Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2016

A possible close-up view of the pyramid that dominated the Mayan city “Mouth of Fire”: the pyramid does not exist and in its place there is probably a lush marijuana field! thing is a mess – a terrible example of junk science hitting the Internet in freefall. The ancient Maya didn’t plot their ancient cit- ies according to constellations. Seeing such patterns is a Rorschach process [a sort of optical illusion] , since sites are every- where and so are stars” . Similarly skep- tical was Ivan Šprajc of the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, Slove- nia, who confirmed to Gizmodo : “Very few Maya constellations have been identified, and even in these cases we do not know how many and which stars exactly com- posed each constellation. It is thus impos- sible to check whether there is any cor- respondence between the stars and the location of Maya cities” . Always on Giz- modo , Thomas Garrison, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California Dornsife and remote sensing expert, point- ed out that the satellite images provided to William do not show a pyramid, but a wheat or corn field, left fallow for 10-15 years, and added: “This is obvious to anyone that has spent any time at all in the Maya lowlands” . The final blow on the al- leged discovery was delivered by Geoffrey E. Braswell, of the Mesoamerican Archaeol- ogy Laboratory at the University of Califor- nia, San Diego. Braswell knew the area indicated by the young boy as he visited it with some colleagues for research studies, and here is how he commented the two sat- ellite photos produced by William in sup- port of his hypothesis: “An image shows a small seasonally dried patch of swamp about 500 m north of the Laguna El Man- guito” . Thus, no Maya settlement, with the thirty or so buildings seen there that just vanish into nothing. As regards the image of the alleged pyramid, Braswell conclud- ed: “The other image shows two rectangu- lar features on the southeast edge of a dried seasonal lagoon. This is the Laguna El Civalón in southeast Campeche. The two rectangular features identified as pyramids are small fields filled with weeds. The fields may be fallow or may be active marijuana fields, which are common in the area” . In a sense, that of the budding scientist William Gadoury may have truly been a “stupefying” discovery! n