Latest News
NEWS October 2024
OCTOBER 2024 The recent cyber attack on the Internet Archive is deplorable and can be reasonably compared with the repeated burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I have used the Wayback Machine extensively, but, until the full extent of the permanent damage is clear, I am unable to assess its effect on Atlantipedia. At […]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 »
Anthony Woods
Woods, Anthony
Anthony Woods is the author of Atlantis Ireland, published under the auspices of the unaccredited Keystone University(a) in Dublin, with Woods listed as CEO(b). To be blunt, for me as an Irishman, in spite of such an interesting title, I was greatly disappointed. In fact, I was by turn uncertain whether I should laugh or cry.
Woods engages in a generous level of speculation, which was certainly attention seeking. He selectively uses some mythological stories as if history whenever it suits his purpose [p.71]. The content is irritatingly repetitious throughout, references should have been numbered, which along with a few typos, all cry out for an editor.
His core contention is that Stone Age Ireland was a cultural hyperdiffusionist centre. He claims that megalith building, language and religion, all spread globally from Ireland, also known as Atlantis!
Among his many outlandish claims are that:
1.The ancient Irish language is the oldest in the world and is the most extensive with almost a million words [p.142], which is completely wrong by about a factor of six!
2.Irish megaliths are the most spectacular – obviously Woods has never heard of Brittany!
3.Megalith construction spread from Ireland to the world. However respected archaeologists such Aubrey Burl, Mike Parker Pearson and Robert Hensey [1766.6] burst that particular bubble with the their shared view that megalith building originated in France.
According to Woods, “the high concentration of megaliths on the west cost of Britain and France proves that Ireland was the fountainhead, the source of the megalithic mother culture.” The ‘logic’ here eludes me!
4.For some reason Woods thinks islands are ideal for evolution(p139), and that Cro-Magnon Man evolved in Ireland[p.103]!
5.Although Ireland was the island of Atlantis, the city of Atlantis (Cerne) was in Mauritania and is known today as the Richat Structure!
6.The Celts didn’t come to Ireland, they came from Ireland![p.99]
7.Woods makes the modest claim that the Irish visited America thousands of years before Columbus. Which may or may not be true, but what has that to do with Atlantis? [p.93]
In all, this book is not just an Hibernocentric rant. Woods also offers a lengthy diatribe against British imperialism and Vatican political interference, which, although probably justifiable, has also nothing to do with Atlantis
He introduces a range of subjects such as giants, Machu Picchu, Gobekli Tepe and the Garden of Eden, all with Woods’ imagined connection with ancient Ireland!
Apart all the nonsense about ancient Ireland, he barely touches on Plato’s dialogues, except to rubbish his narrative with “It’s clear that Plato’s legend is useful but unreliable, that it combined two separate related places, a lot of exaggeration and several historical errors.”[p.13] and twice patronisingly refers to Plato’s account as “useful but unreliable.”[p.50]
Woods did quote from Ulf Erlingsson, who made a more valliant attempt to link Ireland with Atlantis some years. Erlingsson matched the dimensions of 2000 x 3000 stadia (340 x 227 miles) given by Plato with the diagonal dimensions of Ireland [319.16]. Unfortunately, Erlingsson got it very wrong and Woods copied his error. Plato’s figures were the dimensions of the Plain of Atlantis, while the Central Plain of Ireland is just a fraction of its size(c), being very roughly 150 x 100 miles in extent. Now, who’s unreliable?
At which point, I could take no more and gave up.
Millette, Louis
Louis Millette is a Canadian commentator who claims to have identified the location of Atlantis in the region of the Guadalquivir River in Spain’s Andalusia, maintaining that Tartessos, Tarshish and Atlantis were all the same. He has posted a set of three satellite images (d) to support his contention, unfortunately, I cannot see anything that might be related to Atlantis. His brief video clip(e) is equally uninformative.
However, Millette is a firm believer in extraterrestrial visitors(a), which for me is sufficient reason to consider him an unreliable researcher. He also claims to have located the ‘Hanging Gardens of Babylon’ in Nineveh, (now on the outskirts of Iraq’s city of Mosul), an idea already proposed by Stephanie Dailey of Oxford University as early as 1992(c) and later (2020) adopted by Anthony Woods. Even more provocative is the suggestion from Constantinos Ragazas that the correct title should be The Hanging Gardens of Göbekli Tepe!(f)
Millette promises startling revelations regarding Stonehenge in June 2015. However, a brief posting(g) on the academia.edu website, consisting of some text and three images reveals nothing!
(c) The Hanging Gardens of … Nineveh? (archive.org) *
(d) https://yourshot.nationalgeographic.com/profile/332999/ (link broken)
(e) https://youtu.be/LvrW_Jwintc
(f) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271076011_The_Hanging_Gardens_of_Gobekli_Tepe
(g) https://www.academia.edu/12615336/Stonehenge_the_cycle_of_life_Louis_view_2015_
Richat Structure, The *
The Richat Structure or Guelb er Richat in Mauritania” is regarded by geologists as a highly symmetrical and deeply eroded geologic dome. It was first described in the 1930s to 1940s, as Richât Crater or Richât buttonhole. Richard-Molard (1948) considered it to be the result of a laccolithic thrust. A geological expedition to Mauritania led by Théodore Monod in 1952 recorded four ‘crateriform or circular irregularities” in the area.”(q)
The feature was thought by 
many to be an impact crater until it was identified as the remains of a possible ‘salt dome’(a). Some of the more enthusiastic supporters of the ‘Electric Universe’ school of thought have sought to identify the feature as the consequence of an electrical discharge.(e)
This is outlined in an April 2022 paper by Andrew Hall, explaining what he calls the ‘Keystone Pattern’.(r)
Even creationists have claimed that the original surface of the ‘Structure’ had been eroded by Noah’s Flood(t).
The concentric circles of which the structure is composed is clearly revealed by satellite imagery. However, these characteristics are not visible when walking across the structure(u). The scientific consensus today is that the structure is a natural geological feature. In more technical terms a geological ‘dome’ is “A structure that plunges in all directions to form a circular or elongate structure is a dome. Domes are generally formed from one main deformation event, or via diapirism from underlying magmatic intrusions or movements of upwardly mobile, mechanically ductile material such as rock salt (salt dome) and shale (shale diapir). The Richat Structure of the Sahara is considered a dome that has been laid bare by erosion.”(k) Further geological data was available on a German website(v).
It did not take long before it was compared to Plato’s description of Atlantis. However, Ulf Richter has pointed out that it is too wide (35 km), too elevated (400 metres) and too far from the sea (500 km) to be seriously considered the location of Atlantis. Nevertheless, researchers such as Robert deMelo are still prepared to consider it a possible location candidate(b).
50 km west-southwest of Richat is a similar though smaller feature, the Semsiyat Dome, having a diameter of just 5 km(o).
A 2023 geological study(z) of the Richat feature is worth a read.
In 2008, George Sarantitis put forward the idea that the Richat Structure was the location of Atlantis, supporting his contention with an intensive reappraisal of the translation of Plato’s text(g). His theory has been published in Greek[1470], with an English translation now (2017) imminent.
In 2006 George S. Alexander and Natalis Rosen were struck by the similarity of the Richat feature with Plato’s description and decided to investigate on the ground. Instability in the region prevented this until late 2008 when they visited the site, gathering material for a movie. The film was then finalised and published on their then-newly-established website in 2010(c).
In 2008, Charles Giuliani self-published Alternative View of The Distant Past [1969]. In this wide-ranging book, the author tackles the story of Atlantis and endeavours to identify the Richat Structure as the location of Plato’s city of Atlantis. His speculations lack scientific evidence and contradict reason. The main weaknesses are his dating of Atlantis (9600 BC) and the logistical problems of launching an attack on Athens 4,000km away from Richat at a time when archaeology indicates that seafaring was carried out with little more than dugout canoes or rafts.
In 2013 further support for linking Atlantis with Richat came from Jose D.C. Hernandez with a rather convoluted theory in a paper entitled A Celestial Impact and Atlantis(f).
Even more bizarre is the claim by Anthony Woods that although Ireland was the island of Atlantis, the city of Atlantis (Cerne) was in Mauritania and is known today as the Richat Structure!
Towards the end of the 2018 media ‘silly season’, the YouTube channel Bright Insight made a pathetic attempt to breathe new life into the Atlantis in Sahara theory. However, it fails on one simple fact; it is not submerged, but for good measure, when Alexander and Rosen investigated the Richat Structure they could not produce a single piece of physical evidence from the 35 km wide site. Where was the bustling port described by Plato? I could go on, but remember, it’s not called the silly season without reason.
Early November 2018 saw the British tabloid press give further coverage to Jimmy Corsetti’s ideas(i)(j) (The Sun gave his name as Jimmy Bright!). His theories are totally dependent on the destruction of Atlantis having occurred around twelve thousand years ago. He does not explain how an attack was launched from Mauritania on Athens which did not even exist at that time. Corsetti, like many others, needs this very early date to explain why the Richat Structure is not underwater today but was gradually uplifted as a result of tectonic forces in the region. However, Plato clearly states that the submerged Atlantis was still a hazard to shipping in his day, a period when the Structure would have been at its present elevation. As no geologic event has occurred during the two and a half millennia since Plato, which could have raised the Structure from the seabed to an elevation of 400 metres 500 km from the Atlantic, we are obliged to give greater credence to the scientific conclusion that the Richat Structure is a natural feature. Corsetti does have at least one fan(n).
It was in 2018 that Corsetti published a video promoting the Richat Structure as Atlantis, which received extensive coverage. Steven Novella, a well-known Atlantis sceptic, published an article debunking Corsetti’s ‘evidence’ in some considerable detail(s). However, while I would endorse Novella’s arguments(l) regarding the Richat Structure, I strongly disagree with Novella’s closed-minded attitude towards the existence of Atlantis as well as Corsetti’s attention-seeking location choice for Plato’s island. I would add that Corsetti has his date wrong and that to launch an attack on Athens nearly 4000 km away by land (3000 km by sea) from the ‘Structure’ is logistical nonsense.
In a recent conversation with Joe Rogan, Corsetti claimed that since the Structure contains salt, it MUST have been submerged and no other explanation is possible. However, as I have pointed out above the Richat feature is an eroded ‘salt dome’ and quite naturally has salt in it without the need for submersion.
The natural geological origins of the Richat Structure are discussed in some detail in a 2005 paper by three Canadian scientists in the journal Geology, produced by the Geological Society of America. It would be interesting to hear the response of Corsetti to facts compared with his daft speculations(w).
However, in 2018, Martin K. Ettington published a booklet entitled The Real Atlantis [1641] in which he also insisted that the Richat Structure is the remains of Atlantis but with no real evidence to support his contention.
In Joining the Dots [1590] and in Atlantipedia.ie I have consistently argued that in ancient times, proximity is an essential logistical requirement in order to achieve a successful invasion. This was particularly true in ancient times when all empires expanded through the invasion of neighbouring territories. The Richat Structure is many thousands of kilometres from Athens, so to suggest that an attack was launched from Mauretania on Greece is simply ludicrous.
There is a relatively recent website(m) dedicated to promoting the ‘Structure’ as the location of Atlantis. It is well presented by its author Gergely (Gregory) Dzsida with plenty of content. Unfortunately, I cannot accept its basic claim, To my mind, it fails to answer Richter’s arguments regarding, size, elevation and location as well as my point regarding proximity.
Not unexpectedly, Jason Colavito has a few thoughts to add to this latest Atlantis in Sahara kerfuffle(h).
Although the Richat Structure as the location of Atlantis conflicts with details in Plato’s account as well as reason, it still gathers supporters based simply on its circular shape. A recent example of this came from a Danish commentator, Palle A. Anderson(p).
An even more ridiculous suggestion was offered in 2021 by Carlos Bisceglia in Atlantis 2021- Lost Continent Rediscovered in which he proposed that Atlantis was known to the Egyptians as the ‘Land of Ma’ and that its capital was the Richat Structure together with the Semsiat Dome, mentioned above, which is 50km away. In order to explain how his Atlantis is not submerged, Bisceglia has proposed that the Land of Ma became confused with the submerged Land of Mu (Sundaland) in the Pacific and that “it is possible that Solon or Plato confused ‘the Land of Ma’ with the ‘Land of Mu’, and thus two completely independent accounts were merged into one.” He adds “how the Egyptian priests knew this is a mystery. Evidently, some survivors from Sundaland arrived in some way in Egypt”
In April 2022, David Edward published Atlantis Solved: The Final Definitive Proof [1926], which also endorsed the Richat Structure as the location of Atlantis. The author of this slender 99-page book admits to being greatly influenced by the earlier claims of Jimmy Corsetti.Edward was obviously unhappy with my comments, so he wrote to me complaining that I was costing him hundreds of books sales a day, a claim supported by as much evidence as there is for the Richat Atlantis(y) .
In a 2021 paper(x), Thorwald C. Franke listed a number of reasons why ‘Richat’ cannot be considered as the location of Atlantis. He did not present his selection as definitive but did claim that “our small list is already quite sufficient to establish that this hypothesis does not stand the slightest chance.”
Also in 2021, the prolific Shifu Careaga published a lengthy paper challenging Jimmy Corsetti’s Richat theory. At the start of the paper he offered the following reasons for rejecting Corsetti’s claims.
“Mr. Corsetti’s hypothesis is clearly and definitively incorrect for all of the following reasons:
- That region of Africa has not been submerged in over 99 million years4, and its uplift and downthrust values are stable
- At the time of the Younger Dryas, the sea level was lower and could not have made the richat area an island.
- The richat formation is not concentrically circular.
- It could never act as canals or hold water.
- It is itself on a tilt (and we will look at the topographics and satellite data on this)
- There are no mountains immediately to the north.
- The Atlas Mountains are named for King Atlas, who was named for Atlantis (perhaps), not vice versa.
- The regions is not 1000 miles past the Pillars of Heracles (straits of Gibraltar)
- The whale carcasses found are from clear fluvial megatsunami inundation, as Jimmy himself points out” (aa)
Although not all on Careaga’s list are show-stoppers when combined with the fundamental objections noted above from Ulf Richter, the Atantis in Richat theory looks quite flimsy.
(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20160326200714/https://www.atlantis-schoppe.de/richter.pdf
(b) http://www.gpofr.com/documents/2012Atlantis.pdf
(c) Visiting Atlantis | Gateway to a lost world (archive.org)
(e) Earth’s Richat Crater (archive.org)
https://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050407richat.htm
(f) https://blog.world-mysteries.com/science/a-celestial-impact-and-atlantis/
(g) The System of Wheels – Plato Project (archive.org)
(h) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/youtube-video-claims-atlantis-is-located-in-the-sahara-desert
(i) https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7681682/atlantis-sahara-desert-conspiracy/
(l) https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/no-atlantis-has-not-been-discovered-in-north-africa/
(m) Learn from Ancient Civilizations | Find Atlantis Together (archive.org)
(o) Are the so-called impact craters in Mauritania kimberlite pipes ? (archive.org) (see the end of page)
(p) The Real Atlantis – where is it? (planker.dk)
(q) Richat Structure – Wikipedia
(r) The Keystone Pattern – The Thunderbolts Project™
(s) https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/no-atlantis-has-not-been-discovered-in-north-africa/
(t) https://creation.com/eye-of-the-sahara
(v) richat description (archive.org)
(w) https://archipel.uqam.ca/272/1/Matton_etal05.pdf
(x) Against the 10,000 BC Belief Complex – Atlantis-Scout
(y) Private Correspondence.
(z) Eye Of The Sahara or Richat Structure » Geology Science
(aa) (PDF) Ashes of Atlantis – part 1 | Shifu Careaga – Academia.edu (archive.org) *
Irish Atlantology
Irish Atlantology, with a couple of notable exceptions, has not been overly productive. The man responsible for kick-starting ‘modern’ interest in Atlantis, Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901), was the son of an Irish emigrant to the United States and so, although he might have qualified for the Ireland Soccer Team, I must exclude him as a contributor to Irish Atlantology. Another excludee is Henry O’Brien (1807-1835) who, although unquestionably Irish, has been associated with the study of Atlantis by publishers who cynically retitled his The Round Towers of Ireland [124] as The Round Towers of Atlantis [125] although it does not contain a single reference to either Atlantis or Plato!
Edward Hull (1829-1917) was a noted geologist and like Donnelly supported the idea of the Azores as remnants of Atlantis.
Marion McMurrough Mulhall published a number of books including Beginnings or Glimpses of Vanished Civilizations [1343]. In this interesting, if rather dated work of 136 pages, she suggests that “The gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hindoos, and the Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens, and heroes of Atlantis, and the acts attributed to them in mythology are a confused recollection of real historical events.
Helen O’Cleary in her book, Atlantis [1248], aimed at younger readers, expressed the opinion that the early inhabitants of Ireland may have been refugees, rather than colonisers from Atlantis. She sees the gods of Egypt as having more in common with the Celts than with the pantheons of ancient Greece and Rome.
The most famous Irish Atlantologist was unquestionably the late J. V.Luce (1920-2011). He was a respected classicist and a leading proponent of the Minoan Hypothesis although he considered Plato’s Atlantis story to be a mixture of fact and fiction [120].
P. A. Ó Síocháin (1905-1995), a barrister, sought to link Atlantis with the Irish legend of Hy-Brasil [498].
The filmmaker Bob Quinn, in his book Atlantean [534], links the Irish megalith builders with the culture of North Africa and the maritime heritage which connected both.
Herbie Brennan in The Atlantis Enigma [030] offered a fairly general overview of ancient mysteries but does little to solve the when? where? or who? associated with Atlantis.
Dubliner, Ronan Coghlan produced his Companion to Atlantis and Other Mystery Lands [727] as an A-Z guide to Atlantis, Mu and Lemuria, which unfortunately includes a lot of dubious material which has emanated from ‘psychics’ and psychotics.
A 2010 contribution to Irish Atlantology was my own offering, Atlantipedia [1668], which was intended not only to inform but also encourage and hopefully assist others to take up Atlantean research. I wish all well in such an endeavour, irrespective of nationality. Truth does not recognise borders. It was a 500-page volume compared to the 2,100 pages that would be required to print the contents of this website now (May 2022).
>Ronnie Gallagher, an admirer of Reginald Fessenden, also located Atlantis in the Caucasus region and believes that was inundated as a consequence of the creation of a vast ‘flooded Eurasia’ that resulted from the collapse of glacial ice-dams(b), comparable with the Lake Missoula Floods in America.<
In November 2018, I published an ebook, Joining the Dots [1590], which reflected the results of my own fifteen years of research. The book had the self-explanatory subtitle of Plato’s Atlantis in the Central Mediterranean.
>In 2021, Anthony Woods, CEO of the unaccredited Keystone University(a) published Atlantis Ireland, which is a pathetic attempt to identify Stone Age Ireland as a global hyperdiffusionist centre. He claims that megalith building, language and religion, all spread globally from Ireland, also known as Atlantis!<
(a) https://www.keystone.ie *
Erlingsson, Dr Ulf *
Dr Ulf Erlingsson is a Swedish geographer, geomorphologist and expert in underwater mapping. To explain several puzzles regarding the Ice Age, he developed The Captured Ice Shelf Hypothesis. He was the chairman of the Geographic Society of 
Uppsala, Sweden and in 1991 he received the Linnaeus Prize from the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala.
Erlingsson was the American representative of AB Hydro consult(a), a spin-off from Uppsala University, Department of Physical Geography. A few years after moving to the U.S., he left AB Hydroconsult and founded Lindorm, Inc. in 2006, where he remains as CEO and President.
During the 1990s while studying the geography of the Baltic region, Erlingsson obtained a set of Soviet maps, which greatly assisted the building of the database he was engaged in. However, these maps, which had been bought openly in Riga, outlined plans for a Russian invasion of Sweden in the event of a war in Europe with NATO(b).
Since moving to Florida, Erlingsson has been very involved politically with the ‘Progressive’ wing of the Democratic Party.
Erlingsson recently identified the empire of Atlantis with the megalithic cultures of Western Europe and North Africa and suggested its capital may have been located in Ireland. His book [319] is interesting and contains a number of original ideas. However, as an Irishman, I am not convinced that our remarkable monuments in the Boyne Valley are the remains of or related to Atlantis. I will discuss this further in my review of his book. Erlingsson sees Atlantis everywhere, for example, in a carving on a stone basin found in the Knowth passage tomb close to Newgrange.
Erlingsson presented his ideas to the Atlantis Conference held on Milos in 2005(g).
Erlingsson has also suggested that the Irish authorities have deliberately made Newgrange inaccessible. This is total nonsense. As a frequent visitor to the site over many years, I have witnessed nothing but every effort being made to maximise the throughput of visitors into the very confined space within our most famous national monument. The carved basin (see image) discovered near Newgrange, is perceived by Erlingsson as a replica of Plato’s 
circular city of Atlantis while I can see an early version of a Babylonian winged disk. In 2005, probably as a promotional ploy, he issued a challenge for an open debate on his theory.
Frank Joseph has related speculative ideas claiming that “the early date for New Grange, its circular construction, sophisticated solar orientation and mythic tradition all point to Atlantean origins.”[0636.70]
Like all ancient monuments, the Boyne Valley cluster has generated its own collection of wild speculation, such as Freddy Silva’s claim that there is a connection between Knowth and Sacsayhuaman near Cuzco in Peru and who also hints at a possible link with Egypt’s Osirion(f)!
Erlingsson has more recently suggested that the ‘sunken’ island referred to by Plato was probably located in the vicinity of the southern end of the North Sea. He proposes that around 6100 BC a tsunami generated by a massive storegga off Norway reduced the then low-lying Dogger Bank to the impassable muddy shoals recorded by Plato! He has suggested that the original Atlantis narrative, conveyed to Solon, was a mixture of an account of megalithic Ireland and a report of the inundation of Doggerland.
Dr Patrick Wallace, the Director of the National Museum of Ireland, declared that he was unaware of any archaeological evidence to support Erlingsson’s claims.
Nevertheless, Erlingsson has produced some interesting material on the bursting of glacial lakes or what is known in Iceland as jökulhlaups and their possible effect on the ending of the last Ice Age(c).
In 2020, the unaccredited Keystone University in Dublin published two articles on the Ancient Origins website, which drew on the theories of Erlingsson and supported the idea of Atlantis in Ireland(d)(e). The Keystone theory has been developed into a book[1775] by Anthony Woods.
(a) Wayback Machine (archive.org)
(b) USSR Planned to Invade Sweden (archive.org) (halfway down page)*
(c) Explanation of Bølling by jökulhlaup (archive.org)
(d) https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/atlantis-ireland-0013940
(e) https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/ireland-atlantis-0013941