Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City

by Mark Adams

  Another writer famous for her supernatural insights into Atlantis was the late nineteenth-century Russian-born occultist Madame Blavatsky, whose head would surely be carved alongside Cayce’s on the Mount Rushmore of psychics. Famous for her séances and for founding the grab-bag spiritual movement known as Theosophy, Blavatsky popularized the idea of Atlantis as the ancient home of a race of supermen. She claimed that her book The Secret Doctrine was based on a manuscript written in Atlantis (translated from the original language, Senzar), which was at its height in the years prior to 850,000 BC, at least half a million years before the first Homo sapiens is believed to have emigrated from the African continent. The populace of Blavatsky’s Atlantis enjoyed such modern conveniences as electricity and airships powered by psychic energy called vril. The causes she attributes to its downfall seem obvious in retrospect: a group practicing black magic spoiled everything by breeding human-animal hybrids akin to centaurs, which were exploited as warriors and sex slaves.

  Had Blavatsky’s thoughts on “cosmic evolution” merely served as fodder for future New Age fantasies about Atlantis—you can still browse a nice selection of tarot cards at the Theosophical Society bookstore on East Fifty-Third Street in Manhattan—she could be written off as a harmless crank. But her ideas about “root races”—a division of humanity into higher and lower species—were adopted by German mystics with a passionate interest in demonstrating that the superior Nordic race could trace its lineage back to a mythical island. Blavatsky had written of the Aryans as the most developed of the root races of Atlantis. The term Aryan (from the Sanskrit word for “noble”) had originally been used by linguists to describe peoples stretching from northern Europe to India whose languages had shared origins. With the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, any theory supporting the notion that a master Aryan race was responsible for laying the foundations of culture found a warm welcome in Berlin. A special Nazi research institute, named the Ahnenerbe, was created for the purpose of finding and disseminating scientific evidence of Germany’s glorious past.

  The leader of the Ahnenerbe was Heinrich Himmler, who also led the Gestapo and the Schutzstaffel, or SS, the paramilitary force responsible for carrying out the Final Solution outlined by Adolf Hitler. Himmler’s top adviser in the Ahnenerbe believed that the German peoples could be traced to Plato’s Atlantis, which he theorized had sunk in the Atlantic Ocean. In the late 1930s, as Heather Pringle describes in The Master Plan, Himmler sponsored expeditions around the globe to search for evidence of this lost utopia. One trip was to the Canary Islands. Early reports sounded promising, but a major follow-up expedition scheduled for late 1939 was canceled after the German invasion of Poland in September of that year.

  The Nazis’ favorite work of Atlantean speculation was the World Ice Theory, an idea based on an epiphany by its originator, the Austrian engineer Hans Hörbiger. He had imagined that the cosmos was filled with small ice planets that Earth sometimes captured in its orbit as moons. When these satellites eventually began their descent through the atmosphere, their spinning mass created its own gravitational pull. This pulled the oceans toward the equator, causing waves thousands of feet high. The capture of our current moon had been violent enough to produce earthquakes, cracks in the crust layer, and enormous volcanic explosions as the Earth’s molten core escaped. When the oceans coalesced around the planet’s girdle like a gigantic spin cycle, Atlantis was among the civilizations washed out.

  Juan Villarias-Robles’s description of using anthropological analysis to pull the contaminants out of the ancient world’s most famous stories seemed sensible, but the World Ice Theory was a mythological Superfund site. Part of its appeal to the Nazis was that it contained very little science or math—and therefore served as a counterweight to Albert Einstein’s “Jewish” theory of relativity. Hörbiger’s famous defense of his unscientific methods—“Calculation can only lead you astray”—may be the least Platonic sentence ever uttered.

  • • •

  Reading about the World Ice Theory I couldn’t help but think of two people. One was Tony O’Connell. The only time I’d seen him angry was when I’d asked at the coffee shop one day about Cayce and Blavatsky and their unconventional methods. “These people who just make things up without evidence get my blood pressure pumping,” he said, turning red. Tony was not a big fan of Mu, either.

  The other person I thought of was Rand Flem-Ath, whom I telephoned at his home on Vancouver Island. I should state for the record that Flem-Ath is one of the least Nazi-like people I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to. A librarian on Canada’s laid-back west coast, he created his intriguing last name by combining his surname with that of his wife and sometime coauthor, Rose, also a librarian. The photos I’d seen of him online made him look like a friendly, furry creature from an enchanted forest.

  Flem-Ath is the leading proponent of what’s called the Earth Crust Displacement Theory, which is sort of like Plate Tectonic Theory on fast-forward. He also believes that Atlantis was located in Antarctica and is now buried under ice and snow. Flem-Ath’s theory, which he has expounded on in several similar books, is brilliant in its simplicity and its irrefutability. This winning combination has made him both an A-list guest on the Atlantis documentary and talk-radio circuit and a case study for debunkers of pseudoscience. Antarctica wasn’t always cold, Flem-Ath posits. Around 9600 BC, when it was still known as Atlantis, the continent was situated in the tropics. Then it migrated south very rapidly and froze over.

  Where the World Ice Theory crowd disdained Einstein’s genius, however, Flem-Ath eagerly drops Einstein’s name to support his own hypothesis that Antarctica had changed latitude. In a letter to the originator of the Earth Crust Theory, Charles Hapgood, in 1953, Einstein wrote, “I find your arguments very impressive and have the impression that your hypothesis is correct.” The following year the twentieth century’s greatest scientist wrote the foreword to Hapgood’s book Earth’s Shifting Crust.

  Hapgood was a New Hampshire history professor who hypothesized that the earth’s outer skin occasionally shifts violently in a relatively short period of time. The two inner layers, the core and mantle, remain unchanged. (The writer Paul Jordan, who calls Flem-Ath’s theory “perhaps the ultimate catastrophist vision of Atlantis,” compares the effect to an orange whose skin rotates while the fruit wedges inside remain immobile.) Flem-Ath applied Hapgood’s theory to a literal reading of Plato’s Atlantis story, with the sudden shift causing not only Plato’s earthquakes and floods but also rapid climate changes. These shocks, Flem-Ath speculated, had been passed down as myths.

  “One thing that seems certain is that a tremendous amount of things were happening around 9600 BC,” Flem-Ath told me. “Melting ice caps. Mass extinctions in North and South America. Suddenly, virtually simultaneously, agriculture appears on several continents but with different crops. I believe a single idea, mobile crust, solves these problems on a global scale.”

  Hapgood’s 1966 book, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, used late Renaissance-era maps to try to prove that Antarctica had been ice-free prior to a shift in the position of the poles around 9600 BC. The most famous of these maps is probably the Piri Reis map, a large fragment of a hand-drawn world map assembled in 1513 by the Ottoman admiral after whom it is named. The map was mislaid until 1929, when it was rediscovered during renovations of the former Ottoman sultan’s palace in Istanbul. Geographers generally agree that the Piri Reis map is genuine and was based on portolan charts, ancient maps by Ptolemy, modern maps by Portuguese sailors, and the New World discoveries of Christopher Columbus. Indeed, the map has been celebrated as a rare copy of Columbus’s own maps, all of which have been lost.

  The map’s southernmost section is what has attracted the most interest from Atlantologists. Three hundred years before mainland Antarctica was first sighted in 1820, Piri Reis drew a large continent on the bottom of the world. Thinkers as far back as Aristotle had hypothesized the exi
stence of a landmass at the bottom of the globe, acting as a counterweight to the lands of the Northern Hemisphere. But Hapgood believed Piri Reis’s mystery continent at the bottom of the world was in fact an ice-free Antarctica, because its general shape matched up with maps of subglacial Antarctica that were being assembled in the 1950s. Piri Reis, Hapgood surmised, had based his depiction on ancient maps, which subsequently vanished.

  Flem-Ath explained that his eureka moment came when he compared Hapgood’s seismological map of subglacial Antarctica with one of Atlantis published in 1664 by the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. On Kircher’s map, Atlantis is a continent that sits in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, between Europe and South America. Flem-Ath speculated that Kircher had based his own map on an ancient Egyptian one that might have been stolen by the Romans. “It was a near-perfect match” with the modern Antarctic one, he told me.

  I wasn’t so sure about that. For starters, even the illustrations in Flem-Ath’s book didn’t look that much alike. Also, the cartographic resemblance Flem-Ath sees applies only if Kircher knew exactly where Atlantis was located but had somehow mixed up the locations of Spain and Africa. Seemingly Flem-Ath shared Ignatius Donnelly’s tendency to equate coincidence with evidence. Just because my kids’ snow days always seem to occur on my babysitter’s day off doesn’t mean she controls the weather.

  Still, I was trying to keep an open mind. I asked where the Egyptians would have gotten the maps.

  “I think the survivors of Atlantis are those that got the boats,” Flem-Ath told me. “On boats you have two things that are portable: astronomy and maps.”

  He had a point. “Is there any way you could ever prove this?” I asked.

  “Well, the easiest thing would be if a large part of ice fell off Antarctica and there were human structures underneath.”

  The biggest problem I had with Flem-Ath’s theory wasn’t its audacity, nor was it his unshakable faith in diffusionism and catastrophism. It was that his forward-looking ideas were largely based on scientific information from the era of “Our Friend the Atom.” Hapgood’s original theory and Einstein’s noncommittal affirmation of it were proposed in the 1950s when the theory of continental drift was in its infancy, but Flem-Ath hasn’t updated his evidence much past that time. As we chatted, he kept citing data that was fifty years old and sometimes older. I started tapping my fingers when he began talking about how some ancient ruins near Lake Titicaca—very important to the World Ice Theory—had been built more than ten thousand years ago, an idea that has been disproven many times over. (The site’s structures seem to have been built several centuries after Plato died.) When he mentioned that ancient myths indicated Machu Picchu in Peru had been built by the Incas as a refuge from floods, I got impatient.

  “Rand, all of this stuff you’re telling me is considered beyond the fringe. It’s been discredited.”

  “Well, maybe, but that’s not a very important part of my theory,” he said. He admitted that some of his sources were old but insisted that the Earth Crust Displacement Theory was still ahead of its time. “I’m better off bypassing scientists and reaching for a general audience, maybe two or three generations down the road,” he said.

  In the last line of his book Atlantis Beneath the Ice, Flem-Ath proposes what might happen at that future point: “Science and myth might merge.” It’s an idea that went out of style not long after Plato ended the Critias midsentence. It didn’t require the powers of an Einstein—or the foresight of an Edgar Cayce—to see that such a partnership was unlikely to make a comeback anytime soon.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dr. Kühne, I Presume

  Braunschweig, Germany

  Having heard two very different versions of the Tartessos hypothesis from Richard Freund and Juan Villarias-Robles, I decided it seemed like a good idea to dig a little deeper by meeting Rainer Kühne and Werner Wickboldt, the German researchers who had reignited the search for Atlantis with their analysis of the Doñana satellite photos. Conveniently, both men lived in the same midsize city near Germany’s old east-west border. Inconveniently, they disliked each other intensely. I booked a flight to Düsseldorf and rode the train four hours to Braunschweig.

  The week before my arrival in Germany I had reread Kühne’s Antiquity article and e-mailed to remind him of our appointment. I promised to send a confirmation note the day before I got there. “Hi Mark,” he replied, two days later. “I use a public PC only and cannot check my email every day.” This struck me as a little odd for a professor of physics. I agreed to telephone him at home when I arrived at the Braunschweig train station. It was an autumn Tuesday, but Kühne said he’d be home all day.

  My taxi dropped me off in front of an apartment block. I pressed the buzzer, and Kühne met me at the door. He was in his early forties, frightfully thin, with sunken freckled cheeks and thinning reddish hair with flecks of white in it. His old striped sweater hung loose on him. I thought of something the organizer of the Atlantis conferences had told me: “We invite Kühne every time, but he says he has no money.” We shook hands and he led me into his one-bedroom apartment. I’d been up late the night before and had caught a train at dawn, so I was hoping he’d offer me a cup of coffee and warm up with a little get-to-know-you chitchat. Instead, he motioned for me to take a seat and sat down across from me as if ready to play chess.

  Between us was a coffee table covered with books, maps, and papers. The piles were so precisely lined up that they might have been laid out with surveying tools. A pen and paper had been attached to a clipboard for my use. Kühne sat up very straight on the edge of the sofa and folded his hands in his lap, then pushed the clipboard slightly in my direction.

  “So, you have questions about my Atlantis theory,” he said.

  “Um, yes. How did you become interested in Atlantis?”

  “That was when I was a child, about ten years old. I read a cartoon book, a duck story where he had discovered Atlantis in the deep sea. This was the book here, just a moment.” He stood up and took two steps to his bookcase. One entire shelf appeared to be taken up by a row of identical bound volumes, presumably physics journals of some sort. Did he just say duck story? Maybe düch was a German word I could look up later, some category of Bavarian folklore. “It was this one here. You know it, perhaps?”

  He opened the book, The Secret of Atlantis, and pointed out a cartoon of Scrooge McDuck, Donald’s wealthy uncle, encountering a vast undersea city inhabited by men-fish. I was indeed familiar with this work, having read it in the third grade. It had not, to the best of my recollection, been footnoted in his Antiquity article.

  “I bet that’s just what Plato had in mind,” I said, an uncaffeinated man’s sad attempt at a joke. Kühne stared at me blankly for two seconds.

  “They are looking for a coin they have lost,” he said. “This is the story.” He placed the book back in its assigned spot on the shelf. “Then I looked up in the encyclopedia that Atlantis exists outside of the cartoon book. We know this because Plato reported on it.” Kühne began his boyhood research reading books from his local library that placed Atlantis in unlikely spots such as the Bahamas and England, before finding Jürgen Spanuth’s Atlantis of the North. Spanuth’s theory posited that Atlantis had existed on the island Helgoland, in the North Sea off of Germany.

  Kühne told me he wasn’t convinced by Spanuth’s book, but he was impressed by two of his arguments. “First, Plato does not write only of Atlantis but also of its opponent, Athens. Spanuth thinks the Athens Plato describes is of the Mycenaean time”—that is, of the Greek Bronze Age between 1600 and 1100 BC. Plato’s story is really a tale of two cities, but this fact rarely comes up in discussions about Atlantis.

  “Also,” Kühne continued, “Spanuth says the war Plato describes is a war between the Sea Peoples and Egypt.”

  Like Atlantis, the Sea Peoples are one of the great unsolved mysteries of antiquity. Hierog
lyphs on the walls of an ancient Nile temple tell the story of two invasions of Egypt during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC. The attacks were launched by a fearsome confederation of armies who arrived in boats from the Mediterranean. Kühne’s Antiquity article had carried forward Spanuth’s idea that the Sea Peoples were transformed into the Atlanteans sometime between their defeat and Plato’s writing of the Timaeus.

  Intrigued by Spanuth’s new interpretation, Kühne tried to locate Atlantis. “Plato said exactly where Atlantis was,” he told me. “In the Atlantic Sea, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, facing the Gaderian country. This is pretty clearly west of Gibraltar, south of Spain, or north of Morocco. Of course it cannot be in the center of the Atlantic Ocean because it is impossible, geologically. Plato described a great rectangular plain surrounded by mountains, but the capital of Atlantis was situated on the south coast, which later sank and became a mud sea. Where is the south coast in front of Gibraltar? What about Spain or Portugal?”