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 »
Ray Brown
Father Sergio
Father Sergio is presumably a pen-name of the author of a short book, The Legend of Atlantis[1514].This offering is just a mish-mash of quotes from the Old Testament and Edgar Cayce, placing Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean in the vicinity of the Azores. He also cites the highly dubious claims of the late Ray Brown. I think it a good idea that the author kept his identity a secret.
Zelitsky, Paulina
Paulina Zelitsky was born in Poland and studied engineering in the former Soviet 
Union. During the Cold War she worked on a submarine base in Cuba but defected to Canada, where she married Paul Weinzweig and together set up a company called (ADC). The company specialises in deep-sea exploration. The Cuban government had employed them to assist in the location of sunken treasure that is believed to lie off the coast in a variety of vessels.
In 2001, they announced the discovery of megalithic structures 9 km off Cabo San Antonio on the western tip of Cuba, in water half a mile deep. The expedition was a joint venture between ADC, the National Geographic Society and the Centre for Marine Archaeology and Anthropology at the Cuban Academy of Sciences in Cuba. Subsequent announcements included a claim that inscriptions had been found on some of stones that appear vaguely similar to Greek. Other carvings seem to be related to Central American symbols including what is sometimes referred to as the Central American Cross. Cuban academics are studying these incisions. It has been suggested that the US State Department applied pressure on The National Geographical Society to withdraw a promise of two million dollars to fund further investigations because of US Administration’s antipathy towards Cuba at that time. Later that year Zelitsky gave an interview to Linda Moulton Howe that can be read online(a).
In late 2004, Zelitsky led a team to explore the sea floor between the Yucatan peninsula and Cuba where sonar reading had suggested manmade structures. Apparently they think that an island was submerged ten or twelve thousand years ago as a result of seismic activity.
May 2013 saw Zeilitsky and Weinzweig attempt to reprise the attention that they received when they first made their claim a dozen years earlier. A recent interview(b) with journalist Luis Mariano Fernandez has Zeilitsky rehashing her original claim with the addition, perhaps by Fernandez, of the old story of a glass pyramid in the Bermuda Triangle touted by the late Ray Brown.
A more critical review of the Zeilitsky-Weinzweig claims is to be found on the Bad Archaeology website(c).
(b) https://wolfke74.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/atlantis-found/
(c) https://badarchaeology.wordpress.com/2012/10/28/an-underwater-city-west-of-cuba/
Hanson, Bill
Bill Hanson is a fine arts restorer from Vero Beach, Florida, who has also written three books[352][353][354] on the Atlantis mystery. He contends that the Biblical Garden of Eden and Atlantis were two names for the same place, which he claims had been located in the Bahamas region.
Most serious Atlantis investigators will be put off Hanson’s writing by his insistence that Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle are linked, not to mention his apparently blind acceptance of the reports of underwater pyramids off the Florida coast, such as the claim of Ray Brown. If this was not enough, Hanson’s credibility is further undermined, in my opinion, by his support for the idea that aliens founded Atlantis.
Hanson has also completed a work[355] on the ‘assassination’ of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Overall, I feel that Hanson is inclined to depend on bold assertion rather than hard evidence.
Brown, Ray
Ray Brown, a naturopathic practitioner from Arizona is constantly referred in books and websites as having found evidence of Atlantis off the Bahamas. The claim is that in 1970 while diving in 135 feet of water near the Bari Islands he discovered a 120ft high pyramid that he described as ‘shining like a mirror’(d). The story relates that only 90 feet of the pyramid was visible above the sand and that there were the remains of a ruined city around it that stretched for 5 miles.
This is quite an unbelievable tale. If such a pyramid with its tip only 45 feet under water had been found, why has there been no subsequent exploration over the following decades? An organisation such as A.R.E. would have been expected to have pursued the matter without any delay but obviously did not place any credence in it either.
How could Brown have known that the base of the pyramid was 30 ft under sand without digging to that depth? If the base of the pyramid had been covered to a height of 30ft, would not the alleged remains of any ruined city have also been completely covered?
A December 2010 article(a) by Greg Little provided further information on the Ray Brown story and his ‘Atlantean’ crystal and in which he concludes that the whole affair was probably just an attentionseeking hoax. Little also advises us thar Brown died in the mid-1990’s.
The late Philip Coppens also wrote a paper(b) on this controversial subject, which was rather more sympathetic. On the other hand Wolter Smit, whom I expected to have had more carefully honed critical faculties, seems to have been completely taken in by Brown’s fantasy tale[887.182].
In 2012 there was a report that in the same region “oceanographer Dr. Meyer Verlag discovered giant glass pyramids at a depth of two-thousand meters. The use of other devices have allowed scientists to determine that these glass giants are both made of a crystal-like substance, and are nearly 3 times bigger than the pyramid of Cheops in Egypt.” It did not take long before it was realised that Dr. Verlag was non-existent and that the whole story was pure b.s.
(a) https://www.mysterious-america.com/brown%27scrystal.html
(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20190206131342/https://www.eyeofthepsychic.com/nap_art15/
(d) Farshores Ancient Mysteries Article: The Device By JJ (archive.org) *
Berlitz, Charles
Charles Berlitz (1913-2003) was born in New York, as Charles Frambach and was the grandson of Maximilian D. Berlitz, founder of the well-known language school. At his grandfather’s request, he changed his name to Frambach-Berlitz, subsequently dropping the Frambach completely. He spoke a wide range of languages and wrote extensively on the subject.
>He graduated from Yale and eventually became a vice-president of the family company in charge of the New York based publishing house. “He left the company in the late 1960s, not long after the publishing firm Crowell, Collier & Macmillan took over. In a strange legal maneuver, the new owners obtained a temporary court order preventing Mr. Berlitz from using his surname professionally, arguing that Berlitz was a trademark.” Berlitz won the case along with a $350,000 settlement(d) .<
He spent 26 years of his life in the US Army, half of that on active duty, serving as an intelligence officer. He served in World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.
He developed an interest in mysteries and published a number of related books[165–173] including two about Atlantis that support an Atlantic location for the lost civilisation, with the Canaries and Azores as leading contenders.
As a linguist, Berlitz wrote a critical review of the claims of Brasseur deBourboug and Le Plongeon that they had deciphered the Mayan script(c).
Unfortunately, his obsession with the Bermuda Triangle led him into lunatic fringe territory when he suggested a link between the ‘Triangle’ and Atlantis citing the ‘prophecies’ of Edgar Cayce and further extending his appeal to various factions of the aforementioned lunatic fringe, by hinting at a possible connection between Atlantis and UFOs.
More serious is that Berlitz has been accused of perpetrating ‘an elaborate Atlantis pyramid hoax in his 1978 book Without a Trace.’ He claims the discovery of a 470 feet high pyramid with a 4×520 feet base(a). Various suggestions regarding the real source of the story(b). For me, it sounds like a slightly garbled rerun of the Ray Brown hoax.
(a) Pyramid Schemes: A Brief History of the Mysterious Monuments (archive.org)
(d) Linguist Charles Berlitz Dies – The Washington Post *
Hoaxes
Hoaxes associated with Atlantis are of various types; the most common sort are those perpetrated by writers who write volumes of balderdash about information they claim to have received through psychic channels. The simple fact that so many of these authors contradict each other demonstrates the fictional nature of their offerings. To be extremely kind, I might accept that some of these people are simply self-deluded but to be brutally honest, I believe that the majority of them are simply churning out their rubbish, in collusion with equally opportunistic publishers, in order to separate gullible readers from their cash.
The father of such drivel has to be Edgar Cayce, although I am inclined to think that he personally was in some way one of the self-deluded and did not have any financial motivation. However, it was pure greed or should it be impure greed that ‘inspired’ the vast majority of writers who followed Cayce, building on his foundation of spurious information.
Other types of hoaxers must include Madame Blavatsky, the godmother of occultic garbage, who was declared a fraud in 1884 by the London Society for Psychical Research. Her first book, Isis Unveiled, published in 1877 devotes just one page out of two volumes to Atlantis. Her second book The Secret Doctrine (1888) expands greatly on her ‘knowledge’ of Atlantis. It is worth pointing out that these extended ‘revelations’ were produced only a few years after the success of Ignatius Donnelly’s groundbreaking book in 1882.
Another strange Atlantean hoax concerns Paul Schliemann the grandson of Heinrich Schliemann the discoverer of Troy. See the Paul Schliemann for fuller details.>Incredibly, there are still writers citing Paul Schliemann’s story as fact.<
A more harmless story, frequently touted in books on Atlantis, is that of the S.S. Jesmond that was reported to have discovered an uncharted island in the Atlantic on which they found artefacts including a sarcophagus complete with an occupant. The ‘discovery’ was published in a New Orleans newspaper after the ship arrived there on April 1st, 1882, the same year that Donnelly’s book was published. The newspaper retracted the story later.
Another frequently quoted claim is the alleged discovery of an underwater pyramid by the late Dr Ray Brown, which does not stand up to the most cursory examination.
Other hoax nominees must include Aaron DuVal(g) and Jerry Querrard.
In 1970 a book entitled Mu Revealed purported to have evidence which supported Churchward’s claims, but was subsequently revealed as a hoax perpetrated by one Raymond Buckland, writing under the pen-name of Tony Earll, an anagram of ‘not really’.
>Carla Sage was an invented British archaeologist, who was reported to have announced in November 2003 her support for a North African location for Atlantis, in particular, she believed that the Gulf of Sidra (Syrtis Major) held their ports, apparently impressed by ancient accounts that recorded how the Mycenaean, Cretan and Egyptian civilisations all traded with Atlantis. This has now been confirmed as fiction, as the Sage story originally appeared in the now-defunct and largely fictional US tabloid magazine, Weekly World News (11/11/2003). It was then picked up by many less than diligent websites and took on a life of its own.<
Blatant commercial frauds have also been perpetrated invoking Atlantis as the ultimate source. One such instance is the sale of replicas of the so-called ‘Atlantis Ring’, an object that is decorated with special geometric symbols and is claimed to emit electromagnetic waves that protect the wearer, give increased psychic abilities, and healing powers and bring the owner good luck. It is claimed that the original was found in 1860 in the Valley of the Kings by “well-known French Egyptologist” Marquis d’Agrain who claimed that it came from Atlantis. He is supposed to have bequeathed the ring to another “famous Egyptologist” Arnold de Belizal(h). An Internet search reveals little about either person apart from this alleged connection with the Atlantis Ring. Two more articles about it are available online(d)(e), unfortunately, they include a lot of psychic twaddle. One supplier charges $350 for replica rings(a).
There are so many other Atlantis-related claims which stretch credibility beyond breaking point that a book devoted to that subject alone is warranted.
In fact, some years ago the Atlantis Online website had a forum devoted to the subject of Atlantis hoaxes(c). But Atlantis was not the only classical subject that has a hoax associated with it. In 1924, Di Martino, editor of Mouseion, an Italian classics journal, claimed to have discovered all the lost books of Livy(b).
Jason Colavito has written an interesting article(f) on hoaxes, which were more prevalent before WWII.
However, before anyone cries ‘hoax’ or ‘fake’, they should remember the case of the Parian Marble (Parian Chronicle), which was found in two sections on the Greek island of Paros in the 17th century. In 1788, Joseph Robertson (1726-1802) declared the Chronicle to be a ‘modern’ fake in a lengthy dissertation[1401], a claim disproved by the discovery of the final third piece, over a century later.
(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20181103053016/https://www.atlantisring.com/sales/order.aspx
(b) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/1/post/2013/09/the-great-livy-manuscript-hoax-of-1924.html
(c)https://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php?topic=5834.0
(d) History of the Atlantis ring (archive.org) *
(e) Atlantis ring journal at home2b.nl (archive.org) *
(g) http://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php?topic=5834.0 *
(h) Archive 6669 (private correspondence} *