In early May of this year, a Canadian teenager sparked a global frenzy with the news that he had located a previously unknown Maya city in the Mexican jungle—while never leaving his home country.

According to the initial report, William Gadoury of Québec was able to align more than 100 Maya cities to maps of modern constellations. When one constellation appeared to be missing its corresponding city, Gadoury turned to specialists to interpret satellite images of the area in an attempt to find the "lost" site.

When the announcement that a Maya city, which Gadoury named K’aak Chi, or "Mouth of Fire," had indeed been located where it was expected to be, international media stumbled through its own Kübler-Rossian