Skip to main content

Lost! The Golden Hoard of L.A.'s Lizard People

Support Provided By

A golden thread runs through the American imagination from Hernán Cortés to Joseph Smith to George Warren Shufelt of Los Angeles. In our imagination, fabulous wealth lies hidden by time or sorcery under some hill somewhere, left by Aztecs or men from Mu, and waiting for a lucky someone to seize it. It even runs through California's motto - Eureka, Greek for "I have found it."

Glen Creason, the Los Angeles Public Library's map librarian, reminded us the other day of Shufelt's "eureka" on Fort Moore Hill (touched on in these pages by Nathan Masters and Hadley Meares.). Shufelt, a mining engineer and an inventor with a mysterious "radio X-ray" device, claimed to have found treasure catacombs under Fort Moore Hill in 1933.

According to Rex McCreery and Ray Martin, who spoke of an ancient map they had, Shufelt's find was a vault of Spanish gold. Or perhaps it was Aztec. It wasn't clear. In early 1933, the three treasure hunters convinced the county Board of Supervisors that they should be authorized to dig. They offered an even split of the riches with the county.

It seemed like a good idea in the worst year of the Great Depression.

By March, a crew of volunteer diggers (hoping for a cut of the gold) had driven a 28-foot shaft into the hilltop. They found nothing but rocks and mud. Strangely, the treasure shaft was directly over an excavation for the new Broadway tunnel. The tunnel workers boring through the hill hadn't found any Spanish or Aztec gold either.

In September, the disappointed gold seekers let their county permit lapse. Alfred Scott took up the search, promising the Board of Supervisors that he could reach the treasure vault with his own pick and shovel. He may have dug, but if he did, he didn't find anything.

Shufelt and his "radio X-ray" returned in January 1934 with an even better story. It combined every pulp fiction trope of super science and thrilling adventure: Native American legends, a doomed civilization of Lizard People from 5000 years ago, unknown technological marvels, and vast caverns filled with wondrous revelations. It wasn't Spanish or even Aztec gold that lay under "the old Banning property," the Los Angeles Times soberly reported, but the wealth of the Lizard empire.

Shufelt had gone back to Arizona and got the whole story directly from Chief Green Leaf (otherwise referred to as L. Macklin in the Times account). The Lizard People weren't actually lizards, it turned out, but refugees from a West Coast version of Atlantis. It was meteors that did in the Lizard People, according to Macklin's scrambled version of Native American mythology.

Shufelt, with Macklin's guidance and a county permit, began a new excavation on Fort Moore Hill in early 1934, hoping to tap the maze of tunnels and vaults the Lizard People had bored by means of an unknown chemical solution. Shufelt's exploratory shaft eventually reached a depth of 250 feet when the attention of the Times ran out and mud and water began pouring in.

If Shufelt and the other treasure hunters of Fort Moore Hill were running a confidence scam, their victims were remarkably quiet after being burned. Perhaps investors were so convinced by the story ... or stories ... that their losses were accounted bad luck. If there were any investors at all, maybe they were simply embarrassed.

Others kept on looking for a golden "eureka" of lost wealth, including these guys.

Shufelt stayed on, too, dying in North Hollywood in 1957. By then, the Lizard People of Los Angeles had seemingly disappeared, except as textbook examples of "bizarre Los Angeles."

But they had gone to populate a darker narrative of forgotten worlds and unknown races in which the golden thread of the American imagination leads not to unearned riches but to ancient UFOs, sinister aliens, and sometimes paranoia.

Support Provided By
Read More
Gray industrial towers and stacks rise up from behind the pitched roofs of warehouse buildings against a gray-blue sky, with a row of yellow-gold barrels with black lids lined up in the foreground to the right of a portable toilet.

California Isn't on Track To Meet Its Climate Change Mandates. It's Not Even Close.

According to the annual California Green Innovation Index released by Next 10 last week, California is off track from meeting its climate goals for the year 2030, as well as reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.
A row of cows stands in individual cages along a line of light-colored enclosures, placed along a dirt path under a blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds.

A Battle Is Underway Over California’s Lucrative Dairy Biogas Market

California is considering changes to a program that has incentivized dairy biogas, to transform methane emissions into a source of natural gas. Neighbors are pushing for an end to the subsidies because of its impact on air quality and possible water pollution.
A Black woman with long, black brains wears a black Chicago Bulls windbreaker jacket with red and white stripes as she stands at the top of a short staircase in a housing complex and rests her left hand on the metal railing. She smiles slightly while looking directly at the camera.

Los Angeles County Is Testing AI's Ability To Prevent Homelessness

In order to prevent people from becoming homeless before it happens, Los Angeles County officials are using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict who in the county is most likely to lose their housing. They would then step in to help those people with their rent, utility bills, car payments and more so they don't become unhoused.