In 1929, workers cleaning out the old Topkapi Palace in Istanbul found a folded piece of gazelle skin covered in ink. It turned out to be a world map drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, an Ottoman admiral, and in the margins he wrote that he had compiled it from twenty older source charts, some reaching back to the time of Alexander the Great, all of which have since been lost.
The map is remarkably accurate for its era along the coasts of West Africa and South America. Then, at the bottom edge, it shows a stretch of coastline that some researchers have matched to the shape of Antarctica’s Queen Maud Land, a continent that would not be officially discovered until 1820 and would not be mapped beneath its ice until the 1950s. Mainstream cartographers argue Piri Reis simply extended the South American coast into an imagined southern landmass, a common guess on maps of that era. Others point out how closely the outline matches modern seismic data of the land under the ice.
The admiral himself never claimed to know what lay under Antarctica. He only claimed to be copying maps older than his own civilization, maps nobody has ever found.
Could it be that Piri Reis really was working from source material we have never recovered, charts drawn by someone who saw that coastline before the ice came.
Lost cartography, or a coincidence that only looks like one?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
What do you think about this? Pacifica’s Devil’s Slide has swallowed sections of Highway 1 since 1937, and a WWII watch bunker still perched on its cliff edge has sat abandoned there since 1949. Geology, or a stretch of coast that keeps trying to shrug people off?
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