Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean has produced two principal schools of thought relating to sunken civilisations. The first concerns what is known as Sundaland, which was comprised mainly of land in the South China Sea that was exposed during the last Ice Age and gradually submerged as the glaciers melted. Today, its principal remnants are the islands of the huge Indonesian archipelago. Several researchers have claimed that this inundation of the land inspired Plato’s Atlantis story. The late Arysio dos Santos was probably the first to give the idea widespread publicity. Today, Dhani Irwanto can claim to be its leading proponent.

The second concerns Lemuria and Mu, the former being a vast hypothetical landmass proposed to explain how lemurs reached Africa and India. Mu, on the other hand, is a complete invention by Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1869 as the name given to a mythical continent that supposedly existed in the Pacific Ocean, according to an incorrect translation of the Codex Troano. At the end of the 19th century, his fictional continent was confusingly moved by Augustus le Plongeon into the Atlantic. Subsequently, le Plongeon’s friend, ‘Colonel’ James Churchward, moved Mu back to the Pacific in his 1931 book, The Lost Continent of Mu [0233], in which he presented it as a kind of Pacific precursor to Atlantis.

The Pacific might, at face value, appear to be a most unlikely candidate to be the home of Plato’s Atlantis, particularly as he clearly stated that the Atlanteans came from the ‘Atlantic’. Whether this Atlantic was the same body of water that we today call the Atlantic Ocean is a matter of continuing debate. Nevertheless, Sir Francis Bacon placed a fictionalised Atlantis in the Pacific off the west coast of America.

There are a lot of confusing ideas, old and new, still in circulation regarding sunken civilisations associated with the Pacific. One that springs to mind is that of Louis-Claude Vincent, who, in 1969, published two large volumes (800 pages) on the origins of civilisation entitled Le paradis perdu de Mu (The Lost Paradise of Mu). He claimed that an impact with an extraterrestrial body changed the axis of rotation of the Earth by 90° causing the Deluge and submerging Atlantis in the Pacific!

There is little doubt that the Pacific, along with every other part of the world, has a long, unwritten history of mankind’s spread throughout that vast ocean. Even the inhabitants of the remote and scattered islands of Polynesia can today relate how they developed navigation techniques unknown anywhere else and have developed and used them over very many years^(a) .

Other related speculation can be found under Nan Madol, Rutas, Garden of Eden, New Hebrides, Ogygia and Yonaguni.

^(a) https://www.dailygrail.com/2017/04/water-lightning-the-mysterious-polynesian-navigation-method-known-as-te-lapa-the-flashing/