The Map of Piri Reis in Color.

The controversy surrounding the Piri Reis map is not just about how the 16th century Turkish cartographer managed to draw an accurate map of the Antarctic region 300 years prior to its supposed discovery, but also on how the map shows the land mass and coastline of the Antarctic region before it was covered in ice, over 6000 years ago.

In 1961, Captain Lorenzo W. Burroughs, a U.S. Air Force captain working in the cartographic section, wrote a letter to Dr. Hapgood and stated that the “Antarctica” depicted on the Piri Reis map seems to accurately depict the coastline of Antarctica as it is under the ice. The captain based his evaluation on the seismic profile of the Queen Maud Land area made by the Norweigan-British-Swedish Expedition of 1949.

Because of this alleged anomaly, Hapgood proposed that the Piri Reis map was actually based on source materials that pre-date 4000 BCE, thousands of years before the earliest known progressive civilizations with developed languages are known to have existed.

With Hapgood’s extraordinary theory, one glaring and compelling question is raised: “Which unknown civilization had the technology and the need to map the Antarctic region 6000 years ago?”