Atlantis is Santorini

The most monumental Atlantis hoax was perpetrated by Herman Schleimann who, in 1912, conned the New York American into running a lengthy feature story entitled "How I Discovered Atlantis, the Source of All Civilization." This not only sold newspapers to impressed New Yorkers by the thousands, but so befuddled the academic world that many texts and source books on the Atlantis legend still list facts and figures from Schleimann's daring piece of science fiction.

Atlantis has never yet been absolutely identified or pinpointed on the earth's surface. Numerous scientists have periodically amassed mounds of conflicting evidence to "definitely and indisputably" locate the mysterious continent variously in South, West and North Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, the Caucasus, Ceylon, Spitsbergen, 1 3,000 feet up in the Andes and in the Baltic Sea. Racial experts have credited Atlantis with fathering both the Spanish and the Italian races, and one of Hitler's hack philosophers in the 30's actually tried to trace Aryan supremacy back to the glorious Atlantans, locating the island just a few miles off the Nazi coastline.

A few years ago no less than three costly expeditions were simultaneously exploring different world sites in a futile search for the remains of Atlantis. Depth charges and sonar were being bounced off the ocean bottom near the Azores; a descendant of Leon Trotsky was skin-diving off Bermuda in search of the lost country, while the Discovery II, a British research ship, charted the Galicia Bank, a steep-sided, 20-mile-long protruberance in the seabed 2,400-feet under the Atlantic's surface 30 miles off the coast of Spain, another alleged site of the lost continent.