Friday, January 13, 2006

CHINA MAP LAYS CLAIM TO DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

Check out the article which is linked at DRUDGE.

In the long view, what does it matter who stepped on it first? Nobody did a thing about it until the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British started carving up chunks and settling in. So China wants to be able to say that they knew about America hundreds of years before they started coming over as slave labor? Not exactly a point of pride, in my opinion.

When I was reading Donald Keyhoe books a couple of years ago, he had a story that went something like this: American Naval Officers came into possession of an ancient map that was created by a Turkish Naval officer named Piri Reis in 1513. Reis had copied the map from sources supposedly dating back to antiquity, perhaps having survived the burning of the Alexandria Library. Keyhoe was writing in the late 1950s about contemporary Naval investigations to get to the bottom of this map, because the map showed not only the Americas in great detail, but also Antartica.

The Navy commissioned some geologist/cartography types to survey the northern coastline of Antartica to see how it compares to the map. Everyone was surprised to find that the map not only correlated precisely, but described the coastline as it exists below the permafrost that has been in place for no less than 6000 years. Their conclusion was that there is no way this map could have been created without aerial surveying, and therein lies the mystery.

1 comment:

Tom said...

Chalk it up with Stonehenge, the Pyraminds and even those crazy figures in South America. I wonder what other treasures were lost in Alexandria/

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