Alien Dawn

In Alien Dawn, you said you had been asked to write a book on the Occult, and after that, you were invited to host a
BBC production, and to be on the editorial board of the Unexplained. I know people who have decided to write a
book, but I've never known anyone who was asked to write a book, especially one outside their area of expertise.
How did you get that offer?

P50 map by Oronteus Finaeus showed South Pole as if from the air and free of ice.
You said, the Piri Reis map was a portolan (from port to port), the Library of Congress had hundreds of these, they
were more accurate than maps being made by well-known map makers of the period.
What was it about the portolans that made them portolans - that made them different? Antiquity? Ownership?
Was there a guild of map makers that specifically excluded non-authorized maps and portolans were non-
authorized?
Were all maps called portolans?

p 51 Talking about the Portolan maps – implies info was kept for 8-9000 years. Was it actively suppressed? Still
being suppressed? To what end?