In 1929, a group of historians found an amazing map drawn on a gazelle skin.
Research showed that it was a genuine document drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, a famous admiral of the Turkish fleet in the 16^th century. 

His passion was cartography. His high rank within the Turkish navy allowed him to have a privileged access to the Imperial Library of Constantinople.

The Turkish admiral admits in a series of notes on the map that he compiled and copied the data from a large number of source maps, some of which dated back to the 4^th century BCE or earlier.

The Piri Reis map shows the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South America, and the northern coast of Antarctica. The northern coastline of Antarctica is perfectly detailed. The most puzzling however is not so much how Piri Reis managed to draw such an accurate map of the Antarctic region 300 years before it was discovered, but that the map shows the coastline under the ice. Geological evidence confirms that the latest date Queen Maud Land could have been charted in an ice-free state is four thousand BCE.

One way of resolving these awkward questions could be to visualise an advanced technological civilization, which must have perished in a devastating cataclysm thousands of years ago.

The English chemist and recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Professor Frederick Soddy (1877-1956), wrote in 1909, “The legend of the Fall of Man, possibly, may be all that has survived of such a time before, for some unknown reason, the whole world was plunged back again under the undisputed sway of nature to begin once more its upward toilsome journey through the ages.”

History, mythology, and the sacred books of most races support Professor Soddy’s imaginative theory. Why did the legends of a deluge appear in sunny Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia, mountainous Peru, and Mexico, icy Greenland, and the sandy Gobi?

The Cro-Magnon of 20 thousand years ago was not physiologically any different from the average European. Had he been a survivor of another civilized epoch, we could then understand why he had the talent to produce works of art in his prehistoric museums of art, such as Altamira and Lascaux. In dynamic realism, the masterpieces of this ‘caveman’ were superior to the succeeding paintings and sculptures of Egypt, Babylon, or Crete.

In antiquity, scholars believed in a lost legendary age. They were certain that empires had been destroyed by the wrath of the elements, and because of the planetary scope of this catastrophe, very little remained of their former grandeur except beautiful myths of a Golden Age.

For instance, Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE – 50 AD) wrote, “By reason of the constant and repeated destructions by water and fire, the later generations did not receive from the former the memory of the order and sequence of events.”

In the Timaeus Plato (427-347 BCE) recorded the words of an Egyptian priest, “There have been, and there will be again many destructions of mankind”. When civilization is destroyed by natural calamities, then ‘you have to begin all over again as children,’ said the high priest of Egypt to the Athenian statesman Solon (circa 630 – circa 560).

The Popol Vuh (‘Council Book’ or ‘Book of the Community’) is a book written in the Classical Quiché language containing mythological narratives and a genealogy of the rulers of the post classic Quiché Maya kingdom of Guatemala.

The Popol Vuh laid stress on the great scientific knowledge of the ‘first men’. ‘They were able to know all, and they examined the four corners, the four points of the arch of the sky and the round face of the earth.’ This primeval race could ‘see the large and the small in the sky and on earth,’ affirms the sacred book of the Mayas.

However, all their knowledge was lost when the gods asked ‘must they also be gods?’ Therefore, the ‘eyes of the first men were covered and they could see only what was close’. This is how ‘the wisdom and all knowledge’ of the first men were destroyed.

A myth is often history concealed. The story of the Popul Vuh may be true if a developed civilization had ended in a geological disaster, and the survivors had been left with only a verbal tradition of a past epoch of culture.

Historical events settle down in time – like mud in a river – and subsequently these events are gradually covered up by later incidents. If the past is not uncovered, studied, and recorded, it will remain in oblivion. The amount of knowledge we possess about the past is only a small portion of the complete story of humankind.

There are riddles in the history of civilization, which can be clarified if we take the legend of a lost/hidden civilization as a working hypothesis. Now where should we turn to find the traces of an antediluvian civilization?

Nevertheless, one thing is certain; the testimony of ancient writers, legends, and sacred books supports the reality of an advanced race, which was not recorded in history. That nation could have passed its scientific tradition to the caste of priests of Egypt, Babylon, Mexico, India, and the philosophers of Greece and China, which might explain how this knowledge continued throughout the ages.

The theory of an advanced culture and technology in protohistory, which was devoured by a global cataclysm, can clarify many riddles in the history of science. For example, it can elucidate the following mysteries, namely:

• Why the Mahabharata mentions planes and atomic bombs. The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the Ramayana. The earliest known references to the Mahabharata date back to the 6^th century BCE.

• Why ancient alchemists believed in transmutation of the elements.


• Why the people of antiquity knew about Iceland, America, and Antarctica.


• Why the Mayan calendar is superior to ours.


• Why electric batteries were made in Babylon and India thousands of years ago.


• Why vaccination is described in the 3,500-year-old Vedas (from ancient India).


• Why the rock paintings of Altamira are such masterpieces of art.


• Why robots and computers are mentioned in classic as well as mediaeval writings.

It is said that a superior being once came to the land of the Nile in a distant past. He civilized the dwellers of Egypt by giving them symbols to record sounds and ideas, the harp to play upon, charts of the stars, numbers to count with, names of herbs and remedies with which to cure sicknesses. Then the benefactor bid adieu to the people of Egypt and ascended into the sky. His name was Thoth (in Egypt), Hermes (in Greece), or Mercury (in Rome).

A culture-bearer arrived in Greece in ancient times. He was a marvellous musician and possessed such wisdom that he could answer all questions. He spoke of such strange, incomprehensible things as, for instance, life in the stars. The Greeks knew him as Orpheus.

The Feathered Serpent or Quetzalcoatl descended from ‘a hole in the sky’ when he came to Mexico. Another version describes a winged ship in which he sailed. Quetzalcoatl instructed the Central American Indians in the sciences of agriculture, astronomy, and architecture, and gave them a code of ethics. This civilizer left an indelible stamp on Central American culture and he is still venerated in Mexico.

At the birth of Sumer (site of the earliest known civilization), a weird creature landed on the shores of the Persian Gulf. It looked like a large fish but in its mouth, there was a human face. This monster spoke to the primitive dwellers of Mesopotamia and taught them how to build cities, compile laws, plant wheat, write down thoughts, count with numbers, and observe the stars. This fishlike god, known as Oannes, civilized the savages and humanised their lives. His scientific legacy was of the highest quality, and the people of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys became great astronomers and mathematicians.

Far away from Babylon, in South America, a tall white man came from the land of dawn. He revealed to the Indians the secrets of civilization and inspired them with high ethical ideals. When his mission was completed, like Oannes, he disappeared into the sea. His name was Viracocha – ‘the foam of the sea’. Yet another legend about a missionary from the stars, whose ship could sail on water as well as in space?

In Tassili-n’-Ajjer, a group of mountains in southern Algeria, peculiar rock paintings were first discovered in 1910, and subsequently in the 1930s, and 1960s. They depict men in what seem to be diving suits or space suits, without mouths. One six-metre rock image was aptly called the ‘Martian’.

Since the rock paintings are dated as far back in time as eight thousand BCE, they are not likely to represent men with headgear protecting them against sand, as some sceptics have suggested, as at that time the northern Sahara was covered with rich vegetation!

Scholars and archaeologists have been unable to date the rock paintings definitively, and all that is known about the people who lived at the time the paintings were created is what can be determined from studying the paintings themselves.

The problem of life in other stellar systems hinges on four basic questions, namely:

• Is life on earth a unique phenomenon unparalleled in a universe of milliards of solar systems?


• Are we then alone in a dead universe?


• Is life potentially locked within the atom and therefore a universal attribute of matter?


• Are some worlds inhabited by rational beings at different stages of evolution?

Today in this Age of Space Travel, there are but few people who would answer the first two questions in the affirmative.

The hypothesis of contacts of galactic civilizations with the men of earth in past ages can account for the following unexpected knowledge in remote antiquity, namely:

• How the ancients were aware of the two moons of Mars.


• How the astronaut Hou Yih of China described the moon as ‘desolate, cold and glassy’, forty-three centuries ago.


• How Greek philosophers were aware of the vast distances between the stars.


• Why myths about the descent of sky-beings are global in scope.


• How ancient thinkers were aware of planets beyond Saturn, which could not be seen without a telescope.


• How Sanskrit texts estimated the life span of the universe in milliards of years as does modern science.


• How the Epic of Etana, the Book of the Dead, and the Book of Enoch drew a picture of extraterrestrial space.


• How Saturn, although a dim stellar body, but actually the second largest planet in our system, was given the prominence it deserved in ancient Pantheons.

Besides the importation of science from another stellar world or the existence of a cultural legacy from a vanished civilization, there is a less fantastic source of knowledge, which could account for some of the peculiarities of the history of science.

In the course of the past 35 thousand years, man has been slowly reaching his present level. Since about eight thousand BCE, he began to change his personality of a roving hunter for that of an established farmer and city tradesman.

The orthodox scientific view has no provision for an unknown advanced civilization in prehistory. It does not entertain ideas about culture-bearers coming from cosmic space and accelerating the progress of humankind on this planet.

Anthropologists say that in the course of a long period of the development of the primates, a true man appeared. The Cro-Magnon prospered as a hunter and fisherman.

Members of a clan sat around the bonfire at night, listening to the elders relate their experiences, transmitting their accumulated knowledge to younger generations.

When man began to cultivate plants, domesticate animals, and perfect his tools and weapons, he stepped over the threshold of civilization. That took place about seven thousand years ago.

Many of the accomplishments of humanity in former epochs, which I outlined in this essay, can be explained by the march of progress.

However, orthodox science is not in a position to offer an explanation to the unsolved mysteries of the history of science, which has been examined in this essay.

Now we come to the crucial point. Did the ancients receive a scientific legacy from the survivors of an older civilization destroyed by tidal waves and the fires of submarine volcanoes in a geological upheaval? On the other hand, was primordial science and culture brought to this world by the space visitors who had aeons ago reached the level of evolution on which we are standing now?

Actually, there is no contradiction between the two hypotheses. As the Russian research scientist in aeronautics and astronautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) said, our history is too brief to estimate how often visitations from space have occurred in the past. However, the American astronomer, Carl Sagan (1934-1996), believes that they take place at 5,500-year intervals.

If history stretches beyond the seven thousand year limit afforded to it by the historians, and if men lived in the last interglacial age, a descent of sky-beings upon earth could have started an epoch of culture. If the technology of extra-terrestrial intelligences was sufficiently developed to enable them to span astronomical distances, their way of life and thinking must have been equally advanced.

The star-born could have founded the world’s first empires, ruled as the Sun-Kings and then passed on their authority to the so-called ‘solar dynasties’. This speculation is confirmed by a belief common to the legends of Egypt, India, China, Greece, Mexico or Peru which affirm that there was a time when the ‘gods’ reigned over humankind.

Well, what about Atlantis, then? The legend of the lost continent of Atlantis starts in 355 BCE with the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato had planned to write a trilogy of books discussing the nature of man, the creation of the world, and the story of Atlantis, as well as other subjects. He finished the first and partially wrote the second.

In Plato’s story, a character named Kritias tells an account of Atlantis that has been in his family for generations. According to the character, the story was originally told to his ancestor Solon, by a priest during Solon’s visit to Egypt.

According to the dialogues, there had been a powerful empire located to the west of the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ (what we now call the Straight of Gibraltar) on an island in the Atlantic Ocean (the Americas?). The nation there had been established by Poseidon, the God of the Sea. Poseidon fathered five sets of twins on the island. The firstborn, Atlas, had the continent and the surrounding ocean named for him. Poseidon divided the land into ten sections, each to be ruled by a son, or his heirs.

About nine thousand years before the time of Plato, after the people of Atlantis became corrupt and greedy, the gods decided to destroy them. A violent earthquake shook the land, giant waves rolled over the shores, and the island sank into the sea never to be seen again.

So, is the story of Atlantis just a fable used by Plato to make a point? On the other hand, is there some reason to think he was referring to a real place? Well, at numerous points in the dialogues Plato’s characters refer to the story of Atlantis as ‘genuine history’ and it being within ‘the realm of fact.’ Plato also seems to put into the story a lot of detail about Atlantis that would be unnecessary if he had intended to use it only as a literary device.

Are there any other candidates for the location of Atlantis? People have made cases for places as diverse as Switzerland, South America, and New Zealand. One of the most convincing arguments, though, came from KT Frost, a professor of history at the Queen’s University in Belfast in 1909. Later, Spyridon Marinatos, an archaeologist and AG Galanopoulos, a seismologist, added evidence to Frost’s ideas.

Frost suggested that instead of being west of the Pillars of Hercules, Atlantis was east. He also thought that the catastrophic end of the island had come not nine thousand years before Plato’s time, but only 900. If this was true , the land of Atlantis might already be a well-known place even in Plato’s time: The Island of Crete.

Crete is now a part of modern Greece and lies just south of the Athens across part of the Mediterranean Sea. Before 1,500 BCE, it was the seat of the Minoan Empire. The Minoans dominated the eastern Mediterranean with a powerful navy and probably extracted tribute from other surrounding nations.

Archaeological excavations have shown the Minoan Crete was probably one of the most sophisticated cultures of its time. It had splendid architecture, and art. A code of laws gave women equal legal status as men. Agriculture was highly developed and an extensive irrigation system existed.

Then, seemingly in a blink of an eye, the Minoan Civilisation disappeared. Geological studies have shown that on an island we now know as Santorinas, located just ten miles to the north of Crete, a disaster occurred that was very capable of toppling the Minoan state.

Santorinas today is a lush Mediterranean paradise consisting of several islands in a ring shape. Twenty-five hundred years ago, though, it was a single large island with a volcano in the centre. The volcano blew itself apart in a massive explosion around 1,500 BC.

To understand the effect of such an explosion, scientists have compared it to the most powerful volcanic explosion in historic times. This occurred on the Island of Krakatoa in 1883. There a giant (tidal?) wave, or tsunami, 40 metres high raced across the sea and hit neighbouring islands, killing 36 thousand people. Ash thrown up into the air blackened the skies for three days. The sound of the explosion was heard as far away as five thousand kilometres.

The explosion at Santorinas was four times as powerful as Krakatoa.

The tsunami that hit Crete must have travelled inland for over a kilometre, destroying any coastal towns or cities. The great Minoan fleet of ships were all sunk in a few seconds. Overnight, the powerful Minoan Empire was crushed and Crete changed to a political backwater. One can hardly imagine a catastrophe more like Plato’s description of Atlantis’ fate than the destruction of Crete.

Many of the details of the Atlantis story fit with what is now known about Crete. Women had a relatively high political status, both cultures were peaceful, and both enjoyed the unusual sport of ritualistic bullfighting (where an unarmed man wrestled and jumped over an uninjured bull).

If the fall of the Minoans is the story of Atlantis, how did Plato get the location and time wrong? Galanopoulos suggested there was a mistake during translation of some of the figures from Egyptian to Greek and an extra zero added. This would mean 900 years ago became nine thousand, and the distance from Egypt to ‘Atlantis’ went from 400 kilometres to four thousand kilometres.

If this were true , Plato, knowing the layout of the Mediterranean Sea, would have been forced to assume the location of the island continent was squarely in the Atlantic Ocean.

Not everyone accepts the Minoan Crete theory of the story of Atlantis, but until a convincing case can be made for some other place, it remains our best guess.

According to Jim Allen (Atlantis: the Andes Solution – the Discovery of South America as the Legendary Continent of Atlantis), the Bolivian Altiplano, the highest plateau in the world, is a possible spot for Atlantis. The Altiplano is a stark wilderness flanked by the Andes and abundant with volcanoes, geysers, and hot springs.

Reminiscent of Plato’s description of Atlantis, “The whole region rose sheer out the sea to a great height but the part about the city was all smooth plain, enclosing it round about and being itself encircled by mountains that stretched as far as the sea”.

True, or false? I do not know, but the legend of Atlantis is still a fascinating story!

The story of Lemuria (like that of Atlantis) cannot be accurately documented, though many have gone in quest of this mythological continent. There are various dates for the Lemurian timeline – some placing it millions of years ago – while others define the Lemurian era as roughly from 75 to 20 thousand BCE. Others speculate that Atlantis and Lemuria co-existed for thousands of years. The exact location of Lemuria also varies with different researchers and authors.

Some believe that Easter Island was part of Lemuria. Its hundreds of colossal stone statues and written language point to an advanced culture, yet it appeared on the world’s most remote spot. The legends of Easter Island speak of Hiva, which sank beneath the waves as people fled.

Samoans called a similar place Bolutu. It was stocked with trees and plants bearing fruits and flowers, which were immediately replaced when picked. On Bolutu, men could walk through trees, houses, and other physical objects without any resistance.

The Maoris of New Zealand still talk about arriving long ago from a sinking island called Hawaiki, a vast and mountainous place on the other side of the water.

Does the discovery of the Hobbit of Flores (in October 2004 – two months before the Asian tsunami and earthquakes) in anyway link to Lemuria? Who would have thought there would be a link between two of the top news stories of 2004: the discovery by an Australian/Indonesian team of the ‘Hobbit of Flores’ and the dreadful devastation of the Asian tsunami?

An Indonesian woman, called Melawati, was rescued after drifting for five days after being washed away by the tsunami, and an Indonesian man, Rizal Shahputra, was rescued after eight days. Does their survival solve one of the puzzles about how the ancestors of the hobbits got across the sea barriers from Bali to Lombok and then from Sumbawa to Flores?

In October 2004, the Homo floresiensis (‘Man of Flores’ or Hobbit man) discovery by Australian and Asian paleoanthropologists was published on the cover of Nature magazine.

According to the discoverers, the ancestors of the ‘hobbits’ first left signs of their presence in Flores about 840 thousand years ago. These creatures’ stone tools have been found by Dutch, Indonesian and Australian researchers with remains of primitive elephants and komodo dragons. An Australian/Indonesian team first obtained absolute dates for the appearance of these tools.

A very big primate fossil find was also recently revisited in Asia – from dwarf to giant or hobbit to beast. In 2005, using a high-precision absolute-dating method (techniques involving electron spin resonance and uranium series), Jack Rink, associate professor of geography and Earth sciences at McMaster, determined that Gigantopithecus blackii roamed Southeast Asia for nearly a million years before the species died out during the Pleistocene period 100 thousand years ago. Gigantopithecus blackii is the largest primate that ever lived (as far as we know), measuring about three metres tall and weighing up to 550 kilogram.

Scientists have actually known about Gigantopithecus blackii since the accidental discovery of some of its teeth on sale in a Hong Kong pharmacy about 80 years ago. While the idea of a giant ape irked the interest of scientists – and Bigfoot hunters – around the world, it was unclear how long ago this beast went extinct.

Mu (some say it is Lemuria) is the name of another hypothesised lost continent, located in the Pacific Ocean. It is believed to have sunk beneath the waters of the ocean like Atlantis and Lemuria.

The idea of Mu first appeared in the works of the Antiquarian Augustus Le Plongeon (1825-1908), a 19^th century traveller and writer who conducted his own investigations of the Maya ruins in Yucatán. He announced that he had translated the ancient Mayan writings, which supposedly showed that the Maya of Yucatán were older than the later civilisations of Atlantis and Egypt, and additionally told the story of an even older continent of Mu, which had sunk in a similar fashion to Atlantis, with the survivors founding the Maya civilisation.

Mu was later popularised by James Churchward (1852-1936) in a series of books.  Apparently, Kemal Ataturk (1881-1939) took great efforts in the 1930s in gathering information considering the lost continent Mu. He hoped to find the missing link between the cultural parallels of Turkish, Uyghur, Indian, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations.

Mainstream scientists will not even explore these possibilities, and usually rejects the notion without as much as a glance. Maybe it tells us something about these so-called scientists.

One reason mainstream scientists reject the notion (a case of Ockham’s razor) that man and dinosaur could have co-existed is that it will obviously demolish all notions of the neo-Darwinian Theory. This would redraw the map of reality that is held so dear by many people today, beyond recognition.

Considering the complexity of human civilisation, and language, that could be a real possibility. Language for one must have taken a very, very long time to evolve to be so complex and profusely different all over the world.

What really is strange about human language is the fact that the further one goes back into the past the more complex language seems to become. This fact really does not fit in the contemporary view of human evolution, for example; just the opposite, in fact, seems to be applicable!

Sanskrit seems to be more complicated grammatically than Hellenistic Greek, which seems to be more complex than Latin, and Latin, again is grammatically more complicated than modern Spanish for example. Why? The exact opposite should be true !