MAPS AND DRAWINGS
Although mysterious, these findings are not quite as compelling because they could have been either forged or misinterpreted:
- Piri Reis map. Piri Reis, a Turkish admiral and avid collector of old maps, compiled information he had gathered into a map of his own in 1513. Astonishingly, his map depicts the coastal outlines of North and South America - and Antarctica, which was not officially discovered until 1818.
- Unexplained maps. Scholars aren't sure what to make of the maps etched on a rock. Do they crudely depict the continents of Earth as they appeared long ago - including the lands of Mu and Atlantis? Or, as some have suggested, do they show the lands of some other planet? To be impartial, however, they also could merely depict divisions of much smaller tracts of land.
- Ica stones. In 1966, Dr. Javier Cabrera, a Peruvian physician and professor of biology, was given a rock for his birthday from a local peasant. On it was a picture of a fish, allegedly carved thousands of years ago. Upon further study, Cabrera realized the fish depicted was of a species that has been extinct for millions of years. Cabrera hunted down the source of the mysterious rock and found many others like it in Ica, Peru - thousands of them. On them were carved impossible ancient scenes: telescopes, open heart surgery, and even men battling dinosaurs (see photo)!
- Egyptian helicopters? Discovered on the walls of a temple in Abydos, Egypt, are hieroglyphics that closely resemble modern aircraft in profile: a helicopter, an airplane, and some kind of hovercraft or flying disc.
HUMAN REMAINS
Although intriguing and remarkable if true, these examples are mostly the stuff of legend and folklore, and therefore largely unverifiable:
- Devilish discovery. Human skulls with horns were discovered in a burial mound at Sayre, Bradford County, Pa., in the 1880s. Horny projections extended two inches above the eye-brows, and the skeletons were seven feet tall, but other than that were anatomically normal. It was estimated they were buried around AD 1200.
- Jaws. In 1888, seven skeletons were found in a burial mound near Clearwater Minn. They were anatomically correct, except that the skulls featured double rows of teeth in the upper and lower jaws and had been buried in a sitting position, facing the lake. The foreheads were unusually low and sloping, with prominent brows.
- Grand Canyon mystery. In 1931, Dr. F. Bruce Russell claimed to have found strange underground tunnels in the Death Valley area. According to his story, he discovered winding tunnels containing artifacts that appeared to be a combination of Egyptian and American Indian. There were also mummies there, he said, that were over eight feet tall. As far as we know, no one has ever rediscovered Russell's mysterious tunnels.
- Bones in rock. Ed Conrad has found impossibly old fossilized human bones embedded in solid shale rock in Pennsylvania. The bones look human, but the rock in which they were trapped is between 280 and 300 million years old.
There are dozens and dozens of examples of such anomalies - enough to give the traditional scientific disciplines a shake-up, I would think. But because they don't fit conventional theories, these exceptions to the rules are almost always rejected out of hand. Yet, it doesn't take dozens and dozens of exceptions to challenge established thinking. All it takes is one thoroughly examined, completely verifiable anomaly to say, "The world isn't quite what we think it is."
