The Vinland Map
A parchment that surfaced with a European dealer in 1957 and was bought for Yale: a fifteenth-century world map with an island of Vinland drawn west of Greenland — America, decades before Columbus. Yale announced it in 1965, on the eve of Columbus Day, and the argument ran for half a century. In 1974 Walter McCrone found anatase in the ink, a form of titanium dioxide first manufactured in the 1920s. Yale gave the final answer in September 2021: X-ray fluorescence mapping showed titanium ink along every line of the map, and beneath it an erased medieval inscription. The parchment is genuine; the map on it is not.
Petit-Rechain and the Belgian Triangle
The photographic centrepiece of the Belgian wave of 1989–90: a black triangle with a light at each corner and one in the middle, taken at Petit-Rechain near Verviers in April 1990. It went round the world, was analysed at the University of Mons and the Royal Military Academy, and produced expert talk of plasma and of an image impossible to fake. In July 2011 Patrick Maréchal went on RTL-TVI and showed how he had done it: a piece of polystyrene painted black, four spotlights and a long exposure. He had kept it to himself for twenty-one years because the joke had got away from him.
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