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NEWS September 2023
September 2023. Hi Atlantipedes, At present I am in Sardinia for a short visit. Later we move to Sicily and Malta. The trip is purely vacational. Unfortunately, I am writing this in a dreadful apartment, sitting on a bed, with access to just one useable socket and a small Notebook. Consequently, I possibly will not […]Read More »
Joining The Dots
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
Berlitz, Charles
Charles Berlitz (1913-2003) was born in New York, as Charles Frambach and was the grandson of Maximilian D. Berlitz, founder of the well-known language school. At his grandfather’s request, he changed his name to Frambach-Berlitz, subsequently dropping the Frambach completely. He spoke a wide range of languages and wrote extensively on the subject.
>He graduated from Yale and eventually became a vice-president of the family company in charge of the New York based publishing house. “He left the company in the late 1960s, not long after the publishing firm Crowell, Collier & Macmillan took over. In a strange legal maneuver, the new owners obtained a temporary court order preventing Mr. Berlitz from using his surname professionally, arguing that Berlitz was a trademark.” Berlitz won the case along with a $350,000 settlement(d) .<
He spent 26 years of his life in the US Army, half of that on active duty, serving as an intelligence officer. He served in World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.
He developed an interest in mysteries and published a number of related books[165–173] including two about Atlantis that support an Atlantic location for the lost civilisation, with the Canaries and Azores as leading contenders.
As a linguist, Berlitz wrote a critical review of the claims of Brasseur deBourboug and Le Plongeon that they had deciphered the Mayan script(c).
Unfortunately, his obsession with the Bermuda Triangle led him into lunatic fringe territory when he suggested a link between the ‘Triangle’ and Atlantis citing the ‘prophecies’ of Edgar Cayce and further extending his appeal to various factions of the aforementioned lunatic fringe, by hinting at a possible connection between Atlantis and UFOs.
More serious is that Berlitz has been accused of perpetrating ‘an elaborate Atlantis pyramid hoax in his 1978 book Without a Trace.’ He claims the discovery of a 470 feet high pyramid with a 4×520 feet base(a). Various suggestions regarding the real source of the story(b). For me, it sounds like a slightly garbled rerun of the Ray Brown hoax.
(a) Pyramid Schemes: A Brief History of the Mysterious Monuments (archive.org)
(d) Linguist Charles Berlitz Dies – The Washington Post *