I'm on a quest to find the secret burial site. The forbidden tomb of the man who ruled one of the largest empires ever known. Genghis Khan. It's the most incredible archaeological puzzle of the last millennium.

Thanks a lot. This is me. Can anybody in this room guess which one is me? It's that one, right. And that's my grandpa and my grandma sitting around all their grandchildren, in Hong Kong. My grandpa used to tell me all the time that he thought that, you know that we had come from the north. And he told me to study hard, you know to do well in school, but... to be curious about those sorts of things to try to figure out where we came from. To always know where we came from and who we were, right. So, I did study hard, you know, I'm... There's me at a microscope studying hard. And then one day I ended up with this Ph.D. in Engineering! And I thought about my grandpa, you know. I thought about this guy who-- he grew up at a time of war. And he travelled all over China but he never made it north. And I thought, well, you know, I'm going to do this.

And I saved up a little money and I bought a ticket to China. And I had this plan, I thought that I would go to the outskirts of the capital Ulan Bator and I'd buy a horse, on the outskirts of the capital. I'm a grad-- just like a fresh grad student, right I'm like, I'm going to buy a horse, you know. I didn't know how to ride a horse. And, I was going to go out into the middle of nowhere and I was a going to live with these nomads and when I had to come back I would... press home on my GPS, you know get back to the capital back to the same place that I'd bought the horse and I would trade it back in for you know, the cash that I had used to buy the horse and then you know, I'd break even and then come home. And, I met these two women on this train you know, these two Mongolian women. And, the next thing you know, they said, well, look I've-- They had a brother and they introduced me to their brother. He agreed to take me up to... ...to their uncle's land, and they would give me a horse. And there I lived with these nomads. Literally lived with these nomads for months.

We think of this place as this far off country, you know. A place of legends, right? And there was one individual whose name was Temujin. He went to this mountain called the Burkhan Khaldun or the God mountain. And he spoke to the sky, to Tengri. And he asked what should he do, right. What should he do? Should he live this like... this life of being a subservient slave you know, his wife had just been stolen from him. Or should he fight back. This guy Temujin would one day take on the name Genghis Khan. In Mongolia he's thought of as a hero. He's thought of as the great creator of... of not only their nation but their... religion you know, their spiritual leader. So why is it that we don't know this history that the Mongols see? There was never a painting of him during the time that he was alive. There was never a document written about him by his own people while he was alive. There's literally not a single one of... the Imperial family, he or his sons or his grandsons, anybody not a single one of their tombs have ever been discovered. It's like it was just this... this whisper of history, right. But he also created this world, which we see today. He had a system of meritocracy, which was far beyond its time. He created the first, you know, global currency. He installed a uniform written language that he instated across all of the lands that he dominated. He created the first empire which practiced religious freedom. We don't really know that much about him, right but, he changed the world. And maybe if we can go back to this this zone, this Ikh Khorig, this forbidden precinct maybe we can begin to piece his story back from the last bit of evidence that we have then, then we can start knowing more about the truth of this story.

So, that's me, that's where I was, right. I just finished my Ph.D. in Engineering. I thought, well, maybe I can start using my mind in a way that will allow me to answer these questions, right. I can use satellite imagery I'll get the world's highest resolution satellite imagery I'll... use this over the entire region of this Ikh Khorig I'll scan it with point-five meter resolution imagery then I'll use drones, with cameras on them and I'll take pictures of the earth where the satellite imagery told me things were, you know a little bit off or weird or something that looked ancient. Then I'd use things like ground penetrating radar like magnetometry, like electro-magnetic induction to try to scan the ground and find things in the sub-surface that were off. And I would use these tools because the Mongolian belief is that if you disturb the tomb of Genghis Khan-- The reason why that area was so forbidden is because if you disturb this tomb then you might cause this curse that will end the world, right. But I quickly realized how am I going to find anything. I've got 6,000 square kilometers of data in which one pixel is less than half a meter in resolution. I've got literally a lifetime of work to do just to sift through this data to find that tiny fragment of information that might be weird.

This is my data, right. Can I have people help me find something like a tomb of you know, something that I don't even know what I'm looking for, right. Can anybody tell me if I said if you had to find a tomb what you would say, I mean, in this image does anybody see something that looks off? Yeah, right. You know, these little things, right? That looks modern, that looks like a river and what is that, right. We thought well, that's simple. So let me make it simple for everybody. Let's make it easy for people to do this. Let's make it so that you can tag data easily. We chop up all the information into all these tiny little bits and we'll make it simple and easy for people to see what you know, to place dots and tags on things that they think are weird. And, we built this thing and we put it online we thought, well, this is how we'll do it. We'll create this website where we'll have people sifting through data. And then every single day, in the field I would download this data with satellite communication links. And I will go and search for those... those sites of interest that are identified by the crowd and then I'd blog back. In less than a few months, we started collecting data that exceeded over like, 2.5 million human generated tags. And then when you look a little closer at certain regions you can see each one of these dots is an individual tag by a person who is sitting on their couch in San Francisco, New York, Washington DC and when they converge you start to see things, clusters, right? When you pulled away the data you see the same tiniest little nuances of something weird.

And, you know, I went to Mongolia and we brought together this team, we started packing up. There's Fred Hiebert, my partner in this. We got to this point where we pass this gate. There was a gate that was guarded by these Mongolian soldiers, right. That essentially have been stationed there for 800 years. I'm serious. The descendants of the Darkhads, you know... this tribe that had been put in place by Genghis Khan himself to defend this region, the Ikh Khorig. This zone that you know he closed off to anybody outside of the Imperial family. Marco Polo wrote about this place, right. The history of the Mongols was written by historians like Rashid Al-Din, from the 17th century. He wrote about this place. They wanted to go here but they couldn't. And for the first time, I am entering into this zone. I am on that journey. We take that data, we had the GPS points now where the crowd had converged. We could mathematically calculate where everybody had converged and clustered. And we started looking and you can see where people had converged. These little clusters of tags would result in you know, us finding things like this huge Khirigsur, which had been here for 3,000 years!

We started scanning this region. This is a magnetometer and you walk back and forth in these lines. And you add up all this data. And of course the sheep come after you every once in a while. And the result is you create these maps of what's under the sub-surface, right. There is some metal underneath this rectangular mound. We don't really know what it was but it wasn't-- we don't believe it was, you know what we were really looking for. So we push north, we push deeper into this region of this Ikh Khorig towards this mountain, right. This place that legend has it Genghis Khan went to every time he went to war, right. He'd go there and pray to Tengri and say well, you know, Am I okay here. Then he would go out and wage war. We would head out every single day up into the upper reaches of this mountain range to hit all of the different peaks to try to see what people were tagging. We'd fly these drones across this whole region with cameras on them to look and see if we could see things that... you know, were little higher resolution than what we were seeing from space.

We're moving down off the side of this mountain and literally this storm just starts descending all around us. You can see this big rain cloud coming at us. Among it was lightning, and thunder, and wind and it started blowing all around us at this rate which was, I mean, really terrifying. Cause there's no trees around you to duck into. We had to move almost a mile down off this ridge down to those trees, just to try to get down below the tree line get down into the undercut but we're so exposed, and we had these big magnetometers hanging off of our back. We ran, we ran and the wind started blowing. You know, I mean, it started gushing around us and I mean, we couldn't even hear each other. And as we were running down off the side of this mountain down the south-east flank of that mountain what would be the sunny side of that mountain what the secret history the Mongols had described as being where Genghis Khan should be buried all these trees started falling down around us. And, you know, it was really... it was almost like... the mountain was showing us its underbelly, it was showing us a window into the sub-surface, you know. And it would be in the roots of one of those trees that my life would really change.

My geologist turns to me and shows me this thing and I'm looking at it, just in the roots of this tree. And it's this lion face. We made a plan, as we were walking around we're like literally walking around across across this grass and the earth is crunching underneath me. I could feel, I could feel like I was stepping on something. I could hear it crunching underneath me like And we agreed that it was okay to just look under the grass like it was a rug, you know we'd just stare barely underneath this. You know, this thing, we'd look underneath the grass. And, we were standing on a roof. And as you look at these pieces that are in this sub-surface it's this part of this temple. We started finding horse bones, tons of horse bones. We sent this data out to get Radiocarbon dated and it comes back... at exactly our sweet spot, right. Somewhere between 500 and 800 years old. Genghis Khan died in 1227, about 800 years ago.

So, Fred and I, we started making a plan. And we started mapping out this region with whatever tools we could find. We used cameras on our drones and we created this 3-D photogrammetry mapper of the surface. And we started using things like ground penetrating radar. This is an 18-- actually an eight-antenna array radar system. We're doing a virtual dig. We're trying to recreate the unknown, in virtual reality because we can't actually go there and pull up the earth, right. But, I feel like... I didn't really even have to look for this artifact. I just had to look at what was happening around me and realize that the people around me were they were telling me that the history was still alive the artifact was in the experience. Did we find the tomb or did each individual in us each individual in this group find something in themselves?

I want to leave you with this one last little story. This story about the moments before before my day of reckoning, really, okay? On our last expedition, I came down off this mountain top and these trucks pulled up to our camp. And they were shamans. There were these seven shamans who had showed up at the base of the Burkhan Khaldun this mountain to pay tribute to... Genghis Khan. And Professor Ishdorj comes to me and he goes, “Albert... the head shaman wants to see the leader of our group.” I was like, “Oh, shoot!” This is the moment before, you know I've a little bit of video, not a lot. “I can't say I'm not nervous.” I'm terrified, okay! Like, what's going to happen here. And these guys are running around preparing, and you've got that arrow, you know, pointed up at the mountain and the shaman is putting on, you know, his gown. And what else could I do. You know, you couldn't even see his face because he was covered in this black, this black felt that wouldn't allow you to see his eyes. But he had these big eyeballs painted on to his headband and these huge feathers... these huge massive feathers that went from you know, above his headband into the sky. And he had these massive dreadlock-like things flapping around him as the pounding got more and more intense. “Boom, boom, boom” over my head and my heart started pounding with the same rhythm underneath him as he is pounding over my head and I'm literally stuck like a stone to the ground, terrified. And then it just stops. And he falls to the ground you know, he just sort of collapses. And he just asks me these really simple questions, like “what's your name, when were you born...” You know, then he asked me “why am I here?” And I'm sitting there and I'm... And I tried to give this great explanation, you know, like the whole deal with the technology and the search and why we're doing it all, and... you know, it's a long explanation and it gets translated into Mongolian and a little bit gets lost there. By the time it gets to the attendant who is translating it from Mongolian to ancient Mongolian it's like one or two words, you know. And... I'm like, “Wow, didn't really work out.” And I am sitting there and the shaman just he doesn't even care, you know. And he starts talking, he was like, “it doesn't matter about the technology”, he says. He says, “I was sent here by my own soul to try to know more about my past. And it's my intentions that matter.” And he says, “Go off and tell the world about this story. And then your intentions will be true. For you will have followed through with what you told me.” You know. “Stay true to your traditions, stay true to your honor but do this, tell the story of our mountain.”

So, today I am standing around you, you know at the National Geographic headquarters years after I launched this project which has totally changed my life. And you are just so deeply in my heart... the edge of that journey, the continuing part of that. You are the reason why I did it all. And now you are part of that whole story. So, thank you very much.