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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 »
Brad Steiger
Alexander, John B.
John B. Alexander (1937- ) retired from the US Army with the rank of Colonel in 1988. He has lectured on pre-cataclysmic civilisations and as an underwater demolition expert with the Green 
Berets he was highly qualified to undertake exploratory diving in the vicinity of Bimini in 1971. He discovered a series of regularly shaped underwater features extending over a considerable area. Alexander was convinced that they were the product of a very ancient civilisation. However, he considered his views compatible with the ‘revelations’ of Edgar Cayce! For me, even more disturbing was his claim in an interview with Brad Steiger[874.59]that he used hypnotic regression to obtain “quite a bit of information on what we call Atlantis.” Plato does not get a look in. Cazeau & Scott[878.10] are even more critical, concluding that the interview shows Alexander to be neither archaeologist nor geologist and that his opinions regarding Bimini are “useless.” Frankly, it seems that Alexander was just one more trying to get on board the Bimini bandwagon.
Valentine, J. Manson
J. Manson Valentine (1902-1994), together with divers Jacques Mayol, Harold Climo and Robert Angove, discovered the so-called “Bimini Wall” in 1968. It appears that Valentine saw his discovery as a confirmation of Edgar Cayce’s Atlantis prediction. During earlier explorations off Gonova Island near the coast of Haiti, in 1966, he discovered ‘sophisticated artefacts of possible Atlantean origin’ in ten feet of water.
It is worth noting that Lynn Picknett & Clive Prnce have pointed out[0705.61] that the Bimini Road was known to the local islanders for years and even offered to show it to its ‘discoverers’! If true, the date of the find could have been manipulated to coincide with Cayce’s ‘prognostication’.
Brad Steiger records[129] that Valentine expressed the view that Atlantis was technologically more advanced than we are today! If so I find it strange that although Athens defeated such a highly developed Atlantis, it did so without leaving any evidence of it being an equally advanced society!
Dr. Valentine also collaborated with Charles Berlitz in the writing of his best-seller, The Bermuda Triangle and its sequel Without a Trace. He was a consultant on the production of a 1979 documentary also titled The Bermuda Triangle.
Dr. Valentine died of complications following a bite from a venomous recluse spider.
The Atlantis Encyclopaedia
The Atlantis Encyclopaedia[0104] by Frank Joseph was published just as the first draft of this volume was completed. When I learned of Joseph’s book I immediately had a copy mailed from the U.S. To be candid I found his volume falling far short of what I would have expected from a person who claims to have spent a quarter of a century studying the subject.
The book has a gushing foreword by Brad Steiger who begins with a recollection of having stood at the tomb of Viracocha in Machu Picchu while Joseph’s own entry in his encyclopaedia tells us that Viracocha eventually left Peru sailing westward to Lemuria. So who is buried in Machu Picchu? Whereas Steiger suggests that Viracocha came from Atlantis, Joseph has him sailing to Lemuria, which he claims was destroyed before Atlantis ever existed. This conflict on the very first page could easily lead a reader to suspect the credibility of one or both of them. As I read on I had my suspicions confirmed as I found two more of Joseph’s entries relating to Ireland that were, for me, particularly annoying. The first was his entry for ‘crannóg’ where he attempts to link it with a sunken city. Crannógs are small artificial islands built in lakes for defensive purposes. The word is derived from the Irish word crann that means a tree, while óg means young or small. There are many such crannógs to be found among the numerous lakes of County Leitrim where I live. My second gripe is the entry ‘Tir-nan-Og’, which should in fact be ‘Tir na nÓg’ which means Land of Youth, implying land of perpetual youth. There is no connection with Og or Ogygia. I respectfully suggest that Frank Joseph and anyone else should tread very warily when trying to link similar sounding words from different languages. For example there is an Irish place name Oghill that Joseph might be also tempted to see it as the hill of Og, where in reality the ‘og’ in this context is a corruption of an old Irish word ‘eóchill’ that means yew-wood, so that Oghill was named after a hill covered with yew trees. Many of today’s place names here in Ireland are a combination of Irish and English words, a consequence of 900 years of English colonisation.
This book is more an encyclopaedia of Frank Joseph’s concept of Atlantis rather than Plato’s. An encyclopaedia is supposed to deal comprehensively with a subject whereas Joseph’s book ignores, or, all too briefly, alludes to various important theories and writers. There is no mention of the work of modern European investigators such as Spedicato, Frau, Bergman, Mifsud, Ellul, the Schoppes, Zamarro, Richter, and Diaz-Montexano who have all made valuable contributions to the solution of the Atlantis mystery. Important English language writers including Dunbavin, Castleden, Settegast and the Flem-Aths have also been ignored, while Andrew Collins gets just four lines. There are no entries for Antarctica, Malta, Crete, Bolivia, The Black Sea, Tunisia, Gibraltar or Troy.
In the Atao entry Joseph refers to the Linear A as a language rather than an undeciphered script. He then speculates that Atao “may be the Minoan version of the Greek Atlas!
Overall this book attempts to link too many places and people with Atlantis where the basis for such connections are at best tenuous and at worst highly suspect. It is an ideal read for those that wish to overdose on speculation.
The full text of The Atlantis Encyclopedia is now available on the Internet(a). >>There is also a website(b) that has plagiarised large chunks of the content from Joseph’s book.
Thorwald C. Franke is highly critical of this book(c) concluding that The Atlantis Encyclopedia by Frank Joseph is a really bad book, bad in a manyfold sense: First the provided information is bad, i.e. wrong, and since the information is ludicrously wrong we have to assume that this is Fake News by intention, i.e. by bad intention. The information is bad, the intention is bad, and the results are bad, because this book is the source of much nonsense and confusion about Plato’s Atlantis.”<<
(a) ftp://195.214.211.1/books/DVD-022/Joseph_F._The_Atlantis_Encyclopedia_(2005)(en)(312s).pdf
(b) https://the-a-z-of-atlantis.blogspot.com/ now changed to https://the-a-z-of-atlantis.blogspot.ie/
(c) Review of: Frank Joseph, The Atlantis Encyclopedia – Atlantis-Scout *
Steiger, Brad *
Brad Steiger was born as Eugene Olson(b) in Fort Dodge, Iowa 
in 1936. He is the author of over 150 books and thousands of articles on a variety of subjects, such as crime, spirituality, UFO’s and other unexplained phenomena. He has written three books[127][128][129] related to Atlantis, but in the main they are re-workings of old and sometimes questionable material. Steiger subscribed to the ancient astronaut theory and concluded that Atlantis can only be found at the bottom of the sea. His book, Atlantis Rising was republished in 2007.
He reiterated his belief in the ‘Sky People’ in a December 2012 interview(a).
In March 2016, it was announced by Nick Redfern that Steiger’s 1974 book, Mysteries of Time and Space, was to be re-released, which prompted Jason Colavito to write a brief but scathing review(c) of Steiger’s work. This prompted online exchanges between Colavito and Redfern.
Brad Steiger died May 6th 2018(d).
(b) https://kevinrandle.blogspot.ie/2015/05/arguing-over-trivia.html
(c) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/brad-steigers-shopworn-mysteries-of-time-and-space