Atlantis Hoax 3 by Benny Peiser

CCNet 150/2004 - 18 November 2004
ATLANTIS FIASCO: STUPID LITTLE HOAX OR ILL-INFORMED NAIVETY?
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You call this sorry Atlantis episode a "stupid little hoax". I don't think you can call it a hoax as I don't believe Mr Sarmast intended to deliberately deceive. He is simply naive and ill-informed and unfortunately the news media are as well. --Joel Schiff, Editor, Meteorite Magazine, 18 November 2004

Besides, the American [explorer], instead of showing real images of the bottom of the sea, has only presented multi-coloured diagrams - and these were manipulated. 'The diagram of the hill is vertically exaggerated', says Hübscher. Not only the alleged Acropolis, but also the wall is much flatter in truth than on Sarmast's multi-coloured images. --Spiegel Online, 17 November 2004

Do you really think anyone at the world's media with half a brain actually believed this. I can assure you that 99% of editors who saw this story cross their desk laughed. If they did shovel it out they knew that within a day or two it'd be back with Part 2, as The Great Atlantis Hoax. It always makes me laugh how you take all this so seriously, as if the "press" is so stupid it couldn't see what this was going to be. --Simon Mansfield, Editor, SpaceDaily.com, 18 November 2004

Alas, UPI fell victim to it as well. I had been away at a science conference and did not have a chance to review the brief item we ran before it was published. I have since instructed the staff not to move anything that seems remotely sensational unless I have had a chance to verify it. Let me assure you that the UPI Science Desk works very hard to assure the accuracy of its output -- but obviously we need to work harder. --Phil Berardelli, UPI Science & Technology Editor

(1) STUPID LITTLE HOAX OR ILL-INFORMED NAIVETY? Benny Peiser <b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk>

(2) ATLANTIS FIND 'JUST VOLCANOES' The Australian, 18 November 2004

(3) ATLANTIS: THE LOST CITY THAT'S ALWAYS BEING FOUND Slate, 16 November 2004

(4) UPI SCIENCE DESK: WE'LL NEED TO WORK HARDER Phil Berardelli <pberardelli@upi.com> On Behalf Of Science Desk

(5) ATLANTIS: STUPID LITTLE HOAX OR ILL-INFORMED NAIVETY? Joel Schiff <jschiff@hug.co.nz>

(6) THE GREAT ATLANTIS JOKE Simon Mansfield <simon@spacedaily.com>

(7) IMPRESSIVE DIAGRAM: ATLANTIS STORY MUST BE TRUE Michael Paine <mpaine@tpg.com.au>

(8) WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE MYTHICAL ATLANTIS IS REAL Alan Alford <alford@eridu.co.uk>

(9) WHY I BELIEVE IN MYTH Nick Sault <Nick.Sault@noelleeminggroup.co.nz>

(10) THE REAL ATLANTIS FOUND Michael Martin-Smith <lagrangia@lagrangia.karoo.co.uk>

(11) AND FINALLY: IF YOU CARE, ATLANTIS IS FOUND ... MAYBE The Herald Mail, 18 November 2004

===============
(1) STUPID LITTLE HOAX OR ILL-INFORMED NAIVETY?

Benny Peiser <b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk>

In a letter to CCNet, Joel Schiff, the editor of Meteorite Magazine, questions whether the Atlantis episode should be called a "stupid little hoax". Mr Sarmast, Joel believes, is "simply naive and ill-informed and unfortunately the news media are as well." In addition to Joel's note, I have received another letter that also cautions better not to use the word 'hoax' when referring to the Atlantis debacle. The British science journalist warns: "As ever, your CC-net is doing a grand job on a whole range of fronts, including this Atlantis thing. As the latter is looking pretty dismal now, and mud may start being flung, it might be an idea to avoid using the word "hoax". As the precise definition of a "hoax" is: "A deceptive trick played as a practical joke" (Chambersdictionary), it carries potentially libellous overtones. That may sound neurotic, but try telling that to a libel lawyer..."

While these concerns of a good friend are much appreciated and certainly prudent, I should point out that Mr Sarmast has been publicly accused of having fabricated some of the 'evidence' he presented as 'prove' of his 'discovery'. A report yesterday in the Germany journal SPIEGEL Online (http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/erde/0,1518,328382,00.html) suggests that Mr Sarmast presented the international media with distorted images that do not match geographical features of the Mediterranean sea floor. According to the report, the computer-generated diagram Sarmast presented at his press conference are bogus fabrications which misrepresent the actual characteristics of the area. Money quote:

"Besides, the American [explorer], instead of showing real images of the bottom of the sea, has only presented multi-coloured diagrams - and these were manipulated. 'The diagram of the hill is vertically exaggerated', says Hübscher. Not only the alleged Acropolis, but also the wall is much flatter in truth than on Sarmast's multi-coloured images."

Regardless what we might wish to call the hilarious charade, the whole episode should be remembered for the botched job by international news organisations who have published concocted images as compelling evidence of a fairy tale. In many differnt ways, the media's Atlantis fiasco is a fitting parable of the slipping standards in 'science' reporting.

Benny Peiser

P.S. for more on the Atlantis farce see http://anthropology.tamu.edu/downloads/AtlantisHoax.htm http://anthropology.tamu.edu/downloads/AtlantisHoax2.htm

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(2) ATLANTIS FIND 'JUST VOLCANOES'

The Australian, 18 November 2004 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11416608%255E2703,00.html

AFP

BERLIN: The remains of the lost city of Atlantis, which a US researcher claims to have found off the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, are in fact submarine volcanoes, according to a German physicist.

US researcher Robert Sarmast claimed on Monday to have found proof that the mythical lost city of Atlantis actually existed and was located under the Mediterranean seabed between Cyprus and Syria.

But German physicist Christian Huebscher said he had identified the phenomenon as 100,000-year-old volcanoes that spewed mud.

Huebscher, of the Hamburg Centre for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, is quoted in today's edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper as saying he and two Dutch colleagues had sailed in a boat to the same area at which Sarmast claimed to have located Atlantis and made their findings.

Sarmast's team claims to have found man-made structures located about 1.5km below sea level and 80km off the southeast coast of Cyprus.

In his book Discovery of Atlantis, Sarmast argued Cyprus was once part of that lost continent -- at its highest peak -- and said his findings matched almost perfectly every clue in the philosopher Plato's description of the legendary city state.

Plato's famed account in Timaeus and Critias is the sole source of the Atlantis myth dating back to 9000 BC.

The privately funded $US200,000 ($258,830) expedition seeks to confound sceptics by bringing back scientific side-scan sonar data that supports evidence revealing man-made structures such as a 3km wall.

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(3) ATLANTIS: THE LOST CITY THAT'S ALWAYS BEING FOUND

Slate, 16 November 2004 http://slate.msn.com/id/2109823/

By Brendan I. Koerner

American architect-turned-archaeologist Robert Sarmast claims to have discovered the lost city of Atlantis, off the southeast coast of Cyprus. Sarmast says his latest sonar readings reveal submerged walls that closely resemble those described by Plato, the first person to ever mention Atlantis in print. In Timaeus, written around 360 B.C., the renowned philosopher portrayed Atlantis as "a great and wonderful empire" that was destroyed by earthquakes and floods in a 24-hour span. How many times have researchers previously claimed to have discovered the vanished island-state?

Oodles-and that's not even counting the numerous psychics and crackpot "Atlantologists" who've placed the city everywhere from Nicaragua to Ceylon. The hunt began in earnest in the early 19th century, when Guatemalan Dr. Paul Felix Cabrera proposed that Hispaniola-the island where Haiti and the Dominican Republic are now found-was the site of Atlantis. Several researchers-such as the husband-and-wife team of Augustus Le Plongeon and Alice Dixon-speculated that Atlantis had been located near Mexico, based on their interpretation of Mayan codices that supposedly mentioned a lost island continent. The Mayans, the theory went, had interacted with the ancient Egyptians, who in turn passed the tale of Atlantis down to the ancient Greeks. This line of conjecture has been discredited over the years, in part because of a lack of physical evidence, and in part because it later became obvious that the early Mayanologists didn't fully understand the culture's complex hieroglyphs.

The world went atwitter in 1912 when a man calling himself Paul Schliemann published an article titled "How I Found the Lost Atlantis" in William Randolph Hearst's New York American. Schliemann claimed to be the grandson of Heinrich Schliemann, the archaeologist who excavated Troy. He wrote that his grandfather had passed down Trojan artifacts that revealed Atlantis' true location, submerged in the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and the United States. (The Azores were supposedly the tips of Atlantean mountains.) Schliemann disappeared soon after the publication of his fantastic account, however, and it's now widely viewed as one of the great "yellow journalism" hoaxes.

The British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett thought he'd solved the mystery in the 1920s, when he argued that Atlantis might have been located in the rain forests of Brazil. (He apparently based this belief on a stone idol he was given as a gift, which had reputedly come from a lost city in the Amazon.) Fawcett embarked on an expedition to find Atlantis in 1925, delving deep into the Brazilian back country; he was never seen again.

Almost a half-century later, a pair of reputable archaeologists, A.G. Galanopoulos and Edward Bacon, published Atlantis: The Truth Behind the Legend, which suggested that Atlantis was, in fact, the Greek island of Santorini. The island's Minoan population, they noted, was likely wiped out by a massive volcanic eruption circa 1450 B.C., a cataclysm that may have inspired Plato's tales of Atlantis being wiped out by floods. (Tsunamis, or gigantic tidal waves, are a direct aftereffect of volcanic eruptions that occur near water.)

A Soviet oceanographer added his own theory to the pile in 1979, when he charted a sunken plateau about 560 miles off the western coast of Portugal. He claimed to have "spotted almost clearly half-demolished walls and giant stairs" and added that the geological shape of the site closely paralleled that described by Plato. The last word came in 1985, when a piece of marble recovered from the ocean was supposedly being taken to the Soviet Academy of Sciences for top-level analysis. And that, apparently, was the end of the Soviets' involvement in the search.

The past year has been a particularly active one for Atlantologists. Aside from Sarmast's discovery, a German physicist, Rainer Kuehne, claimed in June that Atlantis was merely a region in southern Spain, near Cadiz. He based his conclusion on satellite imagery, which reveals a large marshy area surrounded by what appears to be concentric rings of Earth or water-geographic details that Plato noted.

Another European scientist, Swedish geographer Ulf Erlingsson, argued earlier this year that Atlantis wasn't near the Mediterranean at all but was actually Ireland. He says the Emerald Isle's size syncs up nicely with Plato's estimate and that the destruction myth was inspired by the submerging of Dogger Bank, a North Sea shoal, around 6100 B.C.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a fellow at the New America Foundation.

========= LETTERS =========

(4) UPI SCIENCE DESK: WE'LL NEED TO WORK HARDER

Phil Berardelli <pberardelli@upi.com> On Behalf Of Science Desk

Dear Benny

Thank you for pointing this out. Alas, UPI fell victim to it as well. I had been away at a science conference and did not have a chance to review the brief item we ran before it was published. I have since instructed the staff not to move anything that seems remotely sensational unless I have had a chance to verify it. Let me assure you that the UPI Science Desk works very hard to assure the accuracy of its output -- but obviously we need to work harder. You are right to point out about the "Med" being full for millions of years. I remember reading about the gigantic falls at Gibraltar that began flowing into the Mediterranean basin at the end of an ice age, miles wide and nearly a thousand feet tall. Though the event is evidenced by deep drilling cores from both the Atlantic and Med sides of the Straits, the thick, telltale salt layer in the cores -- the remnant from the time when the Med had dried up -- dates back far beyond the appearance of humans. So unless the folk of Atlantis built their civilization on a floating island, it's unlikely their relics have been found on the sea bottom.

Cheers Phil Berardelli Science & Technology Editor

============ (5) ATLANTIS: STUPID LITTLE HOAX OR ILL-INFORMED NAIVETY?

Joel Schiff <jschiff@hug.co.nz>

Hi Benny,

Joel Schiff

========== (6) THE GREAT ATLANTIS JOKE

Simon Mansfield <simon@spacedaily.com>

Benny,

It always makes me laugh how you take all this so seriously, as if the "press" is so stupid it couldn't see what this was going to be.

Stories like this on a Monday morning, are an editor's dream story, as it fills a slow news day with a story that everyone over 5 has heard of, and which anyone with an IQ over 10 will know is fairy tale stuff.

So why not give the punters a little fantasy. Remember most newspapers still publish that day's astrology chart, knowing full well that Astrology is about as real as Santa Claus and that other guy with the beard and the omnipresent daddy.

It's all part of the tapestry of life and selling newspaper.

For the record, SpaceDaily did not publish this story as it was obviously a hoax. But I did read half a dozen reports over the day to make sure we weren't missing the scoop on a hoax story now some 2300 years old.

In the meantime, lighten up and have a giggle next time you see a silly man in a red costume handing our lollies and promises to laughing children.

Regards Simon Mansfield SpaceDaily.com

EDITOR'S NOTE: News agencies that fell victim of the Atlantis joke:

UPI *Breaking News*, 14 November 2004 http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041114-101155-3076r.htm

Associated Press, 15 November 2004 http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/11/14/cyprus.atlantis.ap/

Reuters, 14 November 2004 http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=6806129

Agence France-Presse, 15 November 2004 http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20041115/atlantis.html

Press Association, 15 November 2004 http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3759015

BBC, 15 November 2004 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4011545.stm

Xinhua News Agency, 15 November 2004 http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-11/15/content_2220805.htm

Mazedonia Press Agency, 15 November 2004 http://www.mpa.gr/article.html?doc_id=493252

Big News Network, 15 November 2004 http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=c4c27d351631a540

========= (7) IMPRESSIVE DIAGRAM: ATLANTIS STORY MUST BE TRUE

Michael Paine <mpaine@tpg.com.au>

Benny

The Sydney Morning Herald has the story - with a very impressive computer diagram (so it MUST be true - at least the paper used the words "supposed ruins..")

Mike

============= (8) WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE MYTHICAL ATLANTIS IS REAL

Alan Alford <alford@eridu.co.uk>

Dear Benny,

There is nothing new or unusual in the media's reaction to Sarmast's "discovery" of Atlantis near Cyprus. It has long been the case that theories of a real or historical Atlantis earn far more column inches than theories of a mythical Atlantis. I was made painfully aware of this bias in 2001 when I wrote and self-published my book 'The Atlantis Secret' in which I argued that Atlantis signified the mythical underworld. For me, there was no newspaper frenzy, no deluge of interested publishers, no stampede to my door by television producers. Just a token column in the Guardian.

It is worthwhile asking why this should be the case. The explanation, I believe, lies in a cultural bias towards the historical interpretation of myth. Myth is of interest only in so far as it relates to history. The rest of it is dismissed as inconsequential folk tales about the origins of the world. Our schools and universities teach us to value history but to disregard myth. People understand what history is, but they have no concept of myth.

In a capitalist system, the media survives by giving the public what they want - articles, features, and programmes that can be readily comprehended. It is not its primary concern to re-educate the public.

This is why we have numerous articles and programmes about a historical Atlantis and virtually none about a mythical Atlantis. The former sells. The latter doesn't. The cultural bias is thus fed and reinforced.

In the same way, the public is force-fed a diet of programmes on the historical Noah's flood, the historical Exodus, the historical Troy, the historical wanderings of Odysseus, the historical voyage of Jason and the Argonauts, and the historical quest for the Holy Grail or the Tomb of Christ. The presumption of historicity is deeply ingrained in our Western, Judaeo-Christian culture, and in some cases it is still taboo to question it.

Even CCNet inadvertently reflects this cultural bias. Its terms of reference embrace theories of historical cataclysm, but ignore or exclude ideas about mythical cataclysm, i.e. the cataclysm that gave birth to the cosmos according to the beliefs of the ancient sages.

For what it's worth, I believe that Plato's Atlantis story was just this - a retelling of the myth of the cataclysm of the beginning of the world. It was a 'true' story in the sense that the ancients believed implicitly that their creation myths were true accounts of the genesis of the universe. A detailed synopsis of my theory - including a summary of the problems of the historical Atlantis theory - may be found on my website at http://www.eridu.co.uk/Author/atlantis/

Alan F. Alford alford@eridu.co.uk

========= (9) WHY I BELIEVE IN MYTH

Nick Sault <Nick.Sault@noelleeminggroup.co.nz>

Hi Benny

The Atlantis story is intriguing by any standards. Remember that before Schliemann, Troy was a myth. I am not saying Sarmast has hit the nail this time, but as with the Noah story, perhaps the Atlantis story is simply an allegory borne out of the many flood stories that have come down through the ages.

It seems to me that there should have been no surprise at the revelations of the Black Sea flood. After all we have known for decades that the sea level rose 80-100 metres at the end of the ice age, and though that was a creeping rise in human terms, hundreds of natural dams all over the world would have been periodically breached, producing sudden and catastrophic floods. Apart from the breaking of ice dams, there would have been numerous floods produced by valley heads being breached, and of course numerous breaches of isthmuses, as with the Bosphorous.

A decade ago, long before the revelation of the Black Sea flood, I put the question to an archaeological group - why aren't archaeologists interested in sounding the bed of the Persian Gulf? Before the post-glacial rise in sea-level, this was a fertile valley with the great ancestor of the Tigris/Euphrates running through it, fed by massive glaciers in the Caucasus. Some time after the creation of the Persian Gulf, some of what we recognise as the first great civilisations arose near these shores. Wouldn't is seem obvious that pre-civilisations or even full-blooded civilisations existed on what is now that sea-bed.?

This thinking can be extended to a myriad of flooded basins, deltas, valleys and old sea-shores. We have tended to look on the ice-age as a trying time for human evolution, but most of the lower latitudes experienced an amenable climate. We assume that once the ice-age ended, freed from the rigours of that age, human techno-evolution was let loose. That could be Northern Latitude bigotry. The temperate zone, which has been the nursery to our modern age, sat firmly across the Mediterranean and Middle East regions during the ice age. This begs the question, why could not the rise of the post-flood civilisations represent a resurgence of the ice-age civilisations? No evidence, you say. Well, as with the findings in the Black Sea, the evidence is possibly buried by sediment and nobody seems to have the wherewithal to put two and two together. Surely, early civilisations would have existed close to the sea or on major river deltas or valleys. These areas were inundated by up to 100 metres of water.

And why, when all the major human progress has happened in temperate regions, did the great early civilisations of Sumer, Egypt, Turkey and Greece rise in what are now arid regions; regions that have lagged in the techno-race in the latest millennia? Yes, the climate change is the culprit, but the fact is, both pre-flood and post flood, these regions had climates amenable to great progress, and I put it to you that the only hiccup in the rise of civilisation back then was the flooding of the ancestral lands. I also put it to you that what academia currently term the earliest civilisations, represent a resurgence of civilisations decimated by catastrophic flooding at the end of the ice-age.

Though I doubt Sarmast's claims, full marks to him and his like for plumbing the sea-bed for signs of human remains. If off-the-wall research didn't take place, science would end-up bottlenecked by the constraints of academic channelling. It is well to remember that both Schliemann and Wegener made monumental changes to our thinking, when neither was trained in the field of their discoveries.

I agree with you that it is unfortunate that we have a media now that picks up on every off-the-wall theory and portrays it all as real science, but I defend those who have the guts to chase off-the-wall dreams.

Nick Sault

======== (10) THE REAL ATLANTIS FOUND

Michael Martin-Smith <lagrangia@lagrangia.karoo.co.uk>

Benny,

I thought everyone knew that Atlantis was a fish and chip shop in Scunthorpe?

Michael Martin-Smith

============ (11) AND FINALLY: IF YOU CARE, ATLANTIS IS FOUND ... MAYBE

The Herald Mail, 18 November 2004 http://www.herald-mail.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=96145&format=html

by TIM ROWLAND

After all these decades of looking, they have finally found the lost city of Atlantis. Allegedly.

Robert Sarmast of Los Angeles reported this week that sonar scanning in the Mediterranean seabed between Cyprus and Syria has revealed man-made walls two miles in length. "We have definitely found the Acropolis of Atlantis," he said.

You don't hear as much about Atlantis today, but back in the '70s, it was huge. Atlantis was Plato's mythical city, the grand, utopian civilization where rulers were just, the people were happy and enlightened, intellect was rewarded, everyone's needs were met and contractors showed up when they said they would. Most likely it was the creation of aliens in UFOs, although as I remember there was some debate on this point.

If Sarmast really did find Atlantis I guess I'm happy about it, although after all these years, now I forget why we cared.

Seems to me there was a sense among us young ideologues that if we discovered Atlantis, all our questions would be answered. What those questions were, no one bothered to say - it was more the idea that Atlantis would provide a template for the advancement and perfection of our own sorry civilization.

Then along came MTV and we decided to "rest our case" on that, figuring if perfection were out of reach, staring slack-jawed for hours at some sequined crooner lip-synching and licking fire hydrants with a supporting cast of bikini babes was a pretty darned close second.

You have to figure this discovery must be true, because the mainstream press is avoiding it, just like they did with FDR's paralysis and the murder of Vince Foster.

You have to go to the British papers to find out what the deal is, and truth be told, even they seem a bit skeptical. They describe Sarmast as a "self-proclaimed scientist" and "maverick explorer." These are journalism code words that newspapers employ because their lawyers will not allow them to publish someone's picture with a cutline that says "cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo."

But while I agree it is a shame we have lost this great city to history, the bigger tragedy is that now, following this latest "find," we will all be subjected to about 6 million hours of underwater documentary television, as the Discovery, History, Arts and Entertainment, and National Geographic channels all fall over each other in a race to be the first to bring us the story.

In fact, they will probably have to arm their submarine camera drones with torpedoes to drive off the competition. Then they will do one of those two-hour "mystery" stories in which they catalog the Atlantis find and make it sound credible and then have one expert at the end who will tell us that "everything you have just heard during the past 115 minutes is complete hogwash."

If there were an Atlantis, a perfect society, probably their constitution specifically prohibited any television show based on underwater shipwreck photography. Or it should have, at any rate.

Me, if I'm channel surfing and I see someone in a wetsuit and oxygen tanks being interviewed, that's instant disqualification. They're always showing murky footage of some barnacle-encrusted plank and acting as if they've just translated the Rosetta Stone.

"This pile of silt, 1,500 meters below the surface, conclusively proves that this ship did not go down as the result of a surprise storm, as experts had previously thought."

If these people treated car wrecks like they do shipwrecks, they'd be burrowing around the interior with a videocam saying, "The fact that the steering wheel was turned 15 degrees to the left at the time of the crash only deepens the mystery. Why didn't the driver adjust his speed for the fog? We may never know ..."

And speaking of things that are simply tiresome, in the Shameless Plug Department, I'll be signing copies of my new book "Home Detention" - and giving a small and intimate rant about the unfairness of life - at the Washington County Free Library today at 7 p.m. If you are unable to attend, I would encourage you to visit your grandfather in the home. You won't notice a lot of difference.

On Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., I'll be (rant free) in the Food Court at Valley Mall, and for those in Hancock and Broccoli Springs, I'll be at Tari's Premier Cafe at 123 N. Washington St. in Berkeley Springs, W.Va., that day from 5 to 7 p.m.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

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