Source: Prodigy's Fringe Science Paranormal Newsletter
Date: Saturday, May 10th 1997
Note: Various points of view are represented here. You, the reader, can make up your own mind about what is fact or what is fiction.

To start off, have a look at the Piri Reis map.

THE PIRI REIS MAP

Piri Reis was a famous Turkish admiral in the sixteenth century who had a passionate interest in his collection of old maps. When the admiral's flagship tied up in some new port, Piri Reis and his aides scoured the bazaars for ancient charts and maps.

During a now-forgotten sea battle, the admiral captured several enemy sailors. One of the captives boasted of sailing with Columbus on his three voyages to the new world. Reis, ever on the lookout for new information and maps, questioned the man, who turned out to be one of Columbus's pilots. Reis asked if Columbus was mad, or if he knew that there was land accross the ocean. The pilot said he knew, that he had maps, and that the pilot still had the maps!

The admiral's eyes scanned the yellowed charts. The tracings on the parchment were precise. Using his collection of antique charts, Admiral Piri Reis compiled a world map in 1513.

In 1929, a group of historians, poking around in the harem section of the Palace of Topkapi in Constantinople, found the Piri Reis map in a pile of rubble. These scholars were astonished to discover that the map showed the coastal outlines of South and North America. It also included precise data on the southern polar continent, Antarctica, supposedly not discovered until 1818.

Eventually Arlington T. Mallerey, an authority on ancient maps, came into possession of these documents. Assisted by the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Bureau, Mallerey made a grid and transferred the Piri Reis map onto a globe. The map was totally accurate.
Later, studies by Professor Charles H. Hapgood and Richard W. Strachan revealed that the originals of the Piri Reis charts may have been aerial pictures snapped at a great height. The rivers, mountain ranges, islands, desserts, and plateaus, were drawn with unusual accuracy.
As an example, Greenland was represented as being two separate islands. This was confirmed just recently by a French polar expedition; their seismic soundings beneath the surface indicated ice covers the space between the two islands.
In Antarctica, an exploratory profile was made by seismic soundings. It revealed mountains and valleys beneath the ice cap that matched the markings on the Piri Reis map.

In the January, 1966, issue of FATE magazine, Professor Charles H. Hapgood explained the sensational discovery:
"Now this was extraordinary. In the first place, nobody is supposed to have discovered Antarctica until 1818, three hundred years after Piri Reis, and it is regarded as unthinkable that the Greeks, Romans, Babylonians or Phoenicians could have sailed that far. In the second place, the ice cap in Antarctica is supposed to be millions of years old, and therefore to have been in existence long before man evolved on earth. Mallerey's suggestion (that someone had mapped the south polar continent before the ice cap originated) appeared outrageous and scientists in general refused to concern themselves with it."

It seems incredible that ancient cartographers had maps that were more accurate than the best charts produced today. Yet, Captain Mallerey stated that "it was evident that there was very little ice then, at either pole. But, secondly, they had a record, for example, of every mountain range in Northern Canada and Alaska, including some ranges that the Army Map Service did not have. The U.S. Army has since found them! Just how they were able to do it, we do not know. But, you will probably recall that the Greeks had the legend of an airplane. We don't know how they could map so accurately without an airplane. But, map it they did. Not only that, but they knew their longitude correctly, something we could not do until two hundred years ago."

Source : Info-ParaNet Letters (Volume 1, Issue 5)

Comments made by Captain John Brent of the Naval Academy :

The Hydrographic Office experts couldn't believe it, at first. But they not only proved the map genuine, it has been used to correct errors in some present day maps.
The Director of Weston Observatory of Boston College is a top seismologist - Reverend Daniel Linehan, Society of Jesuits. He's so good that the Navy got him to help in the Antarctic, to find where there was land under the ice. The coast lines they found were identical with those on the Piri Reis map. So the map surveys would have to have been made centuries ago, before the land was buried by that deep ice.
Father Linehan revealed this on a Georgetown University Forum, as proof that this map is genuine. The forum transcript also contains statements by the Hydrographic Office engineer in charge of the evaluation of the map, Mr. M.I. Walters. Other significant points were made by A.H. Mallery, a retired sea captain. He's the man who persuaded the Navy to examine the Piri Reis map, after he realized how important the old chart was.

So far, only part of the complete Piri Reis map had been found, a section covering the coasts of South America, Africa and a portion of Antarctica.
Early in the sixteenth century, Admiral Piri Reis, Turkish Navy, had acquired a map used by Columbus. Combining it with Greek maps dating back to Alexander the Great, he compiled a world chart in 1513. In 1953, a Turkish naval officer sent the Piri Reis map to the Chief Engineer of the United States Navy Hydrographic Office. To evaluate it, the Chief Engineer asked the aid of Captain Mallery, an authority on old maps, who had previously worked with him. After a long study, Mallery discovered the projection method used. Confirming this and other technical points, the Navy cartographers came to these conclusions:
1. Columbus had a map, on his historic voyage to America, which showed the coasts of Yucatan, Guatemala, South America to the Straits of Magellan and a large part of the Antarctic coast.
2. The original maps went back at least 5,000 years, and some data shown went back even farther. Part of the land areas shown had been buried under ice for twenty centuries or more.
3. Only highly trained survey teams and cartographers could have produced charts of such amazing accuracy. Their operations must have covered the entire earth.
"We don't know how they could do it so accurately without the airplane," Captain Mallery summed it up.

Mallery was right. They couldn't have done it without some type of flying machine. There are other indications of a highly advanced technology thousands of years before Christ: archaeologists have found evidence of other lost civilizations. But they found no trace of factories, laboratories or fuel plants, and it would have taken a huge industry to build and maintain such an air fleet.

But spaceships from another world wouldn't require any of that - they'd bring what they needed.
Using the Piri Reis map evaluations, it is assumed spaceships landed at least 10,000 years ago.

The Piri Reis map is in so many books, even old books dealing with cartography... All kinds of books dealing with unusual things.... Robert Charroux, a French writer who pondered over such things as we are in this area, back in the 60's says they wondered why it was spirited away to the United States (he ties it in of course, with Hyperboria, Atlantis, and the "Motherland" - which is commonly held in belief by many today to be the United States)... In regards to Columbus - some facts:

The Greek mathematician Pythagoras declared the earth round in the 6th C. BC. Aristotle reported rumors of land west of Europe, and Erastosthenes computed the circumference of the world amazingly accurately centuries before Christ. The Greek geographer Strabo about 7 B.C. wrote of attempts to circumnavigate the earth...

Thor Hyerdahl claims Columbus had more than rumors, that he knew where he would find land to the west because of letters to the Vatican from Norse priests in Greenland settlements four centuries earlier. He also cites a request that the King of England ordered his ships to stop plundering those settlements. Hyerdahl had hoped [this was written in Nov. 1986] to prove in a forthcoming study that Columbus was aware of the Greenland papers.

According to the Spanish historian Antonio de Herrera, while in Portugal Columbus likely met Martin Behaim, who in 1492 produced his magnificent globe, the oldest existing on earth today. It is now in the German National Museum in Nurnberg. Comparing the globe, along with actual entries in the log, it is highly probable that the Behaim cartography was used. The author [Senior Associate Editor for National Geographic, Joseph Judge] states that 5 years of research team effort, and sailing according to the globe/log comparisons, assisted with computers programmed with the information, sailed several times to what the researchers feel to be the "True Columbus Landfall" --- with this in mind, then the Peri Reis map is totally out of the picture -- [National Geographic (November 1986 Vol.170, No.5) has a supplement map and excerpts of the actual log, and the reader can follow the entire adventure..]

Also, it is well known that the Phoenicians were well versed with the seas and oceans, and their routes were so secret, that death was the penalty to anyone suspected of betraying the secret (they took no chances, according to historians). Perhaps some of these ancient masters' charts were discovered along the way also?

Piri Reis and the Columbian Theory
Source : Aramco World Magazine (Jan-Feb 1980)
by Paul Lunde

Until the discovery of the Piri Reis map, there were only two cartographical sources, both indirect, for how Columbus viewed his discoveries.
One was a sketch made about 1525 by a certain Alessandro Zorzi of Venice, who said it was based on a map brought to Italy by Columbus' brother Bartholomew in 1506. Unfortunately, Zorzi's map also embodies information not known in 1506 and cannot, therefore, be used as evidence of Columbus' geographical notions, although it does show the New World as a part of the Asian mainland.
The only other surviving map going back to Columbus' own voyages is one drawn by Juan de la Cosa, who was a member of Columbus' first expedition of 1492 and who later sailed with Vespucci. But this map too, traditionally dated 1500, incorporates information that was not known to Columbus. For example, it shows Cuba as an island - yet Columbus not only believed Cuba to be part of the mainland of Asia but made each of his crew members swear that it was not an island.

This is why Kahle's 1931 lecture on the Piri Reis map so electrified his audience. It seemed almost miraculous that the only direct cartographical record of the greatest discovery of all time should have been preserved in a library in Istanbul, and that we should owe its preservation to an admiral of the Ottoman navy. Oddly enough, however, few scholars since Paul Kahle seem to have carefully examined the "Columbian" portions of the Piri Reis map, and the question of whether or not, and to what degree, it represents Columbus' ideas is still far from settled.

The Map : The Piri Reis map is drawn on gazelle hide, with a web of lines criss-crossing the Atlantic. Called "rhumb lines", they are typical of late medieval mariners' charts, and most scholars believe do not indicate latitude and longitude, but were used as an aid in laying a course.
Among the map's illustrations are two lozenges, which give the scale, and beautifully drawn ships, some accompanied by inscriptions which record important discoveries.
One is almost certainly an account of the expedition of Cabral in 1500; Cabral discovered Brazil when he was blown off course across the Atlantic while on his way to India.
The Iberian Peninsula and the coast of west Africa are carefully drawn, in a manner suggesting the style of the practical mariners' charts called "portolanos." Here many of the place names are given in Turkish, rather than being merely transliterated from Portuguese or Spanish, showing that the Ottomans had practical experience of their own along those coasts.
At the top of the map is a ship anchored near a fish, with two people sitting on its back. The accompanying inscription tells a tale from the life of the Irish Saint Brandon, a charming medieval legend. Faithfully copied by Piri Reis from one of his source maps, it is evidence that at least one of the maps of the world mentioned as sources by Piri Reis was a medieval European production and not a map of the "ancient sea kings".

Another immediately striking feature of the map is the number of islands, most of them legendary, and some of them adorned with parrots. Maps showing islands scattered through the Atlantic were current in the later Middle Ages, and a Globe made by Martin Behaim in 1492 (the same year Columbus first set off) shows a quantity of them; so does the Toscanelli map, which we know Columbus used.

The Caribbean. With regard to the Hapgood hypotheses, the Caribbean portion of the Piri Reis map is particularly important. In its northwest corner, for example, there is a large island labeled Hispaniola, today the home of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which Columbus discovered on his first voyage and where he set up a colony, marked by the three towers on the map. Immediately below Hispaniola is Puerto Rico, and to the northeast is a group of 11 islands labeled Undizi Vergine or "The Eleven Virgins". The fact that this name is in a recognizable form of Italian (as opposed to Portuguese) is evidence, as Kahle pointed out, of its Columbian origin. This part of the Piri Reis map is thus not based on maps from the ancient civilization postulated by Hapgood.

Further evidence is the fact that the map of the Caribbean area is so wildly inaccurate. Hapgood attempted to bring it into line with geographic reality by postulating an equidistant projection based on a point near Cairo, identifying the island clearly labeled Hispaniola as Cuba, and reorienting the entire Caribbean regions--which is seriously forcing the evidence. Not only is Hispaniola (Hapgood's "Cuba") grossly out of proportion to Brazil, for example, but it is oriented north-south rather than east-west. Most striking of all, it is almost identical to the conventional representations of Marco Polo's "Cipangu" (Japan) on late medieval maps such as Behaim's and Toscanelli's. Why? Probably because Columbus was convinced, on his first voyage at least, that he had found the fabled Cipangu (Japan), and he may have drawn Hispaniola in this shape to support his claim.

An even more important argument for the Columbian origin of this part of the map and against its classical or "ancient" origin - unless Hapgood's ancient mariners were very bad cartographers indeed - is the fact that the real Cuba, as an island, is missing. And so it should be on a Columbian map, for Columbus thought Cuba was part of the mainland of Asia, and drew it accordingly.

On Piri Reis' map, the wedge-shaped projection on the mainland opposite Hispaniola is almost certainly the eastern tip of Cuba; the southward-trending coast below is an attempt to draw Cuba as if it ran north and south, as Columbus believed it did. It is interesting that Behaim's globe and other maps influenced by Marco Polo's description of Cathay show a very similar wedge-shaped projection opposite the island of Cipangu; if Columbus thought he was off the coast of Asia, he may have drawn the mainland this way to correspond to its then conventional representation.

South America: The delineation of the coast of Brazil on the Piri Reis map is much more accurate than that of the Caribbean. The relationship and distance between South America and the west African coast, for example, is much more correct than on most European maps of the time. The place names along the coast, clearly transliterated from Italian and Spanish names, are taken from accounts of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and others.

The most striking topographical detail, and the one that has caused the most discussion, is the chain of mountains running through South America, the mountains which Hapgood identified as the Andes. The rivers which issue from their base are obviously meant to be the Amazon, the Orinoco and the Rio Plata, and the animal with two horns standing on the mountains is Hapgood's "llama."
Interestingly, though, the Piri Reis map is not the only early map - nor the first - to show mountains in the interior of South America. The Nicolo de Canerio map, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and the Waldseemuller chart both show the east coast of South America, though schematically drawn, and a chain of mountains adorned with trees. The de Canerio map was drawn between 1502 and 1504, long before the eastern coast of South America had been explored. As there is a striking similarity between this map and the Piri Reis map, it is therefore possible that one of Piri Reis' source maps was based on that of de Canerio rather than on one produced by an ancient civilization. Other maps showing the east coast of South America may also have been available in some form to Piri Reis - such as the maps of Martin Waldseemuller (1507), Clareanus (1510) and Johannes de Stobnicza (1512). All of these are related to each other and, almost without question, ultimately derive from a de Canerio-derived map.
The map by Johannes de Stobnicza, in particular, could have been available to Piri Reis, for it was printed in Cracow, Poland, in an edition of Ptolemy, in 1512, the year before the Piri Reis map was drawn. Thus it could have been one of the maps "drawn in the time of Alexander the Great" which Piri Reis refers to, especially considering the confusion that existed between the two Ptolemies. Antarctica and the Eastward-Trending Coast. This portion of the map was crucial to Hapgood's hypotheses, yet it too could have been derived from sources other than a forgotten advanced civilization.
While none of the maps derived from de Canerio's shows an Antarctic continent, other groups of early maps do. Beginning in the early 15th century, mapmakers often indicated a huge southern landmass that linked Africa to Asia and made a landlocked sea of the Indian Ocean - a geographical notion derived from Ptolemy's references to a "southern land". When Magellan passed through the strait that now bears his name, he sighted Tierra del Fuego to the south and assumed that it was a promontory of Ptolemy's southern landmass; it was not until Drake's southern voyage of 1578 that this idea too was explored.
The search for terra australis went on for centuries, incidentally leading to the discovery of the land which now fittingly bears the name that so fascinated Renaissance cartographers: Australia. But Antarctica itself eluded the great discoverers.

There are, however, some indications that the coast of Antarctica was sighted before its "official" discovery in 1820. The great Amerigo Vespucci related how, blown off course and driven 500 miles south, he sighted a land which he named Terra de Vista ("Land Seen") and which was possibly the Falklands or even Antarctica. In 1514, the year after the completion of the Piri Reis map, two Portuguese ships reported something similar, as did two Dutch ships about the same time: also blown off course, they sighted land and named it "Pressillgtlandt". Whatever land was sighted on these obscure voyages, the accounts prove one thing: There was no inherent impossibility in a 16th-century ship getting a long way south.

There may, in fact, be an even simpler explanation of the presence of "Antarctica" on the Piri Reis map. To start with, as Hapgood admits, about 900 miles of South American coastline are missing from the map: below the Rio de la Plata the coast simply turns eastward. And, interestingly, if this eastward section of coast is looked at vertically - that is, as continuing south instead of east - it does bear a remarkable resemblance to the actual east coast of South America from below Rio de la Plata down to Tierra del Fuego. Some of the smaller coastal features, moreover, jibe with a modern map as well, and the small group of three islands (Isla de Sara) could then be identified as the Falkland Islands, and the wedge-shaped projection at the most easterly point of the line could correspond to the tip of South America.
To put it more simply, Piri Reis, or the scribe who copied his work, may have realized, as he came to the Rio de la Plata, that he was going to run off the edge of his valuable parchment if he continued south. So he did the logical thing and turned the coastline to the east, marking the turn with a semicircle of crenelations, so that he could fit the entire coastline on his page. If that was the case, then the elaborate Hapgood hypotheses--or at least those elements based entirely on the Piri Reis map--would have no foundation whatever.

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