Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens? by Jim Marrs Page B

“item’”that has all the characteristics of an airplane. But is it one? Or is it something else? Only new evidence, or comparisons with other findings of a similar nature, might give us the final answer.
    Cuneiform Babylonian tablets in the British Museum describe the phases of Venus, the four largest moons of Jupiter, and the seven largest satellites of Saturn, none of which could have been seen in ancient Babylon without the aid of telescopes.
    Many other artifacts indicate advanced knowledge in the far distant past, and not only in the Western world. One example is what seems to be an X-ray machine possessed by China’s emperor Qin Shi Huang, who lived from 259 to 210 BC. This device was described by contemporary scribes as a rectangular mirror about four feet wide and five feet nine inches in height that “illuminates the bones of the body.” It was said that when a person stood before this device, medical practitioners could detect any hidden malady within the organs.
    An ancient Brahman medical text compiled about 1500 BC called the Sactya Grantham described what appeared to be an early vaccination technique. It stated, “Take on the tip of a knife the contents of the inflammation, inject it into the arm of a man, mixing it with his blood. A fever will follow but the malady will pass very easily and will create no complications.” This was some 3,500 years before British scientist Edward Jenner was credited with developing the smallpox vaccination in the 1800s.
    Maps by Turkish admiral Piri Reis dating from 1513 and still available at the library of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, though not usually displayed for the public, are said to be based on earlier maps predating Alexander the Great. The Piri Reis map and his other charts accurately depict the Amazon basin of South America and the northern coastline of Antarctica, neither of which was surveyed until after the advent of aircraft in the twentieth century. The accuracy of these maps regarding Antarctica is especially puzzling because it has been under an ice cap for at least four thousand years. Piri Reis wrote that he made use of charts and maps dating back to ancient Greece, whose intellectuals acknowledged that they drew from even older Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources. In a letter dated July 6, 1960, Air Force colonel Harold Z. Ohlmeyer of the Eighth Reconnaissance Tactical Squadron of the Strategic Air Command stated, “The geographic detail shown in the lower part of the [Piri Reis] map agrees very remarkably with the results of the seismic profile made across the top of the ice-cap by the Swedish-British Antarctic Expedition of 1949. This indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice-cap.” The discovery of ice-encased Cenozoic unicellular algae in 1983 indicated that Antarctica may have been at least partly free of ice as late as three million years ago.
    The late professor Charles Hapgood, who taught the history of science at Keene College in New Hampshire, advanced the theory in 1953 that Antarctica may have moved farther south by some two thousand miles due to “Earth-crust displacement” and therefore could have been partially free of ice until as late as 4000 BC. This is still a thousand years before traditional academics believe that the first true civilizations of Egypt and Sumer with their seafaring explorers began. The idea that someone had accurately mapped an ice-free Antarctica in prehistoric times paled beside the fact that Piri Reis’s 1513 map also depicted the correct position of the Falkland Islands, not discovered until 1592, and the rivers of South America—the Orinoco, Amazon, Paraná, Uruguay, and others not fully charted until the advent of satellites. The Piri Reis maps were not flukes. Another Turkish map from 1559 depicts Alaska and Siberia joined together, indicating that, unless the Bering Strait was intentionally omitted, this was a copy of a map made more than twelve thousand years