History's Greatest Mysteries (2020) s06e10 Episode Script

Tonight, Atlantis,
the lost island kingdom
that's baffled
explorers for centuries.
When you think of lost
cities, you think of Atlantis.
Atlantis is hit
with these earthquakes
and floods that ultimately
sink the entire island nation
to the bottom of the sea,
never to be seen again.
Some say Atlantis is a myth.
Others insist it was
a very real place,
wiped out thousands
of years ago.
Finding Atlantis would not
only be the archaeological coup
of this century, but
perhaps for all time.
Now we'll explore the top
theories surrounding one
of history's most
famous lost kingdoms.
Easily a half dozen sites
fit the profile of Atlantis.
Could Atlantis and this
other lost city be one
and the same?
A major eruption could
have easily wiped out
an ancient civilization
like Atlantis thousands
of years ago.
Is Atlantis a real place
and, if so, where could it be?
Circa 360 BCE, Ancient Greece.
The philosopher Plato writes
of an epic battle waged
long before his time.
This battle, according to Plato,
took place about 9,000
years before his time.
Plato writes about this
battle between the Greeks
and a very highly
advanced civilization
from an island called Atlantis.
Atlantis is this huge
island that is populated
by Atlanteans who are
incredibly prosperous,
wealthy, have huge armies.
So with all their wealth
and prosperity, the Atlanteans
are arrogant, they're proud,
they feel they can expand
and conquer others,
and this is what brings
them into contact
with the Greeks when they
invade their territories.
Atlantis has basically
been provoking the Greeks.
They've been trying to
expand their empire,
and the Greeks finally
decide it's time to respond.
The nation of Atlantis
is a military juggernaut.
They are technologically
advanced.
They've got the better
military, better tech,
they've got this beat.
Plato writes about this battle
as if it's like a true
tale of good versus evil,
and in the end,
the underdog Greeks
end up winning the day.
To make matters worse
for the Atlanteans,
after they lose the battle,
they are then struck
with even more tragedy.
As the story goes,
Atlantis is hit
with these natural disasters,
earthquakes, floods
that ultimately sink the entire
island nation to the bottom
of the sea, never
to be seen again.
Today, Plato's work
remains the only known
ancient record of Atlantis.
The big mystery here
is, is this a true story?
Was there actually an island
nation called Atlantis?
Plato is our singular source
for the story of Atlantis,
and he's using it
almost as a parable,
but he references real
places in this story
that makes it sound like it
could be a historical account.
The reason why we can't
tell if Atlantis was meant
to be completely true
or allegorical is that Plato
used both forms of writing.
And in the Atlantis story,
he has the main speaker
say over and over again,
this story is true,
but maybe that itself
was a rhetorical device.
He tells stories
that have some sort
of a moral purpose to them.
So if it's an allegory, it
would be about the dangers
of power and wealth.
However, not everybody believes
that the story is made up.
People that read
Plato's writing look at it
and go, "There's no way
that he made this up."
It's too vivid of a
description for him
to have fictionalized
this place.
He describes these very
lush concentric islands
all linked together by a
canal with massive waterways
and surrounded by mountains
as well as a rectangular plane
that's 340 miles long.
The Atlanteans were sort
of a sophisticated
maritime trading community,
and on the central island
there is an enormous ornate
temple of Poseidon.
But there are skeptics
who point out details
in Plato's story
that don't make sense.
There's some strange
things about Plato's account,
including the fact that
it's 9,000 years ago
and 9,000 years ago,
we did not have any major
human civilizations.
Humanity was still living
in hunter-gathering
type situations.
Plato might have just
been off in his chronology
or maybe there was some problem
in the transmission
of Plato's text.
Maybe there's a mistake
and it was supposed to be
900 years instead of 9,000.
There are naysayers of Atlantis,
but there are people
that read the description
and they go, "No,
it's got to be real."
And the first place that they
speculate as to the location
of this lost city of
Atlantis is underwater.
It's the year 1500
and as the Middle
Ages draw to a close,
Europeans are venturing out
and exploring the world.
The age of discovery is an
era of global exploration.
Columbus has already
discovered the new world.
Magellan has already
circumnavigated the globe.
The Portuguese have
traveled all the way over
to what's now modern day Japan.
The Dutch East India Company
had already made it all the way
down to the shores of New
Zealand and Australia.
As reports come back
of new lands found
and new cultures encountered,
people have this
voracious appetite
to learn more about
all of these new lands
as they're being discovered.
By the mid 1600s,
The fascination with
undiscovered lands
brings Atlantis
to the forefront.
During this whole
period of discovery,
people are engaging
with these ideas,
reading about Atlantis
and wondering could that
be any of the places
that are being discovered
during all of these excursions?
Enter a young Jesuit
scholar by the name
of Athanasius Kircher.
He is well versed in
multiple languages,
in physics, in history.
In the 1600s,
He is what is called
like a renaissance man.
He's also really
interested in mapping.
He takes Plato's writings
and he also combines those with
some ancient Egyptian texts.
He puts these sources together
and is able to draw what he
thinks is the definitive map
of the land of Atlantis.
Athanasius Kircher
puts Atlantis underwater
in the Atlantic Ocean
and for hundreds of
years moving forward,
people take
Kircher's map as fact
because he's got such
an incredible reputation
as this amazing scholar.
The map is very popular.
It's consistent with
what Plato says.
There are things out there
that they have yet to discover,
so it made sense that
this is where Atlantis is.
Kircher places the
city of Atlantis near what
Plato called in his writings,
the Pillars of Heracles.
To the ancient Greeks, the
Pillars of Heracles mark
what they see as the
edge of the known world.
Historians have tried to
decipher where the Pillars
of Heracles actually are
and they believe that it
actually is the Strait
of Gibraltar, which
is this body of water
that connects the Mediterranean
Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.
It seems, at first,
kind of counterintuitive.
That's awfully far from Greece
and we don't know
exactly where the Pillars
of Heracles were,
but this Strait of Gibraltar
with its very narrow
passage would make sense
as being interpreted
in the Greek context
as being the
Pillars of Heracles.
When people think of
Atlantis, they think, "Okay,
it must be off the western
coast of Europe and Africa,
somewhere beyond the
Strait of Gibraltar
in the Atlantic Ocean."
That just becomes the default
notion of where Atlantis is.
One of the things that
Kircher knows he's looking
for is the possibility
of mountains.
Plato in his description
of the landscape
of Atlantis talks about
there being mountains
and, in fact, in the middle
of the Atlantic Ocean
there is what's known
as the Mid-Atlantic
Ridge, which is a series
of underwater mountains.
Our entire planet is covered
by oceanic crust and
continental crust.
If this happens to be an area
that is tectonically active,
that will cause lots of
geological movement of the land.
Some goes under, some gets
lifted up to form mountains.
There are a number of
island chains, for example,
the Azores and the
Canary Islands,
which are the
topmost peaks of some
of these volcanic ranges.
Thinking about this particular
underwater mountain range,
it's possible that
the volcanic activity
that's creating these mountains
underwater could, in fact,
have played a role in
not just the creation,
but also the
destruction of Atlantis.
A volcano eruption
is definitely known
to wipe out civilizations.
That could have lent itself to
erasing evidence of Atlantis
from the surface.
Kircher's map influenced
a lot of people,
but it didn't
influence everybody.
Some experts who believe
in Atlantis don't think that
we should be using Kircher's
map as the end all answer.
They, in fact, think that
Atlantis isn't underwater.
It's hiding in plain sight.
For centuries,
many European explorers
believe that the lost city
of Atlantis must
be deep underwater.
But in 1839,
a discovery on land
challenges that assumption.
Archaeologists
excavating on the island
of Malta find the remains
of a temple believed
to be older than 5,000 years.
That would make it one
of the oldest buildings
on the planet.
This temple is so old
that the builders didn't
even have metal tools
at the time to create it.
It's a marvel of engineering
for ancient history.
It has hugely large
heavy rocks placed on top
of one another fitted
together almost perfectly.
So this is evidence for a
pretty advanced civilization.
There's a Maltese
architect by the name
of Giorgio Gronet de Vasse.
He's the one overseeing this dig
and he comes to a conclusion.
This has to be the
lost city of Atlantis.
Malta is a nation of five
islands off the coast of Sicily
in the Mediterranean Sea.
The largest island is 17 miles
long and nine miles wide.
That makes it one
of the most densely populated
areas on planet earth.
Scientists believe
that there was more
to Malta than there is now,
and that part of that was
wiped out by an earthquake
and a tsunami that
followed soon after.
This entire Maltese
archipelago was only part
of a larger island chain that
started gradually sinking
around 20,000 years ago
To de Vasse,
the evidence suggests that
this newly excavated temple
was a part of an advanced
civilization that was living
in that time 2000 years
before Plato writes about it.
This is not the 9,000 years
before Plato as he
listed in his writings,
but it is still a
considerable time
before him, so it is conceivable
that the story was
actually passed down
to him as ancient history.
So de Vasse is convinced
that these ancient
structures on Malta indicate
that it is the
legendary Atlantis
and he stakes his entire
reputation on this.
He even gets inscriptions
that were found in these
archaeological sites in Malta
that have the name Atlantis,
and so he thinks, "Here, this
is my smoking gun evidence."
There are lots of people
who did not in any way
take him seriously,
but he goes to his
grave still believing
that Malta is Atlantis.
In the 1930s, 70
years after de Vasse's death,
some turned their attention
to another Mediterranean locale,
a place that's ground zero
for one of the most
powerful natural disasters
in human history.
A new candidate
arises for Atlantis,
and that's the island of
Thera, which is in the middle
of the Aegean Sea,
and we know that there was a
massive volcanic eruption there
in either the late 1600s, BCE
or into the middle 1500s BCE.
This volcanic explosion was
so massive that it shot rock
and ash up into the
air almost six miles,
and it was visible all
the way from Egypt.
After the volcano explodes,
there is an entire
ongoing series
of earthquakes, of tsunamis.
The island basically
collapses in on itself.
Now after the explosion is over,
the island of
Thera will rebuild,
and today the island of
Thera is still around,
but we now know it by
another name, Santorini.
In the 1930s, a Greek
archaeologist by the name
of Spyridon Marinatos joins
the search for Atlantis.
Marinatos is a top
Greek archaeologist.
Probably his biggest claim to
fame is that he found the site
of the ancient battle
of Thermopylae,
probably best known
from the movie "300."
Marinatos is also interested
in the Minoan world.
Now, the Minoans were
a pre-Greek population
that lived on the
islands of the Aegean,
based in Crete we think,
and even in some
coastal settlements
on the mainland of Greece.
The Minoans are a culture
we don't really know a ton
about, but we do know
that they were living
on the Greek island of
Thera around the time
of the volcanic eruption.
We also know that they
were highly advanced
and there's some evidence
that they might have built
structures in an effort
to be earthquake proof.
After that catastrophic
eruption, the Minoans continued
to persist and thrive in
other areas like Crete.
However, mysteriously
they vanish.
There's no historical record
or mention of them after that.
Marinatos's theory is
that the eruption in 1600 was
probably not the only eruption
that ever happened.
A whole series of
volcanic eruptions,
of earthquakes and floods and
tsunamis destroyed this area
little by little.
So if you put all these elements
together about the Minoans,
this highly advanced
civilization
destroyed by a volcano,
by earthquake, floods,
it begins to sound an
awful lot like Atlantis.
When Marinatos takes a closer
look at Thera's topography,
he's pretty certain that
he's on the right track.
For starters, Thera
is a series of
concentric circles alternating
between land and water,
and in the center,
you've got this caldera
that fills up with water
because that's where all the
volcanic activity took place.
And then on the sides you've
got these steep cliffs
that are surrounding it.
These steep cliffs could have
possibly been those mountains
that Plato talked
about in his writing.
In 1967, Marinatos
and other archaeologists
make a spectacular
discovery on Santorini.
They find the remains
of a city buried under ash
for 3,500 years,
and it's an example
of an advanced culture
with a city that had a
harbor, fine works of art,
incredible buildings,
and even indoor plumbing.
Marinatos had to dig
down through layers of ash
to find this
incredible settlement,
which we call Akrotiri today,
and that volcanic eruption
by dumping all that ash
on that settlement, it preserved
it like a time capsule.
It is the Greek equivalent
of the famous Pompeii
from the Roman world.
Given what we know
now, it's very likely
that a place like
Santorini could be
the representation of Atlantis.
In the 1970s, Jacques Cousteau,
the famed oceanographer
and submarine explorer,
decides that he is going
to explore around Santorini.
He is going to see
if he can find proof
that this is, in fact, Atlantis.
In the end, Cousteau does
not find the conclusive proof
that he was looking for.
There's no temple of Poseidon,
but this doesn't
stop the thinking
that this could
still be Atlantis
or that it's at least
out there somewhere.
For centuries,
explorers have been trying
to decipher clues
in Plato's writings,
hoping to find the lost
kingdom of Atlantis.
But while the theory of
Santorini as the location
of Atlantis is explored,
other experts wonder
if they've been misunderstanding
the text all along.
Plato in his writings,
describes Atlantis as an island,
but the word he uses
in Greek, nesos,
doesn't just mean island.
It might refer to a peninsula.
An island is a body of land
that is surrounded on
all sides by water,
whereas a peninsula is only
surrounded on three sides
and a peninsula
is always attached
to a much larger landmass.
Plato describes Atlantis
as being an island
with a large flat area.
You don't usually
find those on islands,
so it's much more believable
to find such a plain
on a peninsula.
In the 1920s, this
idea captures the attention
of a German archaeologist
named Adolf Schulten.
Schulten is known
for his work in Spain.
He's actually uncovered an
ancient Celtic territory
or settlement known as Numantia,
so he knows Spain
actually very well.
He realizes, of
course, that Spain,
all of it is a peninsula,
so it occurs to him, maybe this
is the location of Atlantis.
If you look at Spain
on a map, you'll notice
that it's right there by
the Strait of Gibraltar.
So if the Strait of Gibraltar
actually is the Pillars
of Heracles, you have
another geographical marker
that aligns with what
Plato was saying.
And this region has had plenty
of earthquakes and tsunamis,
which could have
affected civilizations
for a very long time.
In fact, in 1954,
there was an earthquake
that measured 7.8 on
the Richter scale.
Fortunately, that
large earthquake
was mostly subterranean,
and so it didn't do a
huge amount of damage,
but still there are
shifting plates there.
So this could be a place
where you might expect
to find Atlantis.
In the 1920s, Schulten zeroes in
on a region known as Donana,
which is part of
a national park,
and it's this swampy marshland
south of the city of Seville.
There is some evidence
of an ancient site,
but when they get to the
site to start digging,
they run into a huge problem.
The water table of
Donana is very high,
so as they start to dig down,
pretty soon the water
starts to seep up
and they have to
abandon these attempts
to dig down any deeper.
It's kind of like
Mother Nature's way
of saying, "Whatever's
buried here,
you're not going to find it."
After
Schulten's failed attempts,
Atlantis researchers largely
ignore the southern tip
of Spain until the 1990s.
Suddenly we have
this new ability
to take photographs
from satellites,
and that really changes how
we understand this region
because satellite
photography starts
to show us these long
rectangular developments right
in this same area where
Schulten was looking.
So, a physicist from
the University of
Dortmund in Germany,
he looks at these pictures and
is really intrigued by them,
and he thinks that maybe
these rectangular structures
could be the remains of the
famed temple to Poseidon.
He also believes that
he sees some evidence
of perhaps circular
structures that would seem
to fit Plato's
dimensions of Atlantis.
In 2009,
researchers set out to confirm
what these images seem to
show with astonishing results.
They use something called
electrical resistivity
tomography or ER
as it's also known,
which can actually map
beneath the surface
to see large structures.
And what they find
is confirmation
that there are large
structures there
and some of them have
a ring-like shape.
Following the discovery of that,
you have marine archaeologists
that dive into the swamp,
and when they get down there,
they end up finding
these stone structures
that look like walls.
Could these be the
famed walls of Atlantis?
One thing you
would need to do is
to date these structures.
Do they fit with
Plato's descriptions,
if not 9,000 years
before his time,
at least sometime
very far in the past?
These ruins are dated
and they only date back
to the first century CE,
thousands of years too late
for Plato's description.
Roman archaeologists
are pretty familiar
with first century stone
walls, so when they see it,
they know instantly that it
dates from the Roman occupation
of Spain, but there are
at least 20 other sites
in this area that could
still be excavated,
and those are probably
much, much older
than the first century walls
of this particular site.
Archaeologists have
also been able to confirm
that this region probably
was hit by natural disasters,
both an earthquake followed
by a tsunami around 2000 BCE,
which is long before Plato.
So there are plenty of
experts that firmly believe
that Atlantis is hiding in
the marshes of southern Spain.
For centuries, explorers
have been searching
for the lost city
that Greek philosopher
Plato called Atlantis.
They've traveled the globe
and studied the text
endlessly searching
for overlooked clues.
But in the 1990s, a Swiss
archaeologist proposes that
the key to the mystery
might lie in the work
of another legendary
Greek author
who lived 300
years before Plato.
His name is Homer.
Homer is best known for
"The Odyssey," his story,
which tells the voyages of
the young hero Odysseus.
But there's another work
that Homer is famous for
that he writes actually
before "The Odyssey,"
and that's called "The Iliad."
And "The Iliad" tells of an
epic battle between the Greeks
and the inhabitants of the
city of Troy, the Trojan War.
Homer's account
of the Trojan War
concerns a massive
Greek expedition
from the mainland of
Greece to the city of Troy.
This is said to have taken place
some 400 years or so
before Homer's time.
After the Greeks defeat
Troy, the city is destroyed.
Now how it's destroyed,
we're not entirely sure.
It might've been by fire, it
might've been by earthquake.
That information is lost to us.
Archaeologists dream
of finding this place,
but after years of searching,
many people believe
that ultimately
maybe it just never
existed at all.
That changes
in the late 19th century
when archaeologists zero
in on a potential site
in western Turkey
near the Aegean Sea.
It so happens
that this site is already
an archaeological legend.
The city is called Hisarlik,
and in 1871,
archaeologists uncover
what is now believed
to be the city of Troy.
Over 100 years later in 1992,
Swiss archaeologist Eberhard
Zangger makes a shocking claim
in his book, "Flood
From Heaven."
He claims that Troy and
Atlantis are one and the same.
Zangger's premise is that
Atlantis is based on the city
of Troy and that Plato is
actually giving us a
garbled description
of the city of Troy.
Are they in fact the same place?
For Zangger, Troy
turned out to be real.
If that's the case, Atlantis
can be real given the fact that
these places were prosperous,
wealthy, and powerful
and then were destroyed
and disappear from history.
Perhaps it's the same story.
So there are a number of
things that Zangger uses
to make his case for this.
One, both Troy and Atlantis
are said to be very windy.
They're also both said to
have a lot of waterways,
but maybe more telling is
that the King of Troy claims
to be a descendant of
Atlas, an Atlantean,
which is basically the same word
that Plato uses to describe
the people of Atlantis,
the Atlanteans.
Zangger uses satellite
images of Troy
and the area surrounding it
and makes the
argument that a lot
of things line up, the
plains, the mountains,
the general shape
of the city match up
with what Plato
describes about Atlantis.
According to Zangger,
there is also a major
geographic feature of the region
that bolsters his case.
Troy is located next
to a major waterway,
which today is known
as the Dardanelles,
which separates the Black
Sea and the Sea of Marmara
from the Aegean Sea.
Although not precisely,
the same as how Plato
described Atlantis,
Zangger believes that he
can find enough similarities
to equate the two.
Plato writes that Atlantis is
near the Pillars of Heracles,
which has been presumed to
be the Strait of Gibraltar.
Zangger claims,
it's not Gibraltar,
but it's the Dardanelles Strait.
Today, the two sides
of the Strait have highly
developed port towns,
but in ancient
times, these sides
of the Strait
would've been nothing
but just empty land
filled with woods.
Atlantis is clearly on an island
and Turkey is not an island.
So here you find another
kind of creative translation
of the ancient Greek word nesos
that Zangger argues doesn't
exactly mean island.
It really means any kind of
a place that has a coastline.
So if you look at it like that,
then Turkey would qualify.
Zangger's theory is
still pretty hotly debated.
There are people who
insist, Plato made this up.
It is not a real place,
but there are people
equally devoted to the idea
that Troy is Atlantis.
Those who discount
the Troy theory entirely
take their hunt to even
more unexpected locations
like places that barely
have any water at all.
It is a widely held belief that
if Atlantis is real,
it's somewhere at the
bottom of the ocean.
But in 2008, new research turns
that assumption on its head.
In the mid 2000s,
Michael Hubner is a 40-year-old
German software engineer,
but his true passion
is trying to find
and locate the lost
city of Atlantis.
Hubner scours Plato's writings
for any geographical
features associated
with Atlantis, the
mountains, the plains,
the concentric
islands, the water,
the temple in the center of it.
In Hubner's analysis
of Plato's writings about
the geographical features
of Atlantis, he comes up
with 51 characteristics
of Atlantis that he puts
into a computer program
and then applies to a map
of the Mediterranean region
to see if there are any places
that match those
51 characteristics.
So Hubner basically
lays out a grid
with these 400 little squares
and looks for which
attributes each
of those squares might have
so that he can zero
in on the places
that are most like Atlantis
according to Plato.
Months into his research,
Hubner's program reaches
a shocking conclusion.
One of the squares on his
grid lights up as a place
that has a ton of these
geographic features,
but it's in a place that
you would never expect.
The most likely candidate
that his program comes up
with is right on the edge
of the Sahara Desert,
a region called Souss-Massa
outside of Marrakesh, Morocco.
This place just looks
way too dry to be Atlantis,
but Hubner insists
that this is the place.
Hubner believes that
there was a great earthquake
in the North Atlantic
and a resulting tsunami that
swept up the coast of Morocco
before sweeping back.
It's not an island
in the literal sense
that Hubner is talking about,
but the word nesos that Plato
uses in his writing comes up.
And this time another
interpretation is created.
The word nesos can be expanded
beyond island into
peninsula or into beach.
So Hubner takes an even
more expansive definition
of that term and says it's
any region that's bounded
by mountains or an ocean.
The region that Hubner
is talking about,
Souss-Massa is surrounded by
mountain ridges on two sides
and the Atlantic Ocean on one.
So he suggests this one region
of Morocco fits
the bill as nesos.
So Hubner plugs in
these geographic features
into other locations,
but none get as many hits
as the Souss-Massa region.
Case in point, he
tries Santorini,
but the computer program tells
'em that there are only 23
of the 51 geographic features,
whereas Souss-Massa,
44 features pop up.
Proponents
of Hubner's theory say
his most convincing
evidence comes
from his research on the ground.
In 2012, Hubner goes out
to this particular area
of Morocco and in the sands,
he actually finds kind of
a bowl-shaped depression.
In the center of
this bowl is a hill
and the remains of
an ancient temple.
One of the most unique
descriptions of Atlantis that
comes to us from Plato is its
organization as a series
of concentric circles
with the temple of
Poseidon in the middle.
He's absolutely convinced
that he has not
just found Atlantis,
he has found the famed temple
of Poseidon in the center.
And sure enough, these
rings that he identifies
in Souss-Massa are wadis,
which are ancient water
gullies and valleys.
And so perhaps then
they might be evidence
that at one time there
was more water there
and you had the concentric rings
that Plato describes
for Atlantis.
Tragically before
he's able to continue
or finish his research, Hubner
dies in a bicycling accident,
but other scholars are
continuing his work
and looking in the same place
and hoping to prove
that this Moroccan
desert location
is the unexpected
location of Atlantis.
When it comes to
unlikely locations
for where we should be
looking for Atlantis,
there are people who say we
should be digging not in sand,
but in ice.
The 2000-year-old search
for Atlantis takes another
unexpected turn in 1949.
At Springfield College
in western Massachusetts.
A class discussion
piques the curiosity
of anthropology professor
Charles Hapgood.
Hapgood and his students
are talking about the idea
of continental drift.
This theory that the different
continents on our planet,
once they broke apart
from being a central
unified mass,
drifted really slowly over time
to their current locations
where we know them to be now.
Hapgood tries to
challenge those ideas
during this conversation.
He tells the students,
what if it's possible that some
of these land masses
move much faster than we
actually think they did?
Hapgood argues that the crust
of our planet can actually
move freely over the core
and the mantle, and he suggests
that it can move fairly
quickly even so far
as flipping the North
and South Poles.
And he says that
this is something
that may have happened
innumerable times
over the last
100 thousand years.
According to this theory,
at one point, Atlantis
was in a warm climate,
but these massive land shifts
cause another polar shift,
which causes the South Pole
to move closer and
closer to this island.
As it gets closer, it
starts to get colder.
Nothing can survive
there anymore,
and Atlantis becomes known
as the continent of Antarctica.
In 1953, Hapgood
actually writes to one
of the most brilliant
men in Western history,
Albert Einstein,
and he tells Einstein
about his shift theory
and to his great
surprise and delight,
Einstein writes him back
and he tells him that
he finds his theories
actually really very convincing.
Hapgood decides to put
out his theories into a book
in 1958 entitled
"Earth's Shifting Crust,"
and he even manages
to get Albert Einstein
to write the foreword
for his book.
When Albert Einstein writes
the introduction to your book,
that's a pretty
strong endorsement
from one of the greatest
minds of all time.
Suddenly, people are gonna
take Hapgood seriously.
Hapgood contends that
these incredibly fast changes
in these land masses would lead
to these incredible
natural disasters,
earthquakes, tsunamis, melting
ice caps, mass extinctions,
anything that we
would be looking
for would be buried
underneath the ice.
That's why, he contends,
we can't find Atlantis.
From about 1960 on,
Hapgood's career takes
kind of a weird twist.
He meets up with
a psychic medium
by the name of Elwood Babbitt.
And Babbitt channels
various historical figures
from antiquity, everybody
from Jesus to Mark Twain,
and he records these
with Hapgood in a
series of interviews.
This really casts a shadow
on Hapgood's
scholarly credibility.
That this is the direction
his career takes,
makes a lot of people
look quite differently
at his earlier work,
despite the acclaim it may
have at one time received
from Albert Einstein.
But a 2012 book called
"Atlantis Beneath the Ice"
researcher Rand Flem-Ath
revisits Hapgood's ideas
about the lost kingdom.
He goes ahead and
takes these maps
of Antarctica from pre-9,600 BCE
and lines them up with maps
from Athanasius Kircher
and makes an exciting discovery,
which is that the
shapes found on both
of the maps are a
near-perfect match,
proving that Atlantis
is Antarctica.
Some people will still hold that
as climate change continues
and the ice on Antarctica
begins to melt,
once and for all, we will find
the lost ruins of Atlantis
beneath the ice.
The reason why people
get excited about looking
for Atlantis is
because it really is the world's
greatest unsolved mystery.
Did it exist, was
it all made up?
And if somebody finds out
whether that was true or not,
it's gonna be one
of the most amazing
discoveries of all time.
Perhaps Plato really was
inventing the story of Atlantis
for literary effect,
and the details were just
inspired by real places.
But the search is far from over.
Teams of investigators
continue to hunt
for clues all over the world.
in Ireland, the
mountains of Belize,
the waters of the
Caribbean, and beyond,
all operating on the assumption
that Atlantis did exist.
Maybe someday one of them
will dig up the temple
of Poseidon, and that's
when we'll know the kingdom
of Atlantis was no myth at all.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching
"History's Greatest Mysteries."