The real Indiana Jones died in Brazil

Indiana Jones is not simply a figment of film director George Lucas’ imagination. The rugged explorer known for raiding tombs and thwarting baddies on the big screen is in fact an amalgam of several real-life explorers, many of whom fell under the same moral dilemma as Harrison Ford’s swashbuckling hero: for some, they were great explorers, for others, they were greedy treasure hunters. 

One of the major inspirations for Indiana Jones was British archeologist Percy Harrison Fawcett, an avid explorer at the turn of the 20th century. It is believed that Fawcett also served as inspiration for his close personal friend, novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in writing The Lost World.

Born in 1867 in the southwestern English town of Torquay, Fawcett enlisted in the Royal Artillery at the age of 19. He was posted in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Malta, Hong Kong, Morocco, Ireland, and Sub-Saharan Africa, where he worked for the British Secret Service and learned about jungle survival techniques.

But when he was 58 years old, on an expedition in Brazil with his eldest son and his friend, Fawcett disappeared. He was looking for the fated lost city of “Z,” which he believed to be located in the then-almost uninhabited state of Mato Grosso.

It is rumored that Fawcett told his financiers that were he not to return from his expedition, no rescue team should be sent to find him, lest they suffer the same fate. But more than...