Piri Reis Map
The account
The map would show the coast of Antarctica without ice, something that could only have been mapped from space or thousands of years ago.
What investigators found
Admiral Piri Reis compiled about 20 maps, including one by Columbus. Historians see the southern coast as South America, distorted to fit on the parchment.
The story
In 1929, during renovations at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, researchers found a fragment of a map painted on gazelle skin. It had been drawn in 1513 by the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis and showed the coasts of Europe, Africa and, across the Atlantic, South America.
Piri Reis himself wrote in the margins that he had used about 20 older maps as sources, among them one attributed to Christopher Columbus. That made the document a treasure for historians, since it preserves information from maps that have been lost.
In the 1960s, the writer Charles Hapgood claimed that the bottom of the map showed the coast of Antarctica without ice, something no one could have known in 1513. The idea became an ancient astronaut classic. For specialists, that coastline is South America, bent to fit on the parchment, a common solution on maps of the period.