Undocumented Ruins, a Blood Moon, and the Search for Ice Age Civilisation

Aaron Hines and Cody McDonald are self-described pajama scientists - two independent researchers with day jobs, families, and an obsession with the deep past that has taken them from the highlands of Peru to the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. The centrepiece of this conversation is Cody's three-year research project that led them both into the southern Yucatan jungle to investigate undocumented ruins. Working from satellite imagery showing right-angle features in the jungle canopy - cross-referenced against a US Geological Survey geomagnetic anomaly map - Cody identified a location that appeared on no archaeological literature, only marked with an unlabelled star on the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya's comprehensive site map. They parked on a jungle track, hacked over a kilometre through dense vegetation, and found four rectangular stone structures sitting on elevated ground - the first people, as far as they know, to ever film them. The discovery came at a cost: Cody severed a tendon on his machete within two minutes of arrival, inadvertently delivering the Mayan blood offering he had spent months researching how to perform correctly on the blood moon eclipse that night. Beyond the expedition, the conversation opens into the broader research frameworks each brings to the field. Aaron's primary focus is tracking pre-Younger Dryas megalithic remnants - the precision stonework attributed to the Inca but built from andesite and diorite using tools that a Bronze Age culture should not have possessed - found not only in Peru but at sites across Mexico, Japan, India, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and the Americas. He is looking for the physical signature of the civilisation the Younger Dryas wiped out. Cody's interests run parallel but through a different lens - ancient occult knowledge and the Maya specifically, whom he views as having been spiritually connected to the planet in a way that sets them apart from other ancient societies. Both researchers arrived at this work through the internet, met online, and ended up in a jungle in Mexico together. That trajectory, George Howard argues, is the great weaving - the self-organising network of intensely motivated independent researchers who, collectively, may know more about the deep past than the credentialed institutions tasked with studying it.