Our understanding of humanity’s place in the universe and how it came to be is the result of centuries or even millennia of scholarship and dedicated inquiry. But what happens when an intellectual heretic arises, one whose ideas or theory threatens to undermine humanity’s most essential understanding of itself? Is the heretic and his or her work embraced by scholars and considered on merit, or is the bias of what is currently accepted as true too strong to be overcome?

One such heretic was the late Professor Charles Hapgood. An early proponent of Earth crust displacement theory–itself a heretical competitor to the concept of continental drift–Hapgood’s 1966 book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings threatened to undermine the foundations of ancient history, geological physics, and even mythology. What Hapgood and his students found in Maps is compelling evidence of a cartographic tradition that had to date back well into the last ice age and which displayed clear evidence of intellectual and technological sophistication not again achieved until the mid- to late-1700’s in the modern era. In reviewing evidence of ancient polar region maps accurately depicting Antarctica or Greenland in ice-free states, Maps concludes that there must have been an advanced seafaring civilization of global scope in high antiquity that remains unrecorded (or unacknowledged!) to history and that further implies Earth crust displacement theory is the rational explanation for how this came to be.

In his lecture, retired RCAF Navigator Stephen Doyle gives us a practical overview of physical geography, cartography, and celestial navigation, as the layman’s frame of reference with which to appreciate the richness of Hapgood’s Maps heresy.