IVIV context: history of LA: a race of "lizard people" who once lived beneath the city

[Doug Millison]

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/city-laid-out-like-lizard.html

Last week, Josh Williams, formerly of Curbed LA, emailed with an  
amazing link to an article, reportedly published back in 1934 by the  
L.A. Times, about a race of "lizard people" who once lived beneath the  
city.

"Did strange people live under site of Los Angeles 5000 years ago?"  
the article asks, supplying a bizarre treasure map through the city's  
undersides in the process.

Although you can read the article in full through these links, I  
wanted to give you a taste of the story's strange mix of gonzo  
archaeology, Poltergeist-like pre-Columbian cultural anxiety, and  
start-up geophysical investigation squad:So firmly does [a  
"geophysical mining engineer" named G. Warren Shufelt] believe that a  
maze of catacombs and priceless golden tablets are to be found beneath  
downtown Los Angeles that the engineer and his aides have already  
driven a shaft 250 feet into the ground, the mouth of the shaft behind  
on the the old Banning property on North Hill Street overlooking  
Sunset Boulevard, Spring Street and North Broadway.

And so convinced is the engineer of the infallibility of a radio X-ray  
perfected by him for detecting the presence of minerals and tunnels  
below the surface of the ground, an apparatus with which he says he  
has traced a pattern of catacombs and vaults forming the lost city,  
that he plans to continue sending his shaft downward until he has  
reached a depth of 1000 feet before discontinuing operations.The  
article goes on to suggest that this ancient subterranean city was  
"laid out like [a] lizard"; we visit a Hopi "medicine lodge," wherein  
geophysical secrets are told; there are lost gold hoards; and, all  
along, the engineer's "radio X-ray" apparatus continues to detect  
inhabitable voids beneath the metropolis.

"I knew I was over a pattern of tunnels," Shufelt is quoted, "and I  
had mapped out the course of the tunnels, the position of large rooms  
scattered along the tunnel route, as well as the position of the  
deposits of gold, but I couldn't understand the meaning of it."

Perhaps this is what we'd get if Steven Spielberg hired Mike Mignola  
to write the next installment of Indiana Jones.