January 15, 2020 • 66 mins
The legendary civilization of Atlantis was first mentioned in the works of Plato, in dialogues that claimed to recount information from translations of ancient Egyptian texts. And people have been searching for this city ever since. So what was Atlantis, exactly? A metaphor, a work of fiction ... or a real, physical place? Join the guys as they explore the fact and fiction of the ancient legend of Atlantis.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt, my name
is Nolan. They call me Ben. We are joined as
always with our super producer Paul, Mission controlled decand most importantly,
you are you. You are here, and that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know. It occurs to
me that although this episode is coming out in January,
(00:46):
most likely this is the last episode we are going
to record for the year. We're recording this at the
very end of Yes, the Lost Decade. Is that what
it's It's interesting because we're also covering something today that
(01:08):
many of our fellow listeners have asked us to cover
for years and years and years. We have touched upon this,
we have mentioned it, but as as you all know,
longtime listeners, when we first set out creating this show,
we generally wanted to go for more obscure things, things
that were on the edges of the map, things that
(01:31):
mainstream people probably would not have encountered before, things that
used to be on the map, right, So we we
skipped over initially things like the jfk assassination Area fifty one,
you know, the moon landing, all those all those History
channel hits. Uh. Today we are finally, we're finally investigating
(01:53):
something that has been a long time coming or a
long time going, if you, if you believe the story,
and that is the tale of Atlantis, Uh not Atlanta Atlantis.
So here are the facts, according to the folklore, the
stories that we we all know. Atlantis was a civilization
(02:16):
located on a mysterious island, and in ancient times we
do very much mean ancient. This civilization was a seat
of great culture and learning. Like later seats of learning
such as Alexandria. People came to Atlantis from far and
wide to learn the secrets of technology, to divide the
(02:39):
workings of the world and the gods, the heavens in
the firmament. We know that it was a city laid
out on this island in sort of concentric rings, and
it had a central canal going through to the center.
But Atlantis had some issues. Despite the fact that it
was so advanced in architecture, art and technology, it was
(03:03):
destroyed nine thousand years ago, nine thousand, six hundred years ago,
when a wave and earthquake sent by Poseidon, the god
of waves and the sea and earthquakes. Uh, when Poseidon
got tired of them, he uh he sent these natural
disasters or divine disasters, to punish the inhabitants for their
(03:27):
wicked waves. Wait a minute, though, weren't the gods pretty
bacchanalien themselves The interesting choice of words there, yeah, uh.
Any study of Greco Roman gods, even the Old Testament
god of um, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, shows a pretty
clear study in hypocrisy. You know what I mean, do
(03:49):
as I say, not as I do. I think. Didn't
Zeus come down to Earth in the form of like
a bull, aram, a goose goose? So he couldn't uh?
So he could with his right and uh he stayed
in goose form when he did that, or the way
the story goes, Yeah, and the uh. You know, that's
very common in tales of pantheons. But so back to Atlantis,
(04:15):
we can already see how this story in folklore has
so much in common with similar tales from around the world.
Advanced civilizations laid low by divine forces, and you know,
some of the specifics are common to other stories. Gods
seem too often punish ancient communities via floods, and we
(04:37):
can see this as a parable of sorts. You can
choose to read it in that way, which is a warning,
right tell tell people what not to do or else
lest the be punished. Cautionary tale. Yes, parable. The first
mention of Atlantis. We do have the earliest known mention
(04:58):
of Atlantis. Very interesting comes to us from Plato in
his dialogues Tamus and Critias. Plato describes Atlantis as not
just an island, but a huge island. Says it's larger
than Libya and Asia Minor put together. He also says
that he is relaying this story uh third or even
(05:19):
fourth hand, which will will get to uh because there's
a character in his dialogus character Critius c R I
T I A S. And this guy says, okay, I
heard the story of Atlantis from my grandfather, who heard
it from Athenian politician named Solon. This was three years
(05:39):
before Plato was around, and that this guy, this politician,
in turn, learned it from an Egyptian priest. And the
Egyptian priest is the one who says it happened nine
thousand years ago. Atlantis was protected by the god Poseidon.
They worshiped, and they made the son of Poseidon like
a demi god kind of you alluded to earlier in
(06:01):
all Uh. They made his son king of the islands.
His name was Atlas, so he ruled the island and
the ocean surrounding it. And as the Atlanteans came up
in the world, as they became more powerful geo politically,
their ethics declined. The place was a washing corruption in
depravity and perversion. Their armies met a lot of success. Eventually,
(06:25):
according to the story, they conquered um parts of North Africa.
They went on to conquer at least part of Italy,
the Etruscan part of Italy, and then eventually Ah, the
people of Athens posset up with some like minded Atlantis haters,
(06:46):
and they drove the folks back. They drove them out
of Italy, they drove them out of Egypt and North Africa.
But at this point they were still very much in play.
They just got their butts whipped once and they were
planning to do more damage. And then Plato's writings continue
about Atlantis again in that dialogue, this time to me
(07:08):
Is and he writes that this law civilization was in
fact in a location, a place where you could go.
It was real, um. He he calls it the Pillars
of Hercules, the the area where this where Atlantis existed,
and these days like if you looked it up right now, like, hey,
what what are the pillars of Hercules, siri Um, it
(07:31):
would be called the Strait of Gibraltar, which is aknown thing.
You can look that up right now. You could travel there. Yeah,
you could go right now if you want it. And
um Plato argues that despite being technologically advanced and having
a pretty well organized society, the people of Atlantis um
didn't have infrastructure in place to protect them from the
(07:56):
wolf that was at their door constantly, basically the threat
of flood and earthquakes. Um. You know, whether or not
they were actually sent by gods or not, they had
absolutely were basically out there completely unprotected. Uh. And that
great island of Atlantis, along with the city that was
built upon it, did sink over the course of a
(08:19):
single night and day right around nineties b c. E. Now,
that would be intense right right, because again this is
larger than Libya and Asia minor. This thing is almost
its own continent. How could the entire thing be gone
within forty eight hours? But especially by floods, especially by
floods and earthquakes. Earthquakes makes a little more sense, that's
(08:42):
the question. That So it means the sea level just
rose so high that it swallowed up everything. Well, it
depends on the kind of tectonic shift, too, because the
sea could have risen or the island could have just so,
here's the deal. That's that's this where you could read
the full quotations in in these dialogues, but Plato's tail
(09:07):
spoiler alert has a number of vagaries and plot holes. First,
he doesn't stop at saying that the inhabitants of Atlantis
worshiped Poseidon. He says that they were blood descendants of Poseidon.
And this links the more with myth than it does
with any tribal community that would have been extant at
(09:27):
the time, you know what I mean Atlantis. Also, I
like that you pointed out that they had a good
social system here, because they did have a constitution that
was eerily incredibly similar to a constitution that Plato outlined
as a good idea in the Republic, So so it's uh,
(09:51):
it does have it has some troubling ties to fiction already,
even ancient Greeks at the time. We're not or whether,
to your point, Matt, whether Plato's story was meant to
be taken a history or as a metaphor and allegory.
You know what I mean. It's kind of like um,
the Brayer Rabbit ASoP fables. You know, no one there
(10:15):
was no one really thought there was a talking rabbit, right. Uh,
some people did. I'm sure no want to ruin that
for any of us listening. But in the written history books, right,
it was never written, oh, once a talking rabbit did
this and his name was this, right. And we have
to emphasize this part because there were strong doubts about
(10:36):
the veracity of this tale from the very beginning. And
there were two more issues that come into play with
the timeline that I think raise serious questions about this story.
Just just from the jump, before we get anywhere near
the most recent like millennium, there were problems with the story.
The number one on our list here is that when
(11:00):
Plato talked about Atlantis, this is the first time it
had been mentioned before. The The phrase Atlantis, the place,
the thing, just the name itself. Atlantis was the first
time it was ever mentioned when Plato wrote it down.
So even though he says it happened nine thousand years ago,
no one talked about it. This Egyptian priest who so
(11:23):
willingly told his tale to an Athenian politician apparently never
talked to anybody else about it at all. And it
was just this one conversational thread through millennia. Why But
it's also, like I mean, it references the intervention of gods,
as though that is just of course that's what happens, right,
(11:45):
So you gotta wonder is he making up some sort
of teachable moment kind of tail or where is he
getting this info from. There's another aspect here, the second
part that I think is also I want to say damning.
But it doesn't make the tail look good. If this
was rediscovered knowledge, and if it was legitimate, how come
(12:08):
none of Plato's contemporaries, none of Aristotle's contemporaries deigned to
mention it. It's a lot like imagine imagine aliens were discovered,
extraterrestials were discovered, they were real, and you turn on
your local cable news to hear about it, and you
find that only one cable outlet is reporting on it,
(12:29):
and it's Fox News. It's only Fox News, and it's
some intense cataclysmic thing, right right, right, Um, it's a
global events. You know, why is only one source telling
us those are pretty uh, those are pretty important pieces.
Those are things we would think if this were a
real place, we would have heard about a prior to Plato,
(12:50):
or we would have at least heard as contemporaries saying
something about Atlanta's I would say, right here, just we're
gonna explore a little more as we go. But you know,
around the time that Plato is walking around, um, there
have been quite a bit of his history written down
by that point, right, However, there would still be at
(13:13):
that time countless um of tales that had only been
passed down through word of mouth, right, vocal histories that
would still that we existed across the planet at that
time that perhaps never did make it, you know, on
papyrus or whatever, whatever instrument and piece of material you're
(13:36):
going to write it down on. Just we we have
to put that out there. As in there's still that room,
which is where our show comes in for speculation even
though these things are going against it from the jump right,
and these valid concerns did not did not stop the party.
The legend of Atlantis grew over time, from the time
(13:58):
of Plato to the time that you were hearing this episode.
Numerous later authors would argue that Plato had part of
the story right, but that he was let's call it
incorrect or confused on multiple accounts. And just like any
other game of telephone, people embellished this thing. They tailored
it to fit their own notions. So the original story
(14:22):
was rephrased as it was retold over and over and
over again, and soon the residents of Atlantis were no
longer descended from God's They were actually aliens or hybrids
of aliens. And these people who believe this would argue
that Plato and his contemporaries were just We're just framing
(14:45):
extraterrestrials through a social lens that they could understand. And
then they would say, well, the city's technology was super advanced.
They had no idea how advanced it was. They used
energy crystals, and they affected global um oceanic patterns. They
(15:05):
affected the world in more ways than we know. As
a matter of fact, you'll read some fringe author saying
you can you can clearly tell that all of the
quote unquote paranormal disturbances in the Bermuda Triangle are ultimately
traceable back to Atlantis and the infernal technology they created.
This is not something you would read and you know,
(15:27):
scientific American. Just to be fair, Hey, that is a
fun thought experiment that the the crystals have gone haywire
or continue to function in some way down at the
bottom of the ocean somewhere. I like the idea, sure,
and you know, technology functioning in automation after its creators
(15:51):
have gone is is something that very likely become real
in our modern day, you know, like the Ray Bradberry
story that will come soft reigins, or like all the
all the deep space exploratory vehicles that we've put out
that you know, going on one way trips. We're never
going to see him again. Your yes, And I'm also
(16:14):
gonna put it here really quickly just for you guys
to think about. Uh we I think we can collectively
see where the ancient Aliens story kind of meets up there.
As you were talking about the the residents turning from
descendants from God's into descendants of aliens or you know,
extraterrestrials that would be interpreted, as you said, as as God's.
That is getting us closer closer, I say, to something
(16:40):
that would be within the realm of reality, from from
God's at least for from our you know, understanding of
the way the world functions right now, our limited understanding
of it. But we can see, we can see the
reasoning behind some of these things. That's not to say
that any of it is true. Right again, you know,
(17:02):
the people who were alive in that time and in
the time when players writing people who were alive, we're
not dumb. They were not cognitively that different from people today.
They were you know, we're we're explainers, were pattern finders.
We we want to understand the world and we think
(17:23):
it's worth understanding. So they were just as you're saying
that they were. They were just putting the inexplicable through
the lens of what they thought would explain it. And
today you can find multiple people still doing the same thing.
You can find for instance, um, you know, the big
the big shift that occurred in folklore, uh fairly recently
(17:48):
over the span of time, was that stories of changelings
and abductions by the uncealy or the fae turned into
stories of abductions by extraterrestrials or aliens or creatures from
a different dimension. We're just sort of we're we're we're
cooking the same dish with different ingredients and we're subbing
(18:09):
some stuff out, but the stories stay the same. And
today you can find a lot of people arguing that
Atlantis was not only a real place, but also the
Plato got the location wrong. It's it's kind of like,
we're okay, so let's say it's it's like George Lucas
comes up with Star Wars and people say, we love
(18:31):
your original idea, but we're gonna change everything about it.
But don't You're right, there's something called star Wars, but
here's what you got wrong wrong about it. So it's
it's almost like there's this um, this centuries long uh
group of producers saying, Plato, baby Atlantis, love it, love
(18:51):
everything about it. But you know, when you think about it,
it's more it's it's more like, uh, it's it's more
like a mute to a Caribbean thing, right, right, I mean,
if you really just walk through it Uh, yeah, it's uh,
it's also you know it's it's or someone else says
it's move a South China Sea. You know, I've been
(19:11):
looking at that, and that's just the kind of game
that people play. Josh Clark, our longtime friend, host of
one of our pure podcasts stuff, you should know, he
wrote about this and he had a good quote where
he says, Atlantis is in the Caribbean, Atlantis is in
the South China Sea, Atlantis is in Switzerland. And that's
(19:33):
really for every one of those locations. You'll have people
arguing that you have also we've even read that Atlantis
was somehow a part of Antarctica. Yes, read that. Yeah, yeah,
they don't really stop. But the big question is, right
with all of this, that we know, all these stories
that have been told and how they've evolved, where where
(19:54):
are we left right now as we enter when it
comes to Atlantis. Yeah, mean that that really begs the question. Um, okay,
if this is a thing, then where's the proof you
know what elevates it just from the realm of fantasy.
Uh and in a parable kind of situation to hard facts. Um,
(20:15):
you know, where is the proof of this lost civilization
that fits the description of Atlantis. Yeah, and has anyone
actually found something. We'll tell you when we come back
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for an extra three months free. Here's where it gets crazy.
Well yes, actually, oh yes, according to according to the people, Yes,
multiple people believe that they at least know where the
(22:25):
mythic civilization of Atlantis was located, and some people believe
that they have found it and they've been searching for
this for a long time now. Remember we're talking about
two different kinds of Atlantis. One kind of Atlantis is
the o g One. The Plato described some utopian society
(22:47):
downfall punished by the gods. A god's a real uh
b b Atlantis uh you know, was by Gibaltar. The
pillars of Hercules, and then the second Atlanta is the
one that has all the bells and whistles of folklore
and all of the personal attitudes of people writing about it. Later,
(23:09):
in the first centuries of the Christian era, people didn't
really talk too much about Atlantis. They said, you know
what Aristotle wrote it, he was quoting Plato. Those guys
are stand up dudes. They taught us a lot, so
we don't need to worry about it. In the sixteen
hundreds and six there it was, of course, Francis Bacon,
(23:31):
the English philosopher and scientists, who published a utopian novel
titled The New Atlantis. And just like Plato, he was
mainly I don't know. He was taking the story of
Atlantis in a different direction. He wasn't saying it was
necessarily true. He was more interested in exploring the ideas
of politically and scientifically advanced society on a previously unidentified
(23:55):
island that did amazing thing, that did amazing things. In
sixteen seventy nine there was a Swedish scientist named Olas
Rudbeck who published a book called Atlands A, T, L,
A and D. And this this is a work in
four volumes, and over the course of this this is interesting.
(24:16):
This is what you know. I haven't read all four volumes,
but here's what happens. Essentially throughout this four volume work.
Rudbeck is trying assiduously to prove that the thing Plato
called Atlantis was located in Sweden, which is, by the way,
(24:37):
where he's from, and that all human languages are descended
from Swedish, which is by the way way he speaks. Yeah. Um,
I mean this is interesting though, because this is the
first time where Atlantis is depicted as being at the
center of humanity, right like the origin point, or at
(24:57):
least um one of one of the bottlenecks where through
the origins of humanity went um through which they traveled,
of connecting everything that's occurred on this earth, all languages,
all peoples, it all centered around Atlantis at one time
before they spread across the earth. And it sounds it
sounds weird now, but you're right, that's that's a huge
(25:17):
pivot point. It's easy to dismiss it, knowing what we
know about the evolution of language today, right that Swedish
was not the basis for things like Mandarin banned to
you know, other other languages that had existed before then. Well,
it also goes against the our the known migratory patterns
(25:40):
of of humanity and you know, our descendants across time.
There's still a lot of questions there, of course, but
it goes against a lot of that. It also would
have even back in the six hundred, has been a
more compelling argument if the guy making it was not
himself Swedish, you know, and there's its smacks of nationalism
and it time people in Sweden, other Swedes thought that
(26:05):
makes sense. Yeah, yeah, Swede and uh. And even then
people out even then there were people who did not
believe Rubis association. Uh. And they were pretty much everybody
who wasn't Swedish said this is this doesn't make sense. Uh.
And we have we have other examples. There are so
(26:26):
many that we can't that we're trying. We've we've got
to sort of emphasize the ones that show us pivot points.
So in the eighteen hundreds, and there was a U.
S congressman, former US congressman with a great name, Ignatious L. Donnelly,
and he published a book called Atlantis the Antidiluvian World,
(26:47):
and this this became a watershed moment for not the
best choice of words for what is sometimes called the
occultization of Atlantis, which is take member again, and we're
talking about two different conceptual places. Uh. This one was
putting the emphasis on suppressed technology, on this idea of
(27:11):
a proto civilization upon which the majority of not all,
of modern civilizations are based. So he says that Atlantis
was more Uh it did. Yes, it did have its capital,
its seat on an island, but it was really an
(27:33):
empire of sorts, and that immigrants from Atlantis had gone
to ancient Europe, to Africa, to the American continents, and
that their heroes would ultimately become the inspiration for gods
and adventurers in other mythology Scandinavian, Hindu, and Greek. So
(27:55):
it's it's similar to rutbix claim, but this was the
more or popular version, was a more sophisticated argument because
now he's saying, not only does language spring from this place,
but everything you see that feels like a common thread
throughout global mythology is because it all comes from the
(28:18):
same place. We're recognizing a pattern, we're categorizing, and it's
one of the most popular Uh, survivor arguments that the
floods and the earthquakes consumed everything in uh a night
and a day, and some people survived, or maybe they
were just happy to be out of town, off the island,
and they brought their knowledge to other ancient people. So
(28:42):
that's why you'll see you'll see arguments that say, well,
look at these unexplained carvings on the you know, towards
the eastern side of South America, Central America, and you'll
see people arguing that, well, the next were actually Atlantean
(29:03):
or those myths in some areas of the world about
mysterious pale people who show up and tell you how
to do things. Uh, those are stories about people from Atlantis.
There's not a lot to back this up, but it's
a very it was for its time. It's a blockbuster.
It's it's something that people love because it ties into
(29:26):
the concurrent rise of an interest in spirituality and science
united that we can, despite the fact that we were
bad at it earlier, our species can in fact understand
the world around us. And so people who were followers
of theosophy and people who were later who would become
(29:47):
what we would later call new agers or people who
have New Age beliefs loved this and they were saying, well,
you know, maybe this means that esp clairvoyance, all these
other things that are dismissed by the scientific Act of
the scientific institutions of these days, maybe they were just
ancient technology and Atlantis had a handle on it and
(30:10):
it's being suppressed. And this is where we enter the
story of a guy named Edgar Casey who did something
really interesting. Have we ever talked about Edgar Casey on
this show? Pretty sure we have, Yeah, yeah, I think
it's mostly in a mention when when we are getting
into some of these realms, I've lost history year something
(30:31):
like that. He comes up. Yeah. So he was a
He was born in eighteen seventy seven. He was a
clairvoyant and he would go into trances. It was known
as the Sleeping Prophet, and in his trances he would
answer questions that people asked about everything from nutrition to
(30:51):
chronic illness, reincarnation, future wars, future events of global import
and he talked about Atlantis as well. His story is
a little bit different from Rudebeck's, a little bit different
from Bacons and so on, because he and and different
from my my boy Ignatius because he had a specific
(31:15):
prediction that appeared and you know where you stand, appeared
to come true. And just a quick mention, we did
talk about Edgar Casey in an episode called Prophecy, Predictions
and Prescience that I think was back in the YouTube
days as well, So there should be a video version
of addition to the oh yes, Ben he got, he
(31:35):
got very specific about a place where, at least some
part of the thing that we call Atlantis, the city
would rise up from the ocean depths at some point,
and he pinpointed. He said he would rise off off
the coast of Bemini, that's right at the western end
of the Bahamas. And he was like, that is definitely
(31:57):
gonna happen. You guys, I'm Edgar Casey. That's my word
and I'm sticking to it. That's how he talked. Atlantis
is gonna hang out over there off Beamini. And guess
what happened in nineteen sixty eight, noll, I don't have
to guess. Okay, it's right here. A diver actually discovered
an underwater rock formation that's now known as the Bamini Road. Oh,
(32:19):
it's fascinating, And whether or not it was man made. Um,
whether it was natural, it's just it's just not known
right now. Well, it appears to be natural. Just gotta
put that out there. It appears to be natural. But
I don't believe it. I don't know man because it
looks sure it could all be just a a pattern
(32:43):
that we're inventing that we attempt to see. But if
you pull up photographs of it, it looks it looks
like these are gigantic uh stones laid out in a pattern, right,
like a like a cobblestone road for giants. You know. Um. Again,
experts have pooh pooed the idea that it was man made. Uh.
(33:04):
It's also sometimes called the Bamini wall and uh they
look like they're limestone blocks laid out in order in
a pattern. It's not hard to find. You can see
a ton of photographs of it. However, there are people
who feel that there's a geological, non human argument for
(33:30):
its creation, and then there are people who feel like
it has been created by some ancient civilization. Wouldn't that
be relatively easy to test for, like in terms of
the composition or the consistency of the material. I'm no
underwater geologist or anything. Which you would think that, you know,
taking a sample, um you could date it at the
very least and then kind of figure out what kind
(33:52):
of material it's made of, and based on that figure
out if it was cobbled together from different stuff or
if it's consistent or whatever. Well, I think this calls
for a Bemani trip. Guys, Yes, Bahamas, of course we
need to go. Can I bring my snorkel, my face mask.
You have to. We're gonna get a snorkel. We're gonna
(34:13):
get face mask, oxygen tanks. We're gonna send Paul down there.
We're going to start in Applebee's on the ocean. Under
the ocean, well, it's gonna be right above like floating. Yeah,
but the events based under the water. You can snorkel
the Bani Road to get there. There we go, There
we go. And shirts, Yeah, I gotta have t shirts. Uh.
(34:35):
And then also flippers. What's the what's the fancy word
for those you know what I'm talking about? Flippers? He's
just calling flippers. I think so fins, maybe fins foot fins.
Here's guys, here's the best part about the Applebee's that's
going to float above the Bani Road is it that
they play Atlantis the Lost Empire. I mean, that will
(34:58):
certainly be a feature. The best part is that when
you go there, you're gonna have your four basic food groups. Okay, okay, beans, bacon, whiskey. Oh,
and there's a fourth one large large. Why did you
just hold up three fingers? I just I've in my head,
I was like, there are four things within my hand
(35:20):
betrayed me. I really did. Okay, hang on, I'm gonna
make eye contact with with Michigan troll sufficient. Okay, we
got we got it. Okay, we got a weird nod though,
I think we can lean into this a little, a
little further, but yeah, yeah, it's it's weird because bmini road.
It's fascinating about this is that it's when people are
arguing it's man made. It's often presented as a relatively
(35:45):
unique thing, but it's it's one of several types of
formations found throughout the world. There's a tessellated pavement in Tasmania.
There's the UH in Oaklaw, Homa. There's this jointed bedrock
that has been called a Phoenician fortress and furnace. UH.
(36:06):
There's a place called Battlement Mesa in Colorado. What was
that when you just mentioned four Battlement? What were Phoenician
Fortress and furnace Oklahoma? Also, I've never heard of that. Well,
that's what it's called. And how much of how much
of that branding is for how much that branding is
(36:27):
to get tourism. It doesn't matter now because I think
it got paved over. So so Bamini Road has some
cons it's got some pros um Like you said, no,
old people are still fighting over it being man made
or a natural thing. Mainly there's b geologists saying that
(36:50):
it's just something that happened. And then it would be
a lot of supporters of Edgar Casey, uh, some of
some of the members of the Association Research and Enlightenment,
the nonprofit formed to study his work, who argue that
it is man made reverdence of a greater civilization. Man
Eckar Casey is just so fascinating. When I was, um,
(37:13):
I was younger, I used to be really into it.
But the the thing, though, is regardless of which way
you look at it, he did say that there was
something there in Bemini. Well, he said it was going
to rise up. Okay, so it wasn't completely right, but
maybe he just meant it would rise up in our
(37:34):
consciousness because we would be made aware of it. Oh,
here we go, all right, I'll play your reindeer games.
So maybe there's some interpretation that we're lacking here. It's true,
it's true. Maybe you know, maybe, like Plato, the arguments
out whether you're speaking allegorically or or literally. So this
(37:55):
is great because we're already touching on some controversies, right.
Two big big problems was solving the mystery of the
Atlantis story. First, as we said, there's so much added
to the original tale if you think about it now,
Plato himself would not recognize a lot of the things
that are considered canonical Atlantis folklore in the modern day.
(38:18):
He would essentially be going, like, what the hell is
an alien? Are you guys thinking of God's because he
might say there's no such thing as there's no such
thing as aliens. You know, one man's alien as another
man's God, right exactly. Uh, And then he would say
something around along the lines of like no, no, if
they were aliens, they've got God's too. They're probably the
(38:39):
same ones. Maybe not, I don't know, see his like
space beside and rules all of it. Who knows. Uh. Secondly,
and this is the most important part of the story,
we know lost civilizations exist. This world is littered with
remnants and ruins of groups, communities, village is, entire cities,
(39:01):
some of which remain unidentified the modern day. We keep
finding evidence of unknown people from ages past, and it
is possible, if not plausible, that one of these groups
may have provided the real world grain of factual sand
upon which this whole pearl of the Atlantis myth slowly
(39:22):
accreated over time. You'll see why a created is a
terrible pun in a minute or so after a word
from our sponsors, and we're back and we're going to
delve into some of these Uh well, well they're not pearls.
(39:45):
What do we call them? We're gonna call them um,
because Atlantis is the pearl, right, These are the grains
that are around the pearl. Sure, yeah, okay, uh if
Atlantis is the if Atlantis is the main dish, Okay,
if Atlantis is the Applebee's entree, Yes, a law civilizations,
(40:07):
these are the the apps in the side dishes, apps
in the the dessert that also comes with it. Okay,
I gotta tell you, I can't place a signature Applebee's
app in my mind. Like I think of Outback, I
think of a bloom and onion, I think Chile's. I
think Southwestern egg rolls, poppers. Maybe, oh snature like Paul's
(40:29):
got him locked a little. I'm trying to see if I, oh, Paul.
I know he's not allowing himself to be recorded, which
I still bothers me, but I'm not gonna leave that alone. Um.
Paul says in our ears, from from his mouth to
our ears, to your ears, that every dish at Applebee's
is a signature dish. Sure, Okay. What I'm thinking, at
(40:53):
least in my my traversings to Applebee's is the chicken
fingers with honey mustard as as an appetizer. Well, you
can also get the classic combo. I pulled up the
menu where you build your own sampler. Essentially, brisk get
case idea is an appetizer, which is crazy because that's
a meal. A case ida is a good meal, But yes,
(41:16):
it is. It is true. Let let Paul be our
Plato of Applebee's and you are Aristotle interpreting that, and
then we'll we'll figure out who the case he is
the agger Casey Later is that you know, I figured
out the perfect Applebee's appetizer, you guys, because it speaks
so loudly to apple to Applebee's. For me, what is it?
(41:37):
Breadsticks with Alfredo sauce. That sounds disgusting? What it's perfect?
I think we're just not high. That's probably a speak
for yourself. But right, so it is true though from
time to time, and this is the crazy tantalizing for
(41:59):
some people, irritating for other people, thing about the search
for Atlantism. Places like this, Every so often archaeologists and
historians do find stuff. They find hard evidence of things, right,
things like a swampy prehistoric city in coastal Spain, um
(42:20):
a suspicious undersea rock formation in the Bahamas. That's the one.
All might be sources for a potential genesis of the
Atlantis story. Of these, of the site with the widest
acceptance is the Greek island of Santorini. Santorini santorini Um.
(42:41):
Ancient Thera was what it was called back in the day,
half submerged remnant of a volcano known as the caldera
Um created by the massive Second millennium BC volcanic eruption
which created a tsunami that could have really, you know,
hastened the collapse of the Minoan civilization. On Create Create,
(43:04):
get it a cret o. No, No, that horrible joke
paid off after the from before their commercial break or metastasized,
depending on whether you think that was chuckle worthy or cancerous. Ah,
all right, well here we are, like a good spinach
and art man, there there is I mean, you're absolutely right,
(43:27):
You're absolutely right, because people do continue to find things.
There's another real life place that has a lot in
common with the Atlantis myth and geographically could be something
that uh, people in Plato's time would have been aware of,
and that is a coastal city called Heli or Helik,
which is located on the Gulf of Corinth in Greece.
(43:51):
So it was and it's heyday the center of the
Acayan League and the Acaan League was like confederacy sorts
of twelve different cities. By the time Plato was coming
up in the game of philosophy, this city was already
hundreds of years old. Like Atlantis, it was wealthy, like Atlantis,
(44:14):
controlled the seas around it, and like Atlantis, it had
established colonies and other nearby areas like Italy. The residents,
like those of Mythic Atlantis, also worshiped Poseidon. For five
days December three seventy three b c e. Witnesses in
(44:40):
the area of this city noticed that vermin and other
small animals snakes in sex, mice and so on, were
leaving the coast and they were going to the mountains
that formed the southern border of the HLIC delta. And
you know, we all know what what a it is.
(45:01):
Modern seismologists have also noted that some animals do appear
to have a preternatural sense, a little bit of predictive
ability when it comes to imminent earthquakes and some of
that low level, low low rumble, that's not rumble, but
the movement that is occurring vibrations, Yeah, that are so
(45:23):
of such a low frequency, but it's just can be sensed.
And oddly enough, you know, we did look in this
into this little bit in earlier episodes, but oddly enough
we see tremendous anecdotal evidence that some animals can predict
the weather. Matt, you had the predict those disasters, Matt,
(45:46):
you had the most uh salient argument there with the
idea that they're very attuned to vibrations that maybe people ignore, right,
or maybe they can also sense barometric changes. Barometric is
where I'm interested. Yeah, I want to study that. I've
always wanted to. I've always wanted to get some more, uh,
(46:06):
some more research on people who can predict the weather
due to an injury flaring up. It's also probably a
pressure change. Yeah, yeah, I always thought that was a superpower.
I still do. If someone if someone who has kind
of a messed up leg tells me that a storm's
come in, I believe them. I'm going inside, you know
(46:29):
what I mean, I'm waiting outside for the first bolt
to hopefully that's very regular, to trust but verify. I
got you. I was just talking about hoping to get
struck by lightning. But yeah, let's keep going. Oh man,
I just want to know. I just want to see
if you'll get powers. I mean, I think surviving a
(46:54):
lightning strike is a superpower as well. You know more,
there are people have been struck by lightning multiple times.
I told you guys before about coach trip from from
my middle school will middle school science teacher coach trip
truck by lightning at least twice. Wait a minute, really
at least twice? I know. I remember one of them
(47:15):
when he was playing cards in his uh in his
dining room, lightning bolt came right down through the chandelier
and got him. It's because gambling is a sin and
and maybe that was it. Coach Tritt was the second time,
like asking That was the second time. I think the
first time was all on the field for was he
being a plato about this? Was he relaying a story
(47:36):
without first hand proof? No? This him Coach trip Did
I struck by light? And it was? He was like,
I got hit twice and I'm still here. Did you
believe them? I did well? I I mean that was
a middle school or do you have any like Powder
esque powers? You know? I didn't notice any, but he
certainly was no good at science. No, I I am,
(47:57):
I'm not. I thought the story Powder was interesting, but
due to us some intense problems I have with the director,
I can't recommend the film. Oh yeah, that guy got
big time. Can't wait? Wait? Who should be? Who directed?
I forget his name? But he was found to have
been participating in a lot of molestation. I believe Victor
(48:18):
Salva also the creative mind behind Jeepers Creepers. Yep, and
uh convicted no child abuser, but studios kept working with him.
He kept Yeah, he actually kept going after being convicted
in nineteen for the abuse of children. And then made
(48:41):
powder and then I watched it and I loved it,
and I watched it again and again, and then made
Jeepers Creepers, which to be fair is I mean, to
be fair, it's it's pretty solid little horror horror flick. Yeah,
it's a It's set a record for the largest Labor
day box office opening never wow. So so anyway, where's
(49:02):
that flood when you need it? You know what I mean?
There we go, There we go. Where's Poseidon? And when
he needs to flood the studio? Well, let's go back
to Let's go back to this area, because so we
said three three BC, the small animals are starting to
leave the coast. And we have to also remember that again,
(49:22):
people of this age were just as smart as people
are today, and just as many problems, just as many
um good points to themselves as a community and as individuals.
But they were also much more in tune with the
natural world around them, you know what I mean? So
they would have recognized that animals were leaving in the
(49:44):
middle of the night. On that fifth day, a huge
earthquake struck the area. And then what happens when there
are earthquakes around the ocean, A tsunami came from the
Gulf of Corinth. In just a matter of minutes. According
to the accounts, the city of Jalika was overcome by
the sea and it's sank just the way that Plato
(50:06):
described Atlantis. It happened very quickly. Do you see what
I mean, nol He explains everything, it seems to So
why let's look, let's look a little bit at the
you know, the geography, and then let's also I don't know,
I think we we let's call this part of the
argument multiple Atlantis is Atlanta. So you've got the Gulf
(50:30):
of Corinth that has several factors that make it particularly
prone to these types of disasters. It is a hotbed
of tectonic plate activity. Um humans were big fans of
living there, and the three rivers that form the delta
also bring lots of silt deposits to cover things up. Right,
when something goes down gets covered over pretty easily. It's right,
(50:53):
and the research, you discovered ancient Helika after twelve years
of digging also found that UM, this ravage of nature
happened more than one time. UM. The attractiveness of the
area and its attendant destructiveness formed a cycle um where
humans established a city and then nature said no, thank you,
(51:15):
removed it, and then after enough time had passed, people
forgot what what what what the problem was? What went
so terribly wrong? And they built another city on top
of the old one. Yep. And they may not have
even known the older one was there. They may have
just said, this soil is great. Look how well everything grows.
It's so abundant. Why has no one built a city here?
(51:39):
Because I have an idea, Oh my gosh, I'm also
going to postulate that maybe they did. Remember, they just went,
We're going to build it better this time time. Yes,
this time will instead of huts of straw, will build
huts of wood, and then huts of brick, and we'll
see if this big bad wolf is real. And like
(52:01):
Coach Trent before his second lightning, you know, they they're like, well,
you know, lightning doesn't strike twice exactly until it does.
That's a different god. That's zeus and they're like, we're
Poseidon folk. So archaeologists like like we've mentioned before, who
discovered a lead game. As they continued their investigation, they
(52:24):
found evidence of more lost cities in the ground. Underneath
that delta silt, they found cities from the Byzantine period
that ended in the fifteenth century CE R a d.
And then under that literally under that, they found a
ruined Roman city from between the second and fourth centuries.
(52:45):
And then under that that's where they found a leak
which was destroyed as we said in three seven three
b c E. But when they weren't expecting here is
where it gets crazy. I just want to set that up.
Continue please. Oh yeah, they they found an early or
ruined city from the Bronze Age. Now we're getting to
the age where we have to kind of approximate things.
(53:07):
They said this one was from around twenty hundred to
twenty three d b C. And then yes, they found
evidence of human civilization or some kind of habitation that
went even further back than that. We're talking Neolithic period.
And you know, if you're estimating, which again has been
(53:29):
said you have to, it would go back to twelve
thousand years ago. How crazy is that were you know,
we set up the scenario kind of jokingly that that
people would build a city here, then it would collapse,
we would forget as humans, so then build again. But
that is precisely what has has been happening there for
(53:51):
thousands of years. All at all, there are six distinct
that like, six distinct community have all been discovered at
this same spot. And they all rose, and they all fell,
and they all got buried by the rivers. And this
is the kind of stuff that makes a legend, right,
(54:13):
And this is where we this is where we leave
the episode today. Is it possible that Atlantis is a
mixture of myth and mis translations? I mean quite quite probably.
And the story is not over. The search for the
city continues. Uh. There's a guy who thinks he's found
the lost city in Spain a few years back, about
(54:35):
sixty miles in inland away from the coast. Uh. And
then of course, most recently in eighteen, a tech company
called Merlin Burrows when public and said they may have
found the lost city of Atlantis, and they think it's
off the coast of Spain near the near the Donana
(54:59):
National Park. They argue that they found the remains of
temples and towers that they date the material between ten
thousand and twelve thousand years old, and they have some
computer representations you can see about this. Uh, it looks interesting,
almost looks Indonesian to me something, at least the representations
(55:21):
that they've placed online right right. And they call themselves
a land and Seat Merlin Boroughs that has calls itself
a land and sea search company specialized in finding forgotten
or hidden things. But if you read their press releases,
they're also quick to point out they have a documentary
on the horizon called Atlantica, which will put all the
(55:43):
questions to rest. Hey, yeah, maybe maybe maybe they've actually
figured it out. Maybe they have, Maybe they have. So
Brian Dunning, who created the Skeptoid podcast UH, describes Atlantis.
He says, the myth of Atlantis is in the simplest
(56:05):
terms and Elvis sighting, and so he's looking at it
more of a pop culture thing. And he says, you know,
he talks about how people kept trying to keep Elvis alive.
And he says similarly, over the course of the two thousand,
almost five years since Plato wrote about Atlantis, and countless
people have tried to match his fiction to some actual
(56:27):
island or geographical structure. We already know the efforts from
Vain because he says Atlantis was never anything but an
allegorical device used briefly by a philosopher who made stuff
like this up all the time. And this is as
established a fact as is the death of Elvis Presley,
because we know that Plato did work with allegory a lot.
(56:51):
This is what I want to put to you, guys. Yeah, okay,
I'm gonna have to organize it in my head quickly
here before I go and three two, Okay, we're there.
Do you guys think that it is possible at all
that there was some kind of advanced civilization that existed
at one point on the Earth, even if it was
(57:13):
just very small. Let's just say, if we're going to
thought experiment um a base or a landing zone come
impaired two or similar to the way we visited the
Moon the first time during the Apollo missions, where we landed,
we're just in one area. It just kind of but
in this case it's extraterrestrials of some form. They're highly advanced.
(57:36):
They land on Earth just for a little bit to
do some exploration. Do you think there's a site or
there's a possibility that there is a site somewhere on
this Earth where that occurred. Well, that's the tricky thing.
There's allow you have to unpack an order to get there, right,
I would want clarification on what we mean by advanced
I would say, as far as an extra terrestrial site,
(57:59):
it it's tough because Earth is a living thing, and
it's a voracious living thing. It eats evidence. Um, you know.
One of the first arguments against that would be that
we don't see evidence of that in the fossil record
or historical record. One of the arguments for it would
be people saying we do, we just don't recognize what
(58:20):
we've found, right like like, So, to to answer the
question in short form, I believe it is absolutely possible,
depending depending on how we wanted to find advance to
believe it is absolutely possible that earlier undiscovered civilizations were around.
I think it's absolutely possible that humanity in terms of
(58:42):
uh socio political entity or civilization has earlier iterations that
we just haven't found because it's hard to find things
and it's very easy to lose them, you know. But
as far as extraterrestrials. I don't know if I'm willing
to know that far. I just think it's I think
it's an It takes a tremendous amount of hubris for
(59:05):
us to say we know for sure every law civilization.
But I mean Rome was an advanced civilization, you know,
compared comparatively for the time, you know, and we found
all of that. I mean, if I figured if I
left the big enough footprint to have made an impact, uh,
we would find something footprint versus time, right right, Okay,
I've got one more, one more thing to to ask
(59:26):
you guys, what if Atlantis was rather than an extraterrestrial civilization,
it was like an a sub terrestrial subterranean uh, Like Okay,
let's just say some other intelligent force that emerged from
the sea that came up and existed in some kind
(59:50):
of way in a vehicle for a long period of
time or were they base and then it eventually just
went back down into the ocean, like Eldritch forces of
some sort, maybe Eldridge, maybe you know something, some intelligence
that had been on this planet far before you know,
the evolution of our species. I don't know that it's
(01:00:10):
an interesting questions an interesting thought experiment. That's what I'm
trying to do with you, guys. We don't know a
lot about the subterranean depths. Really. A few years back,
several years back now, there was an expedition that we
applied to that said they were going to go to
Antarctica to try to discover the entrance to this huge
(01:00:35):
cavern system that they believed existed. People who will argue
for the quote unquote kind of hollow earth theory will
typically um more science based arguments will say not that
the entirety of the Earth is hollow, but that there
are vast caverns and systems that could house uh, thriving ecosystems. Right,
(01:00:57):
so I could see that, uh, I would say also
to illustrate how little we know about the world before us.
Remember when we did the episode on the early mixtapes
of Man right and Yeah and Dennis Ovans and Neanderthal.
(01:01:21):
This year there was a new species of ancient human discovered. Yeah, Yes,
waited in the Philippines, Homo los ninsis, and it is uh.
It's a small body homin in similar to the Homo florenzis,
and lived at least fifty thousand and sixty seven thousand
(01:01:43):
years ago. Also turns out Homo erectus persisted in Java
as recently as a hundred thousand years ago, tangentially related.
The main reasons I bring it up here because A
it's really fascinating, and B. I think it is a
fantastic illustration of how little we know about again, the
(01:02:06):
civilizations that preceded our own, or the people in the
world's you know, incredible, incredibly weird. You have to wonder
how long it's going to take our civilization to disappear.
I don't know what from now, years years. Give me
a break. I mean, you know, one thing we can
(01:02:29):
say for sure is that on the timeline of history,
of all the history of the universe, we are but
a spec and uh may not be quite as important
as we think. So let's hold on to all we
got it, guys, All right, let's do it. So, Hey,
what do you think about Atlantis? Tell us You can
find us in all the places we are on Twitter
(01:02:50):
as at Conspiracy Stuff. On Instagram, we are a conspiracy
Stuff show. You can write directly to us individually if
you like. You can find me ex lusively on Instagram
at how Now Noel Brown. If I am around by
the time this episode comes out, you can find me
at bimbole and on Instagram at bimbole and hs W
one Twitter. I will be around, but I will not
(01:03:13):
see anything you sent to me, and you can find
me Matt Frederick underscore, I heart cool. That's the one.
And if you don't want to do that stuff, you
can hang out on our Facebook page. Here's where it
gets crazy. We've got a really great group of people
over there, from the people that run it to you
who are on there right now. I can see you specifically,
(01:03:35):
you just chatting about all kinds of fun things, um
about not quantizing beats. So it's a fun little conversation
actually logged into and talked about, like commented and read
for a little bit. Wait, I missed that one. I
liked your comment. I would just I thought it was fun. Um,
I'm gonna I'm a real beat head man. I can't
believe that I missed down on that. Well, it was
(01:03:56):
a Rick and Morty reference where it was I think
it's Morty, I forget exactly what it was, referencing a
recent UM episode, and then yeah, yeah, it's it's it's
the you can turn back now. It was the stuff
about the intro music on the thread right, which people
people love. People are on the same page about the
(01:04:16):
intro view. But the meme itself was so beautiful and
it made me so happy because it just says you
can turn back now ding dong or learn um or
you can turn back now or learn ding dong the
stuff they don't want you to know. And then Morty's like, oh,
you son of a bitch, you got me so bit
I mean. And for the Bakst episode, check that out, um,
(01:04:38):
and we we won't change the intro because uh, you know,
I I love that we've kept the same thing. A
lot of a lot of shows rework their intros, but
that music is amazing. I do want to add I
do want to add everybody listening, especially for listening this
when it comes out before we close the show. It's
(01:04:59):
not necessarily my strong suit saying this sort of stuff,
but you and everyone you know and care about you
all deserve a pad on the back and a high
five because it's official. If you're listening now, you made
it to and that's nothing to sneeze at. You know,
you earned it. I know a lot of people felt
like they were limping to the finish line. But none
(01:05:20):
of that matters. Go you go team, Let's make it
to Yeah, go team. Go get yourself a Gatorade or
a Powerade. If you don't have access to gatorade, orange slices,
bread sticks, Alfredo sauce, and if your coach trip, have
your teammates pour that bucket of gatorade all over your body.
Stick of the stick a fork in a in a
(01:05:42):
socket and don't don't. Don't do that unless you want
to feel something you know to to the family of
Coach Tritt, I don't know if if he's still around,
but I hope he is. He's probably been struck dead
by lightning. No, I hope he's still around. Coach. If
you're out there listening and someone sends us to you,
I do appreciate that class, but I do feel like
I knew a lot more about science than you I
(01:06:05):
thought you were gonna say. I feel like I know
a lot more about science before I took your class. No, No,
he was really cool and nice, just science wasn't. He
was in the wrong position. They were doing him wrong. Attwell, Okay,
I think that's it right. It's a good old fashioned email.
We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they
(01:06:43):
Don't Want You to Know is a production of iHeart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt, my name
is Nolan. They call me Ben. We are joined as
always with our super producer Paul, Mission controlled decand most importantly,
you are you. You are here, and that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know. It occurs to
me that although this episode is coming out in January,
(00:46):
most likely this is the last episode we are going
to record for the year. We're recording this at the
very end of Yes, the Lost Decade. Is that what
it's It's interesting because we're also covering something today that
(01:08):
many of our fellow listeners have asked us to cover
for years and years and years. We have touched upon this,
we have mentioned it, but as as you all know,
longtime listeners, when we first set out creating this show,
we generally wanted to go for more obscure things, things
that were on the edges of the map, things that
(01:31):
mainstream people probably would not have encountered before, things that
used to be on the map, right, So we we
skipped over initially things like the jfk assassination Area fifty one,
you know, the moon landing, all those all those History
channel hits. Uh. Today we are finally, we're finally investigating
(01:53):
something that has been a long time coming or a
long time going, if you, if you believe the story,
and that is the tale of Atlantis, Uh not Atlanta Atlantis.
So here are the facts, according to the folklore, the
stories that we we all know. Atlantis was a civilization
(02:16):
located on a mysterious island, and in ancient times we
do very much mean ancient. This civilization was a seat
of great culture and learning. Like later seats of learning
such as Alexandria. People came to Atlantis from far and
wide to learn the secrets of technology, to divide the
(02:39):
workings of the world and the gods, the heavens in
the firmament. We know that it was a city laid
out on this island in sort of concentric rings, and
it had a central canal going through to the center.
But Atlantis had some issues. Despite the fact that it
was so advanced in architecture, art and technology, it was
(03:03):
destroyed nine thousand years ago, nine thousand, six hundred years ago,
when a wave and earthquake sent by Poseidon, the god
of waves and the sea and earthquakes. Uh, when Poseidon
got tired of them, he uh he sent these natural
disasters or divine disasters, to punish the inhabitants for their
(03:27):
wicked waves. Wait a minute, though, weren't the gods pretty
bacchanalien themselves The interesting choice of words there, yeah, uh.
Any study of Greco Roman gods, even the Old Testament
god of um, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, shows a pretty
clear study in hypocrisy. You know what I mean, do
(03:49):
as I say, not as I do. I think. Didn't
Zeus come down to Earth in the form of like
a bull, aram, a goose goose? So he couldn't uh?
So he could with his right and uh he stayed
in goose form when he did that, or the way
the story goes, Yeah, and the uh. You know, that's
very common in tales of pantheons. But so back to Atlantis,
(04:15):
we can already see how this story in folklore has
so much in common with similar tales from around the world.
Advanced civilizations laid low by divine forces, and you know,
some of the specifics are common to other stories. Gods
seem too often punish ancient communities via floods, and we
(04:37):
can see this as a parable of sorts. You can
choose to read it in that way, which is a warning,
right tell tell people what not to do or else
lest the be punished. Cautionary tale. Yes, parable. The first
mention of Atlantis. We do have the earliest known mention
(04:58):
of Atlantis. Very interesting comes to us from Plato in
his dialogues Tamus and Critias. Plato describes Atlantis as not
just an island, but a huge island. Says it's larger
than Libya and Asia Minor put together. He also says
that he is relaying this story uh third or even
(05:19):
fourth hand, which will will get to uh because there's
a character in his dialogus character Critius c R I
T I A S. And this guy says, okay, I
heard the story of Atlantis from my grandfather, who heard
it from Athenian politician named Solon. This was three years
(05:39):
before Plato was around, and that this guy, this politician,
in turn, learned it from an Egyptian priest. And the
Egyptian priest is the one who says it happened nine
thousand years ago. Atlantis was protected by the god Poseidon.
They worshiped, and they made the son of Poseidon like
a demi god kind of you alluded to earlier in
(06:01):
all Uh. They made his son king of the islands.
His name was Atlas, so he ruled the island and
the ocean surrounding it. And as the Atlanteans came up
in the world, as they became more powerful geo politically,
their ethics declined. The place was a washing corruption in
depravity and perversion. Their armies met a lot of success. Eventually,
(06:25):
according to the story, they conquered um parts of North Africa.
They went on to conquer at least part of Italy,
the Etruscan part of Italy, and then eventually Ah, the
people of Athens posset up with some like minded Atlantis haters,
(06:46):
and they drove the folks back. They drove them out
of Italy, they drove them out of Egypt and North Africa.
But at this point they were still very much in play.
They just got their butts whipped once and they were
planning to do more damage. And then Plato's writings continue
about Atlantis again in that dialogue, this time to me
(07:08):
Is and he writes that this law civilization was in
fact in a location, a place where you could go.
It was real, um. He he calls it the Pillars
of Hercules, the the area where this where Atlantis existed,
and these days like if you looked it up right now, like, hey,
what what are the pillars of Hercules, siri Um, it
(07:31):
would be called the Strait of Gibraltar, which is aknown thing.
You can look that up right now. You could travel there. Yeah,
you could go right now if you want it. And
um Plato argues that despite being technologically advanced and having
a pretty well organized society, the people of Atlantis um
didn't have infrastructure in place to protect them from the
(07:56):
wolf that was at their door constantly, basically the threat
of flood and earthquakes. Um. You know, whether or not
they were actually sent by gods or not, they had
absolutely were basically out there completely unprotected. Uh. And that
great island of Atlantis, along with the city that was
built upon it, did sink over the course of a
(08:19):
single night and day right around nineties b c. E. Now,
that would be intense right right, because again this is
larger than Libya and Asia minor. This thing is almost
its own continent. How could the entire thing be gone
within forty eight hours? But especially by floods, especially by
floods and earthquakes. Earthquakes makes a little more sense, that's
(08:42):
the question. That So it means the sea level just
rose so high that it swallowed up everything. Well, it
depends on the kind of tectonic shift, too, because the
sea could have risen or the island could have just so,
here's the deal. That's that's this where you could read
the full quotations in in these dialogues, but Plato's tail
(09:07):
spoiler alert has a number of vagaries and plot holes. First,
he doesn't stop at saying that the inhabitants of Atlantis
worshiped Poseidon. He says that they were blood descendants of Poseidon.
And this links the more with myth than it does
with any tribal community that would have been extant at
(09:27):
the time, you know what I mean Atlantis. Also, I
like that you pointed out that they had a good
social system here, because they did have a constitution that
was eerily incredibly similar to a constitution that Plato outlined
as a good idea in the Republic, So so it's uh,
(09:51):
it does have it has some troubling ties to fiction already,
even ancient Greeks at the time. We're not or whether,
to your point, Matt, whether Plato's story was meant to
be taken a history or as a metaphor and allegory.
You know what I mean. It's kind of like um,
the Brayer Rabbit ASoP fables. You know, no one there
(10:15):
was no one really thought there was a talking rabbit, right. Uh,
some people did. I'm sure no want to ruin that
for any of us listening. But in the written history books, right,
it was never written, oh, once a talking rabbit did
this and his name was this, right. And we have
to emphasize this part because there were strong doubts about
(10:36):
the veracity of this tale from the very beginning. And
there were two more issues that come into play with
the timeline that I think raise serious questions about this story.
Just just from the jump, before we get anywhere near
the most recent like millennium, there were problems with the story.
The number one on our list here is that when
(11:00):
Plato talked about Atlantis, this is the first time it
had been mentioned before. The The phrase Atlantis, the place,
the thing, just the name itself. Atlantis was the first
time it was ever mentioned when Plato wrote it down.
So even though he says it happened nine thousand years ago,
no one talked about it. This Egyptian priest who so
(11:23):
willingly told his tale to an Athenian politician apparently never
talked to anybody else about it at all. And it
was just this one conversational thread through millennia. Why But
it's also, like I mean, it references the intervention of gods,
as though that is just of course that's what happens, right,
(11:45):
So you gotta wonder is he making up some sort
of teachable moment kind of tail or where is he
getting this info from. There's another aspect here, the second
part that I think is also I want to say damning.
But it doesn't make the tail look good. If this
was rediscovered knowledge, and if it was legitimate, how come
(12:08):
none of Plato's contemporaries, none of Aristotle's contemporaries deigned to
mention it. It's a lot like imagine imagine aliens were discovered,
extraterrestials were discovered, they were real, and you turn on
your local cable news to hear about it, and you
find that only one cable outlet is reporting on it,
(12:29):
and it's Fox News. It's only Fox News, and it's
some intense cataclysmic thing, right right, right, Um, it's a
global events. You know, why is only one source telling
us those are pretty uh, those are pretty important pieces.
Those are things we would think if this were a
real place, we would have heard about a prior to Plato,
(12:50):
or we would have at least heard as contemporaries saying
something about Atlanta's I would say, right here, just we're
gonna explore a little more as we go. But you know,
around the time that Plato is walking around, um, there
have been quite a bit of his history written down
by that point, right, However, there would still be at
(13:13):
that time countless um of tales that had only been
passed down through word of mouth, right, vocal histories that
would still that we existed across the planet at that
time that perhaps never did make it, you know, on
papyrus or whatever, whatever instrument and piece of material you're
(13:36):
going to write it down on. Just we we have
to put that out there. As in there's still that room,
which is where our show comes in for speculation even
though these things are going against it from the jump right,
and these valid concerns did not did not stop the party.
The legend of Atlantis grew over time, from the time
(13:58):
of Plato to the time that you were hearing this episode.
Numerous later authors would argue that Plato had part of
the story right, but that he was let's call it
incorrect or confused on multiple accounts. And just like any
other game of telephone, people embellished this thing. They tailored
it to fit their own notions. So the original story
(14:22):
was rephrased as it was retold over and over and
over again, and soon the residents of Atlantis were no
longer descended from God's They were actually aliens or hybrids
of aliens. And these people who believe this would argue
that Plato and his contemporaries were just We're just framing
(14:45):
extraterrestrials through a social lens that they could understand. And
then they would say, well, the city's technology was super advanced.
They had no idea how advanced it was. They used
energy crystals, and they affected global um oceanic patterns. They
(15:05):
affected the world in more ways than we know. As
a matter of fact, you'll read some fringe author saying
you can you can clearly tell that all of the
quote unquote paranormal disturbances in the Bermuda Triangle are ultimately
traceable back to Atlantis and the infernal technology they created.
This is not something you would read and you know,
(15:27):
scientific American. Just to be fair, Hey, that is a
fun thought experiment that the the crystals have gone haywire
or continue to function in some way down at the
bottom of the ocean somewhere. I like the idea, sure,
and you know, technology functioning in automation after its creators
(15:51):
have gone is is something that very likely become real
in our modern day, you know, like the Ray Bradberry
story that will come soft reigins, or like all the
all the deep space exploratory vehicles that we've put out
that you know, going on one way trips. We're never
going to see him again. Your yes, And I'm also
(16:14):
gonna put it here really quickly just for you guys
to think about. Uh we I think we can collectively
see where the ancient Aliens story kind of meets up there.
As you were talking about the the residents turning from
descendants from God's into descendants of aliens or you know,
extraterrestrials that would be interpreted, as you said, as as God's.
That is getting us closer closer, I say, to something
(16:40):
that would be within the realm of reality, from from
God's at least for from our you know, understanding of
the way the world functions right now, our limited understanding
of it. But we can see, we can see the
reasoning behind some of these things. That's not to say
that any of it is true. Right again, you know,
(17:02):
the people who were alive in that time and in
the time when players writing people who were alive, we're
not dumb. They were not cognitively that different from people today.
They were you know, we're we're explainers, were pattern finders.
We we want to understand the world and we think
(17:23):
it's worth understanding. So they were just as you're saying
that they were. They were just putting the inexplicable through
the lens of what they thought would explain it. And
today you can find multiple people still doing the same thing.
You can find for instance, um, you know, the big
the big shift that occurred in folklore, uh fairly recently
(17:48):
over the span of time, was that stories of changelings
and abductions by the uncealy or the fae turned into
stories of abductions by extraterrestrials or aliens or creatures from
a different dimension. We're just sort of we're we're we're
cooking the same dish with different ingredients and we're subbing
(18:09):
some stuff out, but the stories stay the same. And
today you can find a lot of people arguing that
Atlantis was not only a real place, but also the
Plato got the location wrong. It's it's kind of like,
we're okay, so let's say it's it's like George Lucas
comes up with Star Wars and people say, we love
(18:31):
your original idea, but we're gonna change everything about it.
But don't You're right, there's something called star Wars, but
here's what you got wrong wrong about it. So it's
it's almost like there's this um, this centuries long uh
group of producers saying, Plato, baby Atlantis, love it, love
(18:51):
everything about it. But you know, when you think about it,
it's more it's it's more like, uh, it's it's more
like a mute to a Caribbean thing, right, right, I mean,
if you really just walk through it Uh, yeah, it's uh,
it's also you know it's it's or someone else says
it's move a South China Sea. You know, I've been
(19:11):
looking at that, and that's just the kind of game
that people play. Josh Clark, our longtime friend, host of
one of our pure podcasts stuff, you should know, he
wrote about this and he had a good quote where
he says, Atlantis is in the Caribbean, Atlantis is in
the South China Sea, Atlantis is in Switzerland. And that's
(19:33):
really for every one of those locations. You'll have people
arguing that you have also we've even read that Atlantis
was somehow a part of Antarctica. Yes, read that. Yeah, yeah,
they don't really stop. But the big question is, right
with all of this, that we know, all these stories
that have been told and how they've evolved, where where
(19:54):
are we left right now as we enter when it
comes to Atlantis. Yeah, mean that that really begs the question. Um, okay,
if this is a thing, then where's the proof you
know what elevates it just from the realm of fantasy.
Uh and in a parable kind of situation to hard facts. Um,
(20:15):
you know, where is the proof of this lost civilization
that fits the description of Atlantis. Yeah, and has anyone
actually found something. We'll tell you when we come back
from a quick break. This episode is brought to you
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for an extra three months free. Here's where it gets crazy.
Well yes, actually, oh yes, according to according to the people, Yes,
multiple people believe that they at least know where the
(22:25):
mythic civilization of Atlantis was located, and some people believe
that they have found it and they've been searching for
this for a long time now. Remember we're talking about
two different kinds of Atlantis. One kind of Atlantis is
the o g One. The Plato described some utopian society
(22:47):
downfall punished by the gods. A god's a real uh
b b Atlantis uh you know, was by Gibaltar. The
pillars of Hercules, and then the second Atlanta is the
one that has all the bells and whistles of folklore
and all of the personal attitudes of people writing about it. Later,
(23:09):
in the first centuries of the Christian era, people didn't
really talk too much about Atlantis. They said, you know
what Aristotle wrote it, he was quoting Plato. Those guys
are stand up dudes. They taught us a lot, so
we don't need to worry about it. In the sixteen
hundreds and six there it was, of course, Francis Bacon,
(23:31):
the English philosopher and scientists, who published a utopian novel
titled The New Atlantis. And just like Plato, he was
mainly I don't know. He was taking the story of
Atlantis in a different direction. He wasn't saying it was
necessarily true. He was more interested in exploring the ideas
of politically and scientifically advanced society on a previously unidentified
(23:55):
island that did amazing thing, that did amazing things. In
sixteen seventy nine there was a Swedish scientist named Olas
Rudbeck who published a book called Atlands A, T, L,
A and D. And this this is a work in
four volumes, and over the course of this this is interesting.
(24:16):
This is what you know. I haven't read all four volumes,
but here's what happens. Essentially throughout this four volume work.
Rudbeck is trying assiduously to prove that the thing Plato
called Atlantis was located in Sweden, which is, by the way,
(24:37):
where he's from, and that all human languages are descended
from Swedish, which is by the way way he speaks. Yeah. Um,
I mean this is interesting though, because this is the
first time where Atlantis is depicted as being at the
center of humanity, right like the origin point, or at
(24:57):
least um one of one of the bottlenecks where through
the origins of humanity went um through which they traveled,
of connecting everything that's occurred on this earth, all languages,
all peoples, it all centered around Atlantis at one time
before they spread across the earth. And it sounds it
sounds weird now, but you're right, that's that's a huge
(25:17):
pivot point. It's easy to dismiss it, knowing what we
know about the evolution of language today, right that Swedish
was not the basis for things like Mandarin banned to
you know, other other languages that had existed before then. Well,
it also goes against the our the known migratory patterns
(25:40):
of of humanity and you know, our descendants across time.
There's still a lot of questions there, of course, but
it goes against a lot of that. It also would
have even back in the six hundred, has been a
more compelling argument if the guy making it was not
himself Swedish, you know, and there's its smacks of nationalism
and it time people in Sweden, other Swedes thought that
(26:05):
makes sense. Yeah, yeah, Swede and uh. And even then
people out even then there were people who did not
believe Rubis association. Uh. And they were pretty much everybody
who wasn't Swedish said this is this doesn't make sense. Uh.
And we have we have other examples. There are so
(26:26):
many that we can't that we're trying. We've we've got
to sort of emphasize the ones that show us pivot points.
So in the eighteen hundreds, and there was a U.
S congressman, former US congressman with a great name, Ignatious L. Donnelly,
and he published a book called Atlantis the Antidiluvian World,
(26:47):
and this this became a watershed moment for not the
best choice of words for what is sometimes called the
occultization of Atlantis, which is take member again, and we're
talking about two different conceptual places. Uh. This one was
putting the emphasis on suppressed technology, on this idea of
(27:11):
a proto civilization upon which the majority of not all,
of modern civilizations are based. So he says that Atlantis
was more Uh it did. Yes, it did have its capital,
its seat on an island, but it was really an
(27:33):
empire of sorts, and that immigrants from Atlantis had gone
to ancient Europe, to Africa, to the American continents, and
that their heroes would ultimately become the inspiration for gods
and adventurers in other mythology Scandinavian, Hindu, and Greek. So
(27:55):
it's it's similar to rutbix claim, but this was the
more or popular version, was a more sophisticated argument because
now he's saying, not only does language spring from this place,
but everything you see that feels like a common thread
throughout global mythology is because it all comes from the
(28:18):
same place. We're recognizing a pattern, we're categorizing, and it's
one of the most popular Uh, survivor arguments that the
floods and the earthquakes consumed everything in uh a night
and a day, and some people survived, or maybe they
were just happy to be out of town, off the island,
and they brought their knowledge to other ancient people. So
(28:42):
that's why you'll see you'll see arguments that say, well,
look at these unexplained carvings on the you know, towards
the eastern side of South America, Central America, and you'll
see people arguing that, well, the next were actually Atlantean
(29:03):
or those myths in some areas of the world about
mysterious pale people who show up and tell you how
to do things. Uh, those are stories about people from Atlantis.
There's not a lot to back this up, but it's
a very it was for its time. It's a blockbuster.
It's it's something that people love because it ties into
(29:26):
the concurrent rise of an interest in spirituality and science
united that we can, despite the fact that we were
bad at it earlier, our species can in fact understand
the world around us. And so people who were followers
of theosophy and people who were later who would become
(29:47):
what we would later call new agers or people who
have New Age beliefs loved this and they were saying, well,
you know, maybe this means that esp clairvoyance, all these
other things that are dismissed by the scientific Act of
the scientific institutions of these days, maybe they were just
ancient technology and Atlantis had a handle on it and
(30:10):
it's being suppressed. And this is where we enter the
story of a guy named Edgar Casey who did something
really interesting. Have we ever talked about Edgar Casey on
this show? Pretty sure we have, Yeah, yeah, I think
it's mostly in a mention when when we are getting
into some of these realms, I've lost history year something
(30:31):
like that. He comes up. Yeah. So he was a
He was born in eighteen seventy seven. He was a
clairvoyant and he would go into trances. It was known
as the Sleeping Prophet, and in his trances he would
answer questions that people asked about everything from nutrition to
(30:51):
chronic illness, reincarnation, future wars, future events of global import
and he talked about Atlantis as well. His story is
a little bit different from Rudebeck's, a little bit different
from Bacons and so on, because he and and different
from my my boy Ignatius because he had a specific
(31:15):
prediction that appeared and you know where you stand, appeared
to come true. And just a quick mention, we did
talk about Edgar Casey in an episode called Prophecy, Predictions
and Prescience that I think was back in the YouTube
days as well, So there should be a video version
of addition to the oh yes, Ben he got, he
(31:35):
got very specific about a place where, at least some
part of the thing that we call Atlantis, the city
would rise up from the ocean depths at some point,
and he pinpointed. He said he would rise off off
the coast of Bemini, that's right at the western end
of the Bahamas. And he was like, that is definitely
(31:57):
gonna happen. You guys, I'm Edgar Casey. That's my word
and I'm sticking to it. That's how he talked. Atlantis
is gonna hang out over there off Beamini. And guess
what happened in nineteen sixty eight, noll, I don't have
to guess. Okay, it's right here. A diver actually discovered
an underwater rock formation that's now known as the Bamini Road. Oh,
(32:19):
it's fascinating, And whether or not it was man made. Um,
whether it was natural, it's just it's just not known
right now. Well, it appears to be natural. Just gotta
put that out there. It appears to be natural. But
I don't believe it. I don't know man because it
looks sure it could all be just a a pattern
(32:43):
that we're inventing that we attempt to see. But if
you pull up photographs of it, it looks it looks
like these are gigantic uh stones laid out in a pattern, right,
like a like a cobblestone road for giants. You know. Um. Again,
experts have pooh pooed the idea that it was man made. Uh.
(33:04):
It's also sometimes called the Bamini wall and uh they
look like they're limestone blocks laid out in order in
a pattern. It's not hard to find. You can see
a ton of photographs of it. However, there are people
who feel that there's a geological, non human argument for
(33:30):
its creation, and then there are people who feel like
it has been created by some ancient civilization. Wouldn't that
be relatively easy to test for, like in terms of
the composition or the consistency of the material. I'm no
underwater geologist or anything. Which you would think that, you know,
taking a sample, um you could date it at the
very least and then kind of figure out what kind
(33:52):
of material it's made of, and based on that figure
out if it was cobbled together from different stuff or
if it's consistent or whatever. Well, I think this calls
for a Bemani trip. Guys, Yes, Bahamas, of course we
need to go. Can I bring my snorkel, my face mask.
You have to. We're gonna get a snorkel. We're gonna
(34:13):
get face mask, oxygen tanks. We're gonna send Paul down there.
We're going to start in Applebee's on the ocean. Under
the ocean, well, it's gonna be right above like floating. Yeah,
but the events based under the water. You can snorkel
the Bani Road to get there. There we go, There
we go. And shirts, Yeah, I gotta have t shirts. Uh.
(34:35):
And then also flippers. What's the what's the fancy word
for those you know what I'm talking about? Flippers? He's
just calling flippers. I think so fins, maybe fins foot fins.
Here's guys, here's the best part about the Applebee's that's
going to float above the Bani Road is it that
they play Atlantis the Lost Empire. I mean, that will
(34:58):
certainly be a feature. The best part is that when
you go there, you're gonna have your four basic food groups. Okay, okay, beans, bacon, whiskey. Oh,
and there's a fourth one large large. Why did you
just hold up three fingers? I just I've in my head,
I was like, there are four things within my hand
(35:20):
betrayed me. I really did. Okay, hang on, I'm gonna
make eye contact with with Michigan troll sufficient. Okay, we
got we got it. Okay, we got a weird nod though,
I think we can lean into this a little, a
little further, but yeah, yeah, it's it's weird because bmini road.
It's fascinating about this is that it's when people are
arguing it's man made. It's often presented as a relatively
(35:45):
unique thing, but it's it's one of several types of
formations found throughout the world. There's a tessellated pavement in Tasmania.
There's the UH in Oaklaw, Homa. There's this jointed bedrock
that has been called a Phoenician fortress and furnace. UH.
(36:06):
There's a place called Battlement Mesa in Colorado. What was
that when you just mentioned four Battlement? What were Phoenician
Fortress and furnace Oklahoma? Also, I've never heard of that. Well,
that's what it's called. And how much of how much
of that branding is for how much that branding is
(36:27):
to get tourism. It doesn't matter now because I think
it got paved over. So so Bamini Road has some
cons it's got some pros um Like you said, no,
old people are still fighting over it being man made
or a natural thing. Mainly there's b geologists saying that
(36:50):
it's just something that happened. And then it would be
a lot of supporters of Edgar Casey, uh, some of
some of the members of the Association Research and Enlightenment,
the nonprofit formed to study his work, who argue that
it is man made reverdence of a greater civilization. Man
Eckar Casey is just so fascinating. When I was, um,
(37:13):
I was younger, I used to be really into it.
But the the thing, though, is regardless of which way
you look at it, he did say that there was
something there in Bemini. Well, he said it was going
to rise up. Okay, so it wasn't completely right, but
maybe he just meant it would rise up in our
(37:34):
consciousness because we would be made aware of it. Oh,
here we go, all right, I'll play your reindeer games.
So maybe there's some interpretation that we're lacking here. It's true,
it's true. Maybe you know, maybe, like Plato, the arguments
out whether you're speaking allegorically or or literally. So this
(37:55):
is great because we're already touching on some controversies, right.
Two big big problems was solving the mystery of the
Atlantis story. First, as we said, there's so much added
to the original tale if you think about it now,
Plato himself would not recognize a lot of the things
that are considered canonical Atlantis folklore in the modern day.
(38:18):
He would essentially be going, like, what the hell is
an alien? Are you guys thinking of God's because he
might say there's no such thing as there's no such
thing as aliens. You know, one man's alien as another
man's God, right exactly. Uh, And then he would say
something around along the lines of like no, no, if
they were aliens, they've got God's too. They're probably the
(38:39):
same ones. Maybe not, I don't know, see his like
space beside and rules all of it. Who knows. Uh. Secondly,
and this is the most important part of the story,
we know lost civilizations exist. This world is littered with
remnants and ruins of groups, communities, village is, entire cities,
(39:01):
some of which remain unidentified the modern day. We keep
finding evidence of unknown people from ages past, and it
is possible, if not plausible, that one of these groups
may have provided the real world grain of factual sand
upon which this whole pearl of the Atlantis myth slowly
(39:22):
accreated over time. You'll see why a created is a
terrible pun in a minute or so after a word
from our sponsors, and we're back and we're going to
delve into some of these Uh well, well they're not pearls.
(39:45):
What do we call them? We're gonna call them um,
because Atlantis is the pearl, right, These are the grains
that are around the pearl. Sure, yeah, okay, uh if
Atlantis is the if Atlantis is the main dish, Okay,
if Atlantis is the Applebee's entree, Yes, a law civilizations,
(40:07):
these are the the apps in the side dishes, apps
in the the dessert that also comes with it. Okay,
I gotta tell you, I can't place a signature Applebee's
app in my mind. Like I think of Outback, I
think of a bloom and onion, I think Chile's. I
think Southwestern egg rolls, poppers. Maybe, oh snature like Paul's
(40:29):
got him locked a little. I'm trying to see if I, oh, Paul.
I know he's not allowing himself to be recorded, which
I still bothers me, but I'm not gonna leave that alone. Um.
Paul says in our ears, from from his mouth to
our ears, to your ears, that every dish at Applebee's
is a signature dish. Sure, Okay. What I'm thinking, at
(40:53):
least in my my traversings to Applebee's is the chicken
fingers with honey mustard as as an appetizer. Well, you
can also get the classic combo. I pulled up the
menu where you build your own sampler. Essentially, brisk get
case idea is an appetizer, which is crazy because that's
a meal. A case ida is a good meal, But yes,
(41:16):
it is. It is true. Let let Paul be our
Plato of Applebee's and you are Aristotle interpreting that, and
then we'll we'll figure out who the case he is
the agger Casey Later is that you know, I figured
out the perfect Applebee's appetizer, you guys, because it speaks
so loudly to apple to Applebee's. For me, what is it?
(41:37):
Breadsticks with Alfredo sauce. That sounds disgusting? What it's perfect?
I think we're just not high. That's probably a speak
for yourself. But right, so it is true though from
time to time, and this is the crazy tantalizing for
(41:59):
some people, irritating for other people, thing about the search
for Atlantism. Places like this, Every so often archaeologists and
historians do find stuff. They find hard evidence of things, right,
things like a swampy prehistoric city in coastal Spain, um
(42:20):
a suspicious undersea rock formation in the Bahamas. That's the one.
All might be sources for a potential genesis of the
Atlantis story. Of these, of the site with the widest
acceptance is the Greek island of Santorini. Santorini santorini Um.
(42:41):
Ancient Thera was what it was called back in the day,
half submerged remnant of a volcano known as the caldera
Um created by the massive Second millennium BC volcanic eruption
which created a tsunami that could have really, you know,
hastened the collapse of the Minoan civilization. On Create Create,
(43:04):
get it a cret o. No, No, that horrible joke
paid off after the from before their commercial break or metastasized,
depending on whether you think that was chuckle worthy or cancerous. Ah,
all right, well here we are, like a good spinach
and art man, there there is I mean, you're absolutely right,
(43:27):
You're absolutely right, because people do continue to find things.
There's another real life place that has a lot in
common with the Atlantis myth and geographically could be something
that uh, people in Plato's time would have been aware of,
and that is a coastal city called Heli or Helik,
which is located on the Gulf of Corinth in Greece.
(43:51):
So it was and it's heyday the center of the
Acayan League and the Acaan League was like confederacy sorts
of twelve different cities. By the time Plato was coming
up in the game of philosophy, this city was already
hundreds of years old. Like Atlantis, it was wealthy, like Atlantis,
(44:14):
controlled the seas around it, and like Atlantis, it had
established colonies and other nearby areas like Italy. The residents,
like those of Mythic Atlantis, also worshiped Poseidon. For five
days December three seventy three b c e. Witnesses in
(44:40):
the area of this city noticed that vermin and other
small animals snakes in sex, mice and so on, were
leaving the coast and they were going to the mountains
that formed the southern border of the HLIC delta. And
you know, we all know what what a it is.
(45:01):
Modern seismologists have also noted that some animals do appear
to have a preternatural sense, a little bit of predictive
ability when it comes to imminent earthquakes and some of
that low level, low low rumble, that's not rumble, but
the movement that is occurring vibrations, Yeah, that are so
(45:23):
of such a low frequency, but it's just can be sensed.
And oddly enough, you know, we did look in this
into this little bit in earlier episodes, but oddly enough
we see tremendous anecdotal evidence that some animals can predict
the weather. Matt, you had the predict those disasters, Matt,
(45:46):
you had the most uh salient argument there with the
idea that they're very attuned to vibrations that maybe people ignore, right,
or maybe they can also sense barometric changes. Barometric is
where I'm interested. Yeah, I want to study that. I've
always wanted to. I've always wanted to get some more, uh,
(46:06):
some more research on people who can predict the weather
due to an injury flaring up. It's also probably a
pressure change. Yeah, yeah, I always thought that was a superpower.
I still do. If someone if someone who has kind
of a messed up leg tells me that a storm's
come in, I believe them. I'm going inside, you know
(46:29):
what I mean, I'm waiting outside for the first bolt
to hopefully that's very regular, to trust but verify. I
got you. I was just talking about hoping to get
struck by lightning. But yeah, let's keep going. Oh man,
I just want to know. I just want to see
if you'll get powers. I mean, I think surviving a
(46:54):
lightning strike is a superpower as well. You know more,
there are people have been struck by lightning multiple times.
I told you guys before about coach trip from from
my middle school will middle school science teacher coach trip
truck by lightning at least twice. Wait a minute, really
at least twice? I know. I remember one of them
(47:15):
when he was playing cards in his uh in his
dining room, lightning bolt came right down through the chandelier
and got him. It's because gambling is a sin and
and maybe that was it. Coach Tritt was the second time,
like asking That was the second time. I think the
first time was all on the field for was he
being a plato about this? Was he relaying a story
(47:36):
without first hand proof? No? This him Coach trip Did
I struck by light? And it was? He was like,
I got hit twice and I'm still here. Did you
believe them? I did well? I I mean that was
a middle school or do you have any like Powder
esque powers? You know? I didn't notice any, but he
certainly was no good at science. No, I I am,
(47:57):
I'm not. I thought the story Powder was interesting, but
due to us some intense problems I have with the director,
I can't recommend the film. Oh yeah, that guy got
big time. Can't wait? Wait? Who should be? Who directed?
I forget his name? But he was found to have
been participating in a lot of molestation. I believe Victor
(48:18):
Salva also the creative mind behind Jeepers Creepers. Yep, and
uh convicted no child abuser, but studios kept working with him.
He kept Yeah, he actually kept going after being convicted
in nineteen for the abuse of children. And then made
(48:41):
powder and then I watched it and I loved it,
and I watched it again and again, and then made
Jeepers Creepers, which to be fair is I mean, to
be fair, it's it's pretty solid little horror horror flick. Yeah,
it's a It's set a record for the largest Labor
day box office opening never wow. So so anyway, where's
(49:02):
that flood when you need it? You know what I mean?
There we go, There we go. Where's Poseidon? And when
he needs to flood the studio? Well, let's go back
to Let's go back to this area, because so we
said three three BC, the small animals are starting to
leave the coast. And we have to also remember that again,
(49:22):
people of this age were just as smart as people
are today, and just as many problems, just as many
um good points to themselves as a community and as individuals.
But they were also much more in tune with the
natural world around them, you know what I mean? So
they would have recognized that animals were leaving in the
(49:44):
middle of the night. On that fifth day, a huge
earthquake struck the area. And then what happens when there
are earthquakes around the ocean, A tsunami came from the
Gulf of Corinth. In just a matter of minutes. According
to the accounts, the city of Jalika was overcome by
the sea and it's sank just the way that Plato
(50:06):
described Atlantis. It happened very quickly. Do you see what
I mean, nol He explains everything, it seems to So
why let's look, let's look a little bit at the
you know, the geography, and then let's also I don't know,
I think we we let's call this part of the
argument multiple Atlantis is Atlanta. So you've got the Gulf
(50:30):
of Corinth that has several factors that make it particularly
prone to these types of disasters. It is a hotbed
of tectonic plate activity. Um humans were big fans of
living there, and the three rivers that form the delta
also bring lots of silt deposits to cover things up. Right,
when something goes down gets covered over pretty easily. It's right,
(50:53):
and the research, you discovered ancient Helika after twelve years
of digging also found that UM, this ravage of nature
happened more than one time. UM. The attractiveness of the
area and its attendant destructiveness formed a cycle um where
humans established a city and then nature said no, thank you,
(51:15):
removed it, and then after enough time had passed, people
forgot what what what what the problem was? What went
so terribly wrong? And they built another city on top
of the old one. Yep. And they may not have
even known the older one was there. They may have
just said, this soil is great. Look how well everything grows.
It's so abundant. Why has no one built a city here?
(51:39):
Because I have an idea, Oh my gosh, I'm also
going to postulate that maybe they did. Remember, they just went,
We're going to build it better this time time. Yes,
this time will instead of huts of straw, will build
huts of wood, and then huts of brick, and we'll
see if this big bad wolf is real. And like
(52:01):
Coach Trent before his second lightning, you know, they they're like, well,
you know, lightning doesn't strike twice exactly until it does.
That's a different god. That's zeus and they're like, we're
Poseidon folk. So archaeologists like like we've mentioned before, who
discovered a lead game. As they continued their investigation, they
(52:24):
found evidence of more lost cities in the ground. Underneath
that delta silt, they found cities from the Byzantine period
that ended in the fifteenth century CE R a d.
And then under that literally under that, they found a
ruined Roman city from between the second and fourth centuries.
(52:45):
And then under that that's where they found a leak
which was destroyed as we said in three seven three
b c E. But when they weren't expecting here is
where it gets crazy. I just want to set that up.
Continue please. Oh yeah, they they found an early or
ruined city from the Bronze Age. Now we're getting to
the age where we have to kind of approximate things.
(53:07):
They said this one was from around twenty hundred to
twenty three d b C. And then yes, they found
evidence of human civilization or some kind of habitation that
went even further back than that. We're talking Neolithic period.
And you know, if you're estimating, which again has been
(53:29):
said you have to, it would go back to twelve
thousand years ago. How crazy is that were you know,
we set up the scenario kind of jokingly that that
people would build a city here, then it would collapse,
we would forget as humans, so then build again. But
that is precisely what has has been happening there for
(53:51):
thousands of years. All at all, there are six distinct
that like, six distinct community have all been discovered at
this same spot. And they all rose, and they all fell,
and they all got buried by the rivers. And this
is the kind of stuff that makes a legend, right,
(54:13):
And this is where we this is where we leave
the episode today. Is it possible that Atlantis is a
mixture of myth and mis translations? I mean quite quite probably.
And the story is not over. The search for the
city continues. Uh. There's a guy who thinks he's found
the lost city in Spain a few years back, about
(54:35):
sixty miles in inland away from the coast. Uh. And
then of course, most recently in eighteen, a tech company
called Merlin Burrows when public and said they may have
found the lost city of Atlantis, and they think it's
off the coast of Spain near the near the Donana
(54:59):
National Park. They argue that they found the remains of
temples and towers that they date the material between ten
thousand and twelve thousand years old, and they have some
computer representations you can see about this. Uh, it looks interesting,
almost looks Indonesian to me something, at least the representations
(55:21):
that they've placed online right right. And they call themselves
a land and Seat Merlin Boroughs that has calls itself
a land and sea search company specialized in finding forgotten
or hidden things. But if you read their press releases,
they're also quick to point out they have a documentary
on the horizon called Atlantica, which will put all the
(55:43):
questions to rest. Hey, yeah, maybe maybe maybe they've actually
figured it out. Maybe they have, Maybe they have. So
Brian Dunning, who created the Skeptoid podcast UH, describes Atlantis.
He says, the myth of Atlantis is in the simplest
(56:05):
terms and Elvis sighting, and so he's looking at it
more of a pop culture thing. And he says, you know,
he talks about how people kept trying to keep Elvis alive.
And he says similarly, over the course of the two thousand,
almost five years since Plato wrote about Atlantis, and countless
people have tried to match his fiction to some actual
(56:27):
island or geographical structure. We already know the efforts from
Vain because he says Atlantis was never anything but an
allegorical device used briefly by a philosopher who made stuff
like this up all the time. And this is as
established a fact as is the death of Elvis Presley,
because we know that Plato did work with allegory a lot.
(56:51):
This is what I want to put to you, guys. Yeah, okay,
I'm gonna have to organize it in my head quickly
here before I go and three two, Okay, we're there.
Do you guys think that it is possible at all
that there was some kind of advanced civilization that existed
at one point on the Earth, even if it was
(57:13):
just very small. Let's just say, if we're going to
thought experiment um a base or a landing zone come
impaired two or similar to the way we visited the
Moon the first time during the Apollo missions, where we landed,
we're just in one area. It just kind of but
in this case it's extraterrestrials of some form. They're highly advanced.
(57:36):
They land on Earth just for a little bit to
do some exploration. Do you think there's a site or
there's a possibility that there is a site somewhere on
this Earth where that occurred. Well, that's the tricky thing.
There's allow you have to unpack an order to get there, right,
I would want clarification on what we mean by advanced
I would say, as far as an extra terrestrial site,
(57:59):
it it's tough because Earth is a living thing, and
it's a voracious living thing. It eats evidence. Um, you know.
One of the first arguments against that would be that
we don't see evidence of that in the fossil record
or historical record. One of the arguments for it would
be people saying we do, we just don't recognize what
(58:20):
we've found, right like like, So, to to answer the
question in short form, I believe it is absolutely possible,
depending depending on how we wanted to find advance to
believe it is absolutely possible that earlier undiscovered civilizations were around.
I think it's absolutely possible that humanity in terms of
(58:42):
uh socio political entity or civilization has earlier iterations that
we just haven't found because it's hard to find things
and it's very easy to lose them, you know. But
as far as extraterrestrials. I don't know if I'm willing
to know that far. I just think it's I think
it's an It takes a tremendous amount of hubris for
(59:05):
us to say we know for sure every law civilization.
But I mean Rome was an advanced civilization, you know,
compared comparatively for the time, you know, and we found
all of that. I mean, if I figured if I
left the big enough footprint to have made an impact, uh,
we would find something footprint versus time, right right, Okay,
I've got one more, one more thing to to ask
(59:26):
you guys, what if Atlantis was rather than an extraterrestrial civilization,
it was like an a sub terrestrial subterranean uh, Like Okay,
let's just say some other intelligent force that emerged from
the sea that came up and existed in some kind
(59:50):
of way in a vehicle for a long period of
time or were they base and then it eventually just
went back down into the ocean, like Eldritch forces of
some sort, maybe Eldridge, maybe you know something, some intelligence
that had been on this planet far before you know,
the evolution of our species. I don't know that it's
(01:00:10):
an interesting questions an interesting thought experiment. That's what I'm
trying to do with you, guys. We don't know a
lot about the subterranean depths. Really. A few years back,
several years back now, there was an expedition that we
applied to that said they were going to go to
Antarctica to try to discover the entrance to this huge
(01:00:35):
cavern system that they believed existed. People who will argue
for the quote unquote kind of hollow earth theory will
typically um more science based arguments will say not that
the entirety of the Earth is hollow, but that there
are vast caverns and systems that could house uh, thriving ecosystems. Right,
(01:00:57):
so I could see that, uh, I would say also
to illustrate how little we know about the world before us.
Remember when we did the episode on the early mixtapes
of Man right and Yeah and Dennis Ovans and Neanderthal.
(01:01:21):
This year there was a new species of ancient human discovered. Yeah, Yes,
waited in the Philippines, Homo los ninsis, and it is uh.
It's a small body homin in similar to the Homo florenzis,
and lived at least fifty thousand and sixty seven thousand
(01:01:43):
years ago. Also turns out Homo erectus persisted in Java
as recently as a hundred thousand years ago, tangentially related.
The main reasons I bring it up here because A
it's really fascinating, and B. I think it is a
fantastic illustration of how little we know about again, the
(01:02:06):
civilizations that preceded our own, or the people in the
world's you know, incredible, incredibly weird. You have to wonder
how long it's going to take our civilization to disappear.
I don't know what from now, years years. Give me
a break. I mean, you know, one thing we can
(01:02:29):
say for sure is that on the timeline of history,
of all the history of the universe, we are but
a spec and uh may not be quite as important
as we think. So let's hold on to all we
got it, guys, All right, let's do it. So, Hey,
what do you think about Atlantis? Tell us You can
find us in all the places we are on Twitter
(01:02:50):
as at Conspiracy Stuff. On Instagram, we are a conspiracy
Stuff show. You can write directly to us individually if
you like. You can find me ex lusively on Instagram
at how Now Noel Brown. If I am around by
the time this episode comes out, you can find me
at bimbole and on Instagram at bimbole and hs W
one Twitter. I will be around, but I will not
(01:03:13):
see anything you sent to me, and you can find
me Matt Frederick underscore, I heart cool. That's the one.
And if you don't want to do that stuff, you
can hang out on our Facebook page. Here's where it
gets crazy. We've got a really great group of people
over there, from the people that run it to you
who are on there right now. I can see you specifically,
(01:03:35):
you just chatting about all kinds of fun things, um
about not quantizing beats. So it's a fun little conversation
actually logged into and talked about, like commented and read
for a little bit. Wait, I missed that one. I
liked your comment. I would just I thought it was fun. Um,
I'm gonna I'm a real beat head man. I can't
believe that I missed down on that. Well, it was
(01:03:56):
a Rick and Morty reference where it was I think
it's Morty, I forget exactly what it was, referencing a
recent UM episode, and then yeah, yeah, it's it's it's
the you can turn back now. It was the stuff
about the intro music on the thread right, which people
people love. People are on the same page about the
(01:04:16):
intro view. But the meme itself was so beautiful and
it made me so happy because it just says you
can turn back now ding dong or learn um or
you can turn back now or learn ding dong the
stuff they don't want you to know. And then Morty's like, oh,
you son of a bitch, you got me so bit
I mean. And for the Bakst episode, check that out, um,
(01:04:38):
and we we won't change the intro because uh, you know,
I I love that we've kept the same thing. A
lot of a lot of shows rework their intros, but
that music is amazing. I do want to add I
do want to add everybody listening, especially for listening this
when it comes out before we close the show. It's
(01:04:59):
not necessarily my strong suit saying this sort of stuff,
but you and everyone you know and care about you
all deserve a pad on the back and a high
five because it's official. If you're listening now, you made
it to and that's nothing to sneeze at. You know,
you earned it. I know a lot of people felt
like they were limping to the finish line. But none
(01:05:20):
of that matters. Go you go team, Let's make it
to Yeah, go team. Go get yourself a Gatorade or
a Powerade. If you don't have access to gatorade, orange slices,
bread sticks, Alfredo sauce, and if your coach trip, have
your teammates pour that bucket of gatorade all over your body.
Stick of the stick a fork in a in a
(01:05:42):
socket and don't don't. Don't do that unless you want
to feel something you know to to the family of
Coach Tritt, I don't know if if he's still around,
but I hope he is. He's probably been struck dead
by lightning. No, I hope he's still around. Coach. If
you're out there listening and someone sends us to you,
I do appreciate that class, but I do feel like
I knew a lot more about science than you I
(01:06:05):
thought you were gonna say. I feel like I know
a lot more about science before I took your class. No, No,
he was really cool and nice, just science wasn't. He
was in the wrong position. They were doing him wrong. Attwell, Okay,
I think that's it right. It's a good old fashioned email.
We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they
(01:06:43):
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