ATLANTIS DISCOVERED?

ATLANTIS DISCOVERED? For centuries mankind has searched for the fabled lost continent of Atlantis. One man who's spent his life looking explains why he's convinced he has finally found it.

From the days of ancient Greece man has been trying to unravel one of the most enduring of all historical mysteries--the legend of the lost continent of Atlantis, said to have vanished beneath the sea 10,000 years before the birth of Christ. For my part, I have been looking for Atlantis for 25 years, travelling the world to examine evidence that has been passed down through the ages, from the original descriptions of the continent found in Plato's writings to medieval maps which show mysterious islands that have long disappeared.

During my search, I have talked to eminent scientists and historians who are as bewitched by the continent as I am. I have come across theories, both plausible and implausible, as to its location and size.

I have been certain on occasions that I have found out where it is, only to be disabused of that certainty by arguments I have overlooked. Never, not once, have I had any doubt that one day man will find Atlantis.

And the extraordinary thing is that I believe that day is very close. In fact, so convinced am I by a new theory on the continent's whereabouts, that I am joining an expedition with a team of explorers to look for it next month. Our destination is not, as you might suppose on account of the name of the continent, the mid-Atlantic.

We are heading for Cyprus. For astonishing new evidence seems to indicate that long-lost Atlantis is the southern part of the island, which was dramatically submerged more than 11,000 years ago, when the Atlantic ocean burst through a dam of mountains that separated it from the Mediterranean.

But before I tell you why I am convinced we're on the verge of one of the greatest discoveries ever, it is necessary to examine the origins of the Atlantis story, and to look at some of the other theories put forward by those who, like me, have become obsessed by this most intriguing of mysteries.

Only by discounting those theories can we really make the argument for the existence of Atlantis.

The Greek philosopher Plato wrote the story of Atlantis in about 400 BC. He claimed that two centuries earlier, Egyptian priests had given an account of this flourishing civilization to the Greek statesman Solon.

Atlantis had been peopled by god-like beings, but there had been a terrible conflict between them and the Athenians and the continent--described as a large island with a great city in the south within a few miles of the sea--had been destroyed in 'a day and a night' in a great catastrophe that plunged it under the waves.

The priests blamed the corrupt populace of Atlantis for this disaster. They had, according to Plato, become so decadent that the gods decided to destroy them.

Inevitably, most historians have dismissed Atlantis as a myth--some have even called it the first science fiction story. Yet anyone who takes the trouble to read Plato's account will be struck by its minute detail. If it was simply some kind of moral fable about human corruption, why was such embellishment necessary?

For more than 2,000 years the story of Atlantis continued to fascinate historians. But the first really serious attempt to prove that it had, indeed, existed, was made in the 19th century by an Irish American congressman called Ignatius Donnelly, whose massive book, "Atlantis, The Antediluvian World," has been in print ever since and remains the basis for many of today's theories.

According to Donnelly, the 'great original race' from Atlantis invented gunpowder and paper. They were the first to manufacture iron and to make astronomy an exact science.

All this knowledge, he said, they imparted to people less advanced than themselves--such as those in Egypt, which was one of their colonies. He took the view that Atlantis had once been in the mid-Atlantic, since Plato had said that it was 'beyond the Pillars of Hercules'--generally assumed to mean the Strait of Gibraltar.

Donnelly speculated that the Azores are the only part of this great continent that now remains above water. But there is a powerful reason for rejecting this view. Underwater scans of the bed of the Atlantic reveal no sign of a sunken continent.

That seems conclusive enough, but not all Donnelly's ideas should be dismissed, as I discovered when, in 1979, I was drawn into the quest for Atlantis.

Someone sent me for review a book called "Serpent In The Sky" by John Anthony West, who was arguing, with a wealth of historical learning, that Ancient Egypt came into existence long before 3,000 BC--the date most historians accept.

He said that it inherited its civilization wholesale from a far older culture--Atlantis itself. The great Sphinx of Giza, West suggested, was built by survivors from the catastrophe of Atlantis.

It must therefore be thousands of years older than we believe. His reasoning was that the Sphinx was not weathered by wind-blown sand, as is generally accepted, but by rainfall.

And though the kind of heavy rain that might have caused such weathering did used to occur in Egypt, it hadn't happened for thousands of years.

West had persuaded a professor of geology named Robert Schoch to accompany him to Egypt to look at the Sphinx. And Schoch had agreed, the wear and tear was due to water-weathering, not sand-weathering, he declared.

Schoch though that the Sphinx might well have been built nearly 5,000 years earlier than anyone had supposed--not 2,500 BC, at the same time as the Great Pyramids, but closer to 7,000 BC, long before Egyptian civilization was supposed to have started.

I went to meet West, and travelled with him to Egypt. As we stood in the Sphinx enclosure, I saw that its walls are clearly weathered by water that ran down the rock face, cutting channels.

West had to be right. The builders of the Sphinx came from elsewhere--and the likeliest place was Atlantis.

My search for evidence of Atlantis has taken me to many distant shores--Egypt, Mexico, Bolivia, where on the roof of the Andes I saw the massive ruins of the 10,000 year old city of Tiahuanaco.

I have heard and been entranced by probably a dozen theories of the location of Atlantis. It has been suggested that it's in Costa Rica, that it is hidden in the rain forests of Brazil, that it lies buried deep under the sea off the coast of Spain--even that it was north of the British Isles.

In the Sixties, a new theory emerged when archaeologists discovered an underground city on the island of Santorini, in the Mediterranean. Santorini was destroyed in a giant volcanic explosion around 1,500 BC, which ripped the core out of the island and turned it into little more than a gigantic crater.

The theory's proponents argued that Santorini was Atlantis. But they pointed out that the figures and dimensions Plato used to describe the capital city were too large to be credible.

They pointed out that there was a huge plain south of the city, which contained a harbour consisting of concentric circles of canals, all 100 ft deep and 300 ft wide. But who would dig a canal that deep? One hundred feet is the size of five average houses piled on top of one another, and no ship would have that much draught, or even a quarter of it. As to that enormous width, it would take several aircraft carriers.

A Greek professor named A. G. Galanapoulos argues that Santorini is indeed Atlantis, but some copyist had added a nought to many of Plato's figures--after all, 10 ft deep and 30ft wide is perfectly adequate for any canal. And the same, he suggested, is true of the date. Plato said the catastrophe that wiped out Atlantis occurred 9,000 years before the Greek statesman Solon was living.

But if you take a nought off 9,000 you get to 900 years--add 900 years to the date of Solon and that would take us back to 1,500, the approximate date of a great volcanic eruption that devastated the Mediterranean.

I went off to look at Santorini in the Seventies, and had to agree that Galanapoulos's theory made sense. The devastation had obviously been total and abrupt, as Plato said.

But what about his statement that Atlantis lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules? To that, Galanapoulos replies that the ancient Greeks also referred to the twin capes of Maleas and Taenarum, in southern Greece, as the Pillars of Hercules, and that Santorini is, indeed, beyond these.

My final feeling, however, was that Santorini is too small to have been the continent of Atlantis that Plato described and neither was I convinced by the professor's argument about dates. Although I could accept his views on the measurements of canals and so on, I still felt that the ancients knew the difference between 900 and 9,000 years.

And this explains why I have found the theory of Cyprus the most convincing so far. First of all, Plato says that Atlanteans were at war with Athens, and that is unlikely unless the continent was in the Mediterranean.

But the key to this theory, put forward by American explorer Robert Sarmast, is that Atlantis was lost under the sea some 11,000 years ago when, he says, the Mediterranean as we know it was formed.

This view, propounded by Sarmast, will provoke violent reactions among earth-scientists, who have always taken it for granted that the Mediterranean was formed five million years ago, when the Atlantic broke through a gap in a land mass and mountain range running form southern Spain to north Africa forming a giant pond.

How do they know? They don't. It is just an informed guess based upon the fact that in geology, most changes take a million years of so.

But what we do know is that the last great ice age began about one and a half million years ago, and came to an end about 15,000 years ago. We know, too, that there were many tremendous floods at this time, as the ice melted and vast northern lakes poured billions of gallons of fresh water into the sea.

Sarmast believes, therefore, that the Mediterranean is a much younger sea than previously thought, formed at the end of the last ice age. But before that happened a great civilization flourished on the floor of the basin at a time when the area was still protected by a range of low mountains between what is now Gibraltar and north Africa. The civilization was Atlantis.

The floodwaters from the melting ice meant that the Atlantic eventually began to leak through a gap near Gibraltar, and into the Mediterranean, though at first the leak was but a trickle.

And Atlantis was able to thrive for many thousands of years before the trickle became the flood that eventually proved its undoing.

Furthermore, Sarmast argues that years of that research has convinced him that Cyprus fits Plato's detailed specifications of Atlantis more than any other site--but only if you remember the main argument of Galanopoulos: that Plato's measurements for the city of Atlantis are obviously too big.

Plato says there was a fertile plain in front of the great city, 340 miles long by 230 wide, on which farmers grew food for the Atlanteans. But that is about half the size of England, and would certainly provide more food than any city could eat, even London.

Plato says there was a rectangular ditch around the whole plain, into which several rivers were diverted to collect water. But that would provide enough water for ten cities. Anyone can see that this would be more convincing if it was all divided by ten.

Besides, Sarmast bases his theory on maps of the Mediterranean sea bed to the south and west of Cyprus, and which show a vast undersea plain 23 miles long by 34 miles wide. Knock off the two noughts from Plato's Atlantis plain and you have the exact dimensions of the Cyprus plain. As to the Pillars of Hercules, Sarmast points out that the entrance to the Bosphorus was also known by that name, and Cyprus is beyond this to the East.

If we also take into account the fact that civilization began in the Middle East, we have one of the most convincing theories of Atlantis that, in my opinion, has ever been suggested.

Which is why I have decided to travel to Cyprus next month with a group of Atlantis enthusiasts, then sail with Sarmast on the ship that will photograph the seabed.

What he is hoping to find are the remains of temples, monuments and ancient artifacts and the huge circular canals. 'Atlantis City' itself would have been on the edge of this plain, and even 10,000 years of submersion cannot have destroyed the magnificent architecture, described by Plato, with its bridges, palaces and inner-harbours.If the giant stone blocks of Tiahuanaco can survive 10,000 years, then those of Atlantis certainly can. And I think it likely that, before long, we shall find them.

Thought this might be of interest:

Cataclysm! 9500 BC

by

David Lewis

Index of Issue 12

In recent prehistory, possibly as late as 9,500 B.C. (the date ascribed by Plato to the sinking of Atlantis), a profoundly traumatic phenomenon plagued the earth. This event, the result of a distant cosmic explosion, caused severe volcanic eruptions, massive earthquakes, catastrophic flooding, and the upheaval of the world's mountain ranges. The earth's axis may have tilted, or its crust been violently displaced. Continents rose and sank. Mass extinctions of plants and animals followed, and a period of eerie global darkness.

The catastrophe struck suddenly, researchers report. Those that survived sought refuge in caves and high mountains, the record of their plight preserved to this day in hundreds of ancient deluge/conflagration myths from virtually every cultural tradition. Scientists gathered the evidence for such a catastrophe in the last century, and more recently, but explained away parts of it through ice age theory, now known to be fundamentally flawed. The rest of the evidence, until now, science has been unable to explain.

No, this is not the synopsis of Hollywood's next disaster extravaganza, nor a rehashing of Immanual Velikovsky's catastrophe theory, but the product of serious research and the subject of two soon-to-be released books written by independent experts in the field of recent prehistory. The compelling evidence assembled by these authors reveals the existence of a prehistoric reality that casts orthodox notions about early man into the realm of mere guess work. The books are: Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9,500 BC, by D. S. Allan and J. B. Delair, and Earth Under Fire: Humanity's Survival of the Apocalypse, by Paul LaViolette.

ORTHODOX ASSUMPTIONS
With its long-standing preference for uniformitarianism (the doctrine that nothing sudden occurred in prehistory, only slow evolutionary and geological changes), modern science has discounted what was taken for granted in the last century: that hard evidence reveals a global catastrophe occurred recently on Earth. That bias, coupled with the dogma of scientific materialism, the presumption that all existence, even consciousness, evolved from matter alone, remains the unproven basis upon which conventional theories of human origins rest.

Ice age theory was born about 180 years ago, in connection with studies carried out in the Alps. Geology was then only just being born. Pioneers of the day took most fossil evidence as having resulted from the Great Flood of tradition, the benchmark in world history before the birth of modern science, promulgated by classical writings and religion, and tied to beliefs that the world is a mere 4,000-6,000 years old. Geology, however, as a systematic science, found the earth was millions of years old, and that rain-induced flooding could not account for much of the geological devastation that occurred at the time of the mass extinctions. As the scientific movement adopted its uniformitarian dogma, it sought to explain away all prehistory in purely materialistic terms, discarding anything that smacked of superstition or catastrophism. Scientists of the day, in effect, threw out the baby with the floodwater, adopting prejudices about human origins and past civilizations that dominate to this day.

Within this skewed climate, science ascribed some of the hard evidence of a great cataclysm in recent prehistory to the movement of glaciers, which undoubtedly took place in some areas. But relying on this theory alone necessitated a full blown ice age, then ice ages of greater duration and severity to account for mounting evidence that something extraordinarily severe had struck the planet, something that wiped out most of the world's mammals, uplifted mountain ranges, caused widespread volcanic explosions, carved valleys and fjords, and left massive deposits of stone and gravel strewn across the globe's land masses.

LETTING THE FACTS SPEAK
To understand more fully the story told by the scientific record, rather than what may be described as the contrived positions of orthodoxy, we spoke with J. B. Delair, a long-time researcher in the field of recent prehistory, and coauthor of Cataclysm!, published in '95 in the U.K. (to be released in the U.S. early this fall by Bear & Co. with introduction by Rand Flem-Ath).

Delair told us that in his career as a researcher he had come upon many very strange anomalies including massive fossil records in bone caves, where the remains of countless numbers of incompatible prehistoric animals, saber-toothed tigers, lions, wolves, bison, rhinoceros, mammoth, were found washed into deep subterranean recesses, animals that perished in recent prehistory all over the world. Human beings, in many instances, were found in similar conditions, radio carbon dated to times consistent with the animal deaths, and from ethnic groups as diverse as European, Eskimo and Melanesian, as in the case of a find in China. Similar finds have been recorded in India, Brazil, North America and the Balkans. Geologists have also recorded finding the remains of hundreds of humans who died from natural causes in caves, apparently seeking refuge from the catastrophe.

As a result of this, I wasn't at all happy with some of the explanations, Delair said. One of these being the ice age, another being the chronology.

The key to unlocking the problem of the anomalies proved elusive. But Delair discovered he was not alone in his quest. He received a phone call from Dr. D.S. Allan, a biologist and researcher in the field of earth severance (shifting land masses), who shared similar interests, and a partnership was born. Coupling their talents and interdisciplinary backgrounds, they labored for years and found what appears to be the missing link that unlocks the secret of recent prehistory, global cataclysm.

Allan and Delair discovered that, contrary to scientific dogma, certain events took place very rapidly in earth's prehistory, such as the shifting of land masses, as in the case of their own British Isles, detached from the European mainland just 6,000 years ago.

Allan, a Cambridge University doctor of philosophy, versed in physics, chemistry and biology, had already discovered that many of the same types of plants and animals have existed in different parts of the world when they should not, being separated by deserts or water. Delair characterized his knowledge of anomalous fossil evidence and Allan's of biological as two sides of the same coin....bits and pieces of the same puzzle.

After years of work, those pieces would fit together, buttressed by an ignored scientific record that, when fully revealed, proved stunning.

It throws a monkey wrench into almost everything, even evolution, Delair told us, when asked about the implications of his work. Evolution cannot always be a question of the survival of the fittest. You can have a sudden event that can wipe out the best and worst, the survival of the luckiest in those instances. he said.

Using carbon dating, the resources of the British Museum and the Cambridge University library, Delair and Allan established a time frame for the anomalous fossils, which in turn set a time frame for the event that caused their sudden demise.

The main thing is the dating of the fossils, Delair said. They are very, very recent in geological parlance, although quite old in human history. The changes they signify are enormous, because there are dislocations in entire faunas and floras by thousands of miles. There are also a lot of very abnormal burials. You get sea animals alongside birds and land animals, coal alongside tropical sea urchins, and all sorts of funny things.

CONTRIVED SCIENCE
It (the ice age) was an invention, Delair stated flatly, and in part a reaction to what early geologists and the scientific movement as a whole considered superstition, the Flood/Conflagra-tion legends. The original idea of an ice age going back millions of years, ebbing and flowing across the northern and southern hemispheres near the poles, just doesn't stand up to scrutiny, as you can see from our writings. We've drawn upon the literature which was, in fact, full of objections (to ice age notions), on geological and biological grounds.

Many Norwegian fjords, for example, thought to have been carved by ice sheets sliding down from mountains, are open ended. There is nowhere for the glaciers to have come down from, Delair said. The fjords were gigantic fissures, filled up with ice at some later time and smoothed by some ice action, but not caused by ice. So-called evidence for an ice age having occurred, more over, such as striation (grooved or ridged rocks) and erratically strewn boulders, supposedly the result of glacial movements, occurs in parts of the globe where an ice age is known not to have taken place.

Research funding that rewards conventional results, Delair told us, is partly responsible for perpetuating erroneous assumptions, along with trying to fit all the evidence into the same worn out theory, necessitating longer, geographically broader, and more numerous ice ages. Also, Delair notes, fitting the pieces of this grand puzzle of prehistory together requires expertise in a variety of fields. Dr. Allan, what's more, devoted his retirement to this study, a concentration of effort few, if any, conventionally employed researchers would be able to accomplish.

The picture Allan, Delair and others paint, supported by a great deal of field evidence, resembles a catastrophe of mythic proportions. Ice age theory, on the other hand, fails time and again to account for the overwhelming field evidence. The devastation proves to have been so great, in fact, that nothing of earthly origin could have been responsible. Not even a comet or asteroid, Allan and Delair say, could have wreaked such severe damage. The destructive agent, they tell us, would not have been necessarily very large, but would have been magnetically powerful, an exploding star, a supernova, that hurled one or more pieces of its fiery mass our way, upsetting the axes and orbits of various planets through magnetic influence, as it moved like a pinball through our solar system for about nine years. The event wreaked horrific trauma upon various planets, and caused Earth to convulse, they say, but amounted to a minor incident in cosmic terms.

COSMIC EXPLOSIONS
Evidence of a supernova explosion, in the form of aluminum 22 (along with other scientific and mythological evidence), found in concentration at the edge of our solar system, helped Allan and Delair conclude that a stellar blast probably caused the massive destruction. Iron ore in the earth from 11,000 years ago, its magnetic polarity violently reversed, also testifies to a powerful, extraterrestrial encounter with a magnetically powerful agent at the same time period.

Dr. Paul LaViolette, author of Earth Under Fire, discovered evidence of a different sort of cataclysm, a volley of cosmic waves resulting from an explosion in the galactic core. Entering our solar system, this galactic super wave (the most powerful energetic phenomenon in the galaxy) would have interrupted the solar wind's ability to repel most intruding cosmic dust particles, letting the interstellar wind, in effect, have its way with us.

LaViolette, a systems scientist and physicist, found high concentrations of cosmic dust in undisturbed polar ice from Greenland at ice-age depths. He determined the amount of cosmic dust in the ice samples by measuring the amount of iridium, a metal that is rare on Earth but abundant in extraterrestrial material. The old uniformitarian assumption was that the rate of cosmic dust depositing in the earth would not have change over millions of years, but LaViolette found unusually high concentrations in his samples, and other evidence of a cosmic visitor during ice age times.

In Earth Under Fire, a synthesis of astrophysics and ancient mythical and esoteric traditions, LaViolette details the case for the super wave phenomenon having recently passed through our solar system. He includes, in his body of evidence, the discovery by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft of narrow grooves, like that of a phonograph record, in the rings of Saturn, which, if millions of years old as uniformitarians maintain, would have banded together by now. LaViolette explains how the super wave would have caused the rings to appear as they do, even as Allan and Delair describe how a super nova chunk, would have disrupted the orbital paths and axial rotations of neighboring planets, indications that something of immense proportions came our way in recent prehistory. Some researchers stated, even before the Voyager visit, that Saturn's rings may be a mere 10,000-20,000 thousand years old, within the time period LaViolette, Allan, and Delair say the cataclysm took place.

Within months of the event, LaViolette says, a shroud of cosmic dust would have caused severe climatic changes on Earth, periods of darkness, severe cold, and then extreme heat, massive flooding, and incendiary temperatures as the dust interacted with the Sun, causing it to go into an active, flaring state, LaViolette said in a recent interview. If you could imagine the worst solar storm that's ever occurred and beef that up a thousand or hundred thousand times, that would be going on continuously...And then you have the possibility that a flare event could engulf the Earth.

WHAT THE ANCIENTS KNEW
LaViolette builds a scientific and mythological foundation for cataclysm as a cyclical event, a recurrence of galactic core explosions in 26,000 year cycles, a period that relates to the precession of the equinoxes. This is the duration of one Great Year recognized by the ancient Greeks, Zoroastrians, and Chinese. Hindu scriptures recognize the same cycle, a succession of declining and advancing ages that seem to relate to our solar system's orbit around the galactic core, the apparent astrological focus of the Central Sun of existence, Brahma, conscious experience of which results in transcendental ecstasy and liberation from cycles of mortal suffering, or karma, not the least of which would be recurrent cataclysms.

The Galactic core explosion cycle is another important cycle that Earth must reckon with, LaViolette urges, citing numerous ancient traditions, many of which reveal that advanced astronomical knowledge, and therefore advanced human beings, existed in precataclysmic times.

The zodiac, in fact, LaViolette says, probably came down to us as a cryptogram, a time capsule, designed to alert us to the ongoing emanations from the galactic core, and that the sphinx and pyramids of the Giza plateau stand as an astronomical memorial to the great catastrophe. The figures of the zodiac, Delair told us, appear in most catastrophe myths. And the universality of this time capsule's message, the knowledge of cosmic cycles, is hard to ignore. LaViolette and others find it encoded in numerous myths, in cultural and mystical traditions, and in the world's megalithic architecture (see The Orion Mystery, Robert Bauval, Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock, and The Message of the Sphinx, Hancock and Bauval). As these commentators point out, the ancient myths speak universally of a sea-faring people who seem to have been the guardians of advanced knowledge. Their universal message, apparently passed down from a forgotten pre-cataclysmic world, urges human progress and harmony with the source of all creation.

Almost unavoidably then, LaViolette, Allan and Delair, Hancock, and Bauval (see also Thompson and Cremo's Hidden History of the Human Race) reveal that recent prehistory was not at all what modern science, burdened by its prejudices, has erroneously assumed. A past cloaked in mystery comes to light, objectively, and the way mankind sees himself must profoundly change. A rich, diverse body of work has accumulated, interdisciplinary in nature, filled not only with ancient lore but hard evidence that supports timeless traditions. This body of work, moreover, discredits the dogma western science has promoted regarding human origins, the very nature of man.

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