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March 18, 2025 - Skeptoid
22:49
Skeptoid #980: How to Find Atlantis

Ten of the places where Atlantis true believers think the mythical city might actually be. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hunting for Fictional Atlantis 00:09:59
Nobody who studies history believes that Atlantis was anything other than what Plato said it was.
A fictional nation used to make a point in one of his philosophical dialogues.
But many people can't accept that and insist that if it's mentioned in literature, it can only be an actual physical place.
And so they hunt for it to this day.
Where are they looking and what signs are they searching for?
We're going to find out right now on Skeptoid.
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How to find Atlantis.
Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.
Today, we are going to learn how to find Atlantis.
Even if you're aware that the idea of Atlantis was never intended as anything more than a philosophical thought experiment, not everyone is so well read.
The majority of Americans, some 57%, according to a recent poll, believe that Atlantis was a real prehistoric civilization.
With most people thinking it was real, it should come as no surprise that quite a lot of people are reasonably serious about finding out where it was.
And so today, I present 10 of the top possibilities.
You'll find plenty of other claimed locations of Atlantis besides what I list here.
My list is a bit different in that I tried to limit it to places where you can actually go and see the claimed evidence for yourself.
In his works Timaeus and Critias, Plato had his character Socrates, based on his real-life mentor, Socrates, challenge the other characters to imagine a perfect, ideal society, for which he used an idealized version of their hometown of Athens, contending with an imaginary opposing power, which he named Atlantis, some 8,500 years before Athens existed.
A foe which was larger than Asia and Libya combined, and which represented the very antithesis of all that Plato deemed ideal.
From this, it's obviously quite a stretch to get the impression he was referring to an actual place that really existed.
Nevertheless, a subculture of people believe that if it was in print, it was therefore automatically non-fiction, and therefore Atlantis could only have been a real place.
And so they search for it, presumably for what Indiana Jones termed fortune and glory.
But belief is when dogma prevails over knowledge.
And so here are the top 10 places they search that you can personally visit and inspect for yourself.
Number one, Doñana National Park in Spain This UNESCO World Heritage Site in Spain is known for its unusually high biodiversity.
It is a vast plain of marshlands and low sand dunes along Spain's southern coast, west of Gibraltar.
Nearly half a million people visit each year.
It is believed that Phoenicians and other ancient peoples may have spent time here, but no archaeological evidence remains.
Why?
Because it's marshlands and sand and gets completely wiped out and replaced quite regularly along the geological time scale.
It has also been completely washed away and gone, then built back up more times than anyone can know.
And yet, as recently as the 2000s, this beautiful national park has joined the list of Atlantis candidates.
Why?
For no other reason than science by press release.
A team which included zero people with any relevant expertise looked at satellite imagery, read that as Google Earth, and felt they saw vaguely circular structures in the sand and mud.
The press releases went out, and that's how public understanding of science got to the point it is today.
Number 2.
Santorini in Greece If you're a believer that Atlantis was real, the island of Santorini in the Aegean should be at the top of your list.
A beautiful vacation destination today, the island is the rim of a mostly submerged caldera which exploded in 1600 BCE.
The Bronze Age city at Akrotiri partially survived, though archaeologists found no human remains, suggesting the people had sufficient warning to mostly escape.
Some believe the event may have inspired Plato's Atlantis, though it's not a very good match.
Plato said Atlantis was destroyed in a single day and night of earthquakes and floods.
Strange that he would omit the apocalyptic explosion of the entire island.
Number 3.
Bimini Road in the Bahamas In the 1930s, Edgar Casey, one of America's first celebrity psychics, claimed that he had received messages from someone who had lived in Atlantis in a previous life.
They told him that the island of Bimini was the peak of an ancient mountain on the continent of Atlantis.
Though this is a hard case to make if you look at the underwater bathymetry of the area.
Nevertheless, ever since then, believers in Casey and in Atlantis alike have kept their eyes open for evidence there.
There are conflicting stories over who found the Bimini Road first.
Possibly a pilot flying around the island looking for it.
Possibly a group of divers doing the same thing.
About 14 meters underwater and about 600 meters offshore, there are big blocks of limestone poking up through the sandy bottom.
They're big and bulbous, and some of them appear to be lined up.
Unsurprising to geologists, because that's how rocks fracture.
If it ever was a road, it was a terrible, terrible one.
Locals can plainly see that it's little different from the underwater rocks all around all the islands, but to true believers, it uniquely betrays the hand of man.
And, not to forget, the second annual Skeptoid adventure in July 2025 is taking a huge group of you right there, though a boat ride out to the road is an optional extra.
There are still tickets available, so if this sounds like it even might be fun, and trust me, it will be, come to skeptoid.com slash events to check it out and reserve your spot.
Number four, Antarctica In 1513, the Turkish naval cartographer Piri Rees compiled a map from about 20 others in an effort to depict the whole world.
One of its many inevitable gross inaccuracies is that it depicts Antarctica as ice-free, since no one had yet been there or knew that it was covered in ice.
Based on this alone, pseudo-history authors such as Charles Berlitz and Erich von Doniken began promoting Antarctica as the actual site of Atlantis as a given fact.
Compounding this was a pseudo-geophysical conjecture named Earth Crustal Displacement, which attempts to explain how Atlantis could have zoomed all the way from the Mediterranean to the South Pole in just 12,000 years.
Pseudo-archaeologist Graham Hancock embraces this conjecture and today still argues for an expedition to Antarctica to find Atlantis.
Number five, Malta Some say that the island of Malta was Atlantis, based on little more than it has ancient stone temples dating back more than 5,500 years.
They are said to be the second oldest structures in the world, second only to Turkey's Gerbekli Tepe.
But Atlantis was supposedly 7,500 years older than that.
So the ruins on Malta would be from a much later civilization.
Those don't constitute evidence that there was also a far older one.
Sea levels at the alleged time of Atlantis, say 12,000 years ago, were some 60 or 70 meters lower than today.
The several islands that make up Malta were all joined into one, but overall it was only about one and a half times its current size of 316 square kilometers.
Sea Level Evidence Debunked 00:02:47
So let's be generous and say it was 500 square kilometers.
But Plato said that just the central plain of Atlantis alone measured 2,000 by 3,000 stadia, which is just about 150,000 square kilometers.
That's bigger than Germany.
And it's also 300 times bigger than Malta was at its biggest.
Moreover, we can pretty easily tell that Malta was never destroyed in a single day and night of earthquakes and floods, and it hasn't sunken under the sea.
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Number six, the Spartel Bank, Strait of Gibraltar.
The Spartel Bank is a submerged island outside the Strait of Gibraltar, which was covered up just about 12,000 years ago as sea levels rose.
Today, it's about 56 meters underwater.
And I know I said these were all places you could go to, but yes, you will need special diving equipment to see this one.
Spartel had been slipping under the rising waters since the last glacial maximum.
The Submerged Spartel Bank 00:06:32
At its largest, when ocean levels were lowest, it was about 113 square kilometers.
By 20,000 years ago, it was down to 26 square kilometers.
By 12,000 years ago, it was down to less than one square kilometer, and then it was gone.
But Plato said Atlantis was 150,000 square kilometers, with a military consisting of about a million men and a navy of 1,200 ships.
It would have been quite a trick to squeeze all that onto an island half the size of New York's Central Park.
Number 7.
The Island of Pharos in Egypt Pharos was a tiny island just off the coast of Alexandria in Egypt and was the site of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
It was connected to the mainland when a 1,200-meter causeway was built, named the Heptastadion, meaning seven stadia, the causeway's length.
In 1913, remains of an ancient harbor were discovered in the shallow waters off of Pharos, and so some concluded the island used to be bigger.
However, at the time of Atlantis, Pharos was not only not an island, it was well inland in Egypt.
Today, the Pharos and the Heptastadion are both lost under centuries of fill and new construction.
But you can still visit the site of the lighthouse.
Number eight, the Recot Structure in Mauritania Way out in the middle of the desert in Mauritania is the Recot Structure, also known as the Eye of the Sahara, a 30-kilometer-wide structure of concentric rings of rock and sand.
They're low-lying.
If you were on the ground, you probably wouldn't notice a thing.
But from the air, it's startling.
It was created by the uplift of sedimentary and volcanic rock layers due to a subsurface igneous intrusion and shaped into concentric rings by millions of years of erosion.
Plato described Atlantis as being designed as concentric rings, alternating between water and land.
So some ancient Atlantist theorists insist this had to be the place.
Never mind that this part of Africa was last underwater some 61 million years ago.
Give or take a few.
But if you want to fly over an Atlantis candidate, this is the one to put on your bucket list.
Number nine, the Americas.
When Christopher Columbus returned to Europe after his first voyage to the Americas, a surprising number of people figured that he had actually landed on Atlantis.
Even in those days, it was not unusual for people to assume that Atlantis had been an actual place.
Honestly, how many people have actually read Plato's dialogues, or even scholarly analysis of them?
Almost none.
So whatever the average person knows about Atlantis is probably that it was a real place, because that's the only thing they've ever heard.
It was the same in the late 15th century.
They knew that Columbus had sailed across the Atlantic. toward what Plato said was opposite the pillars of Hercules, which was the Strait of Gibraltar.
Amerigo Vespucci's recognition of the Americas as a new world, distinct from Asia, resonated with people's idea of a lost continent.
And since the full extent of the Americas was yet unknown, it left room for speculation about mythical lands.
Number 10.
Southwest Morocco One Atlantis theorist in particular, Michael Hubner, believes the Souss-Massa Plain on the coast of Morocco is where Atlantis was.
This is a geologist's paradise located between two small mountain ranges with beautiful rock formations everywhere you look.
Huebner's evidence is mainly that there is a caldera-like structure in the northwest that he believes is exactly the dimensions Plato gave for the central island of Atlantis, despite the fact that Plato gave no such dimensions.
He only did for the whole nation of concentric rings, which was the 150,000 square kilometers number.
Huebner's other piece of evidence is a series of caves on the shore, cut by wave action in a layer of softer rock overlain by harder rock, and which are also pretty cool.
He believes these to be the docks that the Atlanteans must have used.
Overall, Hubner's conjecture is nothing but pure pareidolia, the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random stimuli.
I've often noted that when a claim is backed by no good evidence, but instead with a mountain of really bad evidence, that's a pretty good indication that no good evidence exists.
We have a thousand blurry photos of Bigfoot, but not a single good one.
Why?
Bigfoot doesn't photograph so well, because he's a guy in a $20 gorilla suit.
And these 10 conjectures were only among those where I felt you could reasonably go there for yourself to see.
One of the very most popular claims for Atlantis is off the coast of the island of Cyprus, where images were collected by sonar of blobs that some people have interpreted as man-made structures, 1,500 meters underwater.
I didn't include that because no one can go that deep.
But anyone can also see that even at the height of the last glacial maximum, that spot was still under more than a kilometer of water.
I give you my personal guarantee that it was not Atlantis.
Atlantis hunting is not an evidence-driven mission.
It is a passion project.
It is practiced by people who have already heard and understood and rejected the fact that Atlantis was conceived purely as fiction for a philosophical thought experiment.
They are those who are driven purely by wonder and hope and imagination, and the belief that the buried treasure lies just one more thrust to the shovel away.
I do not hold with them in the false hope that they will find Atlantis, but I still very much sympathize.
Skepticism as the Best Medicine 00:03:25
Each of us has some yearning in life, perhaps even an impossible one.
But that yearning is a spark that is the difference between life and stagnation.
I have my spark, and I know what it is, and I will always strive toward it.
And that's what makes my life meaningful to me, and not just a footnote about a random hunk of temporary meat whirling through space.
We all have some spark.
My question to you is: what is yours?
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