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15-Year-Old Boy Discovers Long-Lost Ancient Mayan City Using Constellations And Google (nzherald.co.nz)
Master Moose quotes a report from NZ Herald: Deep within a dense Central American forest sit the ruins of an ancient city the world forgot. And it has just been discovered by a precocious 15-year-old boy. Quebec teenager William Gadoury claims he has discovered a long-lost ancient Mayan city using a clever combination of old-world astronomy and ultra-modern technology. [The inquisitive youngster, who has a deep fascination with ancient Maya, analyzed 22 Mayan constellations and realized that the Mayans aligned their 117 cities with the positions of the stars. Using satellite images from the Canadian Space Agency and Google Earth maps, William zeroed in on the precise location -- and a pyramid and about thirty ancient buildings were spotted, partially hidden, in the dense forest.] UPDATE: As the story continues to spread, so does the skepticism. David Stuart, anthropologist from The Mesoamerica Center-University of Texas at Austin, said via his Facebook page: "This current news story of an ancient Maya city being discovered is false..." Thomas Garrison, an anthropologist at USC Dornsife, told Gizmodo that the objects are relic corn fields.
Well, it is a theory, so now he his looking to go there in person.
No sig for now.
in this case test is actually checking the site. and that evident fails to confirm the theory. there is no city, just a fallow cornfield abandoned 10-15 years ago.
nor is there any other correlation between other mayan cities and visible stars, then or now, that is just modern pseudo science mystic nonsense.
a modern high resolution image of sky with lots of stars may fit a map of known mayan cities (or any random map of cities or parking lots/malls/anything) with stars but since there are lots of stars that is to be expected, and most stars in that image wont have corresponding cities and never will.
this is what so called modern "science' has become to sell tv shows and books.
and mass society at large takes it for real science and are ever ready to believe stories that fit fairy story patterns( this story fits right in; young boy, ancient legends and mysteries, confounded authority etc etc).
media is happy to oblige . (how many media outlets that ran this story today, will run a story that pointed out that "city" was a cornfield tomorrow? very few. and fewer people will choose to read it if it ran).
"science" now has become a popular mass belief with believers thinking it is the undeniable unchallengeable TRUTH (a concept that is alien to philosophy of science), with computer models and artists images taken for real instead of experiments and real world data, and consensus and voting has become proof of theories while scientific method is ignored