Percy Fawcett and The Lost City of Z
By Sami on July 21st, 2008
Colonel Percy Fawcett had a lifelong passion for the esoteric and exploration. In 1893, while exploring Ceylon’s jungles, he discovered a large boulder with strange inscriptions. He was eventually told that they were a form of script that only a handful of Buddhist monks could understand. The idea of a lost civilization hiding just beyond what had been explored in the jungles captivated him to the point that it led to his 1925 disappearance in the Amazon. It reads like a H.P. Lovecraft story: the occult, cannibal tribes, whispering spirits, and a lost Atlantean city.
In 1906, the 39-year-old Fawcett was sent to delimit the borders between Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. The area was unforgiving. European rubber plantations would illegally enslave entire jungle villages and the cannibal natives would attack anything that entered their land. Fawcett broke tradition by treating the natives with respect, providing them with gifts whenever he entered their land, and listened to their stories intently.
One of their stories about a lost golden city located within a 10-mile-valley within the Mato Grosso jungle where strange cold lights terrified men captivated him. He started calling the city “Z” and through letters with other occultists like H. Rider Haggard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle it was decided that natives were describing an Atlantean outpost. Haggard provided Fawcett with a small basalt statue with mysterious inscriptions that was claimed to have been found in a Brazilian lost city in 1913. Eventually Fawcett began to believe that the statue enabled him to connect with a female spirit called a “Sith” that was beckoning him to find Z.
In 1925, through funding from a group of supporters called “The Glove”, Fawcett set off to find Z with his son and a friend of his son’s. Fawcett hoped to set up a Theosophist commune where his son would be worshipped as a god when he discovered Z. Even though the small expedition was sick and badly equipped before they entered uncharted territories he was optimistic about what he would find.
It was the last time he was seen or heard from.
So what happened to Percy Fawcett? Explanations about his fate range from simple to absolutely bizarre. On the simple side he was either eaten by wildlife, killed by hostile tribes, or had assimilated into one of the tribes. Sightings of blue eyed children became commonplace and many natives claimed to have seen him as late as the mid-’30s. Some remains were found in the jungle along with stories from the tribes that claimed to have killed Fawcett, but none ever turned out to be him. On the bizarre side are the UFOlogists, hollow earth theorists, and occultists. According to them he was abducted by UFOs for discovering Atlantis or lived in an underground empire with 28 children, his eldest armed with a golden spear. His family tried to reach him through psychics and claimed to be communicating with him as late as the ‘40. But he was never found dead or alive.
Maybe we will never know what happened to Colonel Percy or if Z ever existed. Maybe the best explanation is a mix: he went into the jungle motivated by native myths that surrounded a dead civilization, was brainwashed by his own occult beliefs about it having an Atlantean origin, and ended up dead somewhere along the line. The harsh Amazon jungle, which still hides many people that haven’t been contacted yet, made sure that his body was never found. Or, maybe, somewhere within the Amazon jungles, he formed his own tribe in a lost city.
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