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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 »
Bibhu Dev Misra
Dwarka
Dwarka, which means ‘door’ in Sanskrit, is a city in North-West India in the state of Gujarat. Today’s Dwarka is the seventh to bear this name, the previous six having been successively submerged. The original city is referred to throughout the Hindu scriptures and was once the capital of Krishna, the Hindu deity(h).
Similarly, the submerged city of Mahabalipuram on the other side of the country would seem to have suffered in the same way, although Dr Glenn Milne, from Durham University, dates that particular submergence to 4000 BC± 1000 years(c). In early 2016 it was announced(d) that one of the legendary Six Pagodas of Mahabalipuram has been discovered. Others have suggested that the sunken cities of Cambay may be even older than 9,500 years(g)!
Bibhu Dev Misra is the author of a 2018 paper, in which he explores the idea that the inundation of Dwarka was a consequence of a megatsunami resulting from the cometary impact which created the Burckle Crater in the Indian Ocean(i).
>An Indian astronomy site has an article(j) by Dr Manish Pandit supporting this idea, dating the event to some time between 2800 and 3050 BC and suggesting that the impact was caused by the Comet Soho which was seen in Feb. 3030 BC.<
The search for the ancient Dwarka had been ongoing for some decades until a circular wooden structure was discovered underwater off the coast of Jamnagar. Scientists have dated the original Dwarka to around 2280 BC. Plans have been submitted for the development of the world’s first underwater museum on the site.
Some investigators, including Dr Ashok Malhotra, have suggested that the submergence of Dwarka was the inspiration behind the story of the inundation of Atlantis. Binoy Gupta, a retired government official, subscribes(a) to the same idea but offers little hard evidence to support it.
In August 2016, a blogger, possibly Indian, again proposed that Atlantis and Dwarka were mirror images, adding that Krishna and Hercules were one and the same(e), an idea expanded on elsewhere(f).
(a) https://indianbureaucratsdiary.blogspot.com/2008/02/dwarka-lost-atlantis.html
(b) www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc2dWngyZH4 & youtube.com/watch?v=NVIsjx5X3QM
(c) See: Archive 2380
(e) See: Archive 3162
(f) Shri Krishna and Hercules – indian and greek mythology – Indian mythology (archive.org)
(h) https://rmiessle.sites.gettysburg.edu/rel-247/vaishnav-krishna/dwarka/ *
Burckle Crater *
The Burckle Abyssal Impact Crater is named after Dr Lloyd Burckle (1931-2014) of Columbia University in the United States. It is a 30km wide underwater crater around 1500km southeast of Madagascar, considered by some to have been the 
result of a cometary impact less than 6,000 years ago. Wikipedia describes it as a hypothetical underwater feature(a) founded on a study of chevron dune formations in Madagascar and Australia. The Holocene Impact Working Group has an interesting article on the global extent of these dunes(b).
The chevron-tsunami linkage is disputed by University of Washington geologist and tsunami expert Jody Bourgeois(e), among others.
Chevrons on Madagascar
A paper(l) presented by Burckle et al at the 2005 Atlantis Conference explored the possibility that this impact resulted in one of the inundations referred to by Plato that preceded the flood of Deucalion. Acceptance of this view would add weight to the claim that Plato’s Atlantis story contains some historically factual details. However, if Plato’s floods were localised in the Mediterranean, it is difficult to understand how an impact in the middle of the Indian Ocean could have caused them.
In 2010 a South African writer, Alewyn J. Raubenheimer, published Survivors of the Great Tsunami [744], in which he linked the Burckle Impact with the inundation described in the widely discredited Oera Linda Book. He placed his megatsunami in 2193 BC, borrowing the date from the Oera Linda Book. Raubenheimer’s defence of the OLB has generated widespread support(c)(d).
The suggestion that Burckle impact was the possible cause of a global deluge was given due consideration in a paper(h) by a team of prominent scientists, including Lloyd Burckle, which concluded that “We have strong evidence for at least one large oceanic impact event during Holocene time. This event produced the Burckle crater and its ejecta layer. It may also have produced numerous subsidiary craters that are too small to see with our present data. We infer that the Burckle impact was part of a Shoemaker-Levy-type impact of a comet, which vaporized enough seawater to produce a global deluge. It also produced megatsunamis in many parts of the world. An expanded sample of deluge myths, additional study of the Burckle crater site, studies of potential megatsunami locations, and the search for contemporaneous craters in the Pacific will help refine and validate our inferences.”
Raubenheimer’s dating of the megatsunami is rather different from that of Kevin Curran in his Fall of a Thousand Suns[1113], in which he offers more compelling evidence for a date of 3067 BC. Readers may find it useful to read Curran’s book along with the work of Dallas Abbott who has dated the Burckle Event to 2870 BC and sees the impact as just one of a number generated by a fragmented comet(f).
Dallas Abbott is described by Wikipedia(j) as “a research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and is part of the Holocene Impact Working Group. The primary focus of her present research is on submarine impact craters and their contribution to climate change and megatsunamis. She also has presented research regarding a large impact crater in the Gulf of Maine.” Abbott has dedicated years to the study of the Burckle Crater and the gathering of evidence that will convince her more sceptical colleagues of the reality of the impact theory(i).
In 2020 an Indian astronomy site had an article(k) by Dr Manish Pandit supporting this idea, dating the event to some time between 2800 and 3050 BC and speculating that the impact was caused by the Comet Soho which was seen in Feb. 3030 BC and may have led to the destruction of Dwarka.
A recent paper by Bibhu Dev Misra on Graham Hancock’s website has also proposed that the comet or cometary fragment that created the Burckle Crater generated a megatsunami that submerged the legendary city of Dwarka. Drawing on the Mahabharata, archaeology and geology, the author has deduced that the impact event took place around 3700 BC(g). However, I have some difficulty with this as tsunami floodwaters eventually return to the sea!
(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burckle_crater
(b) http://tsun.sscc.ru/hiwg/chevrons.htm
(c) https://joshualightningwarrior.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/the-fryan-question-part-i/
(f) Dallas Abbott: The Burckle Impact | MalagaBay (archive.org)
(g) https://grahamhancock.com/dmisrab12/
(h) https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D89P31F3
(i) Dallas Abbott: The Burckle Impact | MalagaBay (wordpress.com)
(l) https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D89P31F3
Olmecs
The Olmecs flourished around 1200 BC on the southern Gulf coast of Mexico and spread their influence in Central America from Belize to Costa Rica until around 300 BC when they just disappeared!
In a short 2022 article, National Geographic describes the Olmec civilization as an ‘archaeological culture’. “This means there is a collection of artifacts thought by archaeologists to represent a particular society. What is known about archaeological cultures is based on artifacts, rather than texts.”(ac)
David Childress wrote an interesting article(c) on what little is known about the origin of the Olmecs in the 2007 Sept/Oct. issue of Atlantis Rising magazine. This was one of a number of promotional pieces(e) for his book The Mystery of the Olmecs[1034] published earlier that year. In early 2014, Frank Johnson published a lengthy paper(f) debunking Childress’ Olmec book, with further criticism from Jason Colavito following shortly afterward (g).
Jacques de Mahieu, the French Nazi, claimed that the Olmecs were descended from refugees that fled from Troy after the Trojan War. He goes further claiming that the Trojans had originally come from Scandinavia!
The Olmecs have been linked by a variety of writers with Atlantis. The first Latin writer of Aztec history was Fernando de Alva Cortes Ixitilxochill, of Aztec lineage, who maintained that the Olmecs had come to Eastern Mexico from the Antilles via Florida.
At the end of the 17th century, a former Jesuit, Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Gongora who had befriended the son of Ixitilxochill was allegedly in possession of a remarkable collection of native manuscripts that had escaped the insane mass burnings of the 15th century. He believed that the earliest inhabitants of Mexico had come from Atlantis. The Olmecs who preceded the Toltecs were not identified until the 19th century.
The 1973 discovery of a grooved 3.5 cm hematite bar by Michael D. Coe at the San Lorenzo site led researchers to immediate conjectural comment. In 1979, Robert Temple wrote two articles(o)(p), for Second Look magazine, on this find and the possibility of Olmec knowledge of magnetism. However, wild speculation led to the conclusion from this single artefact that the Olmecs had invented the compass. This assumption led to the further suggestion(j)(k) that the Olmecs had advanced navigational skills and with a final leap of imagination decided therefore that they had arrived in America from their homeland, Atlantis!
Ivar Zapp & George Erikson use the stone spheres of Costa Rica as the starting point for their controversial book[244] on Atlantis, insisting on a connection between the stones and the Olmecs. Gene Matlock considers the Olmecs to have had Hindu origins(t) and to be possible survivors from Atlantis[472] and Clyde Winters holds similar views and has supported them with his book [496] on the subject. In the same book[p.13] he offers Libya as the home of Atlantis, while elsewhere Matlock suggested(d) that the Olmecs were Turkish! Nevertheless, this speculative suggestion that the Olmecs were possibly Atlantean survivors has persisted until today, without a shred of any real evidence(aa).
In March 2024, my attention was drawn to an undated paper on the Academia website written under the pseudonym of ‘Mumble’ and titled Mexico City & the Site of Atlantis(ad). Its basic contention is that the Olmecs were originally Hyksos, who ruled an empire stretching from America to India! Unfortunately, real evidence is in short supply here to support this wild hypothesis. The paper is full of misquotations and other inaccuracies that are offered throughout.
However, Afrocentrist, Paul Barton, claims(m) that the Olmecs came from the Mende people of West Africa who are now one of the principal ethnic groups of Sierra Leone. Alessandro Demontis, who is something of a Zecharia Sitchin apologist, has written a short paper(r) on the leading proponents of the concept of an African origin for the Olmecs and argues that the academic background of many of them demands greater consideration of their viewpoint. Demontis thinks that to simply dismiss them as pseudoscientists is unwarranted.
The Negroid features that are clearly to be seen on some of the huge beautifully carved Olmec heads are probably evidence of an ancient link with Africa and nothing more. 17 heads have been discovered so far and like so many other megalithic monuments around the world have raised comparable questions. Some of the heads are up to 10 or more feet in height and weigh up to 12 tons.
The basalt stone used to carve the heads were often located many miles from their resting places, so the questions of how they were quarried and transported remain unanswered(ab).
Many think that the Olmec heads are the only evidence for pre-Columbian links with Africa, however, that is far from the truth as dozens if not hundreds of artefacts displaying African features have been discovered in the Americas(u)(v), although I cannot help noting that there is an obvious Asian influence in some of the figures!
On balance, I do not think that any credible case for identifying the Olmecs with Atlantis has yet been made. However, in my opinion, a far more convincing case has been made for linking the Chinese with the Olmecs(a)(b) and in that regard, the book by Dr H. Mike Xu, Origin of the Olmec Civilisation [698], is worth a read. Similarly, Charlotte Harris Rees has compiled a vast collection of data linking the Chinese with America in her Secret Maps of the Ancient World [0697]. She devotes chapter 4 to the Olmecs. Jacques Gossart has also reviewed(l) the evidence for the Chinese ancestry of the Olmecs. R.A. Jairazbhoy proposed in his book Ancient Egyptians and Chinese in America[992] that as well as Chinese, there are also Semitic, Egyptian and African traces to be found among the Olmecs.
Archaeologist Betty J. Meggers (1921-2012), who worked at the Smithsonian Institution has made a study of the apparent cultural similarities between the Chinese Shang dynasty of c.1750 BC and the Olmecs dated to some centuries later. This she did in a lengthy paper in American Anthropologist in 1974(w).
Jason Colavito describes Patrick Chouinard as a gigantologist, who in his Lost Race of the Giants [1424], argues that the Olmecs were merely one branch of an indigenous race of ‘red-haired giants’. Many Mormons believe that the Olmecs were the Jaredites who are only referred to in their Book of Ether. This idea has been developed in a short Kindle book by John Dreha[1377].
This multiplicity of suggested origins for the Olmecs is confusing and was made more so by the observations of Bibhu Dev Misra that many Olmec artefacts show figures adopting a range of yogic poses, which adds to the possibility of an Indian cultural influence. His 2017 illustrated paper on Graham Hancock’s website is intriguing(x).
In 2006 it was announced(a) that a stone slab was discovered in the Mexican state of Vera Cruz, which appears to be the earliest known writing in the Americas and attributed to the Olmecs and dated to around 900 BC.
The most extreme theory regarding the Olmecs that I have found, is the claim that they were astronauts. This idea was expressed(h) by Xavier Séguin, quoting US astronaut Gordon Cooper [1757]! However, I discovered Séguin to be unreliable when I found that he also quoted the words of a fictional character, Professor Mortimer, from a work by the renowned writer, Edgar P. Jacobs, as supposedly uttered by a real scientist(n), concerning the Pillars of Heracles.
Zechariah Sitchin in The Lost Realms [1718] claims that the Olmecs were culture bearers who arrived in America circa 3000 BC, which conflicts with the date of 1500 BC proposed by conventional archaeology. Sitchin also quoted(s) Cooper’s heavily panned book, A Leap of Faith [1757] in which he offered supporting evidence from a leading Mexican archaeologist, Pablo Bush Romero, for Sitchin’s early date for the Olmecs(y).
In 2006, it was announced(i) that a stone slab was discovered in the Mexican state of Vera Cruz, which appears to be the earliest known writing in the Americas and attributed to the Olmecs and dated to around 900 BC.
May 2017 brought an interesting article(q), on the Ancient Origins website, outlining the unique features of the Olmecs. Three years later AO published another article offering further information about the Olmec culture(z).
(a) See Archive 2532
(b) https://printarchive.epochtimes.com/a1/en/us/sfo/2007/11-Nov/29/B6_Sci&Tech_2007-11-29.pdf See: Archive 3316
(d) https://viewzone2.com/ancientturksx.html
(e) https://www.transformtheillusion.com/articles/David%20Childress/The%20Mystery%20of%20the%20Origin%20of%20the%20Olmecs%20.html (offline Nov. 2016) see Archive 2294
(f) https://ancientaliensdebunked.com/mystery-solved-olmecs-and-transoceanic-contact/ (offline May 2018) See: Archive 2295
(g) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/frank-johnson-on-david-childress-and-the-Olmec
(h) https://eden-saga.com/en/gordon-cooper-finds-olmecs-deep-knowledge-in-astronautics.html
(i) Archive 2708 | (atlantipedia.ie)
(j) Archive 2776
(k) Ancient Olmecs: Survivors of the city-continent of Atlantis (archive.org)
(l) Orbs l’autre Planète #4 : Les Racines du Futur http://www.orbs.fr Issue #5
(m) https://www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/ancientamerica.htm
(o) Wayback Machine (archive.org) *
(p) Wayback Machine (archive.org) *
(r) https://migration-diffusion.info/article.php?year=2020&id=717
(s) The Olmecs and Ancient Astronauts – Alien UFO Truth (archive.org)
(t) http://www.viewzone.com/gene.olmec.html
(u) <American Archeology> (ucr.edu)
(v) https://faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/ethnic/oriental.htm
(w) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7f40/cdcdd4d1ddd513696cf04c68631886c84e29.pdf
(y) Atlantis Rising magazine #26 http://www.pdfarchive.info/index.php?pages/At
(aa) Olmec Civilization: Survivors of Atlantis? – Nexus Newsfeed
(ab) Atlantis Rising magazine #57 http://www.pdfarchive.info/index.php?pages/At
(ac) Olmec Civilization | National Geographic Society
(ad) (99+) Mexico City & the Site of Atlantis | The Mumble – Academia.edu