The Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial is the largest concrete military memorial in America, featuring a huge obelisk in the wall. Behind it lies the grounds of a high school. Although Fort Moore saw little action, it may have seen some 5,000 years ago.
On January 29th, 1934, the Los Angeles Times featured a cover story on a mining engineer named G. Warren Shufelt. He claimed to have developed a “Radio X-Ray” that showed a series of underground tunnels beneath Los Angeles, which he mapped out. He also believed that there was gold there. Legends of Spanish gold buried treasure somewhere under Fort Moore Hill dated back to the Nineteenth Century.
However, things got weirder, as the Los Angeles Times headline suggested. The headline read “Lizard People’s Catacomb City Hunted”. Shufelt claimed that once he had mapped the tunnels, he was taken to a Hopi Indian named Little Chief Greenleaf who told him about the “Lizard People”. Greenleaf said they had built three underground cities along the West Coast, 5,000 years ago, after a great fire had engulfed the American Southwest.
The “Lizard People” were not lizards as we think of them as reptilians from the show V or David Icke. They were a highly advanced race of humans, more intelligent than modern humans, that considered the lizard a symbol of long life. They built their subterranean cities in the shape of a lizard. The head of the lizard was under what now is Dodger Stadium, and the tail was under the downtown Central Library. He even said that the tunnels extended to the ocean.
Shufelt and his partners believed that the “Key Room” was under Fort Moore Hill. They were told that the “Lizard People” kept all of their most important knowledge inscribed on thirty-seven gold tablets that were in that Key Room. Shufelt even claimed to have seen those tablets and taken pictures of them with his “Radio X-Ray” machine. The County of Los Angeles authorized the dig as long as they got fifty percent of whatever treasure was found. The drilling expedition began, but they found no gold within the first 250 feet. By December, the group had quit the notion, and Shufelt left the public eye. The city deemed the project too dangerous to continue.
The irony is that Shufelt’s machine worked. There are tunnels that come from natural gas, naturally created. At the time, it was a surprising discovery that there are all of these tunnels underneath Los Angeles, including huge chambers that seemed like rooms, at least through the way he was reading his device.
To add to the weirdness, a Miss Edith Elden Robinson of nearby Pico Rivera sent a letter to the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research on September 26th, 1934. She claimed she had a vision of an ancient submerged civilization under Los Angeles. Her vision described a culture of surpassing excellence with a development of art and architecture superior to anything now existing. She had a vision of tunnels extending to the seashore, much like Greenleaf claimed. She wasn’t alone when she had her moment of clairvoyance, and her friends swore that she had it before any of the Lizard People business was announced by the local newspaper.
So, who knows? They did dig into the hill twice, once for the creation of the Broadway Tunnel and again for the building of the 101 Freeway, but no gold was found. Perhaps they just haven’t dug deep enough yet. The existence of these tunnels raises questions about what other secrets lie beneath the city of Los Angeles, and whether there really is an ancient, advanced civilization buried beneath it. While there is no evidence to support the existence of the Lizard People or their gold tablets, the legends of underground tunnels and lost treasures continue to capture our imaginations. Explore the mysteries of the past with us and see Fort Moore for yourself on our Los Angeles Hauntings Ghost Bus Tour, now running every Saturday at 7pm.
