INTERVIEW: Go deep into the ‘Lost City of the Monkey God’
Photo: From left, Steve Elkins, Doug Preston, Oscar Neil Cruz and Honduran special forces soldiers explore a river near a lost city. Photo courtesy of Science Channel / Provided by press rep with permission.
Science Channel is set to premiere the new TV special Lost City of the Monkey God about an archaeological adventure that takes a team of researchers into the jungles of Honduras looking for a city and civilization lost to the endless vegetation. The legend of this purported place has been the subject of many mysteries and stories, most notably Douglas Preston’s New York Times-bestselling book. Some believe the city was made of white marble-like stone (hence another name it goes by, Ciudad Blanca).
Now viewers can head into the jungle with the team. The TV special, which airs Sunday, Oct. 31 at 8 p.m., features Preston, Oscar Neil Cruz and Steve Elkins as they go searching for answers in the rainforest. For Elkins, an explorer and cinematographer, this journey has been a long time coming.
“I’ve been after this thing since 1994, so whenever there was an opportunity to pursue, I’m ready to go,” Elkins said in a recent phone interview. “I was in the television business. I was a cinematographer. I had a company that provided crews and cameras and so on and so forth, and we were looking for a show that I could produce internally, instead of just being a contract producer, so to speak. … Put the word out, and I heard about this guy who was a treasure hunter, adventurer, so on and so forth, and he was actively looking for this lost city. I met him, and I was convinced he kind of knew what he was doing. He said, ‘Hey, it’s really inexpensive to do production in Honduras, and I’m looking to do it. Why don’t you come along?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ That’s how it started.”
The team used cutting-edge technology to map out the remote terrain, but even though they were aided by 21st century advancements, the entire journey was a slog. There was torrential rain, biting bugs and natural obstacles to overcome.
“The logistics are substantial, no question about it,” Elkins said. “I mean getting to Honduras itself is not so difficult. You fly on a couple of airplanes, but of course you have to work on all the permits and the political ramifications. But getting into the jungle with all your camera gear and making sure it’s going to work, that becomes a whole other ballgame, and the people I brought were very, very good, very professional. We had redundancy and so on and so forth, and of course even with that, you still have to deal with equipment that fails, constant rain and mud and stuff like that. It’s a lot of work. I’ve done it myself, and I’ve done it with the crew that I brought with. You just have to do a lot of planning and have a lot of redundancy and strong people.”
The cat is out of the bag on this “lost” story. One quick Google search will turn up some of the findings, some of the theories and some of the unanswered questions. What this Science Channel documentary allows is a deeper look, revealing new evidence and new perspectives. Elkins is upfront about what they found and whether it can be considered the true lost city of the monkey god.
“I think it’s very clear that it was something new that was found,” he said. “There are many lost cities that have been found over time, but we did find a totally unknown culture. And it does fit a lot of the parameters of the legend. Did we find the place of legend? Possibly, possibly not. Sometimes it’s hard to prove a legend; however, we did find an unknown culture, an unknown place. In fact, we found several places, and it’s become a very big deal to the archaeologists and anthropologists. They’re still studying it now, and they probably will long after I’m done.”
The team also used a technological technique called lidar, which sends out pulses of laser light to map out the surrounding area. In fact, these adventurers used lidar from an airplane, which expanded the team’s knowledge of what the terrain looked like below.
“So you go in an airplane, and you’re shooting out zillions of pulses of this laser light per second,” he said. “And they hit everything. They hit the treetops, the leaves, the ground. They bounce back to the airplane, collects the data. And it’s a complicated process, but it’s able to recreate an image of what it sees so you can then take all these points, these little dots of information called a point blog, and the computer can generate a picture. You can tell it what elevation you want to look at it, so you can filter out all the treetops, all the bushes, and just look at the undulations of the ground itself. That way if there’s any stones sticking up or foundations of buildings or pyramids or whatever, it’ll show up. You don’t have to be bothered with looking at all the vegetation in the way. There’s nothing else that can do that.”
That dense vegetation is a real obstacle, but the team of explorers overcame those hurdles and was able peek behind the leaves. In fact, that greenery is probably one of the reasons this lost city has remained lost for so long. “There are more lost places in rainforest areas because you simply can’t see them,” Elkins said. “It’s very difficult to get there, but there are lost cities in deserts, too, and all over the place. They’re just harder to find in the rainforests because of the obvious reasons.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Lost City of the Monkey God, featuring Steve Elkins, will air Sunday, Oct. 31 at 8 p.m. on Science Channel. Click here for more information.
