Bates, Robert Stanley
Robert Stanley Bates is a retired US naval officer. He is a supporter of Robert Sarmast’s theories that Atlantis and a/the Garden of Eden had been situated in the Eastern Mediterranean in the region of Cyprus. In 2004, Bates was the expedition leader to the suspected site of the First Garden of Eden/Atlantis. In 2006 he was the consultant to the History Channel for the second expedition in their lead story for its “Digging for the Truth” series.

Although very little has been heard from Sarmast in recent years, in two papers in 2014(a) and 2017(b) Bates attempted to breathe new life into Sarmast’s ideas(a) with a claim of fresh evidence. This new support is the 1978 claim of Ya‘akov Petrovitch Malovitskiy (1932-2002) that the Levantine Basin was a sunken continent. In my opinion, Malovitskiy’s claim along with Bates’ rehashing of much of Sarmast’s arguments fail to locate Atlantis and/or the Garden of Eden.
(a) https://squarecircles.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/FirstEdenAnalysis.pdf