a report concerning a metallic vase that had been dynamited out of solid rock at Meeting House Hill in Dorchester Massachusetts was reprinted from the ‘Boston Transcript’. "On putting the two parts together it formed a bell shaped vessel, four and a half inches high, six and a half inches at the base, two and a half inches at the top and about an eighth of an inch in thickness. The body of this vessel resembles zinc in colour, or a composition metal in which there is a considerable portion of silver. On the sides there are six figures of a flower, a bouquet, beautifully inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part of the vessel, a vine, or wreath, inlaid also with silver. The chasing, carving and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some cunning craftsmen. This curious and unknown vessel was blown out of the solid pudding stone, 15 feet below the surface" (12). Journalists and archaeologists investigating this puzzle estimated that the solid rock, which had entombed this vase, was at least several million years old.

Some years before, a Colorado man obtained coal from a drift mine known as the Marshal coal bed, the coal being taken from a point 300 feet below the surface. The Scientific American report continues:

Similarly, on the 22nd of June 1844 workmen were blasting granite out of a pit in a quarry near Rutherford Mills in England. The came across a gold thread embedded in rock judged archaeologists to be 60 million years old (15).

In Pennsylvania in 1937, a Mrs Myrna Burdick found a spoon among ash from burnt coal. The ashes had not been disturbed after a large piece of coal was burned, but when they fell apart, the spoon was noticed among them (16).

The SpringField (Illinois) Republican reported in 1851 that a businessman, Hiram de Witt, had brought back with him from California a piece of auriferous quartz about the size of man's fist. When showing this rock to a friend, it slipped from his hand and split open on the floor. In the centre of the quartz they found a cut iron nail, slightly corroded but straight with a perfect head. The quartz was estimated to be over a million years old (17).

 Certainly someone was walking on the planet millions of years before they should have been. What appears to be a footprint found in a limestone bed in Nevada dating from a period before the coming of man (left).

Other puzzles include a nail half bedded into a granite block excavated from the Kingoodie Quarry near Dundee in Scotland, with the granite estimated at being at least 60 million years old. This find was made around 1844 and the circumstances of the discovery were given in the following contemporary report:

"The stone in Kingoodie quarry consists of alternate layers of hard stone and a soft clayey substance called ‘till’; the courses of stone varying from six inches to upwards of six feet in thickness. The particular block in which the nail was found, was nine inches thick, and in proceeding to clear the rough block for dressing, the point of the nail was found projecting about half an inch (quite eaten with rust) into the ‘till’, the rest of the nail lying along the surface of the stone to within an inch of the head, which went right down into the body of the stone.

"The nail was not discovered while the stone remained in the quarry, but when the rough block (measuring tow feet in length, one in breadth, and nine inches in thickness) was being cleared of the superficial ‘till’. There is no evidence beyond the condition of the stone to prove what part of the quarry this block may have come from …. It is observed that the rough block in which the nail was found must have been turned over and handled at least four or five times in its journey to Inchyra, at which place it was put before masons for working, and where the nail was discovered." (18)

A two-inch metal screw discovered in a piece of feldspar unearthed in 1865 from the Abbey Mine in Treasure City, Nevada. The screw had long since been oxidised but its form, particularly the shape of its threads, could be clearly defined in the feldspar, which were millions of years old (19).

In 1885 in the foundry of the Austrian Isador Braun of Vocklabruck, a block of coal dating from the Tertiary period was broken open. Inside was discovered a small metal tube. The cube was taken to the Salzburg Museum where Austrian physicist Karl Gurls examined it.

Tests indicated that the cube was composed of a steel and nickel alloy. It measured 2.64 by 2.64 by 1.85 inches; weighed 1.73 pounds and had a specific gravity of 7.75. The edges of the cube were straight and sharp; four of its sides were flat, whilst the other two remaining sides, opposite each other, were convex. A deep grove had been cut all the way round the cube about half way up its height. There appeared little doubt that the cube was machine made and seemed to be part of a larger mechanism (20).

In the late 1780s, in a quarry near Aix-en-Provence in France, coins, hammer handles; other tool fragments and broken boards were found "all changed into agate". These finds were 50 feet deep "and covered with eleven beds of compact limestone (21)".

In November 1830 a block of marble was quarried from a depth of 60-70 feet in a quarry near Norristown, Pennsylvania and when slabs were cut off the block, two raised characters, resembling the letters I and U were found in an rectangular indentation 1.5 inches long and 5/8 of an inch wide in the marble (22).

Five miles out in the Mediterranean, directly south of Marseilles, Jacques Mayol, a French diver, explored a mile long shoal, running at a depth of sixty to one hundred and twenty feet with vertical shafts, quarries and slag heaps lying outside the shafts. In other words, a ma-worked mine from a period in man’s development contemporary with Cro-Magnon man (23).

On August 2^nd 1890, Superintendent J H Neale of the Montezuma Tunnel Company signed the following statement about discoveries made by him at Table Mountain in Tuolumne County, California. "At a distance of between 1400 and 1500 feet from the mouth of the tunnel, or of between 200 and 300 feet beyond the edge of solid lava, Mr Neale saw several spear-heads, of some dark rock and nearly one foot in length. On exploring further, he found a small mortar three or four inches in diameter and of irregular shape. This was discovered within a foot or two of the spearheads. He then found a large well-formed pestle, now the property of Dr. R. I. Bromley, and near by a large and very regular mortar, also at present the property of Dr. Bromley.

"All of these relics were found the same afternoon, and were all within a few feet of one another and close to the bed-rock, perhaps within a foot of it. Mr Neale declares that it is utterly impossible that these relics can have reached the position in which they were found excepting at the time the gravel was deposited, and before the lava cap formed. There was not the slightest trace of any disturbance of the mass or of any natural fissure into it by which access could have been obtained either there or in the neighbourhood (24)." What is remarkable is that the pestle and mortar are dated to 33-55 millions years old.

In a paper read before the American Geological Society and published in its journal in 1891, geologist George F Becker, stated; " It would have been more satisfactory to me individually if I had myself dug out these implements, but I am unable to discover any reason why Mr Neale’s statement is not exactly as good evidence to the rest of the world as my own would be. He was as competent as I to detect any fissure from the surface or any ancient workings, which the miner recognises instantly and dreads profoundly.

"Some one may possibly suggest that Mr Neale’s workmen ‘planted’ the implements, but no-one familiar with mining will entertain such a suggestion for a moment … The auriferous gravel is hard-picking, in large part it requires blasting, and even a very incompetent supervisor could not possibly be deceived in this way…. In short, there is, in my opinion, no escape from the conclusion that the implements mentioned in Mr Neale’s statement actually occurred near the bottom of the gravels, and that they were deposited where they were found at the same time with the adjoining pebbles and matrix." (25)

However, Neale’s account may not be as honest as he claims and Becker believed, for in a later statement given to William Henry Holmes in 1899 and detailed in ‘Review of the Evidence Relating to Auriferous Gravel Man in California’ (26) Neale stated that it was one of the miners and not himself who actually discovered the spearpoints inside the tunnel. Then later, when he discussed the matter with a Dr. Sinclair he changed his story again and reported that he had discovered all of the artefacts except for a stone dish or platter found by a miner simply known as ‘Joe.’ (27)

Neale’s story and affidavit do suffer from a lack of documentary and other supporting evidence, however one piece of evidence that Earth does have a hidden history is not so similarly flawed. This clue came to light in 1929 at the Old Imperial Palace in the then Constantinople and it appears to prove that man not only knew of the continent of Antarctica in pre-history (only being ‘rediscovered’ in 1820) but had also mapped it before it became embedded in ice.

The story starts in 1929 at the old Imperial Palace. There an old parchment was found with a map painted on it dated the month of Muharrem in the Moslem year 919 (1513AD). The map was signed by the Turkish Admiral Piri ibn-Haji Memmed (also known as Piri Reis.) The parchment appeared to show the outline of the coast of the Americas and drew attention as it also appeared to show South America and Africa in correct relative longitude, despite the fact that the navigators of that time had no way to establish longitude.

The map later came to the attention of Captain Arlington H Mallery, who, in 1951 had published a book entitled ‘Lost America’. In that book, Mallery claimed that ancient maps of Greenland show landforms under the present ice cap. The Piri Reis map therefore interested Mallery as it appeared to show the same coastal detail of Antarctica as had recently been identified by the Seismic Survey. In other words, this ancient map appeared to show the outline of the Antarctic Coast before it was covered in ice.

Mallery, convinced of the authenticity of the map, asked two astronomers and a cartographer to check his assertion that the map accurately showed coastal detail of Antarctica’s Queen Maud Land. He wanted this confirmation before going public. And on being satisfied that he had this confirmation he duly went public on radio on August 1956 and announced his discovery. (28)

Mallery’s work, by this stage had come to the attention of one Charles Hapgood (left), a Professor at Keene State College who, at that time, was working on a theory of ‘Earth Crust Displacement’. (Hapgood later published this work in 1959 as ‘Earth’s Shifting Crust’, complete with an encouraging, but ultimately erroneous, introduction from Albert Einstein.)

Hapgood, along with his students at the college, began a tireless research into the Piri Reis and other ancient maps, and eventually published ‘Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings’ in 1966. (This book has recently been reissued following a further wave of interest most notably generated by the work of Graham Hancock, the Flem-Aths and others.)

In that work, Hapgood states "in one of the legends inscribed on the map by Piri Reis, he stated that he had based the western part of it on a map that had been drawn by Columbus". Hapgood added "Piri Reis made other interesting statements about his source maps. He used about twenty, he said, and he stated that some of them had been drawn in the time of Alexander the Great and some of them had been based on mathematics." (29)

"Piri Reis, whose real name was Ahmet Muhiddin, stayed with the Ottoman Fleet during the reigns of Yavuz Selim (1512-1520) and Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). He served as an aide to Barbaros Hayrettin Pasha, Great Admiral of the Imperial Ottoman Fleet. In 1551 he was elevated to the rank of Commander in Chief of the Fleet of Egypt, then a dependency of the Ottoman Empire…Piri Reis was executed in Egypt in 1554.

"’Kitabi Bahriye – the Navy’s Book’, which was the most famous of his works, is considered as an excellent geography book of his times. He also prepared a map of the world, which has been reproduced in recent years. He wrote many poems too." (30)

Hapgood, convinced, as was Mallery, that the map put together from older maps by Piri Reis did show the outline of part of Antarctica before it was covered in ice, sought independent verification of his conclusions. To that end he wrote to Colonel Harold Ohlemeyer at the United States Airforce, 8^th Reconnaissance Technical Squadron. He received the above reply, dated 6^th July 1960.

Ohlmeyer’s conclusion was what Hapgood was looking for. "We have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed state of geographical knowledge in 1513." However, looking at the map itself, it is not so easy to be impressed on first examination. Indeed the first thoughts that come to mind, include, what exactly is it a map of, and if it was used, did the navigators become hopelessly lost when using it? One cannot help a wry smile, in forgiving Columbus for thinking America was India if he used maps such as this appears to be.

The top right-hand side of the map (below) shows the outline of Spain, above western Africa, with the left side of the map showing the outline of the Americas flowing down to Antarctica. (The map appears to merge Antarctica and the Americas into one continuous coastline by missing out Drake’s Passage at the tip of Southern America.)

At first glance the map does truly appear clumsy and simply wrong; however, in actual fact, it is our modern understanding of the map that it wrong rather than much of the map itself. Some knowledge of ancient map making helps break the ‘code’ of the Piri Reis parchment.

Nowadays map-making seems such a simple task given that we can take full aerial photographs of the planet from space. However, to the ancient cartographer, accurately reflecting a three dimensional globe of apparently unknown proportions onto a two-dimensional parchment was no easy matter. (Take a globe; flatten it out and the result shows continents miss-shaped and out of proportion.)

The next difficulty facing the ancient map-maker was how to measure and construct a map. A modern map is constructed on a grid of lines of longitude and latitude, spaced at regular intervals on paper. Ancient maps, often referred to as ‘portolan’ maps (from ‘port to port’), also have lines on them, however these lines appear to emanate from centres on the map, like spokes from a wheel. Each ‘wheel’ has either sixteen or thirty-two spokes flowing from it. The entire map would have been centred on some place, with concentric circles emanating out to provide as grid to be drawn upon.

The Piri Reis map is such a portolan map, and in order for its accuracy or not to be established, it needed to be converted into a modern map. This process, however, was further complicated by the fact that the map itself was a composite of may other maps, clumsily assembled into one. (Piri Reis noted that he had combined twenty maps into the world map, and there is no reason to believe that these individual twenty were themselves not composites of even earlier maps.) Mistakes such as showing the Amazon River twice or apparently failing to leave a gap at the tip of Southern America, thus leaving out a 900 mile section of coastline, are amongst many errors on the map. (This later error could be explained by the map of the Antarctic coastline being simply copied on too large a scale, leaving no room for Drake’s Passage when the two maps were combined as one.) Piri Reis could, however, be forgiven. He had never visited Southern America and would therefore not have had any reason to believe there were errors in the parchment

Once the necessary adjustments had been made, researchers claim the Piri Reis map is an accurate reflection of the coastline of Queen Maud Land in Antarctica before it was covered in ice.