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On 10 May 2016, British outlet The Telegraph reported that a Canadian teenager found a lost Mayan city using satellite mapping: That final line gave many readers pause — if the story was accurate, experts studying such history for decades missed the findings of a teenager. The article did little to inspire confidence in the claim's credibility, noting that the boy's study focus was inspired by 2012 Mayan doomsday prophecies: The Telegraph sourced their report from a 7 May 2016 article on French-language web site Journal de Montréal. Both articles made essentially the same claims, with little effort at authenticating them. Both articles, too, lacked information about how such an astonishing discovery was deemed credible — or by whom. The narrative arc was vague and suggested that the boy requested further data from the Canadian Space Agency before connecting the dots himself. Gawker's tech site Gizmodo was one of the first outlets to run with the story, only to later participate in its debunking. An assessment made by University of Southern California anthropologist Thomas Garrison was later added to Gizmodo's article in an update. Garrison said that the purported Maya ruins were, in fact, a fallow cornfield: Ivan Šprajc of the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies in Slovenia also voiced skepticism about the purported discovery: Other critiques voiced by archeologists in the wake of the claim's spread on social media was that the area in which the site was discovered was already extensively mapped and excavated: Ultimately, while the narrative of a plucky untrained teenager succeeding where the experts failed is always compelling, the lost Mayan city report was one of several science claims reported by the media only to be fact-checked by experts after the fact. However, neither the way the story was reported initially nor its debunking were fully accurate. We spoke to the Daniel de Lisle with the Canadian Space Agency, who worked with William Gadoury on his project. We actually met William during the summer of 2014, because at that point [he] won a few science fairs with his project, de Lisle told us: William Gadoury's projected uncovered what they called an area of interest, which suggested that there something underneath the vegetation. However, despite news reports to the contrary, the teenager never claimed to have found a lost city; instead, he formed a hypothesis based on available data that he had spent years researching and curating, so that experts could proceed from there.
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