doing a flyover

to find a safe landing site,

our head archeologist Chris Fisher met with

his Honduran counterpart, Oscar Cruz, to make a plan.

Fisher: What I'm showing Oscar are hill shapes

that we've generated that accentuates mounds

and other human features.

And it's the basic way of illustrating lidar data,

visualizing it and examining it.

It basically shows us house foundations,

pyramids, plazas, man-made features on the ground

that we can investigate.

♪

♪

9 times out of 10, when you go into these environments,

you'll see nothing, because when you do go in there,

we are not on the menu, alright?

It thinks it's on the menu,

and when you go into the place, everything just goes -- [gasps].

You won't see things initially, but it is there.

If you go looking for it, however,

you will find it at the most inopportune times.

The snakes -- the biggest snake of concern

out there is the fer-de-Lance.

He is a nasty thing.

They're predominantly nocturnal and they tend to hunt

around streams and rivers and what have you.

You've got to tune in mentally right now

what you're about to do, 'cause it's not gonna be easy,

and it's not a walk in the park to see this business.

It's not a day trip. It's a serious job, guys.

Yeah, things go wrong when people don't listen.

There are no guidebooks.

There's no one you can ask "what's it like?"

This completely unknown valley

that human beings have not seen in 500 years, probably.

And what were we going to find there?

And to me, that was both frightening and very exciting,

to be the first.

♪

The landing zone, which had just been cleared

hours before by this s.A.S. Team --

♪

Elkins: I'm actually standing on this ground

that I've been looking at from satellites

and from aerial photographs and from lidar for years.

It was almost overwhelming.

♪

[ Insects chirping ]

♪

[ Birds chirping ]

[ Water sploshing ]

[ Chopping ]

[ Monkey hooting ]

Start making it up towards that area

where Sully and Woody are working right now.

They're basically preparing, like, a base camp area for us.

So let's just slowly hump and dump, guys.

[ Rustling ]

Elkins: I would like to go to the mound --

What we think is the pyramid, the two things together --

As soon as possible, to see.

Fisher: That's down that way.

Isn't it on the other side of the river?

Other side of the river are all the big plazas.

Yeah.

Two mounds together is down that way.

Yeah, but that was just what you saw.

We're talking about --

Preston: Steve's instincts have gotten us this far,

but now we have 10 Ph.D. scientists

with a certain way of doing things,

and that's a big adjustment.

I just want to walk down the entire thing,

because I don't want to be in a situation

where we immediately go there, focus all our work down there,

and all of a sudden we get right down there --

Which is less than a kilometer away --

And all of a sudden we're like, "holy [bleep]."

Preston: Do we want to do that today, then?

I'd love to do it today, but don't think it's going to happen

because I know these guys have a lot of stuff to do,

setting things up and helicopter rides coming in.

I don't think it's gonna happen today.

[ Thunder rumbles ]

Preston: We were very eager when we arrived,

but we were totally exhausted.

And we had to get everything prepped before nightfall,

because the jungle at night turns into a very different

and far more dangerous place.

The animals come out.

We could hear them purring as they wandered

among our tents at night, and the bugs start to bite.

So we're sitting in camp, and Woody is telling stories

and I'm thinking to myself, "oh, my god,

I got to write some of these stories down."

And I had to go back through the jungle

in the darkness to my camp to get my notebook.

♪

And I'm coming back and I somehow got off the trail...

a moment of panic,

and finally I found Juan Carlos' hammock,

and I'm thinking, "thank god I didn't get lost."

And my flashlight, I'm sweeping it around,

and all of a sudden, there's this gigantic snake.

So I backed up, and I said,

"hey, guys, there is a really big snake over here."

And Woody said, "keep your light on it. We're coming."

And their flashlights --

Woody says, "okay, everyone, put your lights on the snake.

I'm gonna move it."

He pins the snake like this, the body of the snake,

and it unfurls,

and it is huge, and it is striking everywhere,

and it is spraying venom.

He seizes the head with his hand,

took out his knife and cut off its head.

And I'm coming back and I somehow got off the trail...

a moment of panic,

and finally I found Juan Carlos' hammock,

and I'm thinking, "thank god I didn't get lost."

And my flashlight, I'm sweeping it around,

and all of a sudden, there's this gigantic snake.

So I backed up, and I said,

"hey, guys, there is a really big snake over here."

And Woody said, "keep your light on it. We're coming."

And their flashlights --

Woody says, "okay, everyone, put your lights on the snake.

I'm gonna move it."

He pins the snake like this, the body of the snake,

and it unfurls,

and it is huge, and it is striking everywhere,

and it is spraying venom.

He seizes the head with his hand,

took out his knife and cut off its head.

Man: I think he's listening.

This snake has fangs that are over an inch long.

I felt, "oh, god, what do we do?"

We human beings come into this virgin area,

this totally perfect area,

and the first thing we do is kill that snake.

It was self-defense,

but it feels like such a violation.

♪

♪

Em? Hey, listen, don't dispatch anybody to this location

until I call you back to let me know

that the mist has cleared.

Everybody, and I mean everybody, must bring their snake gaiters.

Elkins: I have nerve damage in my left leg,

and it's difficult for me to get around,

so I'm kind of disappointed that I couldn't join

this first walk, 'cause I'd slow everybody up.

♪

Cruz: We'll find something right here.

♪

♪

♪

♪

Preston: Chris had a very sophisticated GPS unit

which had downloaded the lidar maps,

and it showed where he was on those lidar maps.

Fisher: Trimble geo 7x.

They're top-of-the-line handheld survey instruments.

So it shows you in real time

where you are and what's on there.

You can also trace and digitize your features on here.

You can collect points. You can plot artifacts.

So let's go up on top of this one

and work our way back down that way.

So it shows you in real time where you are.

It has the GPS receiver antenna.

It has a built-in, very sophisticated barometer,

corrective satellites, and a really nice math engine.

All of that stuff together means that once we're out here

and we get a signal,

you can walk for, I think, over a kilometer.

[ Device blips ] Right now, I'm getting accuracy

of 70 centimeters or so.

Alright, let me look over this edge here.

♪

[ Device blipping ]

♪

This whole thing was paved.

It's all covered in sediment.

That whole surface you're walking on was paved, Doug.

Preston: Oh, I see, yeah. I see it. I see them.

Preston: Standing at the base of the pyramid

and being utterly unable to tell that there was a pyramid there,

or that you were anywhere but

in the densest jungle -- It was weird.

I was thinking, "god, is this all we're gonna be able to see?"

♪

I mean, there was clearly stuff there,

but you really had to seek it out

and then you could only see a tiny piece of it.

Fisher: There's no other rock up here, right?

It's been shaped into a square pattern,

so it's basically like a block or a brick.

And it was hauled up here and then placed

on top of this, on top of this earth.

They're delimiting the edges of plazas and structures,

and they're basically like foundations

or construction stone.

I think it's pretty awesome.

We have to check all of them for petroglyphs or anything else.

It's really nice to find these here.

It's amazing confirmation of what

we've been thinking and talking about.

♪

♪

Preston: Where the canyon cut through,

you could see where it would have been paved the stone.

It's really hard to --

These are covered up. We've got to cut it away.

They're completely covered.

Here's another stone, but they have to be uncovered,

and then Chris is gonna GPS each one of them to Mark them

and then map them onto the lidar map,

and then we'll see where they are.

These are the stones. They're big. They're shaped.

You can see packing -- Can you zoom in?

Did you go to the top?

'Cause in the lidar, it showed

what looked like a rectangle on the top.

Well, maybe if we clear the brush, we could see it.

What about the Plaza itself?

We only got to one Plaza, Steve, we didn't even --

Did you go to the one next to the pyramid?

The big one? Mm-hmm.

But we didn't find any ceramics at all,

so who the hell knows?

And we're not gonna see any in that cover.

So on a scale of your expectations,

how would you rate it?

It feels bigger in person.

I think we've only seen one tenth of it so far,

so I have to reserve my expectations

until we see the rest of it.

My confidence level's at 80 percent.

I guess we'll see.

♪

[ Groaning ]

♪

That'll warm you up.

[ Chuckles ] I'm awake now.

Fisher: That's the pyramid, right there in front of you.

Where is the pyramid?

Right there. You're looking at it.

A big lump.

Can't say I see a whole lot from here.

That's what it is. That's a pyramid.

It's made out of earth.

Well, that's probably the base.

I mean, how many years has this been in decay,

and all this debris is piled up on top?

Preston: You want to have that big moment where you suddenly

see the city through the trees,

but visually, it's very anticlimactic.

Without the lidar data, we would have had no idea

that we were standing on a temple site,

but the lidar could see the contours of the city

extending deep into the jungle,

so it becomes easier to imagine what might have once been here.

That these mounds of earth are covering crumbled walls

where houses and majestic temples once stood.

It's all hidden by centuries of overgrowth.

Excavating this area is at least a 20-year project.

♪

Fisher: We're standing right here.

We're on that mountain. Okay, so...

We're looking down this way,

so you have a sunken Plaza, sunken Plaza.

I don't know what that is, that connection.

Preston: Steve, what do you want to do? Where do you want to go?

What I would like to do, before you go wandering off,

I'd like to go back up there and go down

to what looks like that little promenade or something.

Yeah. I'd like to just follow that for a little bit.

Fisher: Okay. Remember, we have the ball court area over here

which has not been explored.

We could look in there for a marker as well.

Okay, we haven't done that yet.

How far is that?

It's over there. Right there. You can see it.

"Over there" is how far? 10 meters.

Let's go do that first, then.

Okay.

♪

Elkins: So after a while, you go, "okay, this all there is?"

I'm starting to fear that after

all this time and money and effort,

we'd have nothing to show for it.

And we're mapping everything we saw on the lidar.

Problem is, they're pretty much invisible to your eye,

unless you're a trained archeologist.

♪

This is definitely hard stone, and this has been cut.

Look how smooth this is, here.

Maybe the other side has the monkey god.

[ Chuckling ]

Everything is covered in dirt and trees and vegetation.

I didn't think we were gonna have anything we could

actually show that would be exciting.

Can't exactly take back

a foundation of a pyramid with you.

♪

Elkins: Chris Fisher!

Fisher: Look at these rocks!

I mean, it's unbelievable.

Those big, quartz rocks supporting it.

This is like a table.

It's got this really cool vein of quartz or something.

Cruz: Can we scan a little bit more here?

What did I tell you?

Elkins: No, it didn't fall in this position.

If you look underneath, there's quartz stones

that are supporting this.

Fisher: I don't know if the speculation about the quartz

and the orientation and stuff,

is something I'm that comfortable with.

We don't know. We have no idea about it.

Elkins: Well, that's the whole point. We're all guessing.

We're going, "alright. This is an idea."

No one knows for sure.

There's been other examples

of these kind of astronomical orientations.

Possibly it is and possibly it isn't.

But why wouldn't you want to discuss it?

Why you want to say flat out, "no."

Because it's not in place.

It's just guessing.

And by having a lot of multiple eyes look at it

with reasonable expectations, you might find the answer.

Okay.

We're not gonna be able to get a lot of answers

in the short time we're here,

who knows?

♪

Cohen: Okay.

♪

Elkins: Well, we're walking back and forth

in the same area several times, and we're heading back to camp

towards the end of the afternoon,

then all of a sudden...

Fisher: See this?

Gonzalez: There's a heap.

There are inscriptions right here.

There are? Yes.

On the edge here, at least decorations, anyway.

Elkins: Well, we're walking back and forth

in the same area several times, and we're heading back to camp

towards the end of the afternoon,

then all of a sudden...

Fisher: See this?

Gonzalez: There's a heap.

There are inscriptions right here.

There are? Yes.

On the edge here, at least decorations, anyway.

Yep, that's it.

Cruz: Wow, wow, wow! Look at that!

[ Indistinct exclamations ]

Pay dirt. Look at this!

Whoa, whoa! Everybody stop! Back off.

Don't touch anything. Don't clear anything, please.

Yeah. See that. Here's a monkey.

Elkins: We got a monkey?

Yeah, that's...

Excuse me. Gonzalez: Oh, my goodness.

Fisher: Okay, guys. I need --

No, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Nobody walk on this!

Nobody walk on this stuff. Everybody back up.

Yep. I know.

I'm standing right here for a reason.

Whoa -- Steve!

I'm putting my stick there. Cool it, man.

This is great. This is the real thing.

Wow. That's our monkey god.

Gonzalez: There's our monkey.

Cuidad blanca, the lost city of the monkey god.

You can't touch it, carve it, scrape anything off,

because he needs to register where this is, as a site.

Elkins: One of the first things that I saw was the head

of what I thought was a monkey effigy

sticking out of the ground.

Somebody said, "yeah, it looks like a monkey,

except the ears are on top of its head."

As much as I didn't want to admit it, this was not a monkey.

It was a more feline-looking character.

Preston: I have never -- I've been to many

archeological sites in my life --

I've never seen anything

so pristine, so untouched as this.

This is what I dreamed about, you know?

We really found something. This is just the beginning.

When that cache was found, that changed everything.

52 sculptures poking up out of the ground,

and they're all in one spot, in a very small area

of maybe 200-300 square feet.

Elkins: This is the big thing here, guys.

Chris, we can step where there's no obvious thing. Come on.

Fisher: There's stuff under all of this.

Well, the whole place is full of stuff!

We're not crushing anything. Come on.

We're just taking pictures.

Preston: What are we gonna do with this stuff?

We'd love to just dig it up.

I don't know if we have to do rescue archeology

to get some of this stuff out or they can take their time.

I don't know. I mean, this is a political call now.

You know, in a way, we've opened up pandora's box

yeah, because a lot of people now know exactly where this is.

Right.

♪

I mean, this to me -- This is the vindication.

I've never seen anything like that.

This is museum stuff.

I'm glad I've lived to see this day.

♪

♪

There's some concern if we leave stuff totally undisturbed,

will it be here when someone comes back?

There's a narco lord with an airstrip close by,

with unlimited amounts of money,

and the cat's out of the bag, in terms of what's here.

It's sort of very difficult to control,

so dilemma is, what do we do?

You know, do we try and save a couple of these items

that will exemplify what it is we've found,

and maybe create more interest around the world

to hurry up and generate more money

so people can get in here quicker?

Or do we leave it in Situ,

and with the hopes that in some time in the future

there will be the money, and people will come out here

and that stuff won't be stolen by then.

It stays.

Can't remove any of the pieces.

If it's gone, it's gone. That's on the Hondurans.

It's a giant, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle,

and you can't take out one piece like that.

It just doesn't -- that kind of situation

just doesn't work like that.

Benenson: But what about if we leave here,

the next time someone comes back in --

You come back in a year or two from now, there's nothing left.

That's fine?

That absolutely sucks,

but we can't just take one or two pieces out like that,

because we'll lose -- Besides just saying "you can't,"

explain to me the logic behind that.

By pulling out pieces Willy nilly,

we lose a lot of information.

We lose the complete context for the piece.

But if we record its position,

we photograph with your lidar scan,

everything in its position.

The lidar scanner will not record it

in the kind of detail that you're thinking.

But what information are we losing, other than its position

relative to other objects?

And the objects below it.

That's the most important information.

The context of the bowl is what's important,

and the undisturbed context

of the entire cache is what's unique.

Cohen: I'm afraid I would have to agree with Chris.

I feel incredibly uncomfortable excavating

something out of context.

Learning about the architecture around that cache --

What does that mean?

If you just take out a bowl or a seat,

or whatever those artifacts are,

we don't know what their function was.

We don't know what they were used for.

It makes me uncomfortable just to think

about excavating it right now.

I won't do it.

Okay.

It really puts me in a precarious position,

professionally.

If you're talking about sending a team up here

to spend a month excavating the cache,

that's a different thing,

if the president wants to give a permit for that to happen,

that's great.

An academic expedition in here might take years,

and then what happens if --

Let's say my view is correct, that it's been looted?

Has that protected the site?

The value of pulling a single stone bowl out of there is,

there is no value to it.

Well, I know what makes people excited,

and makes them want to give up their money

and invest in -- to put money up to do these things.

So if they see something, and they can touch it,

then they get excited about it,

and then they go, "yes, we'll contribute.

Yeah, let's get a team there right away."

So are we talking about taking a bowl out to demonstrate

that there's something there?

Or are we talking about taking a bowl out

because we're afraid it's going to get looted?

So we're talking about

taking a bowl out of there for a marketing idea.

It's both. It's two sides of the coin.

Taking a single bowl out --

Then they're just gonna come up and get the other 50.

No academic archeologist

will touch this project after that happens.

And I absolutely -- I cannot condone it.

You will lose all academic credibility,

probably, within the archeological community,

if you pull something out like that.

You will be seen as treasure hunters.

♪

♪

Elkins: We made the difficult decision to leave the site as-is

and simply record the location of the objects

with terrestrial lidar.

Our fears of looting were put to rest

when the president ordered the soldiers

to stay on and guard the site.

♪

[ Note playing ]

♪

Fisher: Lidar is the ultimate conservation tool.

Archeological sites are disappearing

at a really rapid rate, and that's one of the great things

about these lidar records,

is all of a sudden we have this big data

that we've never had before --

But then we open up a pandora's box.

Once we find this stuff and it sort of gets publicized,

we have to work to protect it.

♪

♪

Elkins: As I'm getting on the helicopter,

I obviously had a great feeling of satisfaction

that we accomplished so much,

and was almost a fulfillment of this multi-decade dream.

♪

As soon as we got out of the jungle,

the president of Honduras expressed an interest

that this discovery be reported

as quickly as possible,

so I wrote a little 800-word piece,

and the publication of that little news piece

caused quite a stir, actually --

I guess the word "furor" is not inaccurate --

Among scholars, who put together a letter of protest

about what we were doing, which became public

and was signed by a number of archeologists and students

who were working in Honduras.

Maggie: They have sufficiently tweaked you,

but there's no way to win in a [bleep] match with [bleep]

Benenson: Maggie, you've made your point very well.

Chris, where are you?

What are you thinking you want to do?

Elkins: All of a sudden, there's a group of academics --

Many of the same ones that had

chastised us several years before --

Claiming what we did was really a bunch of b.S.,

and we didn't have the right people.

One of my concerns,

and the concerns of my colleagues is that,

because it was initiated by people

who weren't archeologists themselves,

there's been a disregard

for what archeology actually knows.

Preston: In reading the letter,

one criticism is failure to acknowledge local knowledge.

Archeology has long had a problem

with talking about discoveries of things

that were well-known to indigenous people.

Fact of the matter is, there is no local presence in that area.

It is a wilderness, in the true sense of of that word --

A place without roads, electricity,

permanent human settlement.

Indigenous knowledge is a very important part of this story,

and it's complicated, because when

the Rio platano biosphere reserve was created,

indigenous settlements were actually relocated,

and the access of people to this area was restricted.

The reason why it's important

is because generations of American schoolchildren

have been taught that Columbus discovered america.

The idea that indigenous people,

their territories, their sacred sites,

their artifacts, their culture, are discovered

by white Europeans is very offensive to indigenous people.

They've known about these things all along.

They may be new to the Europeans who've just arrived,

but they're very resentful of being "discovered."

Almost every significant archeological discovery

made at mosquitia was because indigenous people

brought the archeologists to that site

and showed them the site.

However, this site is almost unique

in not having been discovered that way.

We knew this place was virgin, and there's no refuting it.

The narrative of discovery has been an essential part of this

from the very beginning.

Preston: The next point was, the expedition had engaged

in exaggerated claims of discovery --

That it was no bigger than any other ruin in mosquitia,

and that we were

sensationalizing archeological research.

My feeling as a journalist was, it is sensational.

Amazing to think that in the 21st century,

a lost city could actually be discovered.

Archeology actually is a very difficult thing to do.

It often takes years of work with local communities

to have permission to go into a particular area,

and I think it's probably fair to say

that indigenous communities are still mostly dissatisfied

with how that information is being used

and still feel that they're not having much come back to them,

in terms of what they would like to have.

♪

♪

♪

Elkins: By this point, we had gained the support

of a second presidential administration.

[ Indistinct chatter ]

[ Speaking on mic in Spanish ]

[ Applause ]

[ Speaking in Spanish ]

[ Helicopter blades whirring ]

♪

Man: So, El presidente.

We are here with the president and many government officials

to facilitate the planning of the excavation.

Fisher: They certainly had contact with the Maya.

They would have traded,

maybe exchanged people and information,

but they were a completely separate people,

and they were a people that were centered

here in la mosquitia.

There are all of these descriptions of these objects.

Nobody has ever systematically excavated a cache like this.

It's -- I've never seen anything like it, and I've worked in --

Maybe. [ Chuckles ]

Who is afraid of the curse of the lost city?

Certainly not the explorers

who've been reliving their adventures and misadventures.

Elkins: Maybe some press reports may have blown it up

more than what it was,

but we never officially said anything,

I think, that anybody could really [bleep] about.

My feeling is that the issue of urbanism

remains undemonstrated.

They will sell many, many more articles and stories

and documentaries if it's "the search for the lost city."

If the title had been

"the search for the abandoned village,"

probably not so much.

♪

Elkins: About a month after the expedition,

and we had thought that everybody came through

everything without any injuries, or so on and so forth --

In fact, we're congratulating ourselves about that.

Some people's bug bites didn't go away.

It starts off as a little, hard cyst,

and then it developed into kind of what

looked like sort of a really bad bug bite --

But one of the characteristics of it is that

it doesn't itch and it doesn't hurt.

It's like, it doesn't bother you at all.

You don't even feel it.

And that, I guess, is because the tissue is necrotizing.

You know, you're not feeling anything

because everything's dying.

The parasite's killing everything.

So at a certain point, it developed into a scab,

and then at one point,

the scab just crumbled and fell off,

and that's when it turned into an open sore.

Preston: There it is.

That's a pretty bad looking lesion.

Elkins: Oh [bleep]. Holy [bleep].

That is classic leishmaniasis crater.

That's a pretty, pretty bad looking lesion.

Elkins: Between the Honduran soldiers, the members of our team,

50 percent of those that went on the expedition

got leishmaniasis infections.

There's so many bug bites that it took a month for us

to see that that the one bite

that wasn't going away was the leish bite.

And then I looked it up, and that was pretty shocking.

Elkins: When you see images of people who have leishmaniasis,

it's not the disease that's doing the damage.

It's the body attacking itself from reaction to the parasite.

Preston: The treatment is very toxic, and there's a question

as to whether my body will be able to tolerate it.

The n.I.H. Is the unquestionably largest supporter

of neglected tropical disease research

of any organization or entity in the world.

Nash: Leishmaniasis is a one-celled animal, which we call protozoa,

and it's a particular type of protozoa.

It has a lifecycle, involves a fly and a reservoir host,

and it's found in many areas of the world.

But they're -- depending on the species

and the fly and the population,

the manifestations are somewhat different.

Our interest in that stems from the fact

that there's growing appreciation

of the importance of these diseases,

particularly, as you think in terms of,

we live in a global community, and economically and otherwise,

the interactions with different countries,

that it has gone from kind of neglected --

In the sense of not only neglected with resources,

but neglected on the radar screen --

To now, people paying much more attention.

You know, we weren't there very long -- 8, 9 days --

And then, boom, everyone gets it.

Even the Hondurans got it.

Nash: You know, we don't usually see epidemics.

You know, this would be defined as an epidemic.

I probably wouldn't have been surprised

if all 22 had come down with it, given the frequency of bites.

You were clearly in a habitat

where there were reservoir animals, other animals,

I presume, mammals that were the source of infection

for these flies that were then biting these strangers.

Fauci: If you look at the diseases that afflict man,

a substantial proportion of them relate to animal reservoirs.

In fact, if you look at many of the important diseases,

they are called zoonotic diseases,

or diseases that have a reservoir in animals.

One of the difficulties with diseases

that have reservoirs in animals,

it makes it that much more difficult

to completely eradicate the disease.

If a disease weakens the population

and weakens their productivity,

the effect on economy can be much, much more profound

than a disease that might acutely kill someone,

get them out of the cycle of productivity,

and someone else who's healthy will take their place.

Whereas, when you're dealing with the fact that

you have a substantial proportion of people

are impeded in their productivity --

Then the economic consequences are almost unmeasurable.

I mean, they're extraordinary.

There's very few places on the planet

where you really have these pristine ecological niches

that really have been just doing what they do

in some sort of equilibrium for centuries.

So, you've brought back a window into what's happening

in an area where, really, there's no people.

♪

♪

♪

♪

Fisher: That's good. Right there.

♪

[ Indistinct chatter ]

Gonzalez: To have a grouping of several hundred pieces

is a phenomenon we don't yet understand,

but we do know that there is a center,

and the placement is thought out.

I think t1, basically, we're at the superfice.

We're at the very top levels.

We'll probably go down eight more levels

and find some extraordinary things.

The sophistication of the pieces that we found there

on the surface really tells us that we had an artisan class

that was very well-developed.

Everything depicted in the cache is also what surrounds us.

The macaws, the vultures, the felines

were visibly designed into these very sophisticated sculptures

that were used for ceremony.

Fisher: The cache of ground stone objects had lain undisturbed,

as far as we can tell,

since, probably, the city was abandoned.

What happened to these people and when is something that

we still don't understand very well.

There appear to have been many sites that were abandoned

between about 1300 and 1500,

which is when the Spanish arrived.

Fisher: The working hypothesis is that it was abandoned

as the result of European conquest.

That is, the introduction of old world diseases

and other perturbations ravaged native American populations

in the Americas, decimated those populations.

Gonzalez: If people had to leave,

why would they have left what they have left?

Because there was not enough food anymore?

Because they had invaders that were coming?

Would they, as in other cultures, would they

purposely destroy some of their most precious elements?

Yes, that's a possibility.

We just barely scratched the surface.

It's fabulous to use lidar,

but the frustration is that we still have to take time

to study each thing very carefully

before we come to any conclusions.

♪

♪

♪

♪

Elkins: I understand what they do here at the club

is they ask different people

who have done explorations or projects

to come up with a drink that they can serve at the bar.

So I think I have to come up with

a monkey god or a lost city drink.

I'm not exactly sure what it's gonna be yet.

Now, if I had gone into the mosquitia 75, 80 years ago,

this is the hat I would have worn.

Thank god I didn't have to.

Matthew a. Henson.

Same hairdo as me. [ Chuckles ]

Man: It is my great pleasure and honor tonight

to introduce you to Mr. Steve Elkins.

[ Applause ]

♪

It's a real honor for me to be here

in New York at the explorers club.

As a child, I had heard about the explorers club.

I really didn't know what it was about,

and I thought, "one day would really be cool to go there."

Well, now I'm a fellow in the explorers club

and I'm talking here.

It's really -- to me, it's amazing.

It's almost as amazing as finding the lost city.

Not only did we prove that airborne lidar

was a viable option

for archeological survey in the jungle,

we've also created and left a legacy

which I hope will last for many years.

For example, there is now a sustainable

conservation movement in the country.

The current president is a young guy --

And I don't think he wants to be leader of a failed state --

Is taking a lot of actions to try and save the rainforest.

We decided to work with conservation international,

which is a big ngo in conservation,

and put together a team of 12 biologists from Central America

to try and find out, is this place really special?

Well, they went and they found out it was.

I'm gonna show you two quick clips.

We had 22 wildlife cameras out there,

and we just were able to retrieve them last fall

at great peril to the biologist.

[ Crowd exclaims ]

[ Gasps ]

And that is why the first city we found in t1,

we're not calling it Ciudad blanca

or lost city of the monkey god,

we're calling it Ciudad del Jaguar,

because it's full of jaguars,

and that's the head we saw, the sculpture.

People often say the days of exploration are over --

We've climbed the mountains.

We're going to the bottom of the sea,

even though we've barely seen any of it,

and we've crossed the Sahara,

the gobi desert, Mongolia, whatever.

We are entering a new period of exploration,

and what I believe is the greatest

period of exploration in human history,

and why? Because of remote-sensing technology.

It's improving so rapidly that we are gonna be able to

discover things on this planet and all over the universe

that we couldn't even imagine 10 or 20 years ago.

We're gonna be able to see things from our past

that we had no idea

that we'd be able to decipher millennia later.

So for the young people, this is a brave new world,

in a good way.

[ Applause ]

Thank you for listening.

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