Map of the Lost Lizard City under Los Angeles

The Underground Catacombs of L.A.’s Lizard People One of the more colorful urban legends of L.A. is that of the Lizard People, an advanced race of humans who created an underground city here some 5,000 years ago. According to the story, incalculable riches and gold tablets with the origins of human civilization carved into them were just waiting to be discovered by some savvy treasure hunter.

This super-race, allegedly related to the Mayans, had purportedly fled a catastrophic meteor shower and created several such communities along the Pacific Coast, including the one in our dear basin.

The so-called Lizard People were so intellectually and technologically advanced that they used mysterious chemicals to dig a network of some 285 tunnels fully equipped with vast chambers (large enough to accommodate 1,000 families who lived off of a store of food and water placed there by the tribe).

This story, loosely drawn from a Hopi Indian myth by a tribesman called Chief Green Leaf, was told to a geophysicist and mining engineer named George Warren Shufelt in 1933. As it turned out, Shufelt had invented what he called a “radio X-ray machine” (which he believed could detect underground tunnels).

Add to that the promise of an ancient sheepskin map held by two other treasure seekers, and you have a tale that went viral by 1933 standards.