June 29, 2025 • 57 mins
Flashback to May 2015:
IS THERE A LOST CITY somewhere that formed the basis of the legend of Atlantis? Dr. Kenny Feder returns, not to praise Atlantis, but to bury it.
Kenny Feder: Selected Works
The Past in Perspective
Frauds, Myths and Mysteries
Linking to the Past
Related Links
Atlantis by Donovan
Podcast — Archeology Fantasies
In Search Of… Atlantis
Music
Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.
Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.
IS THERE A LOST CITY somewhere that formed the basis of the legend of Atlantis? Dr. Kenny Feder returns, not to praise Atlantis, but to bury it.
Kenny Feder: Selected Works
The Past in Perspective
Frauds, Myths and Mysteries
Linking to the Past
Related Links
Atlantis by Donovan
Podcast — Archeology Fantasies
In Search Of… Atlantis
Music
Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.
Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Monster House Presents.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
As part of our summer Flashback series. This week, we're
traveling back to May of twenty fifteen. At the time,
we were planning to try and do a cruise with
archaeologist doctor Ken Fader, but that didn't work out yet.
This week I'll actually be going on a similar cruise
with some of our skeptical colleagues and cooperation with Brian Dunning,
a skeptoic podcast. So if you're attending that, be sure
and say hello. It's really interesting to me when I
(00:32):
go back and see how various structural elements of the
show have changed. And I'm going to have to slap
an explicit tag on this one because I can't remember
ever talking to Ken Fader without needing one. Ken's a
real friend of our show, and we'll be talking to
him again soon to discuss his newest book. He's a
real pioneer in the fight against pseudo archaeology and his
books are a tremendous resource for anyone interested in such topics.
(00:54):
Check out the show notes for links.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
More instrutal.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
My family didn't have cable TV for much of my youth,
but my great aunt and uncle did and I would
often walk over to their house to watch the kind
of shows which thrilled me with their discussion of monsters,
mysteries and magic. The king of these shows was in
Search of It was hosted by Leonardymoy and could any
casting choice have better accluded skepticism than having that paragon
(01:20):
of logic and reason Star Trek's Mister Spock introducing the
magnificent march of mysteries that the show paraded before us
each week. Just listen to this clip.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Long before the Egyptians built the Pyramids, someone constructed a
vast stone city atop a peak in the Andes. The
ruins stand empty and silent. Each carving is a disconnected
figure from the past, yet some common origin might join
them together. The earth itself bears the portraits of still
(01:53):
other giants scratched onto a plateau in California ten thousand
years ago. Others were esched with precision into an English
hillside long before the building of Stonehenge. The tools to
carve and move the giants indicate an advanced technology. There
(02:17):
is a place where the knowledge and skills to create
the giants may be found, the Kingdom of Atlantis. Never
before have explorers been so close to finding Atlantis. Never
have we possessed as many clues, nor have we been
(02:38):
able to bring the detection equipment of modern science to
the search.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Until now Here's a confession. There's no monster in this
week's episode. This episode exists because by far the most
popular episode of Muster Talk is episode number thirty eight,
Ancient Alien Astronauts with Kenny Fader. It has twenty five
percent more downloads than its nearest competitor. We've had more
requests for Ken to come back than any other guests.
I'm Blake Smith. This is Monster Talk, and today doctor
(03:06):
Karen Stolesno and I are going to talk to an
archaeologist about Atlantis. Cover your kid's ears. Doctor Kenny Fader
is back, and there is no beep button. You get
ready because everything you thought you knew about Atlantis is
about to be destroyed in a single day. It's actually
quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
A giant, hairy creature party party net in Luckness, a
twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the highlands
of Scotland, if a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
More obstrutle.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Well, welcome back to Monster Talking. Maybe Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5 (04:09):
I said, well, a huge that's a huge mistake. You
shouldn't do that.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
But you're a little late.
Speaker 5 (04:15):
My taking these things is that there's a certain limited
amount of life force in the universe.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Hmm. That's great scientific.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
As long as you don't have kids, you get to
keep all of that for yourself. But as soon as
you have kids, they suck it right out of you.
You would live forever. But now the kids, you will
start feeling like some pains and you'll and you'll die
because of having children.
Speaker 6 (04:34):
So I've got four days to go then exactly until
you start feeling it, you will you will see the
life being sucked out of you and being given to
those kids.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
If if life force is synonymous with free time, I
am going to have to agree with your hypothesis.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
Yeah, it's one way of defining it absolutely.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So what if you welcome back to Monster Talk. Thank
you your most requested repeat gas by far I'm.
Speaker 5 (05:02):
Blushing, but since it's not like Skype video, you can't
tell well, that's true.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
So what have you been up to?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Though?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
I mean I actually know the answer to that question
a little bit, But why don't you tell our listeners
what you've been up to.
Speaker 5 (05:12):
Well, it's a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, my
primary project, the thing that I'm kind of really involved
in right now is what I call my you know,
it's my fifty sides bucket list, which is there's a
long story behind it. Along some background is that I
was having one of those those kind of those moments
you have when you're a professor and you've just given
(05:34):
back like a midterm, and you wonder, what the heck
the hell am I teaching? And does it make any
goddamn difference? Because these kids are they going to remember
what the half life of radio carbon is five years
from now? Probably most of them won't remember it five
minutes from now, So what the hell is the point?
And the weird thing was and it's wonderful synchronicity. I
(05:54):
got an email from a student, a past student, so
this this all happens maybe five years ago, and he
had been a student of mine three or four years
before I just kind of don't nowhere. Randomly he emailed
me saying, hey, listen, doctor Vader, you won't remember me,
which is sure I didn't, and I wasn't a very
good student. It's true because I went in check and
I didn't have a good student, but he says, I
(06:15):
loved your class. I just wasn't a real good student
back then, and it really had this impact on me
and a couple of years, this is before I received
the email. He and his wife and he has two
children now, were in the Southwest coincidentally driving up what
I'm seventeen, from Phoenix to Flagstaff, and he says in
doctor Fader repassed a big brown National Park ser a
(06:39):
sign that says this exit Montezuma Castle. And I turned
to my wife and I said, remember that crazy archaeologia
professor I told you about, and you know I was
proud of that. And she says, yeah, because well I
remember he showed us pictures of that site, and I
remember it look pretty cool. Do you mind if we
stop here? And his wife, again according in the email,
(07:00):
said the other wife said that'd be fine, and then
he spends the rest of the email just kind of gushing,
thanking me for inspiring him and a callow youth at
the time to actually think about how cool an archaeological
site might actually be to visit. And he said that
his wife thought it was really cool. His littlest girl
(07:20):
was tiny. She didn't you know, she couldn't process any
of it, but that his older daughter, who was like three,
now wants to grow up and be an archaeologist. And
I thought, how incredibly cool. And then I thought, well,
that's that's what my job really is. It's not that
kids are going to remember to have like a radio
carbon or you know what the master sequence time depth
(07:41):
business Southwest, but to kind of open them up to
the notion that, you know what, there's this cool shit
that you can go and actually see. You can visit
the past, you can you can time travel by going
to see these archaeological site. So what I decided, well,
not only should I be doing this in my classes,
I should be doing it personally in my life. Pick
(08:02):
fifty fifty and I've actually seen more than that at
this point, but fifty sites that have all in common
the fact that they are open to the public. So
these are public, public places, and that it's these are
places where somebody who knows very little about archaeology, but
maybe as interested in history, may be interested in Native Americans,
may be interested in art, maybe just interested in hiking,
(08:23):
that they can go to these places and be kind
of inspired by these awe inspiring cliff dwellings and great
houses and burial mounds and effigy mounds and spectacular works
of art on cave walls. And so I've been doing
that for the last several years actually, and I'm just
about at fifty and now hoping that I'm going to
(08:44):
get some publisher who's foolish enough to want to actually
publish it as a book.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
That would be awesome. Are you going to call it
fifty Sides of Graves?
Speaker 5 (08:52):
You know, I like fifty sides of graves? Oh my god,
you know that would have went right under my head,
not over. But that's gonna be something like archaeological odyssees,
and but it's not going to be the fifty sites
you should see before you die. And that's been well
done to death, I guess.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
But that's fantastic. It's a idea that one, yeah, just
make the cover basically the same and have them accidentally
put it into the you know, adult fiction section.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
So listen.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (09:23):
I don't know that it's absolutely true, but I have
heard that, Well, you can copyright the content of a book,
you cannot copyright titles. So I was thinking, you know,
Harry Potter. You put Harry Potter in there, but.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Something something like that.
Speaker 5 (09:39):
Before there was a thousands of the books before they
figure out, hey, wait a minute, there's just nothing to
do with Harry.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Potter for books.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, exactly. Now, I think I saw that you also
have a podcast out.
Speaker 5 (09:59):
Yeah, I'm doing a podcast with Sarah Head, who's an
archaeologist out in the Midwest. It's called Archie Fantasy.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Oh it's not Archie Fantasy. So I thought it was
like a Veronica and Archie thing.
Speaker 5 (10:08):
You know. I did not. I did not come up
with the name, but I thought that was fine. Yeah,
and again, and people think, oh, this is like the
Archie comics. We can we can we can suck at
them into into actually listening and draw them into our
you know, to be caught in our web of archaeological No.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
It looks fantastic. I've actually I'm going to subscribe after
the show because I just saw it right before the show.
Speaker 5 (10:34):
That's great, it sounds of fun to do.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Well, No, I think our listeners. I'll put a link
to it in the show notes. I bet you get
a nice bump in your listenership.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
This is be great, awesome, absolutely, and so.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
There's no monster in this episode. But we've had so
many requests you to come back. I actually contacted you
and said pick a topic, and you chose Atlantis.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
And so.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Since my uh, I don't know what it's called, nom
de net, I guess is doctor Atlantis. This is a
fuckingly apt topic for us to talk about.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
I think it is.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
So, Karen, why don't you kick us off?
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah? So, Ken, how did you get interested in Atlantis?
And does this predate your archaeology work?
Speaker 5 (11:14):
No? And you know, I'm here's the deal. I'm not
exactly sure what inspired me, but I'll tell you. But
one thing I can tell you for sure is that
I've done a bunch of documentaries talking head stuff on
National Geographic Channel and the History Channel and honest to God,
the Weather Channel, the Fi Fi Channel. And if I
count up all of these things that I've done Atlantis,
(11:35):
all the others put together don't equal the number of
times that I've been asked to comment on the lost
continent of Atlantis. If for whatever reason, it's just enduring
legend and that people. Within the last months, I've been
contacted by a production company in Japan who they're coming
to America they're doing there, they're doing the show about Atlantis,
(11:58):
and they were wondering if I would put because the
irony is and there's a bit of a language barrier.
I mean, obviously I don't speak any Japanese and the
folks I've been communicating with are pretty good with English,
but not perfect. And and this is this is what happens. Typically,
they say, well, would I come and do do an
interview by Atlanta? Says I'm sure, After what exactly would
(12:19):
you tell us? And so I sent them an entry
from this encyclopedia I did a few years ago, called
the Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology. So I sent them my
Atlantis entry, which is abundantly clear. It say, look, this
is a fantasy. Here's why we know none of this
is true. Here's what here's the lack of evidence is
absolutely telling. And I send it to them, and then
(12:40):
I get an email back from them saying, so, so
are you gonna tell us that there's no Atlantis? And I, yes,
that's exactly what I'm gonna tell you. And I haven't
heard back from them, So I'm wondering if they thought,
oh my goodness, that documentary, So who knows, but for
whatever reason, people are drawn to ancient aliens for sure,
(13:01):
Asian astronauts, but Atlantis is you know, we'll always have Atlantis.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Well, so for the I can't imagine any of our
listeners don't have some kind of idea of the story.
But because you sort of give us a broad strokes
overview of the I guess this the whole story of
Atlantis and that, but give us the public one first,
and then we'll kind of get more into the facts
behind it after that.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
All right, Well, but before I do that, I've got
I do have another very short story, and I'm only
going to reveal this to Blake, to you and Karen, hopefully.
I don't want anybody else here in this. Okay, Okay, fine,
So this, in a sense, maybe my first kind of
public commentary about Atlantis happened when I was a freshman
(13:46):
undergraduate in college, and honest to god, this is nineteen
sixty nine, and I cannot explain why I thought this
was a good idea. I don't remember because it was
nineteen sixty nine at all that employe. But I was
hanging out with a bunch of my buddies and a
song came on the radio, which was the song. Like Donovan,
(14:08):
Donovan's a very popular folk singer. Scottish guy had a
lot of real popular stuff, and he had a song
which in fact was called Atlantis. And it's this I
don't know if you guys are familiar with it, but
the beginning is him talking telling the story the continent
of Atlantis was an island in the middle of the Atlantic,
which day before the Great Flood, and it goes on
(14:29):
and on on about Atlantis was kind of the pre
eminent ancient civilization, and all civilizations and all the gods
of the ancient worlds are derived from Atlantis. And then
it goes on to this interminable chorus where Donovan sings,
lay down below the ocean, where I want to be,
she may be whatever the hell amy and it sings
(14:51):
that about a billion times. I counted, it's about a billion. So,
for whatever reason, me and a bunch of blood he's
in the the verse nineteen fifty nine, decided it would
be a really cool idea to strip down into our underwear,
wrap ourselves in dead sheets. Each one of us was
playing guitar had guitar, so we each grabbed a guitar
(15:12):
and sang the chorus of that song as we walked
around the campus for about two hours.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
What's a logical thing to do after that?
Speaker 5 (15:21):
I mean, there must have been some reason why I
thought we thought that would be a great idea, and
knowing me and knowing my buddies in nineteen sixty nine,
we probably thought, maybe this will get us laid. Hey,
it didn't. It's an important the storm. So so that
was kind of my first public public experience with Atlantis,
(15:45):
was singing the chorus of the Donovan song with a
bunch of other horny guys wrapped in bed sheets, walking
around a college campus. But the thing is, if you
want to know kind of the the standard modern telling
of the Atlanta story, go on YouTube and listen to
It's all over the Place, that song told by Donovan,
(16:09):
the story told by him before he breaks out into song,
And it's all about the fact that there was this
spectacularly advanced, wonderful and utopian civilization on an island in
the middle of the Atlantic, far precociously advanced in technology
and in art and literature, and in one day and
(16:32):
one night, some horrible natural catastrophe struck Atlantis. It was
destroyed but as he was being destroyed, a series of sailors,
a number of boats, left that continent, which now was
going to be the Lost Continent, and went out all
of the various continents of the world and began where
(16:52):
the seed of civilization in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in China,
in North America, and in South America. So that all
the great civilizations, Ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilization, the
mound builders, the Maya, the Aztecs, the Inca, that all
of them are much later and paler reflections of fair Atlantis,
(17:15):
which was the inspiration for all civilization. And so if
you look at the archaeological historical records, these cultures all
appeared almost instantly at some point after the destruction of Atlantis,
and that they share many many things in common because
they all were derived from the same source. That's the song.
That's the tale, the story that Donovantell's in the song,
(17:36):
and it is in a very general sense, that's the
story you will hear in Ignatious. You will read it
Ignacious Donnelly's Atlantis, the Antidiluvian World. It's the stuff that
you will hear in Churchwood's work is stuff that you
will hear and stuff that you will read if you
go online today and google Atlantis and look at one
of the not archaeological sites or historical sites, but the
(18:00):
kind of fringe believers in the Lost Continent, as that
same story told over and over again, great amazingly precocious
ancient civilization that is in fact the source of all
of the ancient civilizations that came after.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
That thought would be recommending Donovan on months to talk.
Speaker 5 (18:20):
Yeah, well, you know he's still around, he still performs,
he's ancient as well. His daughter is Ione Sky, who's
this beautiful woman. She's an actress. She's been in a
number of movies.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Yeah, I didn't know that was his daughter an actor too,
leitch So. And then I mean there's also Marvel in DC.
They have Aquaman and Prince neymar So.
Speaker 5 (18:45):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
But aside from pop culture though, there's there's some what's
the real origin of this story?
Speaker 5 (18:56):
There's there's the deal. So often what I end up
having to tell people, very often it's you know, producers,
independent production companies contact me and they go, we want
somebody to talk about Atlantis. We need somebody to talk
about the perfect society that Plato developed, and then that's
Plato is our ultimate source. And the thing that pisss
me off is that about ninety nine percent of the
(19:19):
story that I've just told you about the lost continent
of Atlantis is based on poor reading comprehension by the
people who are the purveyors of that story. Because none
of what I just said that was in Donovant story,
None of that is true. Now that's not my hypothesis,
it's not my opinion. It's go back and read the
(19:40):
ultimate source of the story and you find out that
all of that is bullshit. It's not the story that's
told in the original source. The source is Plato, who's
writing in the three P forty BC something like that,
and he's he writes your Plato writes in dialogues, right,
so he writes these stories as if there were real
people having conversation. A bunch of years ago, on the
(20:04):
public TV in I know it was in New York,
I don't know how if it was a national there
was a show called Meeting of Minds and it was
produced by Steve Allen, who was an amazing polymath, a writer,
a skeptic. He was a member of Psychops for years.
I think he's one of their fellows. And he had
a show in which the fiction was that you would
(20:26):
take four historical characters, people who didn't know each other,
lived in different continents, different time periods, have actors portray
those people, have them sit around the table and then
discuss a topic. So I remember seeing Cleopatra, Charles Darwin,
Abraham Lincoln, and Gandhi talking about the topic of slavery.
And you had actors who are real bright people who
(20:48):
had backgrounds in history, who didn't have a script, not
much of a script, but merely spoke about their philosophies
about that topic. That Plato did that more than two
thousand years ago. So he took real folks, people like
Hermocrates and Prittius the Junior and Timaeus, and he pretended
(21:10):
that they were all in a room together and that
their teacher was Socrates. Again, this is all pretend, and
that they had a topic that they were going to
talk about. Socrates was the initiator of the conversation. But
the students of Socrates were supposed to talk about all
this stuff. Plato, a real guy, was really a student
of Socrates, and so we're supposed to suspend our disbelief
(21:34):
and imagine that these people who, as far as we know,
did not know each other in reality, but we're going
to pretend to put them in a room all at
one time and discuss a topic that Plato is interested in.
And so everything is through Socrates. So if Plato gets
in trouble with the authorities, he can say, well, well,
that's not my opinion. That's what these guys in this dialogue,
(21:56):
that's their opinions. A couple of points before I'll talk
about what actually happened in those dialogues. One is you
will hear from people, and I always hear from people. Yes,
but Plato said this was a true story. No, he didn't,
(22:16):
and that's again poor reading comprehension. Plato doesn't say anything
in the dialogues. Plato is the author, So yeah, ultimately
all comes from Plato. But Plato is putting words in
the mouths of characters in what amounts to a play.
(22:37):
So Crittius is the guy who says that Atlantis was real,
and then people say, yeah, but Plato wrote the dialogue. Okay,
so how about this. In Henry the Six, Shakespeare has
Dick the butcher say, you know, the first thing we're
gonna do and then we get in power, we're gonna
kill all the lawyers. So is that Shakespeare saying we
should kill all the lawyers or a character in a play.
(23:00):
We all understand when Archie Bunker back in the back
in the day when all that TV show out All
in the Family, when Archie Bunker said these idiotic, misogynistic,
racist stuff, was that when Norman Lear was the producer
of that show. This guy is a real Norman Lear
is a real progressive person. Is that were those Norman
Norman Leers perspectives or attitudes or opinions. Hell no, they
(23:22):
were a character in a show and the point was
to move along a dialogue or a conversation. So Critius
is the guy, not Plato, who says, hey, this story,
this story is actually real. I'm not making this stuff up.
But we don't have to believe that because it's not
Plato saying it. It's a character in a what amounts
to a play. The other thing that bothers the I'm
(23:45):
sorry it bothers the shit out of me is when
people say, yes, but didn't Plato talk about Atlantis the
perfect society? And these days when when a TV producer
tells me that, I say, I will be on your show.
When you go back and read Plato, you have to
read the dialogue named after this this real life person,
because you obviously you haven't read it, because you don't
(24:07):
understand a simple fundamental fact, which is the perfect utopian
society that Dodovan talks about. That's not Atlantis. That's ancient Athens,
a mythical Athens that dates back nine thousand years before
Plato's time, eleven thousand years ago or more from our time, when,
by the way, archaeology shows that the ancient Greeks were
(24:28):
living in caves and hunting and gathering and fishing. They
were not living in complex societies. They were not building temples,
they did not have standing armies. They were hunter gatherers
at this point. But in the story that played Hotels
through Critias, the ancient perfect society is an ancient Athens.
(24:50):
Atlantis is the bad guy. They're the plot device in
a story. And it makes sense when I tell my students,
when I start thinking my Atlantis rant to my students,
I say, hey, listen, here's a story, right. We have
this enormously powerful, technologically sophisticated, rich and militarily aggressive culture,
(25:16):
and they're bent on taking over the known universe, and
the only thing standing in their way is a small,
ragtag group of people who they are not technologically sophisticated,
they're not wealthy, they are not militarily aggressive, but they
are living a perfect So the force is with them,
(25:39):
and they, in fact are able despite all the odds,
and contrary to what you would expect, they're able to
defeat this enormously powerful, evil empire. And then I asked
kids in the class, what have I just told you,
and they said, oh, that's Star Wars. No, no, not
even to Star Wars at all. I was thinking of
the Atlantis story as told by Critius. And then I
(26:00):
tell them what the whole deal is about. So really
it's it's Star Wars. It's Star Wars set eleven thousand
years ago, and just like just like Plato, that's a
long time ago. Plato puts Way to Hell, far away
in mildy Atlantic Ocean, which from the perspective of the
ancient Greeks was like another universe, and he puts it
(26:22):
nine thousand years before his time. It's it's long ago
and far away where he puts it just the way
they do it in Star Wars. So anyway, the actual story,
it's kind of it's I think it's a cool story.
Everybody should read the prettiest story. Here's the deal. So
Socrates starts in this in this dialogue, Socrates starts by saying,
(26:44):
he remember that conversation we were having yesterday, And the
students all go, oh, yeah, yeah, that's society. We were
talking about the perfect society, right, and yesterday we talked
about ni Plato gives some of the specifics. Now, anybody
who's ever read Plato immediately knows we're beginning with a
fiction right there, because the story that Socrates is telling
(27:08):
is right out of the Republic another Plato, a lot
of Plato's dialogues. But we know that Plato wrote the
Republic seven years before. So this conversation he's talking about
that happened yesterday and actually happened seven years before in
this kind of fictional timeline that Plato has made up,
so it's really seven seven years before. Black he says
(27:28):
it's yesterday, And Socrates says, remember, yesterday's conversation was completely
hypothetical about a perfect society and what makes them perfect,
and how the military men are not allowed to accumulate
any gold, and the military they live apart from everybody else,
and everybody in the society is exercises and is healthy,
(27:50):
and nobody is allowed to have too much wealth, and
so it goes on and on and on, and Socrates says,
remember I was talking about that yesterday, but then, and
I'm actually going to quote priteous here. Socrates in this
opening scene says, I might compare myself to a person
who beholding a beautiful animal or either created by the
painter's art, or better still alive and at rest, is
(28:12):
seized with a desire of seeing them in motion or
engaged in some struggle or conflict to which their forms
appear suited. And I tell students again, I tell them, well,
I show them in my PowerPoint. I show them a
picture of a female lion, a lioness from a zoo.
She's lying on her back, she's asleep, her belly showing
her arms are up in the air. And I tell
(28:33):
my students, if that's the only thing that that lion
at rest, if that's the only impression you ever had
of a lion, could you explain or describe what makes
a lion a lion, and students will go, well, no,
And then I show them this life of a bunch
of lionesses taking down a zebra, and it's these are
incredibly powerful, quick, ferocious animals, and they're one has her
(28:58):
jaws wrapped around its neck and the there is grabbing
its time quarters by its pause, and it's kind of
sad for the zebra. But that's what makes a lion
a lion. Soccerally, the same same thing we talked very
hypothetically about this ancient perfect civilization. Would I want I
want somebody to tell me about this perfect society? What
makes it perfect? We show that society and a struggle,
(29:22):
and he goes on and says, it's like, this is
an assignment. It's a homework assignment. I should like to
hear someone tell of our own city carrying on a
struggle against her neighbors, and how she went to war
in a becoming manner, and when at war, showed by
the greatness of her actions and the magnanimity of her
words in dealing with other cities, a result worthy of
her training and education. So you get it, Socrates said, yesterday,
(29:46):
we would say about perfect society, I give you guys
an assignment. Somebody tell me a story today that's not
a hypothetical story about a perfect society. Tell me a
story of this perfect society, and the best way to
do it to show what makes them perfect. Tell me
about a war, how they went to war, and how
they were able to defeat somebody in war, and how
(30:08):
they were gracious with the folks they defeated, and gracious
with the other people in their world. So it's over ecientence.
And what happens next is kind of funny. Hermocrates is
one of the people. He raises his hand and Socrates says, oh, Hermocrates,
do you have a story to tell? And Hermocratus says, well, no,
but yesterday, after you had this conversation Prittias over there,
(30:30):
he told us a really great story. So you can
imagine if you're a college student today with somebody else
volunteering you to tell the story in class, and Prittius goes, oh, okay,
And that's when Prittia says, okay, listen, say oh, this
is a story that it's really kind of amazing because
(30:51):
all of the details that you said about this hypothetical
perfect society, it's amazing. All of those details fit perfectly
with the story I'm about to tell. But I assure
you it's a true story. Well, okay, do you believe
Critius or is this, you know, dramatic effect? Is it
like everybody telling a made up story? But for the
draw If Critias says, listen to Plato, to his story,
(31:13):
which I'm just I'm pulling it out of my ass man,
I don't know. Maybe that's a good story. Isn't it
much more dramatic for him to say, Plato, hey, this
is a real story. Now, everybody, all of the philosophers
and historians of philosophy who read this say the next
thing is pretty crucial, because Critias says, well, here's the
(31:33):
deal Socrates. Because he's talking to Socrates. I personally did
not observe any of his firsthand, but I heard it
from my grandfather. His name is also Critius, and my
grandfather he heard it from Dropodes, who was a more
ancient historian, and Dropides he heard it from Solon, who's
(31:55):
even more ancient, and Soullen he heard it from Egyptian
priests who and he went to Egypt and they told
him that story. So it's kind of Plato was saying,
and guys, this is a very indirectly told story. It's
like telephone tag. So by the time we hear it,
it's hundreds of years and many generations removed from the
(32:15):
original source of the story. Most philosophers, most folks who
study Plato, say Plato could not have been any more
clear in divorcing himself from this story. So he's in
fact saying, in a backhanded way, I'm making this story up.
It's long ago, far away, and we heard it from
a guy who heard it from a guy who heard
(32:36):
it from a guy who heard it from a guy. Oh,
by the way, Crittius tells tells Socrates that my grandfather
he told he first told the story at a festival.
And if you know anything about Greek history, it's a
festival where you get a prize for telling the best
(32:58):
bullshit story. It's like it's the equivalent of April Fools Dead,
and whoever town makes up the best story gets surprised.
So again Plato is with a nod and a wink
and a nudge, telling people at his time, who all
would have been aware of this, all right, it's a
true story that my grandfather told that at a festival
where you're supposed to make up the best story. And
(33:19):
then the tells is, yeah, long ago, there was this
society in the middle of the Atlantic. He puts it
out beyond the pillars of Hercules, and it's an island
the size of a continent, he calls bigger than Libya
and Asia together. And that well, they started out okay,
because the gods put a bunch of twins on that island.
But as time was as time went on, and they
(33:42):
were removed in time from the kind of godly portion
they got. They got more and more powerful, but more
and more corrupt, and they became an evil empire bent
on world domination. And they decided. In the story the
prettiest tells, the Atlantians decided, with their enormous and there's
a huge army, that they were going to enter into
(34:02):
the Mediterranean and kick some serious ass and take over
the world. And the only society that stood in their
way was this mythical Athens, who again Critius goes in
the great detail. And if again, if you've read The Republic,
you read how Critius describes the perfect Athens, and it's
(34:23):
like it's a laundry list of all the stuff that
Socrates said. Plato wrote that Socrates said in their public
about what would constitute a perfect society, and talks about
how wonderful these guys are. And even though they were
outnumbered and out gunned and their technology wasn't as good,
(34:45):
they had righteousness on their side. They were able to
defeat the Atlanteans. And then after the military defeat, the
gods looked down in Atlantis and they got kissed off,
and they decided, we're going to wipe them out in
one in one single blow a day of the night,
wipe them out. And the dialogue kind of ends there.
(35:05):
And Plato never actually finished the dialogue, so that that
that that that story ends right there. So the deal. Listen,
you've got this. It's a really it's actually a pretty
pretty interesting story, and it's very clearly all about a
lesson to be learned. It's a work of philosophy. It
is not a work of history. It's also important to
(35:29):
point out I've had people say to me, well, what
if maybe Plato found some historical documentation that nobody else
in Greece knew about. This is, of course thousands of
years as of the fact, but he found this stuff
and was introducing it in his dialogue as a way
of spreading the word. Well, that's really interesting, and that
(35:50):
the best analogy I can give you is supposing so
that that the fact that ancient Athens would have had
this incredible it would have engaged in this incredible war
against a much more powerful enemy and defeated them, and
it's that changed the history of the world as a result.
If Plato had found a true record of that and
(36:11):
was sharing something he believed to be true, well, that
would be the equivalent of, say, the Revolutionary War, that
we had no documentation, no evidence whatsoever of the American Revolution,
but that some historian now finds hidden in some dusty
attic an old book that tells that story. And this
(36:32):
guy is now going to publish this because while this
is a part of our history that we knew nothing about,
a vital part of our history that explains who we
are as a nation. Nobody knew anything about it before,
and now I'm going to reveal it. Well, and I
ask students, says, what do you think would happened? And
they all say, well, other historians would comment on it.
Some historians might say, no, it's a croc that really
(36:53):
didn't happen. Others might say, oh, this is an amazing revelation,
we need to find out more. The cold thing, interesting thing,
the relevant thing here is that after the Critius is distributed,
no Greek historians comment on it, even to say, well,
this is a bunch of shit. Well, the reason they
don't comment on it is they know it's fiction. You
(37:15):
won't find very many historians with PhDs commenting on the
Star Wars saga saying well, wait a minute, none of
that shit happened, and we know that it's called fiction,
so they don't have to. But that's exactly what happens
in the case of the Critius dialogue, the Atlantis dialogues.
The Greek Katilians, at least initially don't say anything about
it and oh that's interesting philosophy. But they don't comment
(37:38):
on it because they know that Plato is telling a
piece of fiction. There's a purpose here. Atlantis is a
plot device to show how this is how a perfect
society should actually behave, and this is by putting them
having a war. It shows that's the ultimate existential challenge.
And they are they prevail, they are they defeat this
(38:00):
powerful enemy because they are living this perfect life and
we all should be living the way they are. So
it's a lesson for us all to learn. But it's
not it's not history, it's philosophy, and it's really through
after the pretious and to meaous dialogues were distributing people
read them. There are people in antiquity who wondered aloud
(38:21):
whether or not those things were real. But it's really
not until the nineteenth century with Ignatius Donnelly, who's an
American writer and political aspirant who writes this book Atlantis
the Antidiluvian World, that it gets to be a really
popular and significant argument about gee, maybe this Atlantis was real,
(38:42):
maybe a lost continent, the existence of this powerful loss continent.
Maybe that explains the archaeology of the ancient world that
was familiar with the Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, North and South America,
and that after that, now the theosophists getting involved in
and that's just all sort of hallucinatory. But it's I
(39:03):
think it's not only more than anybody else who caught
in the eighteen late eighteen hundreds inspired the modern mania
about Atlantis that, as I said, continues to this day.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
On cable TV, So haven't other historical authors written about Atlantis?
Isn't it mentioned in Thomas More's Utopia?
Speaker 5 (39:23):
Oh yeah, I mean once it's out there, people embrace
that story and use it for their own purposes. It
becomes a fairly common but again as a plot device, yes,
and it's very rare to find anybody outside, you know,
outside of the fringe. Rare to find people with backgrounds
(39:46):
in history or archaeology or philosophy who say, no, this
is this is the this is a true story, and
we just need to find more evidence of it.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
So what about Heinrich Schleemann does I mean, I know,
with his finding of Troy it seems like I don't
know if in real life it matters, but on documentaries
or what are presented as documentaries, he always comes up
in these Atlantis things, is like, well they thought Troy
was a leg Sympathon Schleemann found it.
Speaker 5 (40:15):
You know that you and I and Karen we all
know that that is an incredibly specious argument. But my
favorite is Carl Sagan and I have this source someplace
basically called that kind of argument, the they laughed at
Columbus argument, right, say, well, people who of course don't
(40:37):
know the reality behind. Columbus didn't think the world was
flat and nobody is going to fall over the edge.
They just thought it was really far and maybe not navigable.
But in any event, the you know, in the in
the cliche telling of the story, here was Columbus, the brilliant,
you know, the guy. It's like the guy working in
his garage who discovers a perpetual motion and nobody believes them,
(40:59):
but he shows there they're they're wrong, and so that's
the great role model. They laughed at Columbus a colleague
of mine. So therefore anybody with a crazy idea must
be right. And so this argument is they laughed that Shleiman. Well,
the whole story of Schlimann finding Troy is still kind
of up in the air. You know, which level is
(41:19):
the Troy that you know there's it's a multi component site.
So which one really was that was Troy? Well, it
really wasn't that site. We're not even sure of that.
But say supposing Sleiman really did find a story that
was ostensibly legends, ostensibly myth and finds out, yeah, there's
something to it. That's that's a one off that shows
it happens in science. We all recognize, Yeah, there are
(41:42):
people who come up with crazy ideas that turn out
to actually pan out, but each one is individual. Whether
Shliman was right or not bears no relationship whatsoever to
some other crazy guy saying, no, I think there was
a continent in the middle of the Atlantic. Every individual
plane history or archaeology has to stand on its own,
(42:03):
needs evidence for that story and evidence for some other
story that Again, a buddy of mine used to say, yeah,
they laughed at Columbus, they also laughed at Laurel and Hardy.
The Laurel and Hardy aren't going to be used as
that's John Cole, an archaeologist I've known for years. So yeah,
they also left at Laurel and Hardy. But nobody says, well,
we should take those movies a lot more seriously. Yeah,
(42:24):
they were funny, and the Columbus story is kind of
a funny story. The Schliemann that's interesting about Troy doesn't
have anything to do with with Atlantis. But then you'll
hear and then we've talked about this a little blake,
the story that well, but maybe maybe maybe the story
of Atlantis, it's garbled, maybe and maybe there are some things,
(42:46):
you know, individual facts are wrong, but that overall the
story of an incredibly sophisticated ancient civilization being destroyed, an
island being destroyed overnight, and now it's it's you know,
lost in the miss of antiquity. Maybe Plato was aware
of something like that really happening and basically used it
(43:07):
as the basis for his Atlanta story. Now I've heard
that argument about a billion times, and usually it's Minoan Creek,
the temple at Knoso. Sorry, that was a very sophisticated
civilization thousands of years ago, but these guys had contact
(43:29):
with ancient Egypt. These guys had contact but with other
civilizations in the Mediterranean region. So this is more than
three thousand years ago. And in fact, we do know
there was a massive volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini, right,
and that that maybe that eruption destroyed the Minoan civilization,
(43:50):
and that that was passed down over millennia, and Plato
and other guys in Greece knew about that story, and
so Plato.
Speaker 6 (43:59):
It's garbled ky.
Speaker 5 (44:00):
Some of the details are wrong, but but at its core,
the Atlanta story is based on that. You know, I've
heard that so many times. And el Sprague de Camp,
who's was a wonderful science fiction writer but also was
a you know, wrote some historical stuff and wrote a
wonderful book about lost confidence. And basically what's what the
(44:21):
Camp said was, look, how many details are you allowed
to tell in a legend? How many details are you
allowed to change in that legend to make it real
and still have it, you know, relate to the original story.
And he said, when you look at Atlantis, you know,
it's not like one or two details that you would
need to change to make it Minoan Crete or Santorini.
(44:44):
It's like every detail. So what I did, because because
I'm obsessive compulsive, is I read through once again. I
read through Critius and Timius, and I had at my
side various archaeological site reports for Santa and Minoan Creek.
And as an archaeologist, what I did was, I said, look,
(45:04):
there's a lot of stuff in here that I cannot test,
you know, because there's not going to be any archaeological
evidence for or against it. But when Plato, and when
Plato through Prittius mentions specific details about what a palace
looked like, or what animals were on the island of Atlantis,
(45:25):
or what the size was of the plains of So
when he gave specific details, I wrote them all down
and had, I think, I put together like fifty three
specific material facts that would be archaeologically and geologically testable,
and then I went through actual archaeological publications about Minoan
(45:47):
crete and Santorini. And you know what I found. I
found if you look, if you are consistent, and if
you are objective, you come up with exactly one of
information supplied by Critius to Socrates and recorded in Plato's dialogue,
where you could say, yep, that's right, and the one
(46:10):
fact is, Wow, the palace and temple was really big
and impressive. That's it. And yeah, if you look at
the temple at Knosos, that's big and impressive. But every
other detail, every other specific thing mentioned in the dialogue
mentioned by Critius does not match the specifics that we
(46:30):
know about Manolan crete or Santorini. It's not in the
middle of the Atlantic. The size of it way way long.
One of the things that's mentioned several times in the
dialogue is that one of the major animals they had
on the continent of Atlantis were elephants. Nobody's ever found
an elephant, either on crete or on Santorini. So the
(46:54):
metals that were supposedly adorning the walls that have all
recalcum which and we don't even know what the hell
that was, probably with a brass bronze copper combination. Nobody
really knows, well, nobody even knows played it was just
you know, using a term that was used later for
a particular kind of metal, particular alloy, We don't know.
But regardless, there's no evidence is this our calculm was
(47:16):
supposed to line the walls of the ancient city on
the capital city of Atlanta's zero evidence for that in
the know, and crete or Santorini. It's just you kind
of have to be again, it's a reading comprehension thing.
Read what either You're gonna use Plato as your model,
as your source, because well, that's the first time anybody
(47:38):
talks about He's the only one that provides all those details,
so you kind of stuck using him as a source. Well,
then if you are, you don't get the cherry pick
out of dozens of specific descriptions. You're not allowed to say, well,
fifty two of them are wrong. Well, I think, but
I actually do the math, it's like forty eight of
(47:59):
them are. There are a number of them where I
can't tell you if they're right or wrong. And there's
only one of them it's correct. Well yeah, if you
just look at that one, and it's really general anyway,
it's like, you know, that's that's not a very powerful argument.
You don't get to change facts, you don't get to
cherry pick facts. You kind of got it. You have
to look at this objectively, and objectively was this did
(48:22):
Plato hear a story about an ancient destroyed civilization? I
don't know. Maybe getting back to Star Wars, I believe
that that. You know, the folks behind Star Wars have said, well, okay, yeah,
the storm Troopers, they're kind of based on Nazi stormtroopers.
The Emperor Palpatine, Yeah, he's kind of hitler. So is
(48:45):
Star Wars just a kind of twisted and tweaked version
of World War Two? I don't think so. How did
anybody a thousand years from now, if they still have,
you know, copies of Star Wars, the original, not the
fix ones, if they watched it. I don't think t
on a thousand years from now would be able to
legitimately and fairly say this is George Lucas telling the
(49:07):
story of World War Two. It's not. Any writer of
fiction is going to incorporate into their fiction stuff that
they're familiar with, stuff that they've heard of. But that
doesn't make it a kind of attenuated or truncated version
of something that really happened. It just means there are
some cool stories in history, and they plugged it in.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
So it seems like that Atlantis is a legend, though,
has been like this unstoppable engine of producing bullshit. Do
you think maybe it should be the incontinent of Atlantis?
Speaker 5 (49:44):
There you go, here's the me. I actually once sat
down because I have way too much time on my hands,
and I wrote a short story about this guy who
says that he's discovered what it was all about. But
the real story of Atlantis was at LANs was this
island where there was this ear group that grew there
and it was an herb that gave people everlasting life
(50:05):
and that and that people wanted it, and it was like,
you know, it was everybody of course wanted this herb,
this this material that they made at this herb forever
lasting life. And and then the island though was destroyed
in a single day and night. And now so now
of course that we all are still looking for the
lost condiment of Atlanta. So I thought it was about
(50:29):
you can you can remove that from the podcast that
you want?
Speaker 1 (50:32):
Why would I do that?
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Well, I think unfortunately we've we've burned up most of
our hour here. Uh No, it is actually great because
I really appreciate you coming back, and I believe what
we have here is probably the most comprehensive coverage for
why there uh should not be a big effort to
keep finding Atlantis great stuff.
Speaker 5 (50:57):
You know, it's ignitious. Donnelly at the very end of
his book actually has a paragraph. Now remember he's writing this.
This published in eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties, So he says,
who's to say that one hundred years from now, meaning
it would be like nineteen ninety who's to say one
hundred years from now? And I hope this happens, that
(51:19):
the museums of the world will be filled with the
statues and artifacts of Lost Atlantis, and our libraries will
be filled with the books published by the ancient Atlanteans.
So he predicted, at least with his fingers, you know,
hopefully that in one hundred years after his book was
published that today we'd always saying, oh my god, yes,
Atlantis a wonderful, marvelous place, and we have their artifacts
(51:42):
in their books. Well, guess what, folks, that has not happened,
And so they can be on looking for Atlantis and
finding you know, geological features off the coast of Bimini,
and you know, the archaeological sites in Spain, and oh
my god, South America, off the coast of Japan, and
it's all over the world. And you know, until it's
(52:03):
basically in archaeology, it's all about that. It's all about data,
physical evidence, and if you don't have it, you know,
go about your business. That's fine. But until you have
that kind of irrefutable, demonstrable fact supporting that, you know, folks,
archaeologists and historians are gonna say, you know what, it's
(52:23):
there's better stuff that we could spend our time doing,
like visiting fifty real archaeological sites in the United States
where the real genius of antiquity is there for us
all to engage in.
Speaker 2 (52:41):
Oh, I was going to ask you, what's your favorite
real location for Atlantis to all these places like, yeah.
Speaker 5 (52:47):
My favorite real location of Atlantis is, let's see, might
be Bolivia, could be because because they they are people who
say it's it's hard. Well, I know, here's my favorite.
My favorite is the South Antarctica because that's that's really
good because they can say, listen to quse, you're not
going to find it. It's under all that.
Speaker 2 (53:08):
Yeah, yeah, current rates is going to be ten years
before we can find it.
Speaker 5 (53:14):
No, but you know, ultimately it's kind of the ultimate
far away and long. It's under a mile device, so
you don't have to look too carefully because you're not
going to find it there. But that may be. That
may be my very favorite because it really gets called
it's called covering your ass. Put it someplace where nobody.
I mean, at some point somebody's going to say, well,
maybe it was actually on Mars.
Speaker 2 (53:36):
No, well that's a good point. It flew off filled.
Speaker 5 (53:38):
The Mars face and until we go there and actually
walk around, you never know.
Speaker 1 (53:45):
Oh, just in closing can and we've asked you this
question before, but sometimes people change their minds. What's your
favorite monster?
Speaker 5 (53:53):
My favorite monster? Oh, my god, I think my favorite
monster is. I like the law Ness Monster a lot.
I love the story because I love how it changes
through time and how now he's you know, the luck
that's she's a you know, friendly and school kids in
Scotland all love NeSSI that may be my favorite. And
I've been to a drum the Drockets, so I actually
(54:15):
actually looked for the Lockness Monster. I've said with all
those other tourists at the turret of Urkhar Castle and
looked across the loch and all I saw were guys
on sale and sailboards. You know, oh my god, you
guys are gonna be killed by the monster, but they
realy didn't care. So that may be my favorite. Also
because when you go into the town or drum the
drocket which exists because of the Luckness Monster, they're competing
(54:38):
like official exhibits, so you know, one side of the
street there's the official exhibit and the other side of
the street it's the original exhibit. So I think that's
kind of cute.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
That's a fantastic that's a great classic answer there.
Speaker 2 (54:49):
Well, I know you've just scratched a niche that a
lot of people had by coming back to talk to
us who really appreciate it.
Speaker 5 (54:55):
This is great fun. I love doing it and hopefully
people will enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
They will, and you'll put a link to your new
podcast in your newest book and your old books and
the previous episodes on the show notes at monster talk
dot org. Fas Okay, well, have a great night. I
have to go watch a documentary about this Game of Thrones.
Speaker 1 (55:17):
Have to listen to the Donovan sum Yes, absolutely, Karen,
good luck and I reading I said before about you
have a kid being a bad idea.
Speaker 5 (55:25):
I was telling you absolutely the truth.
Speaker 2 (55:29):
Have a great night.
Speaker 1 (55:31):
Thanks kind ticket, bye bye monster.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
You've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner. You just heard
Karen Stolesto and I interviewed doctor Kinney Fader about the
legends and facts of Atlantis. Links to Kenny's books and
additional information is in the show notes at monster talk
dot org, including a link to that groovy song by Donovan.
Speaker 5 (56:44):
This has been a Monster House presentation.
Speaker 3 (56:53):
This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.
The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but
not necessarily the only ones to the mysteries we will
examine
Monster House Presents.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
As part of our summer Flashback series. This week, we're
traveling back to May of twenty fifteen. At the time,
we were planning to try and do a cruise with
archaeologist doctor Ken Fader, but that didn't work out yet.
This week I'll actually be going on a similar cruise
with some of our skeptical colleagues and cooperation with Brian Dunning,
a skeptoic podcast. So if you're attending that, be sure
and say hello. It's really interesting to me when I
(00:32):
go back and see how various structural elements of the
show have changed. And I'm going to have to slap
an explicit tag on this one because I can't remember
ever talking to Ken Fader without needing one. Ken's a
real friend of our show, and we'll be talking to
him again soon to discuss his newest book. He's a
real pioneer in the fight against pseudo archaeology and his
books are a tremendous resource for anyone interested in such topics.
(00:54):
Check out the show notes for links.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
More instrutal.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
My family didn't have cable TV for much of my youth,
but my great aunt and uncle did and I would
often walk over to their house to watch the kind
of shows which thrilled me with their discussion of monsters,
mysteries and magic. The king of these shows was in
Search of It was hosted by Leonardymoy and could any
casting choice have better accluded skepticism than having that paragon
(01:20):
of logic and reason Star Trek's Mister Spock introducing the
magnificent march of mysteries that the show paraded before us
each week. Just listen to this clip.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Long before the Egyptians built the Pyramids, someone constructed a
vast stone city atop a peak in the Andes. The
ruins stand empty and silent. Each carving is a disconnected
figure from the past, yet some common origin might join
them together. The earth itself bears the portraits of still
(01:53):
other giants scratched onto a plateau in California ten thousand
years ago. Others were esched with precision into an English
hillside long before the building of Stonehenge. The tools to
carve and move the giants indicate an advanced technology. There
(02:17):
is a place where the knowledge and skills to create
the giants may be found, the Kingdom of Atlantis. Never
before have explorers been so close to finding Atlantis. Never
have we possessed as many clues, nor have we been
(02:38):
able to bring the detection equipment of modern science to
the search.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Until now Here's a confession. There's no monster in this
week's episode. This episode exists because by far the most
popular episode of Muster Talk is episode number thirty eight,
Ancient Alien Astronauts with Kenny Fader. It has twenty five
percent more downloads than its nearest competitor. We've had more
requests for Ken to come back than any other guests.
I'm Blake Smith. This is Monster Talk, and today doctor
(03:06):
Karen Stolesno and I are going to talk to an
archaeologist about Atlantis. Cover your kid's ears. Doctor Kenny Fader
is back, and there is no beep button. You get
ready because everything you thought you knew about Atlantis is
about to be destroyed in a single day. It's actually
quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
A giant, hairy creature party party net in Luckness, a
twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the highlands
of Scotland, if a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
More obstrutle.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Well, welcome back to Monster Talking. Maybe Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5 (04:09):
I said, well, a huge that's a huge mistake. You
shouldn't do that.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
But you're a little late.
Speaker 5 (04:15):
My taking these things is that there's a certain limited
amount of life force in the universe.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Hmm. That's great scientific.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
As long as you don't have kids, you get to
keep all of that for yourself. But as soon as
you have kids, they suck it right out of you.
You would live forever. But now the kids, you will
start feeling like some pains and you'll and you'll die
because of having children.
Speaker 6 (04:34):
So I've got four days to go then exactly until
you start feeling it, you will you will see the
life being sucked out of you and being given to
those kids.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
If if life force is synonymous with free time, I
am going to have to agree with your hypothesis.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
Yeah, it's one way of defining it absolutely.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So what if you welcome back to Monster Talk. Thank
you your most requested repeat gas by far I'm.
Speaker 5 (05:02):
Blushing, but since it's not like Skype video, you can't
tell well, that's true.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
So what have you been up to?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Though?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
I mean I actually know the answer to that question
a little bit, But why don't you tell our listeners
what you've been up to.
Speaker 5 (05:12):
Well, it's a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, my
primary project, the thing that I'm kind of really involved
in right now is what I call my you know,
it's my fifty sides bucket list, which is there's a
long story behind it. Along some background is that I
was having one of those those kind of those moments
you have when you're a professor and you've just given
(05:34):
back like a midterm, and you wonder, what the heck
the hell am I teaching? And does it make any
goddamn difference? Because these kids are they going to remember
what the half life of radio carbon is five years
from now? Probably most of them won't remember it five
minutes from now, So what the hell is the point?
And the weird thing was and it's wonderful synchronicity. I
(05:54):
got an email from a student, a past student, so
this this all happens maybe five years ago, and he
had been a student of mine three or four years
before I just kind of don't nowhere. Randomly he emailed
me saying, hey, listen, doctor Vader, you won't remember me,
which is sure I didn't, and I wasn't a very
good student. It's true because I went in check and
I didn't have a good student, but he says, I
(06:15):
loved your class. I just wasn't a real good student
back then, and it really had this impact on me
and a couple of years, this is before I received
the email. He and his wife and he has two
children now, were in the Southwest coincidentally driving up what
I'm seventeen, from Phoenix to Flagstaff, and he says in
doctor Fader repassed a big brown National Park ser a
(06:39):
sign that says this exit Montezuma Castle. And I turned
to my wife and I said, remember that crazy archaeologia
professor I told you about, and you know I was
proud of that. And she says, yeah, because well I
remember he showed us pictures of that site, and I
remember it look pretty cool. Do you mind if we
stop here? And his wife, again according in the email,
(07:00):
said the other wife said that'd be fine, and then
he spends the rest of the email just kind of gushing,
thanking me for inspiring him and a callow youth at
the time to actually think about how cool an archaeological
site might actually be to visit. And he said that
his wife thought it was really cool. His littlest girl
(07:20):
was tiny. She didn't you know, she couldn't process any
of it, but that his older daughter, who was like three,
now wants to grow up and be an archaeologist. And
I thought, how incredibly cool. And then I thought, well,
that's that's what my job really is. It's not that
kids are going to remember to have like a radio
carbon or you know what the master sequence time depth
(07:41):
business Southwest, but to kind of open them up to
the notion that, you know what, there's this cool shit
that you can go and actually see. You can visit
the past, you can you can time travel by going
to see these archaeological site. So what I decided, well,
not only should I be doing this in my classes,
I should be doing it personally in my life. Pick
(08:02):
fifty fifty and I've actually seen more than that at
this point, but fifty sites that have all in common
the fact that they are open to the public. So
these are public, public places, and that it's these are
places where somebody who knows very little about archaeology, but
maybe as interested in history, may be interested in Native Americans,
may be interested in art, maybe just interested in hiking,
(08:23):
that they can go to these places and be kind
of inspired by these awe inspiring cliff dwellings and great
houses and burial mounds and effigy mounds and spectacular works
of art on cave walls. And so I've been doing
that for the last several years actually, and I'm just
about at fifty and now hoping that I'm going to
(08:44):
get some publisher who's foolish enough to want to actually
publish it as a book.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
That would be awesome. Are you going to call it
fifty Sides of Graves?
Speaker 5 (08:52):
You know, I like fifty sides of graves? Oh my god,
you know that would have went right under my head,
not over. But that's gonna be something like archaeological odyssees,
and but it's not going to be the fifty sites
you should see before you die. And that's been well
done to death, I guess.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
But that's fantastic. It's a idea that one, yeah, just
make the cover basically the same and have them accidentally
put it into the you know, adult fiction section.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
So listen.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (09:23):
I don't know that it's absolutely true, but I have
heard that, Well, you can copyright the content of a book,
you cannot copyright titles. So I was thinking, you know,
Harry Potter. You put Harry Potter in there, but.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Something something like that.
Speaker 5 (09:39):
Before there was a thousands of the books before they
figure out, hey, wait a minute, there's just nothing to
do with Harry.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Potter for books.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, exactly. Now, I think I saw that you also
have a podcast out.
Speaker 5 (09:59):
Yeah, I'm doing a podcast with Sarah Head, who's an
archaeologist out in the Midwest. It's called Archie Fantasy.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Oh it's not Archie Fantasy. So I thought it was
like a Veronica and Archie thing.
Speaker 5 (10:08):
You know. I did not. I did not come up
with the name, but I thought that was fine. Yeah,
and again, and people think, oh, this is like the
Archie comics. We can we can we can suck at
them into into actually listening and draw them into our
you know, to be caught in our web of archaeological No.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
It looks fantastic. I've actually I'm going to subscribe after
the show because I just saw it right before the show.
Speaker 5 (10:34):
That's great, it sounds of fun to do.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Well, No, I think our listeners. I'll put a link
to it in the show notes. I bet you get
a nice bump in your listenership.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
This is be great, awesome, absolutely, and so.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
There's no monster in this episode. But we've had so
many requests you to come back. I actually contacted you
and said pick a topic, and you chose Atlantis.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
And so.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Since my uh, I don't know what it's called, nom
de net, I guess is doctor Atlantis. This is a
fuckingly apt topic for us to talk about.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
I think it is.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
So, Karen, why don't you kick us off?
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah? So, Ken, how did you get interested in Atlantis?
And does this predate your archaeology work?
Speaker 5 (11:14):
No? And you know, I'm here's the deal. I'm not
exactly sure what inspired me, but I'll tell you. But
one thing I can tell you for sure is that
I've done a bunch of documentaries talking head stuff on
National Geographic Channel and the History Channel and honest to God,
the Weather Channel, the Fi Fi Channel. And if I
count up all of these things that I've done Atlantis,
(11:35):
all the others put together don't equal the number of
times that I've been asked to comment on the lost
continent of Atlantis. If for whatever reason, it's just enduring
legend and that people. Within the last months, I've been
contacted by a production company in Japan who they're coming
to America they're doing there, they're doing the show about Atlantis,
(11:58):
and they were wondering if I would put because the
irony is and there's a bit of a language barrier.
I mean, obviously I don't speak any Japanese and the
folks I've been communicating with are pretty good with English,
but not perfect. And and this is this is what happens. Typically,
they say, well, would I come and do do an
interview by Atlanta? Says I'm sure, After what exactly would
(12:19):
you tell us? And so I sent them an entry
from this encyclopedia I did a few years ago, called
the Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology. So I sent them my
Atlantis entry, which is abundantly clear. It say, look, this
is a fantasy. Here's why we know none of this
is true. Here's what here's the lack of evidence is
absolutely telling. And I send it to them, and then
(12:40):
I get an email back from them saying, so, so
are you gonna tell us that there's no Atlantis? And I, yes,
that's exactly what I'm gonna tell you. And I haven't
heard back from them, So I'm wondering if they thought,
oh my goodness, that documentary, So who knows, but for
whatever reason, people are drawn to ancient aliens for sure,
(13:01):
Asian astronauts, but Atlantis is you know, we'll always have Atlantis.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Well, so for the I can't imagine any of our
listeners don't have some kind of idea of the story.
But because you sort of give us a broad strokes
overview of the I guess this the whole story of
Atlantis and that, but give us the public one first,
and then we'll kind of get more into the facts
behind it after that.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
All right, Well, but before I do that, I've got
I do have another very short story, and I'm only
going to reveal this to Blake, to you and Karen, hopefully.
I don't want anybody else here in this. Okay, Okay, fine,
So this, in a sense, maybe my first kind of
public commentary about Atlantis happened when I was a freshman
(13:46):
undergraduate in college, and honest to god, this is nineteen
sixty nine, and I cannot explain why I thought this
was a good idea. I don't remember because it was
nineteen sixty nine at all that employe. But I was
hanging out with a bunch of my buddies and a
song came on the radio, which was the song. Like Donovan,
(14:08):
Donovan's a very popular folk singer. Scottish guy had a
lot of real popular stuff, and he had a song
which in fact was called Atlantis. And it's this I
don't know if you guys are familiar with it, but
the beginning is him talking telling the story the continent
of Atlantis was an island in the middle of the Atlantic,
which day before the Great Flood, and it goes on
(14:29):
and on on about Atlantis was kind of the pre
eminent ancient civilization, and all civilizations and all the gods
of the ancient worlds are derived from Atlantis. And then
it goes on to this interminable chorus where Donovan sings,
lay down below the ocean, where I want to be,
she may be whatever the hell amy and it sings
(14:51):
that about a billion times. I counted, it's about a billion. So,
for whatever reason, me and a bunch of blood he's
in the the verse nineteen fifty nine, decided it would
be a really cool idea to strip down into our underwear,
wrap ourselves in dead sheets. Each one of us was
playing guitar had guitar, so we each grabbed a guitar
(15:12):
and sang the chorus of that song as we walked
around the campus for about two hours.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
What's a logical thing to do after that?
Speaker 5 (15:21):
I mean, there must have been some reason why I
thought we thought that would be a great idea, and
knowing me and knowing my buddies in nineteen sixty nine,
we probably thought, maybe this will get us laid. Hey,
it didn't. It's an important the storm. So so that
was kind of my first public public experience with Atlantis,
(15:45):
was singing the chorus of the Donovan song with a
bunch of other horny guys wrapped in bed sheets, walking
around a college campus. But the thing is, if you
want to know kind of the the standard modern telling
of the Atlanta story, go on YouTube and listen to
It's all over the Place, that song told by Donovan,
(16:09):
the story told by him before he breaks out into song,
And it's all about the fact that there was this
spectacularly advanced, wonderful and utopian civilization on an island in
the middle of the Atlantic, far precociously advanced in technology
and in art and literature, and in one day and
(16:32):
one night, some horrible natural catastrophe struck Atlantis. It was
destroyed but as he was being destroyed, a series of sailors,
a number of boats, left that continent, which now was
going to be the Lost Continent, and went out all
of the various continents of the world and began where
(16:52):
the seed of civilization in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in China,
in North America, and in South America. So that all
the great civilizations, Ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilization, the
mound builders, the Maya, the Aztecs, the Inca, that all
of them are much later and paler reflections of fair Atlantis,
(17:15):
which was the inspiration for all civilization. And so if
you look at the archaeological historical records, these cultures all
appeared almost instantly at some point after the destruction of Atlantis,
and that they share many many things in common because
they all were derived from the same source. That's the song.
That's the tale, the story that Donovantell's in the song,
(17:36):
and it is in a very general sense, that's the
story you will hear in Ignatious. You will read it
Ignacious Donnelly's Atlantis, the Antidiluvian World. It's the stuff that
you will hear in Churchwood's work is stuff that you
will hear and stuff that you will read if you
go online today and google Atlantis and look at one
of the not archaeological sites or historical sites, but the
(18:00):
kind of fringe believers in the Lost Continent, as that
same story told over and over again, great amazingly precocious
ancient civilization that is in fact the source of all
of the ancient civilizations that came after.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
That thought would be recommending Donovan on months to talk.
Speaker 5 (18:20):
Yeah, well, you know he's still around, he still performs,
he's ancient as well. His daughter is Ione Sky, who's
this beautiful woman. She's an actress. She's been in a
number of movies.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Yeah, I didn't know that was his daughter an actor too,
leitch So. And then I mean there's also Marvel in DC.
They have Aquaman and Prince neymar So.
Speaker 5 (18:45):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
But aside from pop culture though, there's there's some what's
the real origin of this story?
Speaker 5 (18:56):
There's there's the deal. So often what I end up
having to tell people, very often it's you know, producers,
independent production companies contact me and they go, we want
somebody to talk about Atlantis. We need somebody to talk
about the perfect society that Plato developed, and then that's
Plato is our ultimate source. And the thing that pisss
me off is that about ninety nine percent of the
(19:19):
story that I've just told you about the lost continent
of Atlantis is based on poor reading comprehension by the
people who are the purveyors of that story. Because none
of what I just said that was in Donovant story,
None of that is true. Now that's not my hypothesis,
it's not my opinion. It's go back and read the
(19:40):
ultimate source of the story and you find out that
all of that is bullshit. It's not the story that's
told in the original source. The source is Plato, who's
writing in the three P forty BC something like that,
and he's he writes your Plato writes in dialogues, right,
so he writes these stories as if there were real
people having conversation. A bunch of years ago, on the
(20:04):
public TV in I know it was in New York,
I don't know how if it was a national there
was a show called Meeting of Minds and it was
produced by Steve Allen, who was an amazing polymath, a writer,
a skeptic. He was a member of Psychops for years.
I think he's one of their fellows. And he had
a show in which the fiction was that you would
(20:26):
take four historical characters, people who didn't know each other,
lived in different continents, different time periods, have actors portray
those people, have them sit around the table and then
discuss a topic. So I remember seeing Cleopatra, Charles Darwin,
Abraham Lincoln, and Gandhi talking about the topic of slavery.
And you had actors who are real bright people who
(20:48):
had backgrounds in history, who didn't have a script, not
much of a script, but merely spoke about their philosophies
about that topic. That Plato did that more than two
thousand years ago. So he took real folks, people like
Hermocrates and Prittius the Junior and Timaeus, and he pretended
(21:10):
that they were all in a room together and that
their teacher was Socrates. Again, this is all pretend, and
that they had a topic that they were going to
talk about. Socrates was the initiator of the conversation. But
the students of Socrates were supposed to talk about all
this stuff. Plato, a real guy, was really a student
of Socrates, and so we're supposed to suspend our disbelief
(21:34):
and imagine that these people who, as far as we know,
did not know each other in reality, but we're going
to pretend to put them in a room all at
one time and discuss a topic that Plato is interested in.
And so everything is through Socrates. So if Plato gets
in trouble with the authorities, he can say, well, well,
that's not my opinion. That's what these guys in this dialogue,
(21:56):
that's their opinions. A couple of points before I'll talk
about what actually happened in those dialogues. One is you
will hear from people, and I always hear from people. Yes,
but Plato said this was a true story. No, he didn't,
(22:16):
and that's again poor reading comprehension. Plato doesn't say anything
in the dialogues. Plato is the author, So yeah, ultimately
all comes from Plato. But Plato is putting words in
the mouths of characters in what amounts to a play.
(22:37):
So Crittius is the guy who says that Atlantis was real,
and then people say, yeah, but Plato wrote the dialogue. Okay,
so how about this. In Henry the Six, Shakespeare has
Dick the butcher say, you know, the first thing we're
gonna do and then we get in power, we're gonna
kill all the lawyers. So is that Shakespeare saying we
should kill all the lawyers or a character in a play.
(23:00):
We all understand when Archie Bunker back in the back
in the day when all that TV show out All
in the Family, when Archie Bunker said these idiotic, misogynistic,
racist stuff, was that when Norman Lear was the producer
of that show. This guy is a real Norman Lear
is a real progressive person. Is that were those Norman
Norman Leers perspectives or attitudes or opinions. Hell no, they
(23:22):
were a character in a show and the point was
to move along a dialogue or a conversation. So Critius
is the guy, not Plato, who says, hey, this story,
this story is actually real. I'm not making this stuff up.
But we don't have to believe that because it's not
Plato saying it. It's a character in a what amounts
to a play. The other thing that bothers the I'm
(23:45):
sorry it bothers the shit out of me is when
people say, yes, but didn't Plato talk about Atlantis the
perfect society? And these days when when a TV producer
tells me that, I say, I will be on your show.
When you go back and read Plato, you have to
read the dialogue named after this this real life person,
because you obviously you haven't read it, because you don't
(24:07):
understand a simple fundamental fact, which is the perfect utopian
society that Dodovan talks about. That's not Atlantis. That's ancient Athens,
a mythical Athens that dates back nine thousand years before
Plato's time, eleven thousand years ago or more from our time, when,
by the way, archaeology shows that the ancient Greeks were
(24:28):
living in caves and hunting and gathering and fishing. They
were not living in complex societies. They were not building temples,
they did not have standing armies. They were hunter gatherers
at this point. But in the story that played Hotels
through Critias, the ancient perfect society is an ancient Athens.
(24:50):
Atlantis is the bad guy. They're the plot device in
a story. And it makes sense when I tell my students,
when I start thinking my Atlantis rant to my students,
I say, hey, listen, here's a story, right. We have
this enormously powerful, technologically sophisticated, rich and militarily aggressive culture,
(25:16):
and they're bent on taking over the known universe, and
the only thing standing in their way is a small,
ragtag group of people who they are not technologically sophisticated,
they're not wealthy, they are not militarily aggressive, but they
are living a perfect So the force is with them,
(25:39):
and they, in fact are able despite all the odds,
and contrary to what you would expect, they're able to
defeat this enormously powerful, evil empire. And then I asked
kids in the class, what have I just told you,
and they said, oh, that's Star Wars. No, no, not
even to Star Wars at all. I was thinking of
the Atlantis story as told by Critius. And then I
(26:00):
tell them what the whole deal is about. So really
it's it's Star Wars. It's Star Wars set eleven thousand
years ago, and just like just like Plato, that's a
long time ago. Plato puts Way to Hell, far away
in mildy Atlantic Ocean, which from the perspective of the
ancient Greeks was like another universe, and he puts it
(26:22):
nine thousand years before his time. It's it's long ago
and far away where he puts it just the way
they do it in Star Wars. So anyway, the actual story,
it's kind of it's I think it's a cool story.
Everybody should read the prettiest story. Here's the deal. So
Socrates starts in this in this dialogue, Socrates starts by saying,
(26:44):
he remember that conversation we were having yesterday, And the
students all go, oh, yeah, yeah, that's society. We were
talking about the perfect society, right, and yesterday we talked
about ni Plato gives some of the specifics. Now, anybody
who's ever read Plato immediately knows we're beginning with a
fiction right there, because the story that Socrates is telling
(27:08):
is right out of the Republic another Plato, a lot
of Plato's dialogues. But we know that Plato wrote the
Republic seven years before. So this conversation he's talking about
that happened yesterday and actually happened seven years before in
this kind of fictional timeline that Plato has made up,
so it's really seven seven years before. Black he says
(27:28):
it's yesterday, And Socrates says, remember, yesterday's conversation was completely
hypothetical about a perfect society and what makes them perfect,
and how the military men are not allowed to accumulate
any gold, and the military they live apart from everybody else,
and everybody in the society is exercises and is healthy,
(27:50):
and nobody is allowed to have too much wealth, and
so it goes on and on and on, and Socrates says,
remember I was talking about that yesterday, but then, and
I'm actually going to quote priteous here. Socrates in this
opening scene says, I might compare myself to a person
who beholding a beautiful animal or either created by the
painter's art, or better still alive and at rest, is
(28:12):
seized with a desire of seeing them in motion or
engaged in some struggle or conflict to which their forms
appear suited. And I tell students again, I tell them, well,
I show them in my PowerPoint. I show them a
picture of a female lion, a lioness from a zoo.
She's lying on her back, she's asleep, her belly showing
her arms are up in the air. And I tell
(28:33):
my students, if that's the only thing that that lion
at rest, if that's the only impression you ever had
of a lion, could you explain or describe what makes
a lion a lion, and students will go, well, no,
And then I show them this life of a bunch
of lionesses taking down a zebra, and it's these are
incredibly powerful, quick, ferocious animals, and they're one has her
(28:58):
jaws wrapped around its neck and the there is grabbing
its time quarters by its pause, and it's kind of
sad for the zebra. But that's what makes a lion
a lion. Soccerally, the same same thing we talked very
hypothetically about this ancient perfect civilization. Would I want I
want somebody to tell me about this perfect society? What
makes it perfect? We show that society and a struggle,
(29:22):
and he goes on and says, it's like, this is
an assignment. It's a homework assignment. I should like to
hear someone tell of our own city carrying on a
struggle against her neighbors, and how she went to war
in a becoming manner, and when at war, showed by
the greatness of her actions and the magnanimity of her
words in dealing with other cities, a result worthy of
her training and education. So you get it, Socrates said, yesterday,
(29:46):
we would say about perfect society, I give you guys
an assignment. Somebody tell me a story today that's not
a hypothetical story about a perfect society. Tell me a
story of this perfect society, and the best way to
do it to show what makes them perfect. Tell me
about a war, how they went to war, and how
they were able to defeat somebody in war, and how
(30:08):
they were gracious with the folks they defeated, and gracious
with the other people in their world. So it's over ecientence.
And what happens next is kind of funny. Hermocrates is
one of the people. He raises his hand and Socrates says, oh, Hermocrates,
do you have a story to tell? And Hermocratus says, well, no,
but yesterday, after you had this conversation Prittias over there,
(30:30):
he told us a really great story. So you can
imagine if you're a college student today with somebody else
volunteering you to tell the story in class, and Prittius goes, oh, okay,
And that's when Prittia says, okay, listen, say oh, this
is a story that it's really kind of amazing because
(30:51):
all of the details that you said about this hypothetical
perfect society, it's amazing. All of those details fit perfectly
with the story I'm about to tell. But I assure
you it's a true story. Well, okay, do you believe
Critius or is this, you know, dramatic effect? Is it
like everybody telling a made up story? But for the
draw If Critias says, listen to Plato, to his story,
(31:13):
which I'm just I'm pulling it out of my ass man,
I don't know. Maybe that's a good story. Isn't it
much more dramatic for him to say, Plato, hey, this
is a real story. Now, everybody, all of the philosophers
and historians of philosophy who read this say the next
thing is pretty crucial, because Critias says, well, here's the
(31:33):
deal Socrates. Because he's talking to Socrates. I personally did
not observe any of his firsthand, but I heard it
from my grandfather. His name is also Critius, and my
grandfather he heard it from Dropodes, who was a more
ancient historian, and Dropides he heard it from Solon, who's
(31:55):
even more ancient, and Soullen he heard it from Egyptian
priests who and he went to Egypt and they told
him that story. So it's kind of Plato was saying,
and guys, this is a very indirectly told story. It's
like telephone tag. So by the time we hear it,
it's hundreds of years and many generations removed from the
(32:15):
original source of the story. Most philosophers, most folks who
study Plato, say Plato could not have been any more
clear in divorcing himself from this story. So he's in
fact saying, in a backhanded way, I'm making this story up.
It's long ago, far away, and we heard it from
a guy who heard it from a guy who heard
(32:36):
it from a guy who heard it from a guy. Oh,
by the way, Crittius tells tells Socrates that my grandfather
he told he first told the story at a festival.
And if you know anything about Greek history, it's a
festival where you get a prize for telling the best
(32:58):
bullshit story. It's like it's the equivalent of April Fools Dead,
and whoever town makes up the best story gets surprised.
So again Plato is with a nod and a wink
and a nudge, telling people at his time, who all
would have been aware of this, all right, it's a
true story that my grandfather told that at a festival
where you're supposed to make up the best story. And
(33:19):
then the tells is, yeah, long ago, there was this
society in the middle of the Atlantic. He puts it
out beyond the pillars of Hercules, and it's an island
the size of a continent, he calls bigger than Libya
and Asia together. And that well, they started out okay,
because the gods put a bunch of twins on that island.
But as time was as time went on, and they
(33:42):
were removed in time from the kind of godly portion
they got. They got more and more powerful, but more
and more corrupt, and they became an evil empire bent
on world domination. And they decided. In the story the
prettiest tells, the Atlantians decided, with their enormous and there's
a huge army, that they were going to enter into
(34:02):
the Mediterranean and kick some serious ass and take over
the world. And the only society that stood in their
way was this mythical Athens, who again Critius goes in
the great detail. And if again, if you've read The Republic,
you read how Critius describes the perfect Athens, and it's
(34:23):
like it's a laundry list of all the stuff that
Socrates said. Plato wrote that Socrates said in their public
about what would constitute a perfect society, and talks about
how wonderful these guys are. And even though they were
outnumbered and out gunned and their technology wasn't as good,
(34:45):
they had righteousness on their side. They were able to
defeat the Atlanteans. And then after the military defeat, the
gods looked down in Atlantis and they got kissed off,
and they decided, we're going to wipe them out in
one in one single blow a day of the night,
wipe them out. And the dialogue kind of ends there.
(35:05):
And Plato never actually finished the dialogue, so that that
that that that story ends right there. So the deal. Listen,
you've got this. It's a really it's actually a pretty
pretty interesting story, and it's very clearly all about a
lesson to be learned. It's a work of philosophy. It
is not a work of history. It's also important to
(35:29):
point out I've had people say to me, well, what
if maybe Plato found some historical documentation that nobody else
in Greece knew about. This is, of course thousands of
years as of the fact, but he found this stuff
and was introducing it in his dialogue as a way
of spreading the word. Well, that's really interesting, and that
(35:50):
the best analogy I can give you is supposing so
that that the fact that ancient Athens would have had
this incredible it would have engaged in this incredible war
against a much more powerful enemy and defeated them, and
it's that changed the history of the world as a result.
If Plato had found a true record of that and
(36:11):
was sharing something he believed to be true, well, that
would be the equivalent of, say, the Revolutionary War, that
we had no documentation, no evidence whatsoever of the American Revolution,
but that some historian now finds hidden in some dusty
attic an old book that tells that story. And this
(36:32):
guy is now going to publish this because while this
is a part of our history that we knew nothing about,
a vital part of our history that explains who we
are as a nation. Nobody knew anything about it before,
and now I'm going to reveal it. Well, and I
ask students, says, what do you think would happened? And
they all say, well, other historians would comment on it.
Some historians might say, no, it's a croc that really
(36:53):
didn't happen. Others might say, oh, this is an amazing revelation,
we need to find out more. The cold thing, interesting thing,
the relevant thing here is that after the Critius is distributed,
no Greek historians comment on it, even to say, well,
this is a bunch of shit. Well, the reason they
don't comment on it is they know it's fiction. You
(37:15):
won't find very many historians with PhDs commenting on the
Star Wars saga saying well, wait a minute, none of
that shit happened, and we know that it's called fiction,
so they don't have to. But that's exactly what happens
in the case of the Critius dialogue, the Atlantis dialogues.
The Greek Katilians, at least initially don't say anything about
it and oh that's interesting philosophy. But they don't comment
(37:38):
on it because they know that Plato is telling a
piece of fiction. There's a purpose here. Atlantis is a
plot device to show how this is how a perfect
society should actually behave, and this is by putting them
having a war. It shows that's the ultimate existential challenge.
And they are they prevail, they are they defeat this
(38:00):
powerful enemy because they are living this perfect life and
we all should be living the way they are. So
it's a lesson for us all to learn. But it's
not it's not history, it's philosophy, and it's really through
after the pretious and to meaous dialogues were distributing people
read them. There are people in antiquity who wondered aloud
(38:21):
whether or not those things were real. But it's really
not until the nineteenth century with Ignatius Donnelly, who's an
American writer and political aspirant who writes this book Atlantis
the Antidiluvian World, that it gets to be a really
popular and significant argument about gee, maybe this Atlantis was real,
(38:42):
maybe a lost continent, the existence of this powerful loss continent.
Maybe that explains the archaeology of the ancient world that
was familiar with the Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, North and South America,
and that after that, now the theosophists getting involved in
and that's just all sort of hallucinatory. But it's I
(39:03):
think it's not only more than anybody else who caught
in the eighteen late eighteen hundreds inspired the modern mania
about Atlantis that, as I said, continues to this day.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
On cable TV, So haven't other historical authors written about Atlantis?
Isn't it mentioned in Thomas More's Utopia?
Speaker 5 (39:23):
Oh yeah, I mean once it's out there, people embrace
that story and use it for their own purposes. It
becomes a fairly common but again as a plot device, yes,
and it's very rare to find anybody outside, you know,
outside of the fringe. Rare to find people with backgrounds
(39:46):
in history or archaeology or philosophy who say, no, this
is this is the this is a true story, and
we just need to find more evidence of it.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
So what about Heinrich Schleemann does I mean, I know,
with his finding of Troy it seems like I don't
know if in real life it matters, but on documentaries
or what are presented as documentaries, he always comes up
in these Atlantis things, is like, well they thought Troy
was a leg Sympathon Schleemann found it.
Speaker 5 (40:15):
You know that you and I and Karen we all
know that that is an incredibly specious argument. But my
favorite is Carl Sagan and I have this source someplace
basically called that kind of argument, the they laughed at
Columbus argument, right, say, well, people who of course don't
(40:37):
know the reality behind. Columbus didn't think the world was
flat and nobody is going to fall over the edge.
They just thought it was really far and maybe not navigable.
But in any event, the you know, in the in
the cliche telling of the story, here was Columbus, the brilliant,
you know, the guy. It's like the guy working in
his garage who discovers a perpetual motion and nobody believes them,
(40:59):
but he shows there they're they're wrong, and so that's
the great role model. They laughed at Columbus a colleague
of mine. So therefore anybody with a crazy idea must
be right. And so this argument is they laughed that Shleiman. Well,
the whole story of Schlimann finding Troy is still kind
of up in the air. You know, which level is
(41:19):
the Troy that you know there's it's a multi component site.
So which one really was that was Troy? Well, it
really wasn't that site. We're not even sure of that.
But say supposing Sleiman really did find a story that
was ostensibly legends, ostensibly myth and finds out, yeah, there's
something to it. That's that's a one off that shows
it happens in science. We all recognize, Yeah, there are
(41:42):
people who come up with crazy ideas that turn out
to actually pan out, but each one is individual. Whether
Shliman was right or not bears no relationship whatsoever to
some other crazy guy saying, no, I think there was
a continent in the middle of the Atlantic. Every individual
plane history or archaeology has to stand on its own,
(42:03):
needs evidence for that story and evidence for some other
story that Again, a buddy of mine used to say, yeah,
they laughed at Columbus, they also laughed at Laurel and Hardy.
The Laurel and Hardy aren't going to be used as
that's John Cole, an archaeologist I've known for years. So yeah,
they also left at Laurel and Hardy. But nobody says, well,
we should take those movies a lot more seriously. Yeah,
(42:24):
they were funny, and the Columbus story is kind of
a funny story. The Schliemann that's interesting about Troy doesn't
have anything to do with with Atlantis. But then you'll
hear and then we've talked about this a little blake,
the story that well, but maybe maybe maybe the story
of Atlantis, it's garbled, maybe and maybe there are some things,
(42:46):
you know, individual facts are wrong, but that overall the
story of an incredibly sophisticated ancient civilization being destroyed, an
island being destroyed overnight, and now it's it's you know,
lost in the miss of antiquity. Maybe Plato was aware
of something like that really happening and basically used it
(43:07):
as the basis for his Atlanta story. Now I've heard
that argument about a billion times, and usually it's Minoan Creek,
the temple at Knoso. Sorry, that was a very sophisticated
civilization thousands of years ago, but these guys had contact
(43:29):
with ancient Egypt. These guys had contact but with other
civilizations in the Mediterranean region. So this is more than
three thousand years ago. And in fact, we do know
there was a massive volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini, right,
and that that maybe that eruption destroyed the Minoan civilization,
(43:50):
and that that was passed down over millennia, and Plato
and other guys in Greece knew about that story, and
so Plato.
Speaker 6 (43:59):
It's garbled ky.
Speaker 5 (44:00):
Some of the details are wrong, but but at its core,
the Atlanta story is based on that. You know, I've
heard that so many times. And el Sprague de Camp,
who's was a wonderful science fiction writer but also was
a you know, wrote some historical stuff and wrote a
wonderful book about lost confidence. And basically what's what the
(44:21):
Camp said was, look, how many details are you allowed
to tell in a legend? How many details are you
allowed to change in that legend to make it real
and still have it, you know, relate to the original story.
And he said, when you look at Atlantis, you know,
it's not like one or two details that you would
need to change to make it Minoan Crete or Santorini.
(44:44):
It's like every detail. So what I did, because because
I'm obsessive compulsive, is I read through once again. I
read through Critius and Timius, and I had at my
side various archaeological site reports for Santa and Minoan Creek.
And as an archaeologist, what I did was, I said, look,
(45:04):
there's a lot of stuff in here that I cannot test,
you know, because there's not going to be any archaeological
evidence for or against it. But when Plato, and when
Plato through Prittius mentions specific details about what a palace
looked like, or what animals were on the island of Atlantis,
(45:25):
or what the size was of the plains of So
when he gave specific details, I wrote them all down
and had, I think, I put together like fifty three
specific material facts that would be archaeologically and geologically testable,
and then I went through actual archaeological publications about Minoan
(45:47):
crete and Santorini. And you know what I found. I
found if you look, if you are consistent, and if
you are objective, you come up with exactly one of
information supplied by Critius to Socrates and recorded in Plato's dialogue,
where you could say, yep, that's right, and the one
(46:10):
fact is, Wow, the palace and temple was really big
and impressive. That's it. And yeah, if you look at
the temple at Knosos, that's big and impressive. But every
other detail, every other specific thing mentioned in the dialogue
mentioned by Critius does not match the specifics that we
(46:30):
know about Manolan crete or Santorini. It's not in the
middle of the Atlantic. The size of it way way long.
One of the things that's mentioned several times in the
dialogue is that one of the major animals they had
on the continent of Atlantis were elephants. Nobody's ever found
an elephant, either on crete or on Santorini. So the
(46:54):
metals that were supposedly adorning the walls that have all
recalcum which and we don't even know what the hell
that was, probably with a brass bronze copper combination. Nobody
really knows, well, nobody even knows played it was just
you know, using a term that was used later for
a particular kind of metal, particular alloy, We don't know.
But regardless, there's no evidence is this our calculm was
(47:16):
supposed to line the walls of the ancient city on
the capital city of Atlanta's zero evidence for that in
the know, and crete or Santorini. It's just you kind
of have to be again, it's a reading comprehension thing.
Read what either You're gonna use Plato as your model,
as your source, because well, that's the first time anybody
(47:38):
talks about He's the only one that provides all those details,
so you kind of stuck using him as a source. Well,
then if you are, you don't get the cherry pick
out of dozens of specific descriptions. You're not allowed to say, well,
fifty two of them are wrong. Well, I think, but
I actually do the math, it's like forty eight of
(47:59):
them are. There are a number of them where I
can't tell you if they're right or wrong. And there's
only one of them it's correct. Well yeah, if you
just look at that one, and it's really general anyway,
it's like, you know, that's that's not a very powerful argument.
You don't get to change facts, you don't get to
cherry pick facts. You kind of got it. You have
to look at this objectively, and objectively was this did
(48:22):
Plato hear a story about an ancient destroyed civilization? I
don't know. Maybe getting back to Star Wars, I believe
that that. You know, the folks behind Star Wars have said, well, okay, yeah,
the storm Troopers, they're kind of based on Nazi stormtroopers.
The Emperor Palpatine, Yeah, he's kind of hitler. So is
(48:45):
Star Wars just a kind of twisted and tweaked version
of World War Two? I don't think so. How did
anybody a thousand years from now, if they still have,
you know, copies of Star Wars, the original, not the
fix ones, if they watched it. I don't think t
on a thousand years from now would be able to
legitimately and fairly say this is George Lucas telling the
(49:07):
story of World War Two. It's not. Any writer of
fiction is going to incorporate into their fiction stuff that
they're familiar with, stuff that they've heard of. But that
doesn't make it a kind of attenuated or truncated version
of something that really happened. It just means there are
some cool stories in history, and they plugged it in.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
So it seems like that Atlantis is a legend, though,
has been like this unstoppable engine of producing bullshit. Do
you think maybe it should be the incontinent of Atlantis?
Speaker 5 (49:44):
There you go, here's the me. I actually once sat
down because I have way too much time on my hands,
and I wrote a short story about this guy who
says that he's discovered what it was all about. But
the real story of Atlantis was at LANs was this
island where there was this ear group that grew there
and it was an herb that gave people everlasting life
(50:05):
and that and that people wanted it, and it was like,
you know, it was everybody of course wanted this herb,
this this material that they made at this herb forever
lasting life. And and then the island though was destroyed
in a single day and night. And now so now
of course that we all are still looking for the
lost condiment of Atlanta. So I thought it was about
(50:29):
you can you can remove that from the podcast that
you want?
Speaker 1 (50:32):
Why would I do that?
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Well, I think unfortunately we've we've burned up most of
our hour here. Uh No, it is actually great because
I really appreciate you coming back, and I believe what
we have here is probably the most comprehensive coverage for
why there uh should not be a big effort to
keep finding Atlantis great stuff.
Speaker 5 (50:57):
You know, it's ignitious. Donnelly at the very end of
his book actually has a paragraph. Now remember he's writing this.
This published in eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties, So he says,
who's to say that one hundred years from now, meaning
it would be like nineteen ninety who's to say one
hundred years from now? And I hope this happens, that
(51:19):
the museums of the world will be filled with the
statues and artifacts of Lost Atlantis, and our libraries will
be filled with the books published by the ancient Atlanteans.
So he predicted, at least with his fingers, you know,
hopefully that in one hundred years after his book was
published that today we'd always saying, oh my god, yes,
Atlantis a wonderful, marvelous place, and we have their artifacts
(51:42):
in their books. Well, guess what, folks, that has not happened,
And so they can be on looking for Atlantis and
finding you know, geological features off the coast of Bimini,
and you know, the archaeological sites in Spain, and oh
my god, South America, off the coast of Japan, and
it's all over the world. And you know, until it's
(52:03):
basically in archaeology, it's all about that. It's all about data,
physical evidence, and if you don't have it, you know,
go about your business. That's fine. But until you have
that kind of irrefutable, demonstrable fact supporting that, you know, folks,
archaeologists and historians are gonna say, you know what, it's
(52:23):
there's better stuff that we could spend our time doing,
like visiting fifty real archaeological sites in the United States
where the real genius of antiquity is there for us
all to engage in.
Speaker 2 (52:41):
Oh, I was going to ask you, what's your favorite
real location for Atlantis to all these places like, yeah.
Speaker 5 (52:47):
My favorite real location of Atlantis is, let's see, might
be Bolivia, could be because because they they are people who
say it's it's hard. Well, I know, here's my favorite.
My favorite is the South Antarctica because that's that's really
good because they can say, listen to quse, you're not
going to find it. It's under all that.
Speaker 2 (53:08):
Yeah, yeah, current rates is going to be ten years
before we can find it.
Speaker 5 (53:14):
No, but you know, ultimately it's kind of the ultimate
far away and long. It's under a mile device, so
you don't have to look too carefully because you're not
going to find it there. But that may be. That
may be my very favorite because it really gets called
it's called covering your ass. Put it someplace where nobody.
I mean, at some point somebody's going to say, well,
maybe it was actually on Mars.
Speaker 2 (53:36):
No, well that's a good point. It flew off filled.
Speaker 5 (53:38):
The Mars face and until we go there and actually
walk around, you never know.
Speaker 1 (53:45):
Oh, just in closing can and we've asked you this
question before, but sometimes people change their minds. What's your
favorite monster?
Speaker 5 (53:53):
My favorite monster? Oh, my god, I think my favorite
monster is. I like the law Ness Monster a lot.
I love the story because I love how it changes
through time and how now he's you know, the luck
that's she's a you know, friendly and school kids in
Scotland all love NeSSI that may be my favorite. And
I've been to a drum the Drockets, so I actually
(54:15):
actually looked for the Lockness Monster. I've said with all
those other tourists at the turret of Urkhar Castle and
looked across the loch and all I saw were guys
on sale and sailboards. You know, oh my god, you
guys are gonna be killed by the monster, but they
realy didn't care. So that may be my favorite. Also
because when you go into the town or drum the
drocket which exists because of the Luckness Monster, they're competing
(54:38):
like official exhibits, so you know, one side of the
street there's the official exhibit and the other side of
the street it's the original exhibit. So I think that's
kind of cute.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
That's a fantastic that's a great classic answer there.
Speaker 2 (54:49):
Well, I know you've just scratched a niche that a
lot of people had by coming back to talk to
us who really appreciate it.
Speaker 5 (54:55):
This is great fun. I love doing it and hopefully
people will enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
They will, and you'll put a link to your new
podcast in your newest book and your old books and
the previous episodes on the show notes at monster talk
dot org. Fas Okay, well, have a great night. I
have to go watch a documentary about this Game of Thrones.
Speaker 1 (55:17):
Have to listen to the Donovan sum Yes, absolutely, Karen,
good luck and I reading I said before about you
have a kid being a bad idea.
Speaker 5 (55:25):
I was telling you absolutely the truth.
Speaker 2 (55:29):
Have a great night.
Speaker 1 (55:31):
Thanks kind ticket, bye bye monster.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
You've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner. You just heard
Karen Stolesto and I interviewed doctor Kinney Fader about the
legends and facts of Atlantis. Links to Kenny's books and
additional information is in the show notes at monster talk
dot org, including a link to that groovy song by Donovan.
Speaker 5 (56:44):
This has been a Monster House presentation.
Speaker 3 (56:53):
This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.
The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but
not necessarily the only ones to the mysteries we will
examine
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