Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience by Colin Wilson Page B

years ago. But it has always been supposed that such movements take millions of years. Hapgood thought it could happen quite suddenly—his own view was there had been an enormous slippage of the earth’s crust some time since 15,000 BC, before which Antarctica had been 2,500 miles farther north, and had a temperate climate.
    While Hapgood was writing Earth’s Shifting Crust, he learnt of a discovery that seemed to throw an interesting new light on it. In 1956, the US Hydrographic Office became aware that it possessed a strange map that had been presented by a Turkish naval officer. This was a medieval map which had belonged to a Turkish admiral (and pirate) called Piri Re’is, who had been beheaded in 1554, and it appeared to show the east coast of South America, and the coast of Antarctica—which was not officially discovered until 1818. Moreover, it appeared to show certain bays on the coast of Queen Maud Land that were now no longer visible, since they were completely covered with ice. Yet a 1949 survey team, which had taken soundings through the ice, had established that they were precisely where the map showed them to be. What made it so baffling was that, as far as anyone knew, Antarctica had been covered with ice for thousands of years—possibly since about 5000 BC.
    Of course, it was not Piri Re’is who had made the original map—he had merely had it copied. His map was of a kind widely in use among medieval sailors, and known as a portolan (meaning ‘from port to port’). Hapgood began to study other portolans—the Library of Congress proved to have hundreds—and was astonished to find that they were far more accurate than the maps being made by well-known mapmakers working in the same period. One map in particular intrigued him; it was made by one Oronteus Finaeus, and showed the whole South Pole, as if photographed from the air, and again, the coastal region was shown free of ice.
    Obviously, they were based on far more ancient maps. But that in itself was baffling. Historians generally agree that writing was invented by the Sumerians about 3500 BC. We can assume that maps did not exist before that time, since a map is of very little use without writing on it. So how could there have been maps that showed Antarctica as it was at least a thousand years earlier than the Sumerians, and possibly several thousand?
    After years of study of portolans (aided by his students), Hapgood finally concluded that there existed a worldwide maritime civilisation around 7000 BC. He stated this extraordinary conclusion in a book entitled Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, which was published in 1966.
    It was Hapgood’s misfortune that, six years before the publication of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, a book called The Morning of the Magicians had appeared in Paris, and quickly became a world bestseller. Its authors, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, discuss the Piri Re’is map and other portolans, and ask, ‘Had they been traced from observations made on board a flying machine or some space vessel of some kind?’ And in 1968, two years after Hapgood’s book, the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken went even further in Chariots of the Gods?, stating that Hapgood had claimed that the portolans had been based on photographs taken from the air by ‘visitors from space’.
    Von Däniken’s idea that the Earth had been visited in the remote past by ‘ancient astronauts’ was by no means implausible; in fact, it had been suggested in 1962 by the Russian astronomer Josef Shklovskii in a book called Universe, Life, Mind, published in America in 1966 under the title Intelligent Life in the Universe, in collaboration with Carl Sagan. The problem was that von Däniken’s book was full of wild and absurd inaccuracies, such as multiplying the weight of the Great Pyramid by five, and suggesting that the Nazca lines, scratched on the surface of the Peruvian desert, might have been intended as an airport for spacecraft. It was