A photo that a geologist says shows a possible Mayan city in Mexico. Armand LaRoque

A Canadian teenager's claim to what may be an amazing discovery — a lost Mayan city — has turned into confusion among scientists and satellite photo experts.

On Monday, the tabloid newspaper Journal of Montreal reported that 15-year-old student William Gadoury of Quebec had spotted an ancient Mayan city that was previously lost to history.

Using a map of Mayan constellations and satellite images in 2014, Gadoury found a correlation between the stars and the locations of 117 known ruins.

But he noticed that one star had no matching city — so Gadoury used satellite imagery provided by the Canadian Space Agency and the private company Ikonos to study that location in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Gadoury and geologist Armand LaRocque announced this week that a rough square they spotted in the vegetation was possibly a complex of 30-odd buildings of Mayan origin.

If confirmed, the site would match up exactly with the site Gadoury had hypothesized using the stars.

"[This image] clearly shows a manmade structure," LaRocque told Tech Insider. He said he has other images he believes show a network of roads.

But early reports of the claim sparked an intense controversy.

Shutterstock

On Tuesday, George Dvorsky, a contributing editor at Gizmodo, reached out to several experts, who cautioned against jumping to any conclusions about the site without on-the-ground confirmation.

Thomas Garrison, who studies satellite imagery (also called remote sensing), told Dvorsky it was probably an old cornfield: "I'd guess [the field has] been fallow for 10-15 years. This is obvious to anyone that has spent any time at all in the Maya lowlands."

David Stuart, an archaeologist and director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas at Austin, shared a frank assessment on Facebook. (The post has since been taken down, but a screenshot of it is below.)

David Stuart/Facebook (via Gizmodo)

However, LaRocque said these and other criticisms stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding.

Most news outlets, including the BBC (shown in Stuart's Facebook post, above) and Tech Insider, shared the following image of a jungle in Belize, which the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) provided to media:

LaRocque said this image is "not from us." Canadian Space Agency

LaRocque said any conclusions drawn from this and other CSA-provided images, are incorrect.

"We do not know where this image is coming from but surely not from us," LaRocque told Tech Insider in an emailed statement.

"We also have other images showing lineaments that we interpreted as a road network," he added, and included a map of the correct location of the alleged Mayan city — in Mexico, not Belize — labeled "Cité Maya":

Armand LaRocque

While LaRocque and others sort out the dispute, all of the experts seem to agree that Gadoury — the teenager who made the alleged discovery — is a bright young man with a promising future.

"To clarify, I don't want to critique the young man mentioned in the story," Stuart said in his now-deleted post. "He's clearly smart and enthusiastic about archaeology and the Maya. It would be great to channel and develop that interest. What steams me most here is the irresponsibility of 'experts' who sought the media exposure."

Tech Insider asked both Garrison and Stuart for their assessment of what LaRocque says is the correct image, but they did not immediately respond to our requests. (We'll update this post if and when they do.)

If one thing is for certain amid the controversy, it's this: Until archaeologists actually walk onto and explore the site identified by Gadoury and LaRocque, their lost Mayan city will remain an alluring possibility — not a fact.