Oh, fellow conspiracy realist, this classic episode is a such a treat for us and hopefully a treat for you as well. We mentioned Edgar Casey in a recent recording about the prophecy of the Popes and the idea of prophecy in general, and Edgar Casey super into Atlantis.
Yeah, and super into the idea that there was some advanced civilization before what we know as civilization. Great, something must have existed because of all of these weird little pieces of evidence we find throughout.
The world technologically superior to modern existence.
One hundred percent.
And it's one of those stories that I think has captured the imaginations of so many people because there just seems to be this idea of what came before us.
And you know, I think there's a good reason that the whole idea of this underwater advanced civilization with technology that we couldn't possibly wrap our heads around has endured so much because I know there is something about lost civilizations that just causes the mind to kind of become pretty intrigued, at least for me personally, I don't know about you guys.
Yeah, So we're going to get into is Atlantis even the original lost civilization.
Gain from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is No.
They call me Ben.
We are joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission controlled decand most importantly, you are here and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
It occurs to me that although this.
Soda is coming out in twenty twenty January, most likely this is the last episode we are going to record for the year. We're recording this at the very end of twenty nineteen.
Woo, Yes, the Lost Decade?
Is that?
What? Yeah?
The teams.
It's interesting because we're also covering something today that many of our fellow listeners have asked us to cover for years and years and years. We have touched upon this, we have mentioned it, but as you all know, longtime listeners, when we first set out creating this show, we generally wanted to go for more obscure things, things that were on the edges of the map, things that mainstream people probably would not have encountered.
Before things that used to be on the map.
Right, so we skipped over initially things like the jfk assassination in area fifty one, you know, the moon landing, all those History Channel hits. Today we are finally, we are finally investigating something that has been a long time coming or a long time going. If you go, if you believe the story, and that is the tale of Atlantis, not Atlanta Atlantis. So here are the facts, according to
the folklore, the stories that we all know. Atlantis was a civilization located on a mysterious island and in ancient times we do very much mean ancient. This civilization was a seat of great culture and learning. Like later seats of learning such as Alexandria. People came to Atlantis from far and why to learn the secrets of technology, to divine the workings of the world and the gods, the heavens,
and the firmament. We know that it was a city laid out on this island in sort of concentric rings, and it had a central canal going through to the center. But Atlantis had some issues. Despite the fact that it was so advanced in architecture, art and technology. It was destroyed nine thousand years ago, six hundred years ago when a wave and earthquake sent by Poseidon, the god of
waves and the sea and earthquakes. When Poseidon got tired of them, he sent these natural disasters or divine disasters, to punish the inhabitants for their wicked ways.
Wait a minute, there, weren't the gods pretty Bacchanalian themselves.
The interesting choice of words there. Yeah, Any study of Greco Roman gods, even the Old Testament god of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, shows a pretty clear study in hypocrisy. You know what I mean, do as I say, not as I do.
I think didn't Zeus come down to Earth in the form of like a bull.
A ram, a goose, goose?
Yeah? So he could.
With hisomever, right, Yeah? And I think he stayed in goose form when he did that, or.
The way the story goes, yeah, weird and the you know, that's very common in tales of pantheons. But so back to Atlantis, we can already see how this story in folklore has so much in common with similar tales from around the world. Advanced civilizations laid low by divine forces and you know, some of the specifics are common to other stories. Gods seem to often punish ancient communities via floods.
And we can see this as a parable of sorts. You can choose to read it in that way, which is a warning, right, tell people what not to do or else lest the be punished.
A cautionary tale.
Yeah, well, yes, parable the first mention of Atlantis. We do have the earliest known mention of Atlantis. Very interesting. It comes to us from Plato in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias. Plato describes Atlantis as not just an island, but a huge island. Says it's larger than Libya and Asia Minor put together. He also says that he is relaying this story third or even fourth hand, which we'll we'll get to because there's a character in his dialogue's character Critaeus c R.
T I A S.
And this guy says, okay, I heard the story of Atlantis from my grandfather, who heard it from Athenian politician named Solon. This was three hundred years before Plato was around, and that this guy, this politician, in turn, learned it from an Egyptian priest.
And the Egyptian priest is.
The one who says it happened nine thousand years ago. Now Atlantis was protected by the god Poseidon. They worshiped, and they made the son of Poseidon like a demi god, kind of like you alluded to earlier. In all they made his son king of the islands. His name was Atlas, so he ruled the island and the ocean surrounding it. And as the Atlanteans came up in the world, as they became more powerful geopolitically, their ethics declined. The place
was a wash in corruption, in depravity, and perversion. Their armies met a lot of success. Eventually, according to the story, they conquered parts of North Africa. They went on to conquer at least part of Italy, the Etruscan part of Italy. And then eventually the people of Athens posseed up with some like minded Atlantis haters, and they drove the folks back. They drove them out of Italy, they drove them out of Egypt and North Africa. But at this point there
were still very much in play. They just got their butts whipped once, and they were still planning to do more damage.
And then Plato's writings continue about Atlantis again in that dialogue, this time to Mais, and he writes that this last civilization was in fact a location, a place where you could go. It was real. He calls it the Pillars of Hercules, the area where this where Atlantis existed, and these days, like if you looked it up right now, like, hey, what are the pillars of Hercules, serie, it would be called the Strait of Gibraltar, which is a known thing. You can look that up right now.
You could travel there.
Yeah, you could go right now if you want it.
And Plato argued that despite being technologically advanced and having a pretty well organized society, the people of Atlantis didn't have infrastructure in place to protect them from the wolf that was at their door constantly, basically the threat of floods and earthquakes. You know, whether or not they were actually sent by gods or not, they had absolu. They
were basically out there completely unprotected. And that great island of Atlantis, along with the city that was built upon it, did sink over the course of a single night and day right around ninety six hundred BCE.
Now that would be intense, right right, because again, this is larger than Libya and Asia minor. This thing is almost its own continent. How could the entire thing be gone within forty eight hours? But especially by floods, especially by floods and earthquakes.
Yea, earthquakes makes a little more sense to me.
That's the question.
This.
So it means the sea level just rose so high that it swallowed up everything.
Well, it depends on the kind of tectonic shift too, because the sea could have risen or the island.
Could have just said yea, yeah, that makes sense. So here's the deal. That's the story.
You could beat the full quotations in these dialogues, but Plato's tail spoiler alert has a number of vagaries and plot holes. First, he doesn't stop at saying that the inhabitants of Atlantis worshiped Poseidon. He says that they were blood descendants of Poseidon, and this links them more with myth than it does with any tribal community that would have been extant at the time, you know what I
mean Atlantis. Also, I like that you pointed out that they had a good social system here, because they did have a constitution that was eerily incredibly similar to a constitution that Plato outlined as a good idea in the Republic, So it's it does have it has some troubling ties to fiction already. Even ancient Greeks at the time were not sure whether, to your point, Matt, whether Plato's story was meant to be taken as history or as a metaphor and allegory. You know what I mean. It's kind
of like the braer Rabbit Aesop fables. You know, no one, no one really thought there was a talking rabbit, right, some people did. I'm sure, I don't want to ruin that for any of us listening.
But in the written history books, right was never written, Oh one say, talking rabbit did this and his name was this?
Right? And we have to emphasize this part because there were strong doubts about the veracity of this tale from the very beginning. And there were two more issues that come into play with the timeline that I think raise serious questions about this story. Just from the jump, before we get anywhere near the most recent millennium, there were problems with the story.
The number one on our list here is that when Plato talked about Atlantis, this is the first time it had been mentioned before. The phrase Atlantis, the place, the thing, just the name itself. Atlantis was the first time it was ever mentioned when Plato wrote it down.
So even though he says it happened nine thousand years ago, no one talked about it. This Egyptian priest who so willingly told his tale to an Athenian politician apparently never talked to anybody else about it at all. And it was just this one conversational thread through millennia.
Why But it's.
Also, like, I mean, it references the intervention of gods as though that is just of course that's what happened, right, Yeah, So you got to wonder is he making up some sort of teachable moment kind of tale, or where's.
He getting this info from.
There's another aspect here, The second part that I think is also I don't want to say damning, but it doesn't make the tale look good. If this was rediscovered knowledge and if it was legitimate, how come none of Plato's contemporaries, none of Aristotle's contemporaries deigned to mention it.
It's a lot like imagine imagine aliens were discovered, extraterrestrials were discovered, they were real, and you turn on your local cable news to hear about it, and you find that only one cable outlet is reporting.
On it, and it's Fox News. It's only Fox News.
And it's some intense cataclysmic thing.
Right right, right, it's a global event.
You know why is only one source telling us those are pretty and those are pretty important pieces. Those are things we would think if this were a real place, we would have heard about a prior to Plato, or we would have at least heard as contemporaries saying something about Atlantis.
I would say, right here, just we're going to explore
a little more as we go. But you know, around the time that Plato is walking around, there had been quite a bit of history written down by that point, yes, right, yeah, However, there would still be at that time countless tales that had only been passed down through word of mouth, right, vocal histories that would still that we existed across the planet at that time that perhaps never did make it, you know, on papyrus or whatever, whatever instrument and piece
of material you're going to write it down on. I mean, just we we have to put that out there as in there's still that room, which is where our show comes in for speculation, even though these things are going against it from the.
Jump right right, and these valid concerns did not stop the party. The legend of Atlantis grew over time, from the time of Plato to the time that you are hearing this episode. Numerous later authors would argue that Plato had part of the story right, but that he was let's call it incorrect or confused on multiple accounts. And just like any other game of telephone, people embellished this thing.
They tailored it to fit their own notions. So the original story was rephrased as it was retold over and over and over again, and soon the residents of Atlantis were no longer descended from gods.
They were actually aliens or hybrids of aliens.
And these people who believe this would argue that Plato in his contemporary we're just we're just framing extraterrestrials through a social lens that they could understand. And then they would say, well, the city's technology was super advanced. They had no idea how advanced it was. They used energy crystals, and they affected global oceanic patterns. They affected the world
in more ways than we know. As a matter of fact, you read some fringe authors saying you can clearly tell that all of the quote unquote paranormal disturbances in the Bermuda triangle are ultimately traceable back to Atlantis and the infernal technology they created. This is not something you would read and you know, scientific American Just to be.
Fair, hey, that is a fun thought experiment that the crystals have gone haywire or continue to function in some way down at the bottom of the ocean somewhere like the idea.
Sure, and you know, technology functioning in automation after its creators have gone is something that could very likely become real in our modern day. You know, like the Ray Bradberry story, there will come soft rains, or like the all the deep space exploratory vehicles that we've put out that you know are going on one way trips, we're never going to see them again.
Yes, I'm also gonna put here really quickly just for you guys to think about. We I think we can collectively see where the ancient alien story kind of meets up there. As you were talking about the residents turning from descendants from gods into descendants of aliens or you know, extraterrestrials that would be interpreted, as you said, as gods.
That is getting us closer closer, I say, to something that would be within the realm of reality, from from gods at least from our you know, understanding of the way the world functions right now, our limited understanding of it. But we can see, we can see the reasoning behind some of these things. That's not to say that any of it is true.
Right again, you know, the people who were alive in that time, in the time of play is writing. People who were alive were not dumb. They were not cognitively that different from people today.
They were you know, we're we're.
Explainers, we're pattern finders. We we want to understand the world and we think it's worth understanding. So they were just as you're saying, Matt, they were. They were just putting the inexplicable, uh through the lens of what they thought would explain it. And today you can find multiple
people still doing the same thing. You can find, for instance, you know, the the big shift that occurred in folklore fairly recently over the span of time was that stories of changelings and abductions by the uncaly or the Fay turned into stories of abductions by extraterrestrials or aliens or creatures from a different dimension. We're just sort of we're cooking the same dish with different ingredients, and we're subbing
some stuff out, but the stories stay the same. And today you can find a lot of people arguing that Atlantis was not only a real place, but also the Plato got the location wrong. It's kind of like where Okay, so let's say it's like George Lucas comes up with Star Wars and people say, we love your original idea, but we're gonna change everything about it. But you're right, there's something called Star Wars. But here's what you got
wrong about it. So it's almost like there's this this centuries long group of producers saying blade, oh baby, Atlantis, love it, love everything about it. By you know, when you think about it, it's more it's it's more like as it's more like a Bermuda, a Caribbean thing, right, right, I mean if you really just walk through it, Yeah, it's it's also you know it's it's or someone else says, it's more of a South China sea. You know, I've been looking at that, and that's just the kind of
game that people play. Josh Clark are a longtime friend, a host of one of our pure podcasts stuff.
You should know.
He he wrote about this and he had a good quote where he says, Atlantis is in the Caribbean, Atlantis is in the South China Sea, Atlantis is in Switzerland, and that's really You'll for every one of those locations, you'll have people arguing that.
Yeah. Also, we've even read that Atlantis was somehow a part of Antarctica. Yes, I've read that. Yeah, Yeah, they don't really stop. But the big question is, right with all of this, that we know, all these stories that have been told and how they've evolved, where are we left right now as we enter twenty twenty when it comes to Atlantis.
Yeah, I mean that really begs the question. Okay, if this is a thing, then where's the proof? You know what elevates said just from the realm of fantasy and a parable kind of situation to hard facts, you know, where is the proof of this lost civilization that fits the description of Atlantis?
Yeah, and has anyone actually found something?
We'll tell you when we come back from a quick break. Here's where it gets crazy. Well yes, actually, oh oh yes, accord.
According to the people, Yes, multi people believe that they at least know where the mythic civilization of Atlantis was located, and some people believe that they have found it, and they've been searching for this for a long time now. Remember we're talking about two different kinds of Atlantis. One kind of Atlantis is the og one the Plato described semi utopian society downfall, punished by the gods. A god's a real b atlantis, you know, was by Gibaltar, the
pillars or Hercules. And then the second Atlantis is the one that has all the bells and whistles of folklore and all of the personal attitudes of people writing about it. Later, in the first centuries of the Christian era, people didn't really talk too much about Atlantis. They said, you know what, Aristotle wrote it, He was quoted in Plato. Those guys are stand up dudes. They taught us a lot, so
we don't need to worry about it. In the sixteen hundreds and sixteen twenty seven, there was, of course, Francis Bacon, the English philosopher and scientists who published a utopian novel titled The New Atlantis, and just like Plato, he was mainly I don't know, he was taking the story of Atlantis in a different direction. He wasn't saying it was
necessarily true. He was more interested in exploring the ideas of a politically and scientifically advanced society on a previously unidentified island that did amazing thing, that did amazing things. In sixteen seventy nine there was a Swedish scientist named Olas Rudbeck who published a book called Atland, at La and d and this this is a work in four volumes, and over the course of this this is interesting. I
haven't read all four volumes, but here's what happens. Essentially throughout this four volume work, rude Beek is trying assiduously to prove that the thing Plato called Atlantis was located in Sweden, which is, by the way, where he's from, and that all human languages are descended from Swedish, which is, by the way, what he speaks.
Yeah, yeah, I mean this is interesting though, because this is the first time where Atlantis is depicted as being at the center of humanity, right like the origin point, or at least one of the bottlenecks where through the origins of humanity went through which they traveled, of connecting everything that's occurred on this earth, all languages, all peoples, it all centered around Atlantis at one time before they spread across the earth.
And it sounds it sounds weird now, but you're right, that's a huge pivot point. It's easy to dismiss it knowing what know about the evolution of language today, right, that Swedish was not the basis for things like Mandarin, Bantu, you know, or other other languages that had existed before then.
Well, it also goes against the known migratory patterns of humanity and you know, our descendants across time. There's still a lot of questions there, of course, Yeah, but it goes against a lot of that.
It also would have even back in the sixteen hundred. It's been a more compelling argument if the guy making it was not himself Swedish. You know, there's its smacks of nationalism, and at the time people in Sweden, other Swedes thought that makes sense, yeah, sweet, yeah Swede. And even then people out even then there were people who did not believe Rubik's association and they were pretty much everybody who wasn't Swedishi said, this doesn't make sense, and
we have other examples. There are so many that we can't that we're trying. We've got to sort of emphasize the ones that show us pivot points. So in the eighteen hundreds and there was a US congressman, former US congressman with a great name, Ignacious L. Donnelly, and he
published a book called Atlantis, The Antidiluvian World. And this this became a watershed moment for not the best choice of words, for what is sometimes called the occultization of Atlantis, which is taking member again, and we're talking about two different conceptual places. This one was putting the emphasis on suppressed technology, on this idea of a proto civilization upon which the majority of not all, of modern civilizations are based.
So he says that Atlantis was more it did. Yes, it did have its capital, its seat on an island, but it was really an empire of sorts, and that immigrants from Atlantis had gone to ancient Europe, to Africa, to the American continents, and that their heroes would ultimately become the inspiration for gods and adventurers in other mythologies Scandinavian, Hindu,
and Greek. So it's similar to Rudbik's claim, but this was the more popular version, was a more sophisticated argument because now he's saying, not only does language spring from this place, but everything you see that feels like a common thread throughout global mythology is because it all comes
from the same place. We're recognized pattern, we're categorizing. And it's one of the most popular survivor arguments that the floods and the earthquakes consumed everything in a night and a day, and some people survived, or maybe they were just happened to be out of town, off the island,
and they brought their knowledge to other ancient people. So that's why you'll see you'll see arguments that say, well, look at these unexplained carvings on the you know, toward the eastern side of South America or Central America, and you'll see people arguing that, well, the Olmecs were actually Atlantean, or those myths in some areas of the world about mysterious pale people who show up and tell you how to do things, those are stories about people from Atlantis.
There's not a lot to back this up, but it's a very it was for its time. It's a blockbuster. It's something that people love because it ties into the concurrent rise of an interest in spirituality and science united that we can, despite the fact that we were bad at it earlier, our species can in fact understand the
world around us. And so people who were followers of theosophy and people later who would become what we would later call new Agers or people who have New Age beliefs, loved this and they were saying, well, you know, maybe this means that esp clairvoyance, all these other things that are dismissed by the scientific the scientific institutions.
Of these days.
Maybe they were just ancient technology and Atlantis had a handle on it and it's being suppressed. And this is where we enter the story of a guy named Edgar Casey who did something really interesting. Have we ever talked about Edgar Casey on this show?
Pretty sure we have?
Yeah, yeah, I think it's mostly an I mentioned when we are getting into some of these realms that's right of Lost History Year something like that. He comes up.
Yeah, So he was a he was born in eighteen seventy seven. He was a clairvoyant and he would go into trances. He was known as the Sleeping Prophet, and in his trances he would answer questions that people ask him about everything from nutrition to chronic illness, reincarnation, future wars, future events of global import and he talked about Atlantis
as well. His story is a little bit different from Rude Bek's, a little bit different from Bacon's and so on, because he and different from my boy Ignatius because he had a specific prediction that appeared, depending on where you stand, appeared to come true.
And just a quick mentioned we did talk about Edgar Casey in an episode called Prophecy, Predictions and pre Science. Oh yeah, okay, I think it was back in the YouTube days as well, so there should be a video version of okay in addition to the audio.
Oh yes, Ben, he got very specific about a place where, at least some part of the thing that we call Atlantis, the city would rise up from the ocean depths at some point, and he pinpointed, he said he would rise off off the coast of Beamini that's right at the western end of the Bahamas. And he was like, that is definitely going to happen, you guys, I'm Edgar Casey. That's my word, and I'm sticking to it.
That's how he talked.
Yeah, Atlantis is gonna hang out over there off Beamini. And guess what happened in nineteen sixty eight, nol.
I don't have to guess.
Okay, it's right here.
A diver actually discovered an underwater rock formation. Yes, that's now known as the Bamini Road. Oh, it's fascinating or not it was man made, whether it was natural, it's just not known right now.
Well, it appears to be natural. Just got to put that out there. It appears to be natural, but I don't believe it.
I don't know man because it looks sure, it could all be just a pattern that we are inventing that we attempt to see. But if you pull up photographs of it, it looks it looks like these are gigantic stones laid out in a pattern, right, like a cobblestone road for giants.
You know.
Again, experts have poo pooed the idea that it was man made. It's also sometimes called the Beamini wall, and they look like they're limestone blocks laid out in order in a pattern. It's not hard to find. You can see a ton of photographs of it. However, there are people who feel that there's a geological, non human argument for its creation, and then there are people who feel like it has been created by some ancient civilization.
Wouldn't that be relatively easy to test for, like in terms of the composition or the consistency of the material. I'm no underwater geologist or anything, which you would think that, you know, taking a sample, you could date it at the very least, and then kind of figure out what kind of material it's made of, and based on that, figure out if it was cobbled together from different stuff, or if it's consistent or whatever.
Well, I think this calls for a Bemini trip. Guys, yes, Bahamas, sure you don't. Of course we need to go.
Can I bring my snorkel and a face mask or have to.
We're going to get a snorkel, We're going to get face mask, oxygen tanks. We're going to send Paul down there. We're going to start an Applebee's on the ocean.
Under the ocean, well, it's.
Gonna be right above like floating.
This is floating. Yeah, but the events based under the water, you.
Can snorkel the Bemani Road to get.
There, There we go, there we go. Yeah, gotta have T shirts.
And then also flippers. What's the what's the fancy word for those you know what I'm talking about?
Flippers?
Are you just calling flippers?
I think so fins?
Maybe fins, fliers, foot fins.
Here's guys, here's the best part about the Applebee's that's gonna float above the Beamini Road.
Is it that they play Atlantis the Lost Empire four to seven.
I mean, that will certainly be a feature. The best part is that when you go there, you're gonna have your four basic food groups. Okay, okay, beans, yeah, bacon, whiskey. Right, oh, and there's a fourth one, lard.
Why did you just hold up three fingers?
I just in my head, I was like, there are four things within my hand. Betrayed me?
Really did?
Okay?
Hang on, I'm gonna make eye contact with with Michigan Control sufficient.
Okay, we got we got it. Okay, we got a weird nod though. I think we can lean into this a little a.
Little further, but yeah, yeah, it's it's weird because Bemini Road. What's fascinating about this is that it's when people are arguing it's man made. It's often presented as a relatively unique thing, but it's it's one of several types of formations found throughout the world. There's a tessellated pavement in Tasmania. There's the uh in Oklahoma. There's this jointed bedrock that has been called a Phoenician fortress in Furnace.
Uh.
There's a place called Battlement Mesa in Colorado.
What was that when you just mentioned before the Battlement what.
We're Phoenician fortress and furnace Oklahoma.
Also, I've never heard of that.
Well, that's what it's called. And how much of that, how much of that branding is for how much that branding is to get tourism. It doesn't matter now because I think it got paved over in twenty sixteen.
So Beamini Road.
Has some cons it's got some pros. Like you said, no old people are still fighting over it being man made or natural thing, mainly those b geologists saying that it's just something that happened. And then it would be a lot of supporters of Edgar Casey, some of some of the members of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, the nonprofit formed to study his work, who argue that it is man made revidence of a greater civilization. Man Egar Casey is just so fascinating. When I was I
was younger, I used to be really into it. But the thing, though, is regardless of which way you look at it, he did say that there was something.
There in Bemini.
Well, he said it was going to rise up.
Okay, so he wasn't completely right.
But maybe he just meant it would rise up in our consciousness because we would be made aware of it.
Oh, here we go, all right, I'll play your reindeer games. So maybe there's some interpretation that we're lacking here. It's true, it's true. Maybe you know, maybe, like Plato, the arguments out whether you're speaking allegorically or literally. So this is great because we're already touching on some controversies right. Two big big problems was solving the mystery of the Atlantis story. First, as we said, there's so much added to the original tale.
If you think about it now, Plato himself would not recognize a lot of the things that are considered canonical Atlantis folklore in the modern day. He would essentially be going like, what the hell as an alien? Are you guys thinking of gods? Yeah, because he might say there's no such thing as there's no such thing as aliens.
You know, and one man's alien, there's another man's.
God, right exactly, And then he would say something around along the lines of like no, no, if there were aliens, they've got gods to They're probably the same ones.
Maybe not.
I don't know, seas like space beside and rules all of it, who knows. Secondly, and this is the most important part of the story, we know lost civilizations exist. This world is littered with remnants and ruins of groups, communities, villages, entire cities, some of which remain unidentified the modern day.
We keep finding evidence of unknown people from ages past, and it is possible, if not plausible, that one of these groups may have provided the real world grain of factual sand upon which this whole pearl of the Atlantis myth slowly accreted over time. You'll see why accreted is a terrible pun. In a minute or so after a word from our sponsors.
And we're back and we're going to delve into some of these Uh, well, well they're not pearls. What do we call them? We're gonna call them because Atlantis is the pearl, right, These are the grains that are around the pearl.
Sure, yeah, okay, if Atlantis is the if Atlantis is the main dish, okay, if Atlantis is the Applebee's entree, yes, a lot of civilizations. These are the the apps in the side, dish apps, apps.
And the dessert that also comes with it.
Okay, I gotta tell you, I can't place a signature Applebee's app in my mind. Like I think of outback, I think of a blue then onion, I think chili is, I think Southwestern.
Egg rolls, jalapeno poppers. Maybe that's generic though, Oh you mean.
Like Paul's got him locked in load and I'm just trying to see if.
I oh.
Paul, I know he's not allowing himself to be recorded, which that still bothers me.
But I'm not gonna leave that alone.
Paul says in our ears, from from his mouth to our ears, to your ears, that every dish at Applebee's is a signature dish.
Uh.
Sure, Okay. What I'm thinking, at least in my my traversings to Applebee's is the chicken fingers with honey mustard as an appetizer.
Well, you can also get the classic combo. I pulled up the menu.
Oh, where you build your own sampler.
Essentially, Yeah, brisk at casadea is an appetizer, which is crazy because that's a meal. The case is a good meal. But yes, it is true. Let let Paul be our Plato of Applebee's and you are Aristotle interpreting that, and then we'll figure out who the Casey is. The Iggercasey later is that you?
No, I figured out the perfect Applebee's appetizer, you guys, because it speaks so loudly to app two Applebee's for me it breadsticks with Alfredo sauce.
I saw that sounds disgusting.
What it's perfect?
I think we're just not high. That's probably a speak for yourself.
But right, so it is true though from time to time, and this is the crazy tantalizing for some people, irritating for other people. Thing about the search for Atlantas and places like this. Every so often archaeologists and historians do find stuff. They find hard evidence of things, right, Yeah.
Things like a swampy prehistoric city in coastal Spain, suspicious undersee rock formation in the Bahamas. That's the one all might be sources for a potential genesis of the Atlantis story. Of these, the site with the widest acceptance is the
Greek island of Santorini. Santorini Sanerini, ancient Therah, that's what it was called back in the day, a half submerged remnant of a volcano known as a caldera, created by the massive second millennium BC volcanic eruption, which created a tsunami that could have really, you know, hastened the collapse of the Minoan civilization.
On crete, crete, crete, get it a crete. That horrible joke paid off.
It went all the way after the from before the commercial break or metastasized, depending on whether you think that was chuckleworthy or cancerous.
Oh all right, well here we are.
It's like a good spin artichoke.
Man, there there is.
I mean, you're absolutely right, You're absolutely right, because people do continue to find things. There's another real life place that has a lot in common with the Atlantis myth and geographically could be something that people in Plato's time would have been aware of, and that is a coastal city called Helike or Helique, which is located on the
Gulf of Corinth in Greece. So it was and it's heyday the center of the Acaan League, and the Acaan League was a confederacy of sorts of twelve different cities. By the time Plato was coming up in the Game of Philosophy, this city was already hundreds of years old. Like Atlantis, it was wealthy, like Atlantis, it controlled the seas around it, and like Atlantis, it had established colonies and other nearby areas. Like Italy, the residents, like those
of mythic Atlantis, also worshiped Poseidon. For five days December three, seventy three BCE, witnesses in the area of this city noticed that vermin and other small animals snakes and sex mice and so on, were leaving the coast and they were going to the mountains that formed the southern border of the Hilike Delta.
And we all know what adult is.
Modern seismologists have also noted that some animals do appear to have a preternatural sense, a little bit of predictive ability when it comes to imminent earthquakes.
Some of that low level, low rumble no it's not rumble, but the movement that it is occurring vibrations. Yeah, that are so of such a low frequency, but it just can be sensed.
And oddly enough, you know, we did look in this into this a little bit in earlier episodes, but oddly enough, we see tremendous anecdotal evidence that some animals can predict the weather. Matt, you had the most or predict those disasters, Matt, you had the most salient argument there with the idea that they're very attuned to vibrations that maybe people ignore, right, or maybe they can also sense barometric changes.
Barometric is where I'm interested. Yeah, I want to study that.
I've always wanted to. I've always wanted to get some more some more research on people who can predict the weather due to an injury flaring up. Yeah, there's also probably a pressure change joints. Yeah, yeah, I always thought that was a super I still do. If someone if someone who has kind of a messed up leg tells me that a storm's coming, I believe them.
I'm going inside, you know what I mean.
Yeah, I'm waiting outside for the first bolt to hopefully strike true.
That's very regular of you, trust. But verify. I gotcha.
I was just talking about hoping to get struck by lightning. But yeah, I'll just keep going.
Oh man, I just want to know. I just want to see if you'll get powers. Yeah, I mean, I think surviving a lightning strike is a superpower as well. You know, multi their people have been struck by lightning multiple times.
I told you guys before about Coach Trit from from my middle school, Travis Chidwell Well middle school science teacher. Coach Trit struck by lightning at least twice.
Wait a minute, really, yeah, at least twice.
I know. I remember one of them was playing cards in his uh in his dining room, lightning bolt came right down through the chandelier and got.
Him because gambling is a sin.
And maybe that was it.
Coach Tritt was the second time he was asking.
That was the second time, I think the first time was out on the field for something.
And was he being a plato about this? Was he relaying a story without first hand proof?
No, this is him, Coach trip struck by light And he was like, I got hit twice and I'm still here.
Did you believe them?
I did well? I I mean I was a middle school er.
Do you have any like powder esque powers?
You know, I didn't notice any, but he certainly was no good at science.
No, I am, I'm not.
I thought the story Powder is interesting, but due to us some intense problems I have with the director, I can't recommend the film.
Oh yeah, that guy got big time camp.
Wait wait, who should be? Who directed it?
I forget his name, but he was found to have been participating in a lot of molestation.
I believe Victor Salva also the creative mind behind.
Jeepers Creepers, oh Man.
Yep, and as the convicted known child abuser, but studios kept working with he kept uh yeah, he actually kept going after being convicted in nineteen eighty eight for the abuse of children.
And then made Powder and then I watched it and I loved it, and I watched it again and again.
And then made Jeepers Creepers, which, to be fair, I mean, to be fair, it's pretty.
Solid little horror horror flic.
Yeah, it's a It's set a record for the largest Labor day box office opening ever.
Wow. So so anyway, where's that flood when you need it? You know what I mean?
There we go, There we go. Where's Poseidon in all of this? And when he needs to flood the studio? Well, let's go back to Let's go back to this area, because, so we said three seventy three BCE, the small animals are starting to leave the coast. And we have to also remember that again, people of this age were just as smart as people are today, and just as many problems, just as many good points to themselves as a community
and as individuals. But they were also much more in tune with the natural world around them, you know what I mean, So they would have recognized that animals were leaving. In the middle of the night. On that fifth day, a huge earthquake struck the area. And then what happens when there are earthquakes around the ocean, a tsunami came from the Gulf of Corinth. In just a matter of minutes. According to the accounts, the city of Helika was overcome by the sea and it sank, just the way that
Plato described Atlantis. It happened very quickly.
Do you see what I mean, nool, He explains everything, it seems to.
So why let's look, let's look a little bit at the you know, the geography, and then let's also, I don't know, I think we let's call this part of the argument multiple Atlantis is atlantasies.
So you've got the Gulf of Corinth that has several factors that make it particularly prone to these types of disasters. It is a hotbed of tectonic plate activity. Humans were big fans of living there, and the three rivers that formed the delta also bring lots of silt deposits.
To cover things up. Right, once something goes down gets covered over pretty easily, that's right.
And the research you discovered ancient helike after twelve years of digging also found that this ravage of nature happened more than one time. The attractiveness of the area and its attendant destructiveness formed a cycle where humans established a city and then nature said no, thank you, removed it. And then after enough time had passed, people forgot what the problem was, what went so terribly wrong, and they built another city on top of the old one.
Yep. And they may not have even known the old one was there. They may have just said, this.
Soil is great, Look how well everything grows. It's so abundant.
Why has no one built a city here? Because I have an idea.
My gosh, I'm also gonna postulate that maybe they did. Remember, they just went, We're gonna build it better.
This time, Yes, this time will instead of huts of straw, will build huts of wood, and then huts of brick, and we'll see if this big bad wolf is real.
And like Coach Tritt before his second lightning, you know, they're like, well, you know, lightning doesn't.
Strike twice exactly until it does. That's a different god, that's Zeus. And they're like, we're Poseidon folk. So archaeologists, like like we had mentioned before who discovered Elite. As they continued their investigation, they found evidence of more lost cities in the ground. Underneath that delta silt, they found cities from the Byzantine period that ended in the fifteenth century CE or AD. And then under that literally under that, they found a ruined Roman city from between the second
and fourth centuries. And then under that that's where they found Alice, which was destroyed as we said in three seven three BCE. But what they weren't expecting.
Here is where it gets crazy. I just want to set that up. Continue please.
Oh yeah, they found an earlier ruined city from the Bronze Age. Now we're getting to the age where we have to kind of approximate things. They said, this one was from around twenty six hundred to twenty three hundred BCE.
And then yes, they found evidence of human civilization or some kind of habitation that went even further back than that. We're talking Neolithic period. And you know, if you're estimating, which again, as Ben said, you have to, it would go back to twelve thousand years ago. How crazy is that? We you know, we set up the scenario kind of jokingly that that people would build a city here, then it would collapse, we would forget as humans, so then
build again. But that is precisely what has has been happening there for thousands of years.
All in all, there are six distinct that like, six distinct communities have all been discovered at this same spot.
And they all rose, and they all fell, and they all got buried by the rivers.
And this is the kind of stuff that makes a legend, right, And this is where we this is where we leave the episode today. Is it possible that Atlantis is a mixture of the mistranslations? I mean quite probably, And the story's not over the search for the city continues. There's a guy who thinks he's found the lost city in Spain a few years back, about sixty miles in inland
away from the coast. And then, of course, most recently in twenty eighteen, a tech company called Merlin Burrows when public and said they may have found the lost city of Atlantis, and they think it's off the coast of Spain near the Donana National Park. They argue that they've found the remains of temples and towers, that they date the material between ten and twelve thousand years old, and they have some computer representations you can see about this.
It looks interesting, almost looks Indonesian to me something, at least the rever presentations that they've placed online.
Right right, And they call themselves a land and seat Merlin Boroughs that has calls itself a land and sea search company specializing in finding forgotten or hidden things. But if you read their press releases, they're also quick to point out they have a documentary on the horizon called Atlantica, which will put all the questions to rest.
Yay, yeah, maybe maybe maybe they've actually figured it out.
Maybe they have, maybe they have time will tell so Brian Dunning, who created the Skeptoid podcast, describes Atlantis. He says, the myth of Atlantis is in the simplest terms and Elvis sighting, and so he's looking at it more of a pop culture thing. And he says, you know, he talks about how people kept trying to keep Elvis alive.
And he says similarly, over the course of the two thousand, in almost five hundred years since Plato wrote about Atlantis, and countless people have tried to match his fiction to some actual island or geographical structure. We already know the efforts from vain because he says Atlantis was never anything but an allegorical device used briefly by a philosopher who
made stuff like this up all the time. And this is as established a fact as is the death of Elvis Presley, because we know that Plato did work with allegory a lot.
So this is what I want to put to you guys. Yeah, okay, and I'm gonna have to organize it in my head quickly here before I go and three two, Okay, we're there. Do you guys think that it is possible at all that there was some kind of advanced civilization that existed at one point on the Earth, even if it was
just very small. Let's just say, if we're gonna thought experiment, a base or a landing zone come paired to or similar to the way we visited the Moon the first time during the Apollo missions, where we landed, we're just in one area. It just kind of But in this case it's extraterrestrials of some form. They're highly advanced. They land on Earth just for a little bit to do
some exploration. Do you think there's a site or there's a possibility that there is a site somewhere on this Earth where that occurred.
Well, that's the tricky thing.
There's a lot you have to unpack an order to get there.
I would want clarification on what we mean by advance. I would say as far as an extra terrestrial site, it's tough because Earth is a living thing, and it's a voracious living thing.
It eats evidence, you know.
One of the first arguments against that would be that we don't see evidence of that in the fossil record or historical record. One of the arguments for it would be people saying we do. We just don't recognize what we've found, right, like. So, to answer the question in short form, I believe it is absolutely possible, depending on how we want to define advance to believe it is
absolutely possible that earlier undiscovered civilizations were round. I think it's absolutely possible that humanity in terms of socio political entity or civilization has earlier iterations that we just haven't found because it's hard to find things and it's very easy to.
Lose them, you know.
But as far as extraterrestrials, I don't know if I'm willing to go that far. I just think it's I think it's an It takes a tremendous amount of hubrist for us to say we know for sure every lost civilization.
But I mean Rome was an advanced civilization, you know, compared comparatively for the time, you know, and we found all of that. I mean, I figure, for let's a big enough footprint to have made an impact, we would find something.
Right footprint versus time, right, right.
Okay, I've got one more, one more thing to ask you guys. What if Atlantis was rather than an extraterrestrial civilization, it was like a sub terrestrial subterranean uh Like, Okay, let's just say some other intelligent force that emerged from the sea that came up and existed in some kind of way in a vehicle for a long period of time, or were they base and then it eventually just went back down into the ocean.
Like Eldritch forces of some sort, maybe Eldridge.
Maybe you know something, some intelligence that had been on this planet far before you know, the evolution of our species.
Hmm, I don't know, Matt. It's an interesting question. It's an interesting thought experiment.
That's what I'm trying to do with you, guys.
We don't know a whole lot about the subterranean depths. Really. A few years back, god, several years back now, there was an expedition that we applied to that said they were going to go to Antarctica to try to discover the entrance to this huge cavern system that they believed existed.
People who will argue for the quote unquote kind of hollow earth theory will typically more science based arguments will say not that the entirety of the Earth is hollow, but that there are vast caverns and systems that could house thriving ecosystems. Right, so I could see that, I would say also to illustrate how little we know about the world before us. Remember when we did the episode on the early mixtapes of Man right, Theofluens, Yeah and
Denisovan's and Neanderthal. This year there was a new species of ancient human discovered no way, Yeah, Yes, waited in the Philippines. Homo luzoninsis okay.
And it is.
It's a small body hominin, similar to the Homo florensis and lived at least fifty thousand and sixty seven thousand years ago. Also turns out Homo erectus persisted in Java as recently as one hundred thousand years ago, tangentially related. The main reasons I bring it up here because A it's really fascinating, and B I think it is a fantastic illustration of how little we know about again, the civilizations that preceded our own, or the people in the world's you know, incredible.
Incredibly weird.
You have to wonder how long it's going to take our civilization to disappear.
I don't know what, well, from now, five years, thirty years, give me a break, I mean, I'll you know, one thing we can say for sure is that on the timeline of history, of all history of the universe.
We are but a spec and may not be quite as important as we think.
So let's hold on to all.
We got it, guys, and that's our classic episode for this evening.
We can't wait to hear your thoughts. That's right, let us know what you think.
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