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A member of the Kalapalo people, an indigenous group in the region, later reported that the three men had continued east into the jungle further than the Kalapalo themselves would go. The Kalapalo said they had watched from a distance as the campfire smoke disappeared over the course of several days, growing thinner each night until on the fifth night there was nothing. After that, silence. No distress signal. No final letter. No return. The silence generated one of the most sustained searches in the history of exploration. Over the following decades, more than one hundred people adventurers, investigators, journalists, soldiers, and obsessives of every description died in the Amazon attempting to determine what had happened to Fawcett and his companions. Multiple expeditions were mounted by multiple countries. They reached different conclusions. None produced definitive proof of anything. Several ended in the deaths of the people conducting them. Theories accumulated over the years. That the party had been killed by a hostile indigenous group, a fate that befell many outsiders who traveled too deep without permission. That they had been undone by the jungle itself — disease, starvation, or injury in a place with no rescue and no way out. That Fawcett had found what he was looking for and had chosen, for reasons no one could fully explain, not to return to the world he had come from. In 2005, a set of human remains in the Mato Grosso region was identified by one researcher as potentially belonging to Fawcett. The claim was taken seriously enough to authorize DNA testing. The results were inconclusive. In 2017, satellite imaging and aerial survey work over the central Amazon revealed a series of geometric earthworks — ditches, causeways, and structured clearings — that suggested the presence of large ancient settlements deep in the jungle.