Atlantis is Santorini

To study the alleged history of Atlantis is to journey back in time onto a magnificent continent of antiquity... to hear the cry of vendors in the crowded markets of the capital city... to listen to the clang of armor and weapons as imperial guards troop by... to see the glitter of royal crowns amidst thousands of cheering subjects. This is the vision of bygone beauty which has impelled countless scholars and scientists to turn their backs on the magnificence of their labs in modern New York, their libraries in Paris or colonnaded museums in Rome to devote a lifetime to the search for the dead, seaweed-encrusted remains of a lost, centuries-old continent—which indeed may never have existed.

These honest scientists are perhaps not the most fascinating Atlantis-seekers. Far more amusing are the theories of the many charlatans, cosmologists, faith healers and crackpots who over the years have seen Atlantis as a non-debatable historical proof for every variety of strange philosophy they may espouse. Atlantis attracts the kind of fanatics who spend their entire lives trying to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. The Atlantis theme has, over the years, been tied variously to romanticism, racism, pacifism, theosophy, socialism, communism and spiritualism. Crackpots have linked it with cannibalism, the Cyclops and flying saucers as well.

A Russian cosmologist named Velikovsky insisted that Jupiter erupted millennia ago and spewed up a fiery comet which sped past the earth in 1 600 or 1 500 B.C., swamping Atlantis in the same roaring tide which parted the Red Sea and conveniently allowed the children of Israel to pass into the Promised Land. He explains that historians make no record of this event with the convenient rationale that the human race suffers from "collective amnesia."