Land of the Lizard People

January 29, 1934 - Today's front page of the Los Angeles Times described an engineer's account of a lost civilization of lizard people that once thrived beneath the City of Angels.

The title of the article read:

Lizard People's Catacomb City Hunted
Engineer Sinks Shaft Under Fort Moore Hill to Find Maze of Tunnels and Priceless Treasures of Legendary Inhabitants.

At the heart of the story was a geophysicist/mining engineer named G. Warren Shufelt. Apparently Shufelt detected the presence of a massive network of underground catacombs and treasure troves by using a "radio x-ray" that he had invented.

He then consulted with a Hopi medicine man named Little Chief Greenleaf who confirmed that a long lost group of reptilian humanoids had once thrived on the west coast. Supposedly this was happening somewhere around 5,000 years ago.

Unfortunately, the lizard people and their advanced cities had mostly been destroyed by a meteor or "tongue of fire" that swept across their land. The underground tunnels were an attempt to escape future disasters.

Armed with his research and radio x-ray data, Shufelt decided the next step was to drill an exploratory shaft into the ancient tunnel system. According to his map, the underground city was shaped like a lizard that stretched from present-day Dodger Stadium all the way to Central Library.

Shufelt picked an abandoned lot on Fort Moore Hill and drilled a 250-foot shaft. Just as he started to break through into what may have been one of the treasure chambers, water began to pour into the shaft. The risk of a cave-in prevented further exploration and the hole was filled in.

Within a couple of years construction began on the Hollywood Freeway which now carves a path straight through the site. Shufelt's search may have ended there, but the legend of lizard people and mysterious tunnels under Los Angeles lives on.