Charles Hapgood

American academic (1904-1982) who taught the history of science at Keene State College in New Hampshire. In The Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science (1958) he proposed that the whole outer shell of the planet can slip over the layers beneath it, carrying the poles into new latitudes within a few thousand years. Albert Einstein wrote a foreword saying the idea deserved serious attention, while naming the weak point in the same passage. Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966) argued from the Piri Reis Map and a set of portolan charts that a seafaring culture had surveyed the globe before recorded history, work he pursued with his students at Keene State. Geologists rejected the first book as plate tectonics settled the field in the 1960s, and cartographers rejected the second. Both are load-bearing for Graham Hancock.

Connections§

Earth-Crust Displacement · Piri Reis Map · Graham Hancock