The British explorer Percy Fawcett vanished in the Amazon jungle, along with his son Jack and a friend of Jack’s, in 1925. Fawcett was searching for the remains of an ancient mythical (and mystical) city he called Z. Over the following years, many attempts were made to find him…

Many Brazilians told us that, over the past few decades, religious cults had spring up in the area that worshipped Fawcett as a kind of god. They believed that Fawcett had entered a network of underground tunnels and discovered that Z was, of all things, a portal to another reality. Even though Brian Fawcett had concealed his father’s bizarre writings at the end of his life, these mystics had seized upon Fawcett’s few cryptic references, in magazines such as the Occult Review, to his search for “the treasures of the invisible World”. These writings, coupled with Fawcett’s disappearance and the failure of anyone over the years to discover his remains, fuelled the notion that he had somehow defied the laws of physics.

One sect, called the Magical Nucleus, was started, in 1968, by a man named Udo Luckner, who referred to himself as the High Priest of the Roncador and wore a long white gown and a cylindrical hat with a Star of David. In the 1970s, scores of Brazilians and Europeans, including Fawcett’s great-nephew, flocked to join the Magical Nucleus, hoping to find this portal. Luckner built a religious compound by the Roncador Mountains, where families were forbidden to eat meat or wear jewelry. Luckner predicted that the world would end in 1982 and said that his people must prepare to descend into the hollow earth. But, when the planet remained in existence, the Magical Nucleus gradually disbanded.

from The Lost City Of Z : A Legendary British Explorer’s Deadly Quest To Uncover The Secrets Of The Amazon by David Grann (2009)