Go Down the Rabbit Hole

The Disappearance of Percy Fawcett

Percy Fawcett was a British artillery officer, surveyor, and explorer who became one of the most celebrated adventurers of the early twentieth century through his mapping expeditions in South America for the Royal Geographical Society. In 1925, Fawcett led an expedition into the Mato Grosso region of Brazil in search of a lost ancient city he called "Z" — which he believed to be a sophisticated pre-Columbian civilization hidden in the jungle. He set off with his son Jack and a friend named Raleigh Rimell in April 1925. They were never seen again. The disappearance triggered numerous rescue expeditions over the following decades, several of which themselves met with disaster. At least 13 people are believed to have died searching for Fawcett. Various expeditions returned with stories of encounters with potentially hostile indigenous groups, possible artifacts, and secondhand accounts from local tribes — none of which produced definitive evidence of what happened. The Kalapalo people of the Xingu region maintained a tradition that they had met Fawcett and his companions but that the group had continued east into unfriendly territory. The most widely accepted theory, supported by the Kalapalo accounts and geographical analysis, is that Fawcett and his companions were killed by a hostile indigenous group in the Xingu Basin. Bones brought back by expeditions and attributed to Fawcett were tested in the 1990s and found not to be his. Journalist David Grann documented a 2005 expedition following Fawcett's presumed route in his book "The Lost City of Z," which was later made into a major film. Percy Fawcett's fate remains officially unknown. The idea of "Z" itself — a lost city of sophisticated pre-Columbian civilization in the Amazon — has been partially vindicated by modern archaeology, which has found extensive evidence of complex societies in Amazonia that Fawcett's contemporaries dismissed as impossible. Whether he was killed, died of illness, or met some other end in the jungle has never been established.