ty.rannosaur.us

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Dean Reed’s strange journey to become the best known rock star in the Eastern Bloc started in 1958 when, at the age of 20, he moved to Los Angeles to become just like Elvis, his idol. Capitol Records signed him and started molding him into a teen idol. Everything he released was a massive flop in the United States, but following a South American tour it was discovered that “A Summer Romance” was a huge hit in Argentina. Read the rest of this entry »

By the age most of us settled into boring office jobs, Stanley Clifford Weyman was faking the part of a doctor in Lima, Peru where he threw parties that made Hugh Hefner seem like a Mormon. There are no movies starring Leonardo DiCaprio about him but he was one of the most amazing impostors in history. Why did he do it? Screw the money, he just didn’t want to get bored: “One man’s life is a boring thing. I lived many lives. I’m never bored.” This is a look at four things that he did that not even the ballsiest of con artists would dare attempt. Read the rest of this entry »