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Phantom (Apocryphal; Transient) Islands

Dougherty Island is interesting, I think. Gould does into it in great detail in Oddities, as does Gaddis in Invisible Horizons, but the linked wiki article gives a decent over-view. Henry Stommel also goes into it a bit in his book, Lost Islands. Click on the maps. One of them shows the route of one ship's search for Dougherty, and the lower one is a German map of the area of Antarctica from before WWI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dougherty_Island

Dougherty is in the lower left of the German map. Note also the presence of the Maria-Theresa Rocks in this map. They are not currently believed to exist, at least at that location.
 
Sarah Ann (or Anne) Island located 4n, 154 W, was first reported in the 1850's and was claimed by the US government under the Guano Islands Act. In the early 1930's it was looked for due to its' location. It was in the path of totality for the 1937 solar eclipse and an observatory was to be built there. The US Navy searched for it and couldn't find it so it was removed from charts in 1932.

It was claimed by some that the island sank, but looking at the satellite image on google maps, I did not see any nearby seamounts that would account for Sarah Ann Island.

So, what happened? Probably a navigational error where they mistook Sarah Ann for another nearby island.
 
The most 'official' explanation was that a 'clerical error' resulted in the mistaken belief there was a Sarah Anne Island at 4 degrees north, when in all probability it was a duplicate sighting of Malden's / Independence Island - at roughly the same longitude but at 4 degrees south :

http://news.google.com/newspapers?n...ogzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=HvUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7151,4309221

The relative similarity between these two islands' coordinates can be seen in the 1859 Journal of the American Geographical and Statistical Society summary of the guano islands reported as of that time:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=hFteHKKv9lkC&pg=PA188#v=onepage&q&f=false

It's not clear where along the line (starting at initial observation) this clerical error was believed to have occurred.
 
There are also dating anomalies in the Sarah Anne Island story ...

Wikipedia and other sources claim the island was discovered in 1858. This conflicts with a blog entry citing the log of the whaler Alice Frazier:

http://www.marinersmuseum.org/blog/2013/03/sarah-anne-island-by-jessica-eichlin/

... which indicates that ship passed 'Sarah Anne Island' in early December 1854.

Another point is that some primary and secondary articles refer to Sarah Anne Island having been spotted some '15 years before', without giving the year. Here's one example from 1932:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?n...4VOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=f0IDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2584,3552314

In context, most of these references would seem to indicate a sighting circa 15 years prior to one of the 1930's-era news articles. However, there doesn't seem to be any such sighting reported / recorded in the early 20th century.

The news article suggesting the clerical error theory:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?n...ogzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=HvUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7151,4309221

... mentions the US Navy failed to locate Sarah Anne Island 15 years after its purported discovery (i.e., circa 1873). This timeframe correlates with the time the cited ship (USS Portsmouth) was conducting survey missions in the eastern Pacific:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Portsmouth_(1843)

The mirror-image transpositions of both latitude (4 degrees N / S) and time of key sightings (first reported MIA 15 years after discovery; last allegedly sighted 15 years before news article(s)) strike me as weird in and of themselves.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The most 'official' explanation was that a 'clerical error' resulted in the mistaken belief there was a Sarah Anne Island at 4 degrees north, when in all probability it was a duplicate sighting of Malden's / Independence Island - at roughly the same longitude but at 4 degrees south :

http://news.google.com/newspapers?n...ogzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=HvUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7151,4309221

The relative similarity between these two islands' coordinates can be seen in the 1859 Journal of the American Geographical and Statistical Society summary of the guano islands reported as of that time:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=hFteHKKv9lkC&pg=PA188#v=onepage&q&f=false

It's not clear where along the line (starting at initial observation) this clerical error was believed to have occurred.
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Agreed. This was likely a very common reason for false sightings of various islands. Stommel identifies some that were sighted either due east or due west of islands that were quite real. If memory serves, Gaddis, in his book tells us that the Solomon Islands were mislocated for about 200 years until they were rediscovered in the mid-1700's.

Also Bouvet Island was searched for numerous times after its' discovery in 1739, including by Cook, without success and the British Admiralty removed it from charts during the early 1800's. Then, in the 1880's Bouvet was found again and its' location correctly marked where it had located in 1739. In the 1890's and once more in the 1920's, it was correctly located, and is now known to definitely exist. It seems that Cook was searching too far to the east, (about 6 E) and Bouvet is located about 3 E.

Thompson Island was supposedly found NNE of Bouvet, and the German survey ship that correctly charted Bouvet, looked for it. It had last been seen in 1893, but was reportedly sunk in an earthquake or volcano. The problem with that idea is that the depth where Thompson was supposed to be was far too deep. The consensus these days seems to be that Thompson was in reality, a mis-located sighting of Bouvet. But, that area is very close to where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge meets the Antarctic Plate, so I concede the possibility that Thompson did sink. Bouvet is, BTW, a dormant volcano.
 
Not a phantom island per se, but this document indicates a possible, (actually, I'd say likely, but I want to be cautious here) human presence in the Azores prior to their 'official' discovery by the Portuguese in the early 1400's.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AD_2015071509562830.pdf

This was alluded to in an earlier post in this thread.
 
gerhard1 said:
Not a phantom island per se, but this document indicates a possible, (actually, I'd say likely, but I want to be cautious here) human presence in the Azores prior to their 'official' discovery by the Portuguese in the early 1400's.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AD_2015071509562830.pdf

This was alluded to in an earlier post in this thread.
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There already exists a lot of photos of megalithic structures on Azores. The structures are evidence enough.

http://portuguese-american-journal....presence-before-portuguese-occupation-azores/
 
Vardoger said:
There already exists a lot of photos of megalithic structures on Azores. The structures are evidence enough.

http://portuguese-american-journal....presence-before-portuguese-occupation-azores/
Click to expand...

Indeed, and if you tend to believe that Atlantis was exactly where Plato said it was - in the Atlantic, rather than the Mediterranean or Adriatic, then remember that, given the dramatic rise in sea level over the last 12 thousand years and the wild card of tectonic activity, the Azores (and possibly other Atlantic isles) are just the remaining mountaintops of Atlantis. I suspect some very interesting archaeological finds are yet to be found around the Azores, but underwater.
 
gerhard1 said:
Not a phantom island per se, but this document indicates a possible, (actually, I'd say likely, but I want to be cautious here) human presence in the Azores prior to their 'official' discovery by the Portuguese in the early 1400's.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AD_2015071509562830.pdf

This was alluded to in an earlier post in this thread.
Click to expand...
Just a small subtlety: there is a difference between "discover" and "take possession to the Portuguese Crown". So, Columbus took possession of a landmass that have been given to the Spanish Crown by the Pope, even before he landed in Cuba. Captain James Cook took possession of Australia, but the island had been visited before by Dutch, Chinese, probably Portuguese and even East African. Frequently the official reports of the "discovery" seeks to picture a wild, deserted land, to help to justify the possession of the land, the installation of settlers and so on... Just a last remark : my father family (and my family name) are of azorean origin, but I never visited the islands.
 
Steve Dehner said:
Hi guys,
I did some research on Sarah Ann Island a while ago, and my conclusion is that it has always been the modern Malden Island. Read my essay on it:

https://www.scribd.com/document/317181055/The-Nantucket-Connection-II

and tell me what you think.

Thanks for your time,

Steve
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Makes sense to me. A navigational error is the most logical explanation I can think of. Gaddis makes note of Sarah Ann Island in his book, and also tells us that, as you said, astronomers were anxious to be on the island because of the eclipse.

If you are interested in phantom islands, I recommend Stommel's book, Lost Islands, and Gaddis' Invisible Horizons, and Gould's Oddities.

BTW, welcome to the forum and I am flattered that your first post here was in this thread.
 
chicorea said:
Just a small subtlety: there is a difference between "discover" and "take possession to the Portuguese Crown". So, Columbus took possession of a landmass that have been given to the Spanish Crown by the Pope, even before he landed in Cuba. Captain James Cook took possession of Australia, but the island had been visited before by Dutch, Chinese, probably Portuguese and even East African. Frequently the official reports of the "discovery" seeks to picture a wild, deserted land, to help to justify the possession of the land, the installation of settlers and so on... Just a last remark : my father family (and my family name) are of azorean origin, but I never visited the islands.
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I agree completely. There is very strong evidence that the Azores had been visited before their possession by the Portuguese in the early 1400's.

Please the quotation marks that I used.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Indeed, and if you tend to believe that Atlantis was exactly where Plato said it was - in the Atlantic, rather than the Mediterranean or Adriatic, then remember that, given the dramatic rise in sea level over the last 12 thousand years and the wild card of tectonic activity, the Azores (and possibly other Atlantic isles) are just the remaining mountaintops of Atlantis. I suspect some very interesting archaeological finds are yet to be found around the Azores, but underwater.
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Agreed, but the problem is that the waters surrounding the Azores are too deep. There is no underwater plateau there, just that the islands are the top of mountains rising from a deep plain. I submit that it is unlikely for the sea level to have risen that much.

I'll do some more thinking and a bit of checking.
 
The "Frisland" as depicted in the 1623 map by the famous cartographer Mercator shows all kind of cities by name but if you google any of those cities/villages you will not find any information about them. The name Frisland in the rest of the books of old is mainly restricted to the Dutch province, modern day Friesland, which has nothing to do with the myth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisland#/media/File:Frisland_Mercator.jpg

During that time catholic monks had already one or more monastery settlements in Greenland. So perhaps it was a based on this fact. As for the Zeno brothers having discovered America 100 years prior to Columbus, that sounds ludicrous to me. Whereas for the vikings, I am quite sure they beat Columbus quite some centuries to it. Their interaction with a native tribe says it all. But once more....the map by Zeno containing names that only appear on that map and nowhere else in known scripture should raise giant question marks.

The map as well as the story itself have been seriously questioned/scrutinized centuries ago by multiple commentators already. I don't see the added value of ripping apart old wounds like this.

What I am seriously wondering about, though, is how Mercator got hold of the names he placed on the island of Frisland. They were sheer fabrications, but who gave him the names?
 
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gerhard1 said:
Agreed, but the problem is that the waters surrounding the Azores are too deep. There is no underwater plateau there, just that the islands are the top of mountains rising from a deep plain. I submit that it is unlikely for the sea level to have risen that much.

I'll do some more thinking and a bit of checking.
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In the Atlantis thread about a mongth ago, mr socks provided this link on disasters in the Azores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_the_Azores

Admittedly, I'm not a geologist, but the Azores' location (most of them are just to the east of the mid-Atlantic Ridge, and right on the boundaries of the Eurasian-African plate) makes me wonder if there is not the possibility of the Azores area sinking as well as a rise in the sea-level after the end of the Ice Age. The area is seismically quite active, after all.

Earthquakes and/or volcanic activity has caused islands to sink beneath the sea. Torca is one example and there was an island mentioned earlier in the thread of one sinking in the Pacific. Torca, mentioned by Gaddis on his book, was supposedly well-populated.

There are others, so the idea might be worthy of a look.
 
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blessmycottonsocks said:
Angelino Dalorto's 1325 Carta Nautica and the 1339 map from Angelino Dulcert (who may be the same person) show multiple islands to the west of the British Isles. I can't upload a file with the required resolution, as it is too big, so you'll need to search for them yourself and save a copy at highest resolution.

Also, possibly the definitive text about legendary islands of the Atlantic is available here:

https://archive.org/stream/legendaryislands00babc/legendaryislands00babc_djvu.txt
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Here is a link that Steve might find interesting. The book is old (1922) but it goes into a lot of this stuff.
 
EnolaGaia said:
... [An] eruption - including a surface plume of material big enough to be seen on Landsat satellite imagery - was noted in Tonga earlier this month:
http://www.livescience.com/57801-tonga-underwater-volcano-eruption-photo.html
...
Click to expand...

My February 2017 post (#59 above) included the following comments from a geologist specializing in such undersea events:

... "It may continue for some days or weeks, and an island may form temporarily," Martin Jutzeler, a geologist at the University of Tasmania who studies underwater eruptions, said in a statement. "However, new volcanic islands are easily eroded by wave action." ...
Click to expand...

I'm now following up to cite evidence - including photos - of just such a transient volcanic island from an incident in the Pacific more than a decade ago ...

This Snopes article:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/natural/maiken.asp

... describes just such an eruption incident that occurred in 2006 and was witnessed and recorded by the crew of the sailboat Maiken.

It includes photographs illustrating the eruption, the topography of the newly-formed island, and the associated expanse of floating pumice which so resembles a beach or sand bar that it could understandably be mistaken for an island if viewed from a distance.

This article also supports geologist Martin Jutzeler's comments about the transience of such islands:

Alas, the island didn’t last very long. By the time volcanologist Scott Bryan of London’s Kingston University managed to get out to the area a few months later to see it for himself, it was nearly completely washed away, leaving only the lingering scent of sulfur — a clue that magma was still cooling inside.
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NOTE: This 2006 eruption / island incident prompted a 2006 FTMB thread:

http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/new-island-appears-in-south-pacific.28213

The CNN link cited in that earlier thread is 'dead', but the link to the Maiken crew's report, posted to their blog:

http://yacht-maiken.blogspot.com/2006/08/stone-sea-and-volcano.html

... is still active.

I'm attaching 2 photos from the Maiken blog illustrating the floating pumice area ...

pic3.jpg


... and the extent of the island's emergent form.

pic14.0.jpg
 
That was interesting Mr Enola. Thank you for posting.

BTW, this is my 200th post here. This is a good forum, you are good folks and I enjoy being here. Thank you.
 
Yesterday I was visiting a friend who is a veteran of the US Air force, and I was telling him about this forum, and this thread. He has been all over the world, including SE Asia, and he has also been to Diego Garcia. When he left the island his flight wen to the NE, and he said that he saw a small group of islands about 250 miles NE of Diego Garcia. I pointed out to him that I did not think anything was at that location, but he said that there was. I suggested the Maldives, but he said that it was to far east to be that archipelago.

When I got home I looked up Diego Garcia on Google Earth and looked about but saw nothing (that is, no land) within a radius of 300 miles in any direction. The Maldives are closest to Diego Garcia at about 400-500 miles away. Google Earth gives the depth at the area in question as about 15000 feet.

I was stymied until I remembered the two nautical charts in Stommel's book. One of them is a replica of an 1817 Admiralty chart for the Indian Ocean, and in almost the exact spot indicated by my friend, were a small group of Islands called Islas Da Gama. The online maps, (Google maps, bing maps and Google earth) all show nothing there.

The area in question is also in the tropics--very near the equator, in fact--so this would tend to eliminate icebergs such as Dougherty likely was.

He estimated the size as about 1 X 5 miles.

My friend swears that there are uncharted islands left. I would have thought that satellite imagery would have settled this question once and for all. Now, I'm not quite as sure as I was.
 
Might be reef islands that have now become submerged.
'Islas da Gama' suggests discovery by Vasco da Gama.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Might be reef islands that have now become submerged.
'Islas da Gama' suggests discovery by Vasco da Gama.
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Either that or simply named after him.

As for their being reef islands now submerged, the problem with that idea is that the water in the general area (2 S, 77 E give or take) is about 16000 feet deep.

I'd love to believe that there still a few uncharted islands out there. What I'd like even better is to actually honest-to-God discover one. Be that as it may, I still have to have evidence.

This puts me in mind of a story that is somewhat relevant to this thread. Vincent Gaddis, in his book Invisible Horizons, tells the story of a British ship, Royal Navy, if memory serves, in the late 1920's whose captain made a position check. Consulting the charts, he realized that something was very wrong and called two more officers, both of them also experienced navigators. All three agreed independently of one another on their position, and agreed that there was no error. The ship then flashed the news to the world.

Easter Island had vanished.

Since Easter is under Chilean sovereignty, their navy dispatched a gunboat to check the story out, and found that the giant stone faces were looking out on the ocean just like they had been doing for centuries.

Could this Easter Island 'vanishing' have been a mirage? I don't know if mirages will cover things up like they make them appear. And some phantom islands were in all likelihood mirages. Saxemberg in the South Atlantic, mentioned earlier in this thread, could be an example of this.

This could be one possible explanation of what my friend saw. Mirages or optical illusions are the explanation for some (not all, but some) UFO sightings. Could this have have been what happened to my friend?

Or is something really there?ns
 
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There are multiple issues with your friend's story (as you've posted it ... ) that need to be clarified to make sense of it.

When did his sighting occur? (An estimated year would be sufficient.)

What was the destination for that particular flight? (Depending on timeframe, there weren't a lot of feasible destinations or overflight opportunities NE from Diego ... )

Was your friend an aircrew member (on that flight) with reason to deal with bearings and headings (e.g., pilot or navigator), or was he a passenger?

Where / how did your friend get the NE heading he reported? (It's critical to determine whether the alleged NE heading came from instrumentation versus 'butt compass'.)

Where / how did your friend get the 250 miles figure?

In doing your chart research, were you using statute or nautical miles?
 
Vasco da Gama didn't discover, nor (to the best of my knowledge) give his name to, anything NE of Diego, which would have been well outside the bounds of his multiple voyages to the west coast of India.

Da Gama did 'discover' some islands and name them for himself, but with reference to his title / rank rather than his personal name ... These would be the Amirante Islands - originally named the Almirante (Admiral's) Islands. He found them during his second voyage (after he'd obtained the title of Admiral in the wake of the successful first voyage).

The Amirante Islands lie within the Seychelles archipelago, much farther than 250 miles (of any type) to the west of Diego.
 
EnolaGaia said:
There are multiple issues with your friend's story (as you've posted it ... ) that need to be clarified to make sense of it.

When did his sighting occur? (An estimated year would be sufficient.)

What was the destination for that particular flight? (Depending on timeframe, there weren't a lot of feasible destinations or overflight opportunities NE from Diego ... )

Was your friend an aircrew member (on that flight) with reason to deal with bearings and headings (e.g., pilot or navigator), or was he a passenger?

Where / how did your friend get the NE heading he reported? (It's critical to determine whether the alleged NE heading came from instrumentation versus 'butt compass'.)

Where / how did your friend get the 250 miles figure?

In doing your chart research, were you using statute or nautical miles?
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You raise some good points. While I don't believe he made it up out of whole cloth, there are details that I question as well. He went into Air Force in '74 or '75, probably '75, and got out in '79. That would put the time-frame sometime in the late 1970's.

I believe that the ultimate destination was Okinawa, but they would have had to take a somewhat roundabout flight path, as the Chinese would not have allowed them in their airspace. They would have had no reason to fly either south or west, (I included these directions purely to be as thorough as possible) so by process of elimination this leaves north and east. And depending on the time of day, you can figure out the general direction you are traveling by the position of the sun. And if you know the speed and the time in-flight, it is not hard to roughly figure out the distance traveled. I'm going to guess and say that this is how my friend did it.

I used statute miles but even if nautical miles were used, the basic problem with the story still remains; to wit, there is no land within a 300 mile radius of the British Indian Ocean Territory. Further, like I said before the waters are very deep in the area where my friend thought that he was.

My best guess is that what he saw was the southern Maldives.
 
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