Kukal, Zdenek
Zdenek Kukal (1932-2021) was a respected geologist and oceanographer who worked at the Czech Geological Survey, Prague.
As a ten-year-old, he witnessed how in the aftermath of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich “a lot had changed. We were stuck at home, never leaving anywhere. Patrols were walking by, sometimes we heard some distant shooting, and then they began with the night searches. From apartment to apartment, from house to house, one after another. Wehrmacht, police, Gestapo. It ended up well at our house – they found nobody.” (a)
He wrote a volume debunking the more extreme ideas regarding the Bermuda Triangle. In 1978, he published, in Czech, Atlantis in the Light of Modern Research, while a few years later Earth Science Reviews (Vol.. 21, 1984) devoted a special issue to a revised version, in English, translated by Cesare Emiliani. Kukal favoured Santorini as the ‘inspiration’ behind the Atlantis story but as he stated, in a paper delivered to the 2005 Atlantis Conference on Melos, the story is fundamentally ‘pure fiction’.