In his 1975 BYU Devotional, Elder Legrand Richards, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, related the following:

While I was president of the Southern States Mission, an article appeared in the newspaper from the Associated Press about a man who came here to the United States from Lima, Peru. His name was William A. Kennedy. I read that article and I included it in the book A Marvelous Work and a Wonder that I wrote. He came here for the purpose of raising money to establish a school or seminary down in Lima, Peru, to study the early inhabitants of this land of America—the Incan and Mayan civilizations. The article said that he had collected enough money here and, when backed by the small American countries, he’d have thirty million dollars. The article also said that former President Herbert Hoover had agreed to serve on the board. The promises to this Peruvian man indicated that within ten years that sum would increase to seventy million dollars.

I never heard what actually became of that, but I said to myself, when I read that article, “Just think. They are willing to spend sixty or seventy million dollars to learn something about the past history of this great land of America. After they’ve spent that amount of money they will never know even one-hundredth part as much as they could know if they’d read the Book of Mormon.

They may find a few hieroglyphics, pots and pans, and so forth, but they will never know what the God of heaven had in mind when he led the descendants of Joseph here to this land.” You see, it’s a historical thing. Also from a geographical standpoint we know the history of this great land of America as no other people in all the world know it. that’s only one of the great contributions of this book that you learn about here in your schoolwork.

Acknowledgement: h/t reddit user No_Engineering here