The UnXplained

A Utopian kingdom

hidden in the Himalayas...

A city of gold, concealed in South America...

And a massive metropolis

that was found in the middle of the desert.

For centuries, archaeologists and explorers have been obsessed

with locating ancient cities that have been lost to time.

Some of these places are recorded in historical texts,

while others are simply part of oral traditions and folklore.

How does a once-thriving community become a lost city?

And if their ruins are found,

what secrets about our past might be revealed?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

In Central Asia, along the southern border

of Tibet and China, lie the Himalayas.

The Himalayas are approximately 1,500 miles long,

and include Mount Everest,

the highest peak on Earth.

According to Buddhist spiritual beliefs

that go back thousands of years,

this vast mountain range conceals a hidden valley,

within which there is a sacred city

known as the Kingdom of Shambhala.

Shambhala has occupied people's thoughts

and dreams for centuries.

Supposedly, there is a lotus-shaped city

somewhere in the Himalayas in Tibet...

which is Shambhala, where people live for centuries.

Where everyone is noble, everyone is good,

and everyone lives a perfect life.

Buddhism arose, roughly speaking,

about 2,500 years ago.

And there's this belief that has a long history in Buddhism

that Shambala is an almost magical hidden city

tucked away in the recesses of the mountain,

in which you have beings of incredible spiritual power

and accomplishment that reside there.

If you are a citizen of Shambhala,

you are likely to end your life by achieving Buddhahood.

And you will elevate yourself

along the cycle of reincarnation.

And so Shambhala has this kind of mystic,

uh... allure attached to it.

The fact that it's perfect,

the fact that if you live there, you will elevate yourself,

has meant that many Tibetan Buddhists

are desperate to find it.

For more than 2,000 years, Buddhists have believed

that the Kingdom of Shambhala is a true utopia on Earth.

And then, in the early 20th century,

Shambhala was introduced to the wider world

in a book that fictionalized but also popularized the city

by giving it a new name...

Shangri-La.

The Legend of Shangri-La

as we know it in the West

is from the book

called Lost Horizon by James Hilton...

written in 1933.

It largely refers to a sacred

and a hidden or concealed landscape or city.

To Western audiences,

Lost Horizon was a media phenomenon.

There was a film that was released in 1937, from his book.

It really captured the imagination

to the point where

our presidential retreat that's now known as Camp David

was at one time known as Shangri-La.

The legend of Shangri-La is itself a myth.

There was no legend of Shangri-La

until 1933 when James Hilton invented it in his book.

So Shangri-La never existed.

But the inspiration to Shangri-La, Shambhala,

there's no proof that that didn't exist.

For centuries,

historians and religious scholars have wondered

whether Shambhala was just a myth,

or whether this lost paradise actually existed.

In modern times,

some of the first clues were documented by an explorer

named Joseph Rock,

who led a series of famous expeditions

throughout the Himalayas in the 1920s and 1930s.

Joseph Rock, in 1920, started traveling

to these tribal areas of Eastern Tibet,

the Tibetan borderlands and Western China.

And Joseph Rock, in traveling in some of

the Buddhist spiritual areas,

believed he had located something

like Shambhala

in the kingdom of what they called Muli.

There was a peak that was called Mount Yangjiang,

and Yangjiang means "wisdom" in Tibetan.

The travels Joseph Rock did in the Tibetan borderlands

and Western China really captured the imagination

of people in the West,

because there's this enchantment of humanity

for finding these

utopian, spiritual, perfect places.

Ultimately, Joseph Rock was not able

to find the actual ruins of Shambhala.

But in the decades since his groundbreaking expedition,

archaeologists have been inspired

to continue to search the Himalayas

for clues that this hidden utopia was,

in fact, a real place.

The Mustang Valley, Nepal.

At an elevation of more than 13,000 feet,

this green valley

that is tucked away in the Himalayas stands

in stark contrast

to the mountain peaks that surround it.

The Mustang Valley

runs north and south with the Himalaya

on either sides of it,

a beautiful landscape.

And for many people's appreciation,

it could resemble something like Shambala,

which might have existed millennia before.

There's an ancient walled city of Lo Manthang

in the valley,

one of the most beautiful

surviving walled cities that still exist,

and there is so much mystery about it,

so little that's really understood

because the people who currently reside there

don't have real origin stories.

Given the fact that Lo Manthang is

an ancient city located in a remote valley

high in the Himalayas,

some archaeologists have suggested that this area

matches the historical description of Shambhala.

And for further evidence

that this site is linked to Shambhala,

they point to a series of nearby caves

carved into the mountainside, that are referred to

as the Sky Caves.

Mustang's chief mystery is the Sky Caves

because there are thousands of these hand-carved

cave edifices that are in this place.

Some of them are

hundreds of feet above the ground

with no easy access apparent to anyone looking from the ground.

In 2008,

mountaineer Peter Athans led a team of archaeologists

on an unprecedented investigation

to explore how the Sky Caves

may be connected to Shambhala.

I was very excited about getting into some of the caves

that were higher up and more difficult to access.

We had to work with the local people

to be able to explore them.

In some cases, we found remarkable artwork.

In other cases, we found human remains.

We also found Buddhist materials,

sculptures...

writings that indicated that some of these

early cave uses were upwards of 1000 BC.

It's a very, very deep antiquity.

The great lamas or clerics of Mustang,

all believe that it's like

a sanctuary for people to go

to gain access to the spiritual power of this environment.

So, could Mustang be something like a Shangri-La?

Could it be the mythical Shambala?

Mustang might be part of that origin story.

Is it possible that the ruins of Shambhala

have been found in the Mustang Valley?

And if so, was it truly an earthly kingdom,

whose inhabitants lived in paradise?

Questions like these are why Shambhala continues to

inspire fascination and wonder to this day.

If Shambala is indeed found one day,

it would open up an exciting world of possibilities

because the discovery of such a wonderous ancient city

would certainly support the possibility that others

actually exist, as well.

Including one of the most storied locations in history.

A place rumored to be filled with gold...

The lost city of El Dorado.

Spanish conquistadors led by Francisco Pizarro

capture the Incan Emperor Atahualpa,

and kill 5,000 of his men in the course of just one hour.

Pizarro is on a quest to both

conquer the New World

and plunder as much gold as he can find.

Pizarro starts to take these gold and riches

from the kingdoms of the Andes.

And this really starts a precedent for conquistadors

trying to take riches and send them back to Europe.

This quest for gold is what drives them.

From the European point of view,

once there was the hint of gold

up in the hills of South America,

it was an absolute frenzy.

The Indigenous people all around them were

literally draped in gold,

the likes of which Europeans never would see back at home.

As the Spanish conquistadors encountered

Indigenous people throughout South America,