“The Ancient Astronauts or ancient aliens’ theory is a pseudo-scientific proposal that posits intelligent extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth and made contact with humans in antiquity and prehistory. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of human cultures, technologies, and religions.”
--Wikipedia
“The Amazon Rainforest is so large, in fact, that there are still tribes of people untouched by modern civilization. The Amazon maintains perhaps the most species rich tract of tropical rainforest on the planet. It is beautiful to behold, but dangerous in traveling. Dense bush and a slew of venomous creatures keep the common person from delving too deep.”
-- Smashing Lists: Top 10 Least Explored Places in the World
Prologue
Machu Picchu
Urubamba Valley
Amazon Basin (Amazonia), Peru
May 1939
Yanking back his goggles and resting them on the brim of his pilot’s cap, Peter C. Keogh reaches into his waist-length leather pilot’s coat and pulls out his map. His thighs pressed together in order to hold the stick steady, the forty-year-old freelance employee of Standard Oil exhales.
A sea of green stretches for as far as the eyes can see. A forest-covered jagged mountain landscape that is as unrelenting in its thickness as it is in its sheer vastness. The retired US Army Colonel turned explorer-for-hire pulls back on the throttle of his de Havilland DH 82 Tiger Moth and begins to descend toward the tree-topped canopy of a valley split in two by the white-capped waters of the fast-moving Urubamba River. Wiping away some of the condensate from his goggle lenses with the tips of his leather-gloved fingers, he leans his head out over the fuselage to get a better bird’s-eye view of the territory below.
“You’ve got to be here somewhere, you snake,” he speaks into the cool, humid wind that slaps his face as he searches for an elusive break in a jungle that blankets the back half of Machu Picchu and beyond.
The unexplored half.
While his blue, eagle-like eyes search, his brain pictures the five-thousand-dollar bonus waiting for him. The cash comes to him only if he can locate a trail extension the famous cartographer and explorer Dr. Hiram Bingham described in eloquent prose more than twenty years ago—a trail that begins at the backside of Machu Picchu and ends at the mouth of the Amazon River inside the Amazon basin at a place untouched by the modern world, a place known only as Inferno.
He opens the map just enough so that it doesn’t blow away in the gale force winds. Looking up quickly at the brown, barren, boulder-strewn summit of Machu Picchu in the distance, he then looks back down upon the map.
“The Machu Picchu summit is my benchmark which means you must be directly below me. But where?”
Folding the map back up and stuffing it back into his coat pocket, he reaches down to the floor with his free hand and grabs hold of his 16mm Eyemo movie camera, the same make and model his young friend Bob Capa used recently in and around the bombed out streets of civil war–plagued Spain. Leaning the lens over the side, Keogh presses the trigger on the camera and starts shooting footage regardless of the fact that the trail he’s being paid to “rediscover” is nowhere to be seen.
