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Lost City of Z / Percy Fawcett

What do you think about this?

In April 1925, a British explorer named Percy Fawcett walked into the Amazon and never walked out. He was one of the most experienced surveyors of his age, a man who had mapped uncharted stretches of Bolivia and Brazil for the Royal Geographical Society. But he was chasing something bigger than a map. He believed a lost city, an advanced ancient civilization he simply called Z, lay hidden in the jungles of the Mato Grosso, and he was certain he could find it.

He set out from the town of Cuiabá with his son Jack and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimell, traveling light and refusing a large party so they could move fast. His last letter home, sent from a place he called Dead Horse Camp on the twenty ninth of May, said he was about to cross into unexplored country and told his wife not to fear failure. After that, silence. No bodies, no camp, no trace.

Over the years more than a hundred people are believed to have died searching for him. Some found nothing. Some never came back either.

Most researchers now believe the three men died within days of that last letter, from illness, starvation, or a hostile encounter deep in the forest. Yet others point out that for all his eccentricity, Fawcett was rarely wrong about the land, and that ruins of large ancient settlements have since been found in the Amazon.

Is it possible that Fawcett was right about a lost civilization, and only wrong about surviving to prove it?

A doomed obsession, or a man who vanished one step from the discovery of his life? What do you think happened to Percy Fawcett?

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