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  general category of documents that contain the advanced geographical

  knowledge I have outlined.

  The Piri Reis Map of 1513, for example, places South America and

  Africa in the correct relative longitudes,11 theoretically an impossible feat

  for the science of the time. But Piri Reis was candid in admitting that his

  map was based on far earlier sources. Could it have been from one of

  these sources that he derived his accurate longitudes?

  Also of great interest is the so-called ‘Dulcert Portulano’ of AD 1339

  which focuses on Europe and North Africa. Here latitude is perfect across

  huge distances and the total longitude of the Mediterranean and Black

  Seas is correct to within half a degree.12

  Professor Hapgood comments that the maker of the original source

  from which the Dulcert Portulano was copied had ‘achieved highly

  scientific accuracy in finding the ratio of latitude to longitude. He could

  only have done this if he had precise information on the relative

  longitudes of a great many places scattered all the way from Galway in

  Ireland to the eastern bend of the Don in Russia.’13

  The Zeno Map14 of AD 1380 is another enigma. Covering a vast area of

  the north as far as Greenland, it locates a great many widely scattered

  places at latitudes and longitudes which are ‘amazingly correct’.15 It is

  10 Ibid.

  11 Maps, pp. 1, 41.

  12 Ibid., p. 116.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid., pp. 149-58.

  15 Ibid, p. 152.

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  ‘unbelievable’, asserts Hapgood, ‘that anyone in the fourteenth century

  could have found accurate latitudes for these places, to say nothing of

  accurate longitudes’.16

  The Oronteus Finaeus World Map also commands attention: it

  successfully places the coasts of Antarctica in correct latitudes and

  relative longitudes and finds a remarkably accurate area for the continent

  as a whole. This reflects a level of geographical knowledge not available

  until the twentieth century.17

  The Portolano of lehudi Ibn Ben Zara is another map notable for its

  accuracy where relative latitudes and longitudes are concerned.18 Total

  longitude between Gibraltar and the Sea of Azov is accurate to half a

  degree, while across the map as a whole average errors of longitude are

  less than a degree.19

  These examples represent only a small fraction of the large and

  challenging dossier of evidence presented by Hapgood. Layer upon layer,

  the cumulative effect of his painstaking and detailed analysis is to

  suggest that we are deluding ourselves when we suppose that accurate

  instruments for measuring longitude were not invented until the

  eighteenth century. On the contrary, the Piri Reis and other maps appear

  to indicate very strongly that such instruments were re-discovered then,

  that they had existed long ages before and had been used by a civilized

  people, now lost to history, who had explored and charted the entire

  earth. Furthermore, it seems that these people were capable not only of

  designing and manufacturing precise and technically advanced

  mechanical instruments but were masters of a precocious mathematical

  science.

  The lost mathematicians

  To understand why, we should first remind ourselves of the obvious: the

  earth is a sphere. When it comes to mapping it, therefore, only a globe

  can represent it in correct proportion. Transferring cartographic data

  from a globe to flat sheets of paper inevitably involves distortions and

  can be accomplished only by means of an artificial and complex

  mechanical and mathematical device known as map projection.

  There are many different kinds of projection. Mercator’s, still used in

  atlases today, is perhaps the most familiar. Others are dauntingly

  referred to as Azimuthal, Stereographic, Gnomonic, Azimuthal

  Equidistant, Cordiform, and so on, but it is unnecessary to go into this

  any further here. We need only note that all successful projections require

  16 Ibid.

  17 Ibid., p. 98.

  18 Ibid., p. 170.

  19 Ibid., p. 173.

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  the use of sophisticated mathematical techniques of a kind supposedly

  unknown in the ancient world 20 (particularly in the deepest antiquity

  before 4000 BC when there was allegedly no human civilization at all, let

  alone one capable of developing and using advanced mathematics and

  geometry).

  Charles Hapgood submitted his collection of ancient maps to the

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology for evaluation by Professor Richard

  Strachan. The general conclusion was obvious, but he wanted to know

  precisely what level of mathematics would have been required to draw up

  the original source documents. On 18 April 1965 Strachan replied that a

  very high level of mathematics indeed would have been necessary. Some

  of the maps, for example, seemed to express ‘a Mercator type projection’

  long before the time of Mercator himself. The relative complexity of this

  projection (involving latitude expansion) meant that a trigonometric

  coordinate transformation method must have been used.

  Other reasons for deducing that the ancient map-makers must have

  been skilled mathematicians were as follows:

  1 The determination of place locations on a continent requires at least geometric

  triangulation methods. Over large distances (of the order of 1000 miles) corrections

  must be made for the curvature of the earth, which requires some understanding of

  spherical trigonometry.

  2 The location of continents with respect to one another requires an understanding of

  the earth’s sphericity, and the use of spherical trigonometry.

  3 Cultures with this knowledge, plus the precision instruments to make the required

  measurements to determine location, would most certainly use their mathematical

  technology in creating maps and charts.’21

  Strachan’s impression that the maps, through generations of copyists,

  revealed the handiwork of an ancient, mysterious and technologically

  advanced civilization, was shared by reconnaissance experts from the US

  Airforce to whom Hapgood submitted the evidence. Lorenzo Burroughs,

  chief of the 8th Reconnaissance Technical Squadron’s Cartographic

  Section at Westover Air Base, made a particularly close study of the

  Oronteus Finaeus Map. He concluded that some of the sources upon

  which it was based must have been drawn up by means of a projection

  similar to the modern Cordiform Projection. This, said Burroughs:

  suggests the use of advanced mathematics. Further, the shape given to the

  Antarctic Continent suggests the possibility, if not the probability, that the original

  source maps were compiled on a stereographic or gnomonic type of projection

  involving the use of spherical trigonometry.

  We are convinced that the findings made by you and your associates are valid, and

  that they raise extremely important questions affecting geology and ancient

  20 Ibid., p. 225ff.

  21 Ibid., p. 228.
<
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  history ...’22

  Hapgood was to make one more important discovery: a Chinese map

  copied from an earlier original on to a stone pillar in AD 1137.23 This map

  incorporates precisely the same kind of high quality information about

  longitudes as the others. It has a similar grid and was drawn up with the

  benefit of spherical trigonometry. Indeed, on close examination, it shares

  so many features with the European and Middle Eastern maps that only

  one explanation seems adequate: it and they must have stemmed from a

  common source.24

  We seem to be confronted once again by a surviving fragment of the

  scientific knowledge of a lost civilization. More than that, it appears that

  this civilization must have been at least in some respects as advanced as

  our own and that its cartographers had ‘mapped virtually the entire globe

  with a uniform general level of technology, with similar methods, equal

  knowledge of mathematics, and probably the same sorts of

  instruments’.25

  The Chinese map also indicates something else: a global legacy must

  have been handed down—a legacy of inestimable value, in all probability

  incorporating much more than sophisticated geographical knowledge.

  Could it have been some portion of this legacy that was distributed in

  prehistoric Peru by the so-called ‘Viracochas’, mysterious bearded

  strangers said to have come from across the seas, in a ‘time of darkness’,

  to restore civilization after a great upheaval of the earth?

  I decided to go to Peru to see what I could find.

  22 Ibid., pp. 244-5.

  23 Ibid., p. 135.

  24 Ibid., p. 139.

  25 Ibid., pp. 139, 145.

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  Part II

  Foam of the Sea

  Peru and Bolivia

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  Chapter 4

  Flight of the Condor

  I’m in southern Peru, flying over the Nazca lines.

  Below me, after the whale and the monkey, the hummingbird comes

  into view, flutters and unfolds her wings, stretches forward her delicate

  beak towards some imaginary flower. Then we turn hard right, pursued

  by our own tiny shadow as we cross the bleak scar of the Pan-American

  highway, and follow a trajectory that brings us over the fabulous snakenecked ‘Alcatraz’: a heron 900 feet long conceived in the mind of a

  master geometer. We circle around, cross the highway for a second time,

  pass an astonishing arrangement of fish and triangles laid out beside a

  pelican, turn left and find ourselves floating over the sublime image of a

  giant condor with feathers extended in stylized flight.

  Just as I try to catch my breath, another condor almost close enough to

  touch materializes out of nowhere, a real condor this time, haughty as a

  fallen angel riding a thermal back to heaven. My pilot gasps and tries to

  follow him. For a moment I catch a glimpse of a bright, dispassionate eye

  that seems to weigh us up and find us wanting. Then, like a vision from

  some ancient myth, the creature banks and glides contemptuously

  backwards into the sun leaving our single-engined Cessna floundering in

  the lower air.

  Below us now there’s a pair of parallel lines almost two miles long,

  arrow straight all the way to vanishing point. And there, off to the right, a

  series of abstract shapes on a scale so vast—and yet so precisely

  executed—that it seems inconceivable they could have been the work of

  men.

  The people around here say that they were not the work of men, but of

  demigods, the Viracochas,1 who also left their fingerprints elsewhere in

  the Andean region many thousands of years ago.

  The riddle of the lines

  The Nazca plateau in southern Peru is a desolate place, sere and

  unwelcoming, barren and profitless. Human populations have never

  concentrated here, nor will they do so in the future: the surface of the

  moon seems hardly less hospitable.

  If you happen to be an artist with grand designs, however, these high

  1 Tony Morrison with Professor Gerald S. Hawkins, Pathways to the Gods, Book Club

  Associates, London, 1979, p. 21. See also The Atlas of Mysterious Places, (ed. Jennifer

  Westwood), Guild Publishing, London, 1987, p. 100.

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  and daunting plains look like a very promising canvas, with 200 square

  miles of uninterrupted tableland and the certainty that your masterwork

  won’t be carried away on the desert breeze or covered by drifting sand.

  It’s true that high winds do blow here, but by a happy accident of

  physics they are robbed of their sting at ground level: the pebbles that

  litter the pampa absorb and retain the sun’s heat, throwing up a

  protective force-field of warm air. In addition, the soil contains enough

  gypsum to glue small stones to the subsurface, an adhesive regularly

  renewed by the moistening effect of early morning dews. Once things are

  drawn here, therefore, they tend to stay drawn. There’s hardly any rain;

  indeed, with less than half an hour of miserly drizzle every decade, Nazca

  is among the driest places on earth.

  If you are an artist, therefore, if you have something grand and

  important to express, and if you want it to be visible for ever, these

  strange and lonely flatlands could look like the answer to your prayers.

  Experts have pronounced upon the antiquity of Nazca, basing their

  opinions on fragments of pottery found embedded in the lines and on

  radiocarbon results from various organic remains unearthed here. The

  dates conjectured range between 350 BC and AD 600.2 Realistically, they

  tell us nothing about the age of the lines themselves, which are

  inherently as undatable as the stones cleared to make them. All we can

  say for sure is that the most recent are at least 1400 years old, but it is

  theoretically possible that they could be far more ancient than that—for

  the simple reason that the artefacts from which such dates are derived

  could have been brought to Nazca by later peoples.

  2 Pathways to the Gods, p. 21.

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  The principal figures of the Nazca plateau.

  The majority of the designs are spread out across a clearly defined area

  of southern Peru bounded by the Rio Ingenio to the north and the Rio

  Nazca to the south, a roughly square canvas of dun-coloured desert with

  forty-six kilometres of the Pan-American highway running obliquely

  through it from top-centre to bottom right. Here, scattered apparently at

  random, are literally hundreds of different figures. Some depict animals

  and birds (a total of eighteen different birds). But far more take the form

  of geometrical devices in the form of trapezoids, rectangles, triangles and

  straight lines. Viewed from above, these latter resemble to the modern

  eye a jumble of runways, as though some megalomaniac civil engineer

  had been licensed to act out his most flamboyant fantasies of airfield

&
nbsp; design.

  It therefore comes as no surprise, since humans are not supposed to

  have been able to fly until the beginning of the twentieth century, that

  the Nazca lines have been identified by a number of observers as landing

  strips for alien spaceships. This is a seductive notion, but Nazca is

  perhaps not the best place to seek evidence for it. For example, it is

  difficult to understand why extra-terrestrials advanced enough to have

  crossed hundreds of light years of interstellar space should have needed

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  landing strips at all. Surely such beings would have mastered the

  technology of setting their flying saucers down vertically?

  Besides, there is really no question of the Nazca lines ever having been

  used as runways—by flying saucers or anything else—although some of

  them look like that from above. Viewed at ground-level they are little

  more than grazes on the surface made by scraping away thousands of

  tons of black volcanic pebbles to expose the desert’s paler base of yellow

  sand and clay. None of the cleared areas is more than a few inches deep

  and all are much too soft to have permitted the landing of wheeled flying

  vehicles. The German mathematician Maria Reiche, who devoted half a

  century to the study of the lines, was only being logical when she

  dismissed the extraterrestrial theory with a single pithy sentence a few

  years ago: ‘I’m afraid the spacemen would have gotten stuck.’

  If not runways for the chariots of alien ‘gods’, therefore, what else

  might the Nazca lines be? The truth is that no one knows their purpose,

  just as no one really knows their age; they are a genuine mystery of the

  past. And the closer you look at them the more baffling they become.

  It’s clear, for example, that the animals and birds antedate the

  geometry of the ‘runways’, because many of the trapezoids, rectangles

  and straight lines bisect (and thus partly obliterate) the more complex

  figures. The obvious deduction is that the final artwork of the desert as

  we view it today must have been produced in two phases. Moreover,

  though it seems contrary to the normal laws of technical progress, we

  must concede that the earlier of the two phases was the more advanced.

  The execution of the zoomorphic figures called for far higher levels of