15-Year-Old Boy Finds Lost Mayan City With The Help Of Satellite Maps

William Gadoury, a Canadian teenager, believes that he has found a lost Mayan city in the ruins of the ancient civilization in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The 15-year-old used star charts and Google Maps to reach his conclusion.

Justin Hayward/CBC

William - who hails from Quebec - has a deep fascination with Mayan civilisation. While speaking to CBS News, the boy said, "The Mayans were extremely good builders, but they often built in places that made little practical sense ¡ª far from rivers, far from fertile areas. It seemed strange for a civilization that was so intelligent. I knew they were good at astronomy, so I tried to make the link."

William studied 22 Mayan constellations and matched the stars with the locations of 117 known ancient cities. When he overlaid it on a map, he realised that one particular star in a 23rd constellation didn't correspond to any city.

CSA

This got the Canadian Space Agency really interested. After meeting project officer Daniel De Lisle at a school fair, William got access to CSA's high-definition satellite images and cross-referenced these against Google Earth which threw up interesting findings.

William found the remains of man-made structures within the dense forests of Yucatan Peninsula - believed to be pyramids - with the help of astronomical data which pointed towards the missing city.

However, Mayan experts are not convinced. Some find the matching of stars to ancient cities extremely random. Also, since there's no information on exactly what stars the Mayans clubbed together in constellations, the relationship between stars and cities remains dubious.