Doubts cast on Canadian teenager's 'lost city' discovery

[What A Bunch Of Clucks]

Is it a lost Mayan city or a crop of cannabis?

Earlier this week BBC Trending, and other media outlets,
reported on the story of William Gadoury, a remarkable teenager
from Canada who, along with the Canadian Space Agency and the
University of New Brunswick, claimed to have discovered evidence
of the existence of an ancient Mayan city hidden in the jungles
of Mexico. But now some experts have disputed those claims.

William, 15, from Quebec theorised that the locations of Mayan
cities might correspond to stars in Mayan constellations. By
overlaying Mayan star maps from ancient books onto Google Earth
images of the Yucatan Peninsula, he concluded that 117 Mayan
cities matched the star positions. After finding a discrepancy
at a certain location in the Mexican jungle, he was provided
with radar images by the Canadian Space Agency, and asked a
Remote Sensing expert Dr. Armand Larocque from the University of
New Brunswick to analyse them. They concluded that William had
found an ancient city - one which he named K'aak Chi meaning
'Mouth of Fire'.

Scientists from the Canadian Space Agency described William's
work as "exceptional" and presented him with a medal of merit.
The inspirational story went viral. But since then several
experts have challenged the research's conclusions and the
prominence given to them by the media.

"The whole thing is a mess - a terrible example of junk science
hitting the internet in free-fall," wrote Dr David Stuart, an
anthropologist and an authority on Mayan civilisation in a post
on his Facebook page.

"The ancient Maya didn't plot their ancient cities according to
constellations," he added. "Seeing such patterns is a rorschach
process, since sites are everywhere, and so are stars. The
square feature that was found on Google Earth is indeed man-
made, but it's an old fallow cornfield, or milpa."

Another anthropologist, Thomas Garrison from the University of
Southern California, also thinks it's corn field. He told
Gizmodo that remote sensing needs to be backed up by boots on
the ground, or "ground-truthing". He said "You have to be able
to confirm what you are identifying in a satellite image or
other type of scene.".

And another expert, Geoffrey Braswell from the University of San
Diego, suggested that the boy may have, in fact, found a
Marijuana field.

If William is wrong - and that point may not be definitively
settled until an expedition is sent to the site - then this
talented teenager can take comfort that a lot of journalists and
professional scientists, including some from the Canadian Space
Agency were also persuaded. But then discovering lost
civilisations isn't exactly rocket science.

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-36276864

Shows you how woefully ignorant liberal "scientists" are.