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CHAPTER ONE While hairy, beetled-browed cavemen were labouring to invent fire and the wheel, there already existed on this planet a highly developed civilization of intelligent beings, they built massive cities of stone, many of which are still standing. They methodically constructed giant mounds of earth all over this planet for some purpose which still escapes us. They scattered peculiar artifacts of stone and metal across every continent, and they sailed every ocean, mapping the eeeatee V-L -o ena ate Cavemen inherited the earth. They regarded the ancient cities as sacred places. As the centuries ticked off, they became conscious of other life forms around them. Life forms that seemed to possess die power of invisibility, of life and death itself. They invented names for these forms. They worshipped them. They recorded the manifestations of that invisible world in myths and legends handed down from generation to generation. Eventually they perfected sciences .based upon their observations of those manifestations. In time those sciences developed new myths. The original owners of the earth, the builders of those great cities, were forgotten. But as men spread across the face of the planet, the traces of those lost Elders were rediscovered Man's new- fangled sciences couldn't fit such traces into their new concepts, however, so the evidence was ignored. As a result, the earth has two histories: the history taught in our colleges and schools, and the real but ignored history of a very ancient people and of strange forces which have often Ten thousand years ago that unknown civilization carefully mapped the entire surface of the globe. Their maps were copied and recopied and passed along from one age to the next. Finally, copies of them were rediscovered by Capt. Arlington H. Mallery in, of all places, the library of Congress. Known as the Pin Re'is maps, they were originally found among the relics in the former imperial palace of the Sultan of Constantinople in 1929. Eventually they ended up in the archives in Washington DC. At first glance these maps, which are dated A.D. 1513, appear to be nothing more than a hopelessly garbled view of the ancient world. No one paid much attention to them until Captain Mallery came along. Working with the U.S. Hy-drographic Office and the Weston Observatory of Boston, he developed a grid system which suddenly brought the maps into focus. The modern Mercator grid system was not invented until 1559, so the ancient surveyors had to develop a method of their own. Once Mallery had unscrambled that method, he could hardly believe the results. These maps were incredibly detailed and as accurate as the latest charts. Antarctica, for example, was not discovered until Captain Cook reached it in 1773, and it was not fully explored until the 1950s. But the frozen continent is laid out with almost pinpoint accuracy on the Pi'ri Re'is maps, including mountain ranges that were not even known to us until 19521 —5Qt MORTIMER WHBBLER "YOUCANT GET THEREFROM HERE* entire globe systematically. Then they vanished. supervised human events.