130. Atlantis Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight – Jack Kelley

Like most people, writer and filmmaker Jack Kelley thought Plato’s account of Atlantis was just an allegory when he, during a vacation on the Greek island of Santorini, was drawn into a world of research that takes the Platonic story seriously. Even in that world, however, there are diverging opinions about the location of the lost civilization. Jack came across the work of Greek engineer and linguist George Sarantitis and thought: “This guy might actually have cracked it.” He made contact, and the collaboration that followed resulted in the newly released documentary The Atlantis Puzzle, based on Sarantits’ groundbreaking findings (watch and give a review here or here). Taking Plato’s account seriously is controversial. “The very idea of Atlantis is frightening to mainstream academic researchers. They could easily end up looking like fools. The risk-reward is not there. That keeps a lot of first-class minds from seriously addressing what this subject is really about. And Sarantitis is a first-class mind”, Jack says. George Sarantitis refused to believe the two Plato dialogues Timaeus and Critias, where Atlantis is discussed, were just nonsense fables. He retranslated the texts and realized that important concepts had been misinterpreted for centuries. For example, an ‘Atlantic pelagos’ does not mean ‘The Atlantic ocean’. ‘Pelagos’ is a lesser sea. Earlier translators had only made an assumption, because nobody had ever heard of an ‘Atlantic pelagos’. Sarantitis found a few other things that hadn't been well delineated. For instance, three words for ‘island’ are being thrown around. This retranslation led him to the conclusion that ‘the pillars of Herakles’, a crucial reference, probably doesn’t mean the strait of Gibraltar, which completely changes the idea of where Atlantis may have been located. Sarantitis’ surprising hypothesis is that the ‘pelagos’ was a series of navigable inland megalakes in northwest Africa where one could sail to the empire known as Atlantis. It is a fact that there are a series of huge salt lakes in the area that indicate that there was once a large body of water, and we now know that the Sahara was a lot wetter at the time Plato points to. Then there is the much-talked-about Richat structure, the ‘Eye of the Sahara’, which well matches Plato’s description of the Atlantean capital. So, if there was a civilization in this area, why did it disappear? If the extreme climatological changes during the latter part of the Younger Dryas (matches Plato’s time frame) were accompanied by earthquakes, tsunamis and other geophysical disasters, a civilizational collapse is plausible. Jack engaged preeminent earthquake expert Dr Scott Ashford for the documentary. “According to Ashford, Plato is accurately describing what the effects of the combination of these natural disasters would have been”, Jack says. Was Atlantis advanced? In Jack’s mind, it was sort of advanced for its time but probably more of a hunter-gatherer than a bronze age kind of society. He does not subscribe to the more grand theories out there. But he does give other independent researchers credit for pushing the idea that mainstream academia is ignoring many signs of lost human worlds in lands that are now below water, not just the one Plato is talking about. There are hundreds of ancient flood myths, for example. “Clearly there were kingdoms, tribes, even empires that we don’t have any names for today”, Jack says.