The Legend of the Lizard People: Ancient Tunnels and Gold Tablets Beneath Downtown Los Angeles (1934)

The Headline That Stopped Los Angeles

On the morning of January 29, 1934, readers of the Los Angeles Times opened their paper to find a front-page story headlined "Lizard People's Catacomb City Hunted." The story described the activities of G. Warren Shufelt, a Missouri-born geophysicist and mining engineer who had been quietly working around downtown Los Angeles for months with a device he called a "radio X-ray" — a metal radio connected to a glass cylinder containing a copper wire, which he claimed could detect underground voids and mineral deposits by tuning to their electromagnetic frequency. The Associated Press picked up the story and it ran across the country. Depression-era America, hungry for wonder, was captivated.

The Hopi Legend and the Ancient Civilization

Shufelt claimed the investigation had begun in 1933 when a Hopi tribesman named Little Chief Greenleaf shared with him an ancient oral tradition: approximately 5,000 years ago, following a catastrophic firestorm that swept the American Southwest, an advanced civilization had used chemical compounds to bore a network of tunnels through the bedrock beneath what is now the Los Angeles Basin. These people revered the lizard as a symbol of longevity — not because they resembled lizards, but because the animal represented long life in their culture. They built their underground refuge in the shape of a lizard, with its tail running beneath the Main Library at Fifth and Hope and its head positioned beneath North Broadway. Within their tunnels, they stored 37 gold tablets inscribed with the complete knowledge of their civilization, along with other gold artifacts representing the community's wealth — 16 separate deposits by Shufelt's count.

County Approval and the Dig

Shufelt petitioned the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for permission to excavate. The Board approved the request, and Shufelt struck an agreement for a 50-50 split of any gold recovered. Drilling began on North Hill Street, overlooking the Civic Center area. The project drew public attention and press coverage throughout its run. Dense boulders and groundwater flooding complicated the work. Shufelt reached approximately 250 feet in depth. On March 5, 1934, the shafts were quietly filled in and the county contract was canceled. No tunnels were found. No gold was found. No tablets were found.

A Strange Corroboration

In September 1934, months after the dig ended, a Miss Edith Elden Robinson of nearby Pico Rivera sent a letter to the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research claiming she had experienced a psychic vision of an ancient underground civilization beneath Los Angeles — a vision she said she had experienced in the presence of witnesses before any of the Times coverage appeared. Her description of the tunnels, she wrote, included passages extending toward the sea, consistent with what Greenleaf had allegedly told Shufelt. The witnesses she named attested to the timing. There is no way to verify this account.

The Real Tunnels

The story's most ironic footnote: there are real tunnels beneath downtown Los Angeles. They are not 5,000 years old and contain no gold tablets. They were built during Prohibition for transporting alcohol from warehouses to speakeasies, and a portion of them are documented in the historical record. Urban explorers have accessed sections of them over the decades. Whether Shufelt knew of these tunnels and was using the Lizard People story as a pretext to dig for Prohibition-era contraband or buried wealth is a question that has intrigued researchers for 90 years. G. Warren Shufelt lived out the rest of his life in North Hollywood and died in November 1957, taking whatever he actually believed with him.