Hopi legend points out strange race that disappeared 5,000 years ago "Their underground world was where Los Angeles is today"
Deep in the heart of Los Angeles' financial district, hundreds of feet below the massive downtown buildings that house banks, corporate offices, and government agencies, is another city remembered only in dark Indian legends, an underground world built by a strange race that disappeared five thousand years ago
At least that's what mining engineer W. Warren Shufelt claimed in the January 29, 1934 issue of the Los Angeles Times. According to reporter Jean Bosquet, Shufelt was ready to dig up downtown Los Angeles in search of this ancient underground civilization.
Shufelt had first heard of the city in a Hopi Indian legend about the "lizard people." They were a legendary lost race that had almost disappeared after a meteor shower rained down in the southwest around 3,000 BC. (Arizona's famous Winslow Crater was said to be Ground Zero of this fiery deluge.)
The Lizard People built thirteen underground settlements along the Pacific coast, to protect the tribe against future disasters. These underground cities housed a thousand families each, along with food reserves. According to the story, the tribe used a "chemical solution" that melted the solid bedrock to drill the tunnels and rooms of their underground shelters.
In addition to sheltering its people in the event of a disaster, the tunnels were also built to contain a treasure trove of golden tablets that recounted the history of the tribe, the origin of humanity, and the history of the world since creation. Shufelt was particularly interested in these tablets for pecuniary and archaeological reasons.
A Hopi chief named Little Green Leaf told Shufelt that the capital of the missing race was located in present-day downtown Los Angeles.
In 1933, after inspecting the area, Shufelt occupied Banning's property at 518 North Hill Street and dug a 350-well shaft down, looking for what he said was a "treasure room" directly below. Shufelt said he had located gold in the catacombs below with the help of his "radio x-ray."
This peculiar instrument, which was a kind of tricked dowsing rod, had also helped Shufelt map the location and extent of the underground tunnels. He said the underground city was shaped like a giant lizard, with its head close to Chavez Ravine (the current location of Dodger Stadium), and the tail narrowed below the Central Library.
The "key room," the chamber containing the city map and the directory of gold tablets, was several hundred feet below the current Times-Mirror Square site. Shufelt also claimed that he had tracked passages that extended to the area around the Southwest Museum, and said that the ventilation tunnels extended westward, opening into the Pacific Ocean.
Despite all his extensive mapping and mapping of the treasure-filled underground city, Shufelt never found it. Shortly after the Times story appeared, the project, which had been authorized by the City Council more than a year earlier, suddenly ceased and Shufelt and his henchmen disappeared.
The entire mysterious and improbable affair was canceled by trickery, and was quickly forgotten. Since then, unexplained tunnels have been discovered in downtown Los Angeles, but have generally been explained as the work of smugglers hiding illegal Chinese workers in the 19th century.
But Shufelt was not the only modern Californian who believed that an ancient underground city was below Los Angeles. As a postscript of this strange little tale, let's take a look at Pico Rivera's vision of Miss Edith Elden Robinson, which appeared in the highly respected journal of the American Society for Psychic Research.
On the afternoon of December 22, 1933, five weeks before Shufelt's excavations reached the pages of the Times, the clairvoyant Miss Robinson imagined that underneath Los Angeles there was "a great city ... in gigantic tunnels stretching as far as the seashore". She said the tunnels had been built by a missing race to protect themselves from danger and provide access to the sea.
Who knows? Perhaps this fabulous underground city really existed. Perhaps it's even populated by people from late-day lizards living hidden and unsuspected hundreds of feet below modern Los Angeles, emerging only sneakily to see 21st-century barbarians slowly strangle their own smoggy surface-level civilization , traffic and urban expansion. .
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