Quebec Teenager Discovers Lost Mayan City

William Gadoury, a 15-year-old Canadian from Quebec, has revolutionized the academic world by using ingenious reasoning to discover a previously unknown Maya city. Based on his own theory – that the Maya chose the location of their cities following constellations, he realized that there must be another undiscovered city in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Satellite images of the area have confirmed his hypothesis.

As reported in the Spanish newspaper ABC, William Gadoury has become a little star in the eyes of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), NASA, and the Japanese space agency (JAXA) with this finding, which will be released shortly in the most prestigious scientific journals.

William, reportedly a passionate student of the Maya world, found 22 Maya constellations in the Madrid Codex and superimposed them onto a Google Earth map of the Yucatan Peninsula. Then he realized that the stars corresponded to the location of the 117 Maya cities, and also the brightest stars coincided with the most important cities.

Until now, no scientist had noticed the correlation between the stars and the location of the different Maya populations. However, William noted that one of the constellations – specifically number 23, formed by three stars- does not coincide exactly with the map of known Maya cities since it only two cities appears.

He followed his theory there had to be another Maya city, the 118th, in a remote and inaccessible part of the Yucatan Peninsula … and it seems he’s right: analysis and studies of the area using satellite images by the various international space agencies have confirmed the existence of a pyramid and at least thirty buildings in the place indicated by William.

“Geometric shapes, squares or rectangles, appear in these images, shapes that can hardly be attributed to natural phenomena,” says a specialist in remote sensing at the University of New Brunswick, Armand LaRocque, who has had access to the images of different structures that could well belong to an ancient city. [Via Le Journal de Montréal]

Facsimile of the Madrid Codex, Museum of the Americas, Madrid, Spain.