From lost cities to boiling rivers, here are eight of the most mysterious things found
in the jungle.
8.
The Lost City of Giants
Deep in the Ecuadorian jungle, explorers discovered a lost city in 2012.
However, it certainly wasn’t any normal ancient city.
It is known as the “Lost City of Giants.”
According to reports, upon arrival, the explorers found a set of massive structures, the largest
being a 79-meter-tall by 79-meter-wide (260 ft x 260 ft) pyramid of unusual shape.
At the top of the pyramid is a flat, polished stone, believed to have been a sacrificial
altar.
The magnitude of these buildings is what gives the city its name and leads many archaeologists
to believe that giants did build and inhabit the city, although many others remain skeptical
on that point.
What makes this discovery even more peculiar is not just the buildings themselves but also
the tools and artifacts found there.
Many oversized, manufactured tools were said to have been discovered, allegedly so big
that it would be impossible for humans to use them.
The team that discovered the city believes that the tools are a crucial piece of evidence
that in the distant past, giants once walked the Earth.
7.
Maricoxi
The Maricoxi are essentially the sasquatches of South America.
They are reported to be huge, ape-like beings that can stand up to 3.7 meters (12 ft) tall.
Although they appear primitive, they’re said to be fairly intelligent, wielding bows
and arrows and even living in villages.
According to British explorer Colonel Percival H. Fawcett, who allegedly encountered the
creatures while mapping out the jungles of South America in 1914, they were extremely
hairy and lived north of a tribe called the Maxubi.
They could only speak in grunts and were extremely hostile toward humans.
In the colonel’s book, Lost Trails, Lost Cities, he describes how he and his men were
nearly attacked by the beasts when they got close to their village.
However, they were able to keep the beasts away by firing their guns into the ground
by the creatures’ feet, sending them running in terror.
In 1925, Fawcett disappeared along with all his men while on an expedition to find a lost
city.
Theories suggest that they were killed by local tribes or died of starvation.
However, some say they were killed by the Maricoxi, although there is no evidence to
back this up.
6.
Boiling River
When he was only a boy, Andrés Ruzo, a geophysicist, heard a legend from his grandfather.
This legend was about how the conquistadors went in search of El Dorado, the city of gold,
deep in the Amazonian jungles.
The fortunate few survivors of the expedition returned with all sorts of stories, ranging
from man-eating snakes, jungle people with poison darts, trees bigger than they’d ever
seen, and a boiling river capable of instantly killing anyone who would fall in its waters.
This story remained with Ruzo into his adulthood.
For his PhD, he decided to make Peru’s first detailed geothermal map.
Boiling streams do exist.
They are located near volcanoes or other geothermal hotspots.
The Amazonian basin is nowhere near such places, and the existence of a boiling river would
be next to impossible.
However, as fate would have it, his aunt, of all people, was familiar with the boiling
river.
Not only had she been there before, but she was friends with the river shaman’s wife.
She took Ruzo there, some 440 miles away from any volcanoes, and deep within the Peruvian
jungle.
The river itself is about 82 feet wide and 20 feet deep in some places, and for a distance
of about 4 miles, its waters are close to boiling point.
This site is known as Mayantuyacu, and is considered sacred by the natives.
They use its waters for everything from cooking, brewing tea, or washing.
Because Mayantuyacu is nowhere near a volcano, there isn’t a simple answer as to where
the heat comes from.
The best explanation so far, is that this water comes from far away, as far as the glaciers
high up in the Andes Mountains.
Then it goes through an immense network of fissures within the mountains themselves,
then deep underground where it’s heated, only to come back out in this place, making
this stretch of the river boil.
5.
The Stone Spheres of Costa Rica
Ever since the late 1930s, people have been discovering strange stone spheres scattered
all across southern Costa Rica.
In order to make room for banana plantations, farmers began clearing the jungle only to
come across these round balls ranging in size from only a few inches to over 6.6 feet in
diameter, and weighing in as much as 15 tons.
Not knowing what to make of them, the farmers either pushed them aside with bulldozers or
blew them up with dynamite.
Word got around that there was gold inside, so people began destroying them, only to find
the rumors to be false.
Nevertheless, they did a proper archaeological investigation soon after their discovery.
Some of the stone spheres, which were left in their original place, were found alongside
pottery shards dating from around 300 to 1550 AD.
Most of them are believed to have been made around the year 1000 AD, more than 500 years
before the Spanish Conquest.
There isn’t much information about their creators, however, with the culture disappearing
soon after the European arrivals.
Nevertheless, archaeological evidence points to the fact that these people lived in scattered
settlements no larger than 2,000 people at a time.
They also made use of agriculture and lived in circular houses.
To create these spherical stones, this ancient civilization probably used a combination of
techniques such as controlled fracture, pecking, and sand grinding.
They are also not perfect spheres.
But given the technology at the time, they are impressive nonetheless.
Their purpose, on the other hand, is a complete mystery.
4.
Lost Head of Guatemala
In 1987, Oscar Rafael Padilla Lara, a doctor of philosophy, received a photograph of a
giant stone head located somewhere in the jungles of Guatemala.
Supposedly, the owner of the land where the head was located took the photograph during
the 1950s.
Dr. Padilla went on a search for the head.
Unfortunately, however, the head had been disfigured.
From 1960 to 1996, civil war ravaged Guatemala and it appears that the rebels used the mysterious
stone head as target practice.
The site is located some 6 miles away from the small village of La Democracia in southern
Guatemala.
Dr. Padilla measured what remained of the monolith to a height of about 20 feet.
Since the war was still taking place at the time, he never returned to the site.
Now, there have been other stone heads discovered in the country, as well as southern Mexico,
created by the Olmec civilization during the first and second millennium BC.
What makes this stone head so special, however, is the fact that it doesn’t look anything
like the others.
While the Olmec monuments resemble a more “Negroid” appearance – something that
sparked all sorts of wild theories – this one had a more “Caucasian” look to it,
which again ignited alien conspiracies.
Some, nevertheless, speculate that this head was maybe an anomaly in the Olmec period,
or maybe it was made by another culture altogether, before or after the Olmecs themselves.
Others believe that, similar to the Easter Island Statues, there may be a body underneath
yet to be discovered.
But there is some controversy about the whole story.
Due to the odd nature of the discovery and the unlikely and seemingly unfortunate series
of events surrounding it, some believe the head to be a hoax.
The answer, however, is still hidden within the Guatemalan jungles.
3.
The White City of the Monkey God
Ever since the time of Hernan Cortez and his conquest of the Aztecs, there have been legends
of a mighty city somewhere deep in the unexplored jungles to the south.
This city was said to be so wealthy and so powerful that nobles were eating their food
from plates of gold.
In charge of this city was an all-powerful monkey god.
The city was believed to have been deserted in 1520 after a flesh-eating disease broke
out and has remained untouched ever since.
The inhabitants of the city believed that it was cursed.
In 2011, a team of explorers uncovered the legendary Lost City of the Monkey God in the
Honduran “La Mosquitia” jungle.
Among the team of explorers was Douglas Preston, a world-famous author and explorer who wrote
a book on the team’s findings.
While the discovery itself was shocking, an even greater shock came when the team discovered
that they had contracted the flesh-eating disease.
They needed immediate treatment and very nearly lost their faces.
Preston explained in an interview, “The parasite migrates to the mucous membranes
of your mouth and your nose and basically eats them away.
Your nose falls off, your lips fall off, and eventually your face becomes a gigantic, open
sore.”While excavating the city, the group also encountered venomous snakes that had
made their way into the camp at night.
The team narrowly escaped horrific poisoning.
They took a number of artifacts and decided not to return to the city, feeling it was
just too dangerous, even though they’re sure it still has many secrets to uncover.
Perhaps the disastrous obstructions that the team had to face were the monkey god’s attempts
at striking back at the explorers for discovering the lost city.
Either way, it is likely that the city will hold on to its secrets for a while longer,
leaving it a true mystery of jungle.
2.
The Amazon Rings
A series of ring-shaped ditches can be found throughout the Brazilian Amazon, which predate
the rain forest itself.
These structures remain a complete mystery, and archaeologists are unsure what to make
of them.
It is suggested that they served as burial grounds or a form of defense, but no one knows
for sure.
A further-fetched theory is that they are marks left by UFOs that once landed there
before the forest grew.
These blemishes are similar to the Nazca lines in that there is no confirmed reason as to
why they exist.
It is assumed that the early people who inhabited the area constructed these rings.
A further question is, “How did the early men get the tools to create them?”
This is also unanswerable, as there is no proof that any tools sophisticated enough
to have created the rings even existed at the time they were constructed.
1.
A Lost Mayan City
It’s a fairly well-known fact that the Maya were good astronomers.
The Mayan calendar may ring some bells, though it is often confused with the Aztec Calendar.
Nevertheless, a 15-year-old boy by the name of William Gadoury, from Quebec, Canada, put
the Mayan stargazing ability to the test.
He theorized that the ancient pre-Colombian civilization used to build their cities in
accordance with the overhead constellations.
By making use of images from the Canadian Space Agency, Google Earth, as well as other
known Maya settlements, he pinpointed and discovered marks indicating a possible hidden
city deep in the Yucatan jungles of Mexico.
Nobody actually went there to analyze the site first hand, mostly because of the dense
vegetation, but the images provided by the satellite point to a possible pyramid complex
hidden beneath the overgrown canopy.
The satellite discovered linear elements that resemble a street network, as well as a rectangular
shape that may actually be a pyramid.
These images could, of course, show nothing more than natural features interpreted as
man-made, but this is highly unlikely.
Straight lines and rectangular shapes are rarely found in nature on their own and are
usually a sign of human activity.
If proven to be true and there actually is an undiscovered Maya settlement there, then
this technique could prove useful in finding other lost cities just by looking at the stars.
To learn more make sure you watch my video on lost cities!