Category: California

• The Great Los Angeles "Lizard People" Tunnels

  The Great Los Angeles "Lizard People" Tunnels theory held that an ancient reptilian or lizard-symbol civilization had constructed a vast subterranean city beneath downtown Los Angeles, complete with catacombs, treasure chambers, and secret passages. The best-known modern version entered wide circulation in January 1934, when mining engineer G. Warren Shufelt claimed that underground structures beneath Fort Moore Hill and central Los Angeles could be detected with a specialized "radio X-ray" device. In the story’s strongest form, the tunnels belonged to a prehistoric “golden city” inhabited by hidden lizard people or a lizard-venerating race that retreated underground after catastrophe. The theory became one of Los Angeles’s most durable underground-city legends and a precursor to later reptilian-subterranean narratives.

• The "Hidden" Island of California

  This theory revived the much older belief that California was an island, combining it with modern earthquake and plate-tectonic fears to claim that the state was drifting away from the continent and that officials were secretly “bolting” it down. It fused two separate historical traditions: the early modern cartographic myth of California as an island, and the modern misconception that California could simply break off and fall into the Pacific. In conspiracy form, the state’s geology becomes a concealed engineering problem rather than a matter of tectonic science.