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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 »
Flem Ath
Mammoths
Mammoths existed as a number of species in many parts of Eurasia and the Americas and were the ancestors of today’s elephants, part of the fauna of Plato’s Atlantis. Mammoths existed for around 5 million years until their extinction over 10,000 years ago, apart, apparently, from a small population on Wrangel Island in Siberia(d), which appears to have lasted until possibly as late as 1700 BC. An intensive study of mammoth remains on Alaska’s St. Paul Island, which was once part of the Beringia landbridge has revealed that they finally died out there 5,600 years ago(e). “The St. Paul mammoth demise is now one of the best-dated prehistoric extinctions,” the researchers report today (August 1, 2016) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The remains of mammoths were probably not studied scientifically until early in the 19th century, with individual specimens such as the ‘Adams’ and the ‘Berezovka’ receiving great attention(c).
In 2022, the BBC reported(i) that “A whole baby woolly mammoth has been found frozen in the permafrost of north-western Canada – the first such discovery in North America.”
However, it was not until the 20th century that mammoths began to slowly enter the pages of the Atlantis story. Both John Cogan and Wolter Smit, among others, have used the mammoth evidence to support their belief that Atlantis was destroyed by an asteroid strike which caused a sudden Pole Shift and consequent freezing of the mammoths.
>>Jason Colavito has traced the story of the frozen mammoths back to the early catastrophist, George Cuvier in 1822(k), who was among the first to suggest that fossil elephant bones had been mistaken in ancient times for the bones of Giants!<<
Ludwik Zajdler believed that there was evidence of a collision between the Earth and Halley’s Comet in 9570 BC and that this caused a 30° alteration to the axis of the earth resulting in the sudden freezing of the Siberian mammoths.
In 2002, Michael Brass has published a paper(h) titled Tracing the Graham Hancock’s Shifting Cataclysm which is “An examination of a specific portion of Graham Hancock’s book Fingerprints of the Gods, relating to Earth Crustal Displacement, the climates and fauna of Siberia and Alaska, and the deaths of the mammoths, finds it to be critically flawed.” Readers should find the section dealing with the alleged instant freezing’ of the frozen mammoths of Alaska and Siberia particularly interesting.
Then Antarctica was also nominated by the Flem-Aths as the home of Atlantis, before its destruction, caused by a Pole Shift. However, in their scenario, this was caused by the movement of the Earth’s entire crust as a result of an excessive build-up of ice at the poles!
Theosophists have seized on the sudden demise of the very many mammoth remains discovered in Siberia and Alaska as vindication of Blavatsky’s Atlantis claims.(a)
R. Cedric Leonard has also reviewed the matter of the apparently instant death of many mammoths bodies discovered and the date of their end and posed the rhetorical question “Can it be merely coincidence that this is the very date (circa 10.000 BC) indicated by Plato for the floods and seismic disturbances which led to the sinking of Atlantis and the destruction of its empire?” (b)
Beverly Jaegers (1935- ) has written on a variety of subjects for Atlantis Rising and Hera magazines among others. In AR #22 she wrote of the various theories put forward to explain the mystery of the frozen mammoths but concluded that “Finally, it must be restated that little evidence exists for any of these events as a direct cause of giant mammoths expiring on their feet as suddenly as they must have done to freeze so quickly and so perfectly as to be still fresh millennia later. Although many prehistoric animal populations may have been affected by mass kills, these are fossils, and only the largest, frozen in such an apparently lightning-like moment of time, remain to tantalize the theorist. No single piece of this fascinating scientific puzzle yet covers all the gaps. None answers all the questions.”(f)
Jaegers also wrote a paper on the possibility of cloning mammoths(g).
In 2021, it was reported that this idea may not be as far-fetched as some think, when the project received encouragement “in the form of $15m (£11m) raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.” (j)
(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20170603012148/https://www.atlantisquest.com/Paleontology.html
(c) https://mammothtales.blogspot.com/2010/04/zombies-of-mammoth-steppes.html
(d) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-mammoths-idUSKBN20200I or Chapter summary – WhisperingTales (archive.org) *
(f) Atlantis Rising magazine #22 At – PDF Archive
(g) Cloning Of Frozen Mammoths Remains Elusive (rense.com)
(h) p45.pdf (centerforinquiry.org)
(i) Frozen baby mammoth discovered in Yukon excites Canada (bbc.com)
(j) Firm raises $15m to bring back woolly mammoth from extinction | Extinct wildlife | The Guardian
(k) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/the-claim-of-flash-frozen-mammoths-is-older-than-i-thought *
Hapgood, Charles Hutchins
Charles Hutchins Hapgood (1904-1982) was born in New York. He graduated from Harvard and became a Professor of the History of Science at Keene State College of the University of New Hampshire.
He has written several books of which his work on medieval maps [369]+ is probably the best known. Hapgood had built on the valuable collection of ancient maps assembled by the Swedish scholar A.E. Nordenskiöld[370]. Hapgood’s book was the result of years of research in collaboration with his students that determined that the maps had been compiled from much earlier sources that included details of an ice-free coast of Antarctica. His conclusion, as the subtitle of his book states, was that these maps were evidence for the existence of an advanced Ice Age civilisation and have been seen as further support for the early date for Atlantis given to Solon. A review(a) of The Maps of the Ancient Sea-Kings on the Internet is worth a read.
However, Jason Colavito has pointed(g) out that “as scholars have known for decades, the segment of the map identified by Hapgood as “Antarctica” was in fact the southern part of South America, bent to fit the shape of the skin on which it was drawn.”
According to Rand Flem-Ath and Colin Wilson[063.27], around 1958, Hapgood identified a location 1000 miles off the mouth of the Orinoco River, in South America, known as the Rocks of St. Peter & St. Paul as the site of Atlantis. These islets lie above the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and according to Hapgood are the remnants of a large island, now submerged. He attempted to persuade President Kennedy to assist with a US Navy exploration of the area around the Rocks of St. Peter and Paul, but the assassination of Kennedy put paid to any possibility of any help from the White House.
Hapgood’s second controversial offering, Earth’s Shifting Crust [368]+, promoted his belief that the Earth’s crust had shifted. A revised edition of this was published in 1970 as The Path of the Pole [1494]+. Over time, Hapgood appears to have revised his view regarding the precise mechanism that caused this movement. The idea of a pole shift is far from new as it was advocated in the seventeenth century by Robert Hooke(i).
In Voices of the Rocks [454.158] Robert Schoch has drawn attention to “the most glaring omission in Hapgood’s argument is his inability to come up with a mechanism for crustal shifting. He describes what happens, but he can’t say why. He himself saw the problem and spelled it out. ‘it is necessary to admit, in the first place, that at the present time, there is no satisfactory explanation of the modus operandi of displacements in the lithosphere’ Hapgood wrote.” However, Schoch does concede that Hapgood may have been on the right track, but, for the wrong reasons.
Recently, Kyle Bennett has claimed that the idea of crustal displacement was proposed as early as 1866 by Sir John Evans. Bennett has reprinted Evans’ paper in support of his accusation of plagiarism(b). Hapgood has noted [1494.71] that in the 1950’s Karl A. Pauly [1496] and George W. Bain [1498] also supported a form of crustal shift, the former, building on the work of A.S. Eddington [1497], some decades earlier.
Hapgood also involved himself in the controversy surrounding the figurines discovered in Acámbaro, Mexico, which creationists offer as evidence that man lived at the time of the dinosaurs. The 32,000 figurines have been denounced as a hoax(e). Hapgood’s stance supporting their authenticity does little, in my opinion, to enhance the value of his judgement.
Hapgood was also actively interested in parapsychology and spirit communication(f) and wrote three books on the subject.
In 1953 Albert Einstein wrote to Hapgood offering support for his theory and subsequently expressed similar views in a foreword for Hapgood’s book.
Some of Hapgood’s ideas have been supported in a well-illustrated book[065] by the late Robert Argod, who uses both the Piri Reis and the Oronteus Finaeus maps to support his idea that the Polynesians originated in Antarctica and that their influence can be found elsewhere in the world.
Hapgood corresponded with Rand Flem-Ath who subsequently published[062] his theory that Atlantis had existed in the Antarctic. Argod’s book combined with the work of the Flem-Aths does offer a credible case for considering the possibility of an Atlantis-Antarctic connection. This idea was bolstered further when Graham Hancock gave the Antarctica theory additional exposure in one of his popular books, Fingerprints of the Gods[275]
An independent critical overview of both Hapgood’s theory and Hancock’s related comments by Steve Krause can be read online(d).
Hapgood died in a tragic motor accident, which led at least one writer, Kyle Bennett, to suggest that it was murder, in an article now removed from his website.
In 1998, J. Bowles published his The Gods, Gemini and the Great Pyramid[834] which he wrote with the encouragement of Beth Hapgood, a cousin of Charles. He intended to expand on the work of Hapgood relating to the shifting poles. He refers to Antarctica as alternating between Atlantis in the Atlantic and Moo in the Pacific. A fanciful idea, as both were reportedly submerged and at least one is imaginary. He later published a further defence of Hapgood in Issue 18 of Atlantis Rising magazine. (See Archive 7149)
Hapgood’s pole shift ideas continue to inspire researchers, an example of which is a 2018 book, Before Atlantis [1600], by Mark Carlotto, who claims to have “discovered that numerous sites throughout the world are aligned to what appear to have been four previous positions of the North Pole over the past 100,000 years. By virtue of their alignment to ancient poles, Carlotto proposes a new hypothesis: that the original sites were first established by a previous advanced technological civilization that existed throughout the world tens of thousands of years ago and was later co-opted by our ancestors who rebuilt and expanded over and around the older structures while preserving the layout and orientation of the site to the original pole.”
In a separate paper, Carlotto offers a more focused study that concentrates on antediluvian cities in Mesopotamia that appear to be aligned with different locations held by the North Pole in earlier times. Based on Hapgood’s theory of crustal displacement, Carlotto concluded that these cities should be dated much earlier than generally accepted(h).>>In 2019, he wrote a paper with the self-explanatory title of Toward a New Theory of Earth Crustal Displacement(j).<<
[368]+ https://archive.org/stream/eathsshiftingcru033562mbp/eathsshiftingcru033562mbp_djvu.txt
[369]+ https://ia800909.us.archive.org/12/items/MapsOfTheAncientSeaKingsEvidenceOfAdvancedCivilization/maps%20of%20the%20ancient%20sea%20kings-evidence%20of%20advanced%20civilization.pdf (link broken)
(a) Archive 3085
(b) https://blog.world-mysteries.com/science/earth-crust-displacement-and-the-british-establishment/
(d) See: Archive 2761
(e) https://detecting.org.uk/html/Acambaro_Figures_Famous_Fakes_and_Frauds.html
(g) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-ancient-aliens-s14e01-return-to-antarctica
(h) Alignments of the Antediluvian Cities and Other Sites in Mesopotamia by Mark Carlotto :: SSRN
(i) https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2004JRASC..98..183B
(i) https://philpapers.org/rec/CARTAN-13 *
Flem-Ath, Rand & Rose
Rand and Rose Flem-Ath live in British Columbia, Canada. Both are librarians and have spent several years in the British Museum assembling evidence that they believe supports their contention that Antarctica was the home of Plato’s Atlantis. Together they wrote a highly controversial book, When the Sky Fell [0062], promoting the Antarctic location, which included an Introduction by the late Colin Wilson.
In 2000, Rand published his second book[063], co-authored with Colin Wilson on the subject of ancient civilisations including Atlantis. However, Wilson subsequently changed his views and switched his support to Robert Sarmast’s theory of Atlantis being located off Cyprus. Wilson revealed later, in a 2007 edition of From Atlantis to the Sphinx [p381], that he was unhappy with the final content of The Atlantis Blueprint stating that “it did not represent his views” and wrote an account in Fortean Times(f) of how that book evolved.
In 2014, the Flem-Aths published Killing Moses[1090], which is a speculative account of the life and particularly the death of Moses, even identifying his killer(e)(g). Their narrative builds on ideas originally expressed by Sigmund Freud [1091]. In 2017, they published From Atlantis to the Promised Land 1594], which is a recycling of a variety of material already published by them over the past forty years. Rose Flem-Ath is also a thriller writer[297].
The Flem-Aths used to maintain an interesting and well-illustrated website(a). It recently included a paper on their theory of crustal displacement written over twenty years ago(d).
Professor Steven Earle at the Geology Department of Malaspina University in British Columbia uses the Flem-Ath’s Crustal Displacement hypothesis as the basis for his students to write an essay on its inconsistency with our current understanding of crustal and mantle processes(b).>Geologist Paul Heinrich offers a number of flaws in the claims of the Flem-Aths, particularly relating to glacial evidence that they have used to justify their Pole Shift contentions.(h)<Further criticism of the Flem-Aths work is offered by David L. Mohn(c), a Christian writer.
A new revised and expanded hardcopy edition of When the Sky Fell, entitled Atlantis Beneath the Ice, was published in 2012[981].
To put the Flem-Ath theory in its historical context see my Antarctica entry, where I show that they were not the first to suggest the southern pole as the location of Atlantis, a distinction that belongs to Roberto Rengifo, nearly a century ago.
(a) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20170720023341/https://www.flem-ath.com/
(b) Wayback Machine (archive.org)
(c) https://web.archive.org/web/20141005025030/http:/www.ccs-hk.org:80/DM/pyramids/Atlantis.html or See Archive 2858
(d) See Archive 2893
(f) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20190107190740/https://subscribe.forteantimes.com/
(g) Atlantis Rising magazine #110 At – PDF Archive *
Wilson, Colin *
Colin Wilson (1931-2013) was born in Leicester, England. He has been a most prolific author with around a hundred titles to his credit. The range of 
subjects that he has covered is breathtaking; from Jack the Ripper to Sex to Atlantis. A 2004 article in The Observer described him as a self-declared genius and knicker fetishist!
Initially, he was a supporter of the Minoan Hypothesis, then in 1996 he linked the controversial redating of the Sphinx by Robert Schoch, with the influence of earlier sophisticated Atlanteans. It is revealing to note that the original title of Wilson’s book was Before the Sphinx but this was altered at the insistence of his publishers(d) in order to include ‘Atlantis’ on the cover!
A few years later he was co-author with Rand Flem-Ath, the promoter of the Atlantis in Antarctica theory, of The Atlantis Blueprint[063] again promoting the idea of the Atlantean civilisation having spread to other parts of the world that is now visible in the remains of so many megalithic cultures around our planet. Wilson revealed later, in a 2007 edition of From Atlantis to the Sphinx [335]+, that he was unhappy with the final content of The Atlantis Blueprint stating that “it did not represent his views”[p381] and wrote an account in the Fortean Times(b), of how that book evolved.
Wilson joined the Sarmast expedition in October 2004, as he had then shifted his preference(d) to the Cyprus region as the location of Atlantis. He eventually
found the idea of Atlantis in the Antarctic waging war against Athens, a distance of many thousands of miles, untenable. Unfortunately, this brief display of critical thinking was short-lived as he shifted his support to Cyprus as Atlantis’ location. I believe that he might have revised his position again if he had just given some consideration to Plato’s report of how the flooded Atlantis was still a hazard to shipping centuries later. Sarmast’s Cyprus site is in water over a mile deep and could never have been a shipping hazard!
In 2006 Wilson continued[336] his support for Sarmast but added a new dimension with the claim on the cover notes that ‘the Neanderthals had been the civilising force behind Atlantis’. However, in his earlier book [335.390], he stated clearly that he was “not suggesting there was some connection between Atlantis and Neanderthal man”. Perhaps the cover notes were just a concoction of Wilson’s publisher.
At best, Wilson’s book, Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals can be described as disappointing. Laura Knight-Jadczyk goes further, classifying it as ’embarrassing’(c).
Stelios Pavlou has noted(e) that in 2001, Peter Jakubowski published a paper ‘Atlantis of the Neanderthals‘, in which he argues that Atlantis was a Neanderthal civilization that was destroyed in 4804 BC’.” In 2014, Jakubowski revised and expanded the paper into an ebook titled Atlantis of the Neanderthals [1970] with the subtitle of Colin Wilson Corrected, which is offered as a review of Wilson’s book but is more of a promo for Jakubowski’s own ideas of unified physics (naturics)
Pavlou also noted that “Jakubowski formerly supported the notion of Atlantis in Sicily and Malta. It is unclear if this is still the case as all mentions of Sicily and Malta were removed in the book’s recent revision.”
[335]+ Available online: http://www.vielewelten.at/pdf_en/colin%20wilson.pdf *
(b) https://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/5167/a_100000yearold_civilisation.html (offline November 2015)
(c) https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RZWH2PZ425PJW (link broken)
(d) See Archive 2719
(e) Peter Jakubowski – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)