Alleged 12,000-year-old submerged city off Louisiana coast, featuring 280-foot pyramid, sparks scientific debate and competing theories

A controversial claim of a 12,000-year-old submerged city off Louisiana’s coast has resurfaced, with an amateur archaeologist citing sonar-detected structures near the Chandeleur Islands.

The alleged site, featuring a 280-foot pyramid buried beneath sediment, has reignited debate over whether it represents a lost prehistoric civilization or misidentified maritime debris.

According to New York Post website, retired architect George Gelé said, “All I know is that someone built the city 12,000 years ago.”


For 50 years, Gelé has captured sonar images of submerged structures off the Chandeleur Islands, an uninhabited barrier chain in the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles east of New Orleans, he said in the clip.

According to New York Post website, numbering in the hundreds, the structures are located about 30 feet below the water’s surface and buried beneath an additional 100 feet of sediment.

A 280-foot pyramid rising from the ocean floor forms the centerpiece of the alleged site, which the architect claims emits a strong electromagnetic signal affecting passing boats, and is geographically linked to the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Taken together, the findings point to a former civilization dubbed Crescentis, which Gelé claims dates back 11,700 years to the end of the last Ice Age, when rising seas submerged the coast.

Mounds of granite stones discovered beneath Chandeleur Sound, material not native to Louisiana, form the basis of Gelé’s theory that they were transported to the site.

“Somebody floated a billion stones down the Mississippi River and assembled them outside what would later become New Orleans,” Gelé said, adding that he has personally funded and conducted more than 40 underwater expeditions in the region since 1974.

Despite the absence of peer-reviewed publication, Gelé is not alone in believing something unusual lies beneath the sound.

Local shrimper Ricky Robin, who has ferried Gelé to the site, said his boat’s instruments malfunctioned when passing over the alleged pyramid, adding, “Everything will go out on your boat, like you were in the Bermuda Triangle.”

Research from the 1980s by Texas A&M University proposed the stones were likely ballast dumped by Spanish or French galleons to navigate shallow waters, according to New York Post website.