Monday 12 March 2012

The Real Indiana Jones



            Colonel Percy Fawcett – It may not be a name you are aware of but this man was in fact the inspiration for the beloved fictional character, Indiana Jones. It is also well documented he was a muse for Arthur Conan Doyle, who used Fawcett's Amazonian field reports as inspiration for his novel, The Lost World.
During his travels the Colonel recorded his many exploits in a number of handwritten journals; journals that have been posthumously published by his son; published in a 1953 book entitled “Lost Trails, Lost Cities.” The book is essentially a compilation of extracts detailing Fawcett’s adventures between the years 1906 and 1925. Significantly, from my point of view, the climax of his exploits was set to be the discovery of the ruins of an ancient lost city; an ancient city which for the sake of ease he labelled “Z.” Along with his eldest son, Fawcett disappeared under unknown circumstances in 1925 whilst undertaking this expedition and the city’s location perished with him. Luckily his journals survived and it is from them that it is clear that whatever evidence he discovered in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, it was enough to convince him absolutely that Z was an offshoot of Atlantean civilisation. A city of refugees founded when Atlantis fell.

“the connection of Atlantis with parts of what is now Brazil is not to be dismissed contemptuously, and belief in it -- with or without scientific corroboration -- affords explanations for many problems which otherwise are unsolved mysteries." (Lost Trails, Lost Cities, pp. 15-17)
“I expect the ruins to be monolithic in character, more ancient than the oldest Egyptian discoveries. Judging by inscriptions found in many parts of Brazil, the inhabitants used an alphabetical writing allied to many ancient European and Asian scripts. There are rumours, too, of a strange source of light in the buildings, a phenomenon that filled with terror the Indians who claimed to have seen it.
The central place I call "Z" -- our main objective -- is in a valley surmounted by lofty mountains. The valley is about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barrelled roadway of stone. The houses are low and windowless, and there is a pyramidal temple. The inhabitants of the place are fairly numerous, they keep domestic animals, and they have well-developed mines in the surrounding hills. Not far away is a second town, but the people living in it are of an inferior order to those of "Z." Farther to the south is another large city, half buried and completely destroyed.”

Many expeditions have attempted to follow in Fawcett’s footsteps and each of them has failed, even one mounted by his own youngest son. Nonetheless, with so much of Brazil still hidden from the naked eye it is not inconceivable that its Rainforest may still hide Fawcett’s lost city.


As his co-ordinates yielded no results the city has long been dismissed as the folly of an eccentric explorer. However, with Rand’s new theories of continents being mapped using different co-ordinates for polar North (see my blog ‘A Civilisation Lost’), maybe now is the time to pick our maps back up and re-calculate. So who’s going to be brave enough to take a chance and act on the theories of a man who, after all, was the real Indiana Jones…

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