In Search Of…Atlantis!

In the days leading up to the March 1st release of my collection In Search Of and Others, I’ll be sharing some of my idiosyncratic questions on the so-called “paranormal”…and their idiosyncratic answers.

Ooh, the Island of Incipient Racism!

After Plato’s first allegorical mention of this fallen empire of peace and progress in 360BC, Atlantis became a kind of anthropological “dark matter,” an invisible but necessary force for scholars to explain how dirt-scratching Meso-Americans could have learned to build those fancy-pants cities. Whenever an explorer discovered something of surprising sophistication made by brown people, there were always the angelic Atlanteans to explain where they’d gotten it.

Ignatius Donnelly went even further in 1882, claiming that Atlantis was the root of ALL civilizations. Madame Blavatsky considered the Atlanteans as heroes of “racial evolution,” a concept that the Nazis jumped on with both hobnail boots a few decades later. Noted American screwball Edgar Cayce saw visions of Atlantis in his dreams and predicted it would rise in the 60s, which explains the sudden god-like appearance of Steve Jobs.

Come on. If anybody was an Atlantean, it was that guy.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Atlantis was a convenient dumping hole for pot-fueled fantasies about the future — probably just as it was for Plato: “Man, in Atlantis, parents totally don’t hassle their kids about long hair.” As we’ve learned more about plate tectonics, though, the less likely it seems that a continent could rise and sink in human history yet leave no trace.

Oh, except for that weird ass road in about twenty feet of water off the coast of the Bahamas.

The Bimini Road is a half-mile stretch of limestone blocks that look a little like a massive paved boulevard leading to and from nowhere. In the Atlantis episode, In Search Of boldly proclaimed it was either a road or a buried wall. Their footage seemed to focus only on a thirty-foot section of semi-rectangular blocks so the effect is pleasantly eerie.

“Holy shit,” you want to say while watching it. “There’s a road down there!”

It helps to be nine or so when you see it.

Yet, sadly, annoying eggheads have again pissed all over our dreams by claiming it is a natural formation, and they’ve used carbon dating and other stupid “science” to prove it.

They’d better watch themselves, though. That’s just the kind of hubris that got the Atlanteans killed in the first place.