The Long Search Although many unreported expeditions may have taken place the earliest records of treks into La Mosquitia in search of the Lost City date from 1924 through 1934. These expeditions located some archaeological sites or physical remains of people living there in the ancient past and recovered pottery and tools But no one on those expeditions believed they had discovered Ciudad Blanca That's because no golden treasure was found And the sites weren't built of white stones which was how the stories described the famous Lost City The public wasn't very excited about searches for an ancient city in La Mosquitia until a 1940 expedition by US explorer Theodore Morde Morde spent four months in the wild Honduran rain forest and returned with a collection of thousands of stone artifacts or human made objects He also claimed he'd seen evidence of gold silver and platinum in the area where he'd found a ruined walled city Could he have discovered the legendary Ciudad Blanca As intriguing as that was the story Morde said his Native guides told him really grabbed people's attention He reported the city supposedly once housed a temple with a staircase leading to a stone statue of a monkey god US newspapers jumped on this story calling the discovery Left This drawing by Virgil Finlay titled Lost City of the Monkey God illustrated the story of Theodore Morde's amazing discovery when it was first reported in the American Weekly newspaper supplement on September 22 1940 Below Theodore Morde May 18 1911 June 26 1954 was an explorer US Army spy reporter radio announcer and television news producer the City of the Monkey God Morde told no one how to find this city but vowed to return in 1941 to claim its treasures
But things did not go as planned World War II 1939-1945 was underway and instead of returning to Honduras the following year Morde went to Europe serving as a spy for the US Army Even after the war Morde never went back to La Mosquitia What happened In 2016 author Douglas Preston read Morde's expedition journals and he found that Morde's stories about finding the Lost City were false The journal entries showed that Morde spent much of his time in Honduras illegally searching for gold To cover this up he and a partner dug up or 7 purchased artifacts from local people at the end of the expedition It would be many years before Morde's sighting of a lost city that supposedly held the possibility of treasure in La Mosquitia was discovered to be fake And in that time more hopeful searchers made expeditions to look for it including ones in 1953 1960 1976 and 1985. There were several more failed expeditions in the 1990s including a 1994 exploration by US documentary filmmaker Steve Elkins Anyone on an expedition in search of the Lost City in La Mosquitia quickly learned it wasn't an easy walk in the woods
Although Elkins didn't find the Lost City he made an amazing discovery While on a tributary of the Río Plátano he discovered a giant boulder with an intriguing carving It showed a figure of a man wearing a headdress and carrying a bag over his shoulder that had seeds falling out of it Looking at that boulder convinced Elkins there were things yet to be discovered in this intensely challenging rain forest And he was certain that included the Lost City Steve Elkins said I became obsessed with finding it Over the next four years he made a few more expeditions into La Mosquitia each unsuccessful During Steve Elkins's 1994 expedition an amazing carving was discovered on a boulder Outlining it with chalk made it easy to see So in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras canceling another planned trip Elkins decided to give up on expeditions But he never gave up thinking about the Lost City Then twelve years later in 2010 Steve Elkins heard about a team of researchers using a technology called lidar light detection and ranging The equipment had been put on board a plane and flown over the Belize rain forest to map an ancient Mayan city He wondered Could lidar mapping La Mosquitia show where to find the Lost City
How Does Lidar Work To create a lidar map of an area a low flying plane carrying the lidar equipment makes repeated back and forth paths similar to the way someone usually mows a lawn Every second the machine shoots out hundreds of thousands of laser pulses The machine records the time between when the pulses shoot out and when the bounced back reflections are received It's like bouncing a ball on the ground and measuring the time it takes to bounce back The lidar equipment measures the laser pulse bounce based on the constant speed of light That sets the precise distance between the device in the plane to whatever bounced back the laser pulse Meanwhile the onboard navigation system GPS and other special instruments records the precise location on Earth that the plane and lidar equipment are over when that reflection is received Later a computer running a specialized program interprets that location and distance data to create a 3D map This map is called a point cloud map and it shows every reflected laser pulse A skilled operator is able to use other specialized computer programs to eliminate all the random looking points those are ones bounced off tree branches and leaves Then the computer generates a 3D map that shows only the ground's contours and the shapes of any structures that were built on top of it Lidar in Action plane to ground laser i pulses path of pulse sweep bounced back laser pulses GPS signal est pulsan reten ground first pulse return treetops During the lidar scanning the plane flew in paths about 8 miles 13 km long with about a 130 yard 119 m gap between each path point cloud trees GPS satellite GPS signal GPS signals received by GPS ground unit This is the point cloud map of one lidar scanned section of La Mosquitia
