Summary

The author recounts the first time he heard of the White City, which was when he was reporting for National Geographic on ancient Cambodian temples. NASA had recently used a radar system on jungle areas around the world to see if it could see into the dense foliage. After being analyzed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the results led a team to find a 12th century temple in the Cambodian jungle.

Preston met with the team's leader, Rom Blom, who had led the expedition. Blom, an untraditional type of scientist, was famous for having discovered the lost city of Uber in the Arabian Desert. He said that by collecting digitized images and manipulating them with computers, scientists could see fifteen feet beneath desert sands and look through jungle canopies. At first evasive, Blom later admitted that they were trying to...