The Piri Reis Map and the Antarctic Coast
In 1929 a surviving fragment of a map drawn by the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis in 1513 was found in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. Charles Hapgood, and Erich von Däniken after him, announced that the southern part of the map showed the coast of Antarctica beneath its ice, surveyed from the air by an unknown civilisation. Piri Reis wrote his sources on the margin himself: some twenty portolans, Arab charts and a map of Columbus. The southern line on his sheet is the east coast of South America, bent eastward because the parchment ran out — a device found on other portolans of the period. It bears no resemblance to the true sub-glacial topography of Antarctica established by seismic survey.
The Ica Stones
From 1966 the Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera assembled more than fifteen thousand engraved andesite stones: men riding dinosaurs, heart transplants, telescopes. The collection became a mainstay of the whole literature of forgotten civilisations. They were supplied by a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, and in 1975 he told reporters he was carving them himself — the alternative was answering for trading antiquities. In 1977, for a BBC documentary, he engraved a fresh stone on camera with a dental drill and aged it with shoe polish and stove soot. Not one stone from the collection has ever been recovered from an archaeological layer.
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