Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (22 page)

“What the fringe means by
accurate
is ‘Gee, it looks the same to me,’” McIntosh told me.

Selective picking and choosing of evidence was, of course, a problem with every Atlantis location theory to some degree. Tony O’Connell had cautioned me about that from the get-go. I’d seen the sites in Spain, Malta, and Santorini, and while all seemed plausible candidates to one degree or another, the hypothesis behind each
reflected the bias of its authors. I could empathize. My own journalistic objectivity about this project had long since evaporated. By this point I didn’t just want to figure out why people were searching for Atlantis. I wanted to find it, too.

Plato’s purpose in the
Timaeus
had been to impose mathematical logic on the cosmos, so it seemed appropriate to make my last stop in Morocco. There, I’d been promised, Atlantis had already been found strictly by the numbers.

Statistically Speaking

Bonn, Germany; and Agadir, Morocco

E
ven the most math-obsessed Greeks before Plato’s time didn’t study probability. They were more interested in the power of gods like Poseidon to determine their fates. To learn what the residents of Olympus might be thinking, ancient Greeks consulted oracles, shrines where prophets could answer questions and prognosticate based on contact with the supernatural world. The most famous of these was the Oracle of Delphi, where a priestess passed along cryptic messages from Apollo that time and again redirected the course of ancient history. In Plato’s
Apology
, Socrates tells the story of hearing that the Delphic oracle had declared no man was wiser than Socrates himself. He took this to mean that he was wisest because only he understood how limited his knowledge was.

While oracles may have been handy, there’s little doubt that Plato would have preferred statistics, with its magical-seeming formulas and bell curves that tease out the unseen patterns underlying the world. But it was Aristotle, the great taxonomist, who first classified events into three types: certain, probable, and unpredictable. As I packed my bags in Athens to fly to Morocco, I knew what Plato must’ve felt like to be stuck between Socrates and Aristotle. I knew
what I didn’t know about Atlantis, and I knew that there were some things I couldn’t know. I also thought I might be zeroing in on some probable answers. First I needed to meet the one Atlantologist who had used statistical modeling to search for Plato’s lost civilization, and got surprisingly definite results.

•   •   •

Back in Malta, Tony O’Connell had spoken so highly of Michael Hübner’s work on Atlantis that I’d sensed Anton Mifsud was a little jealous. Hübner’s theory was far and away the most objective I’d seen—he had located Atlantis strictly by analyzing the data he could glean from Plato’s accounts. After watching Hübner’s half-hour online video presentation, I understood why Tony had written in the Atlantipedia that “although there are still some outstanding questions in my mind, I consider Hübner’s hypothesis one of the more convincing on offer to date.” Hübner had pinpointed the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

I had first met Hübner in Bonn on my way to visit Kühne and Wickboldt. Hübner lived a few blocks from Beethoven’s old house, on a pretty tree-lined street that in midautumn looked like a movie set for a European romantic comedy. He was a big man, well over six feet tall and bearish, with a long ponytail and a four-day growth of beard. He invited me into his one-bedroom apartment and immediately handed me a piece of tangible Atlantis evidence he’d brought back from Morocco: a chunk of rock that had red, white, and black striations like a slice of Poseidon’s marble cheesecake.

Hübner brewed me an enormous cup of tea and offered me a selection of pastries on a platter before sitting down at his desk. The surface was crowded with two open laptop computers and a large microscope. Since science and philosophy have been moving in opposite directions almost since the
Timaeus
, I told Hübner I thought it was odd that an information technology specialist had taken an interest in Plato.

“One day I was carrying a washing machine and my back cracked,” he explained in a voice that was surprisingly soft for a man built like a nightclub bouncer. “I was in bed for two weeks—even going to the toilet was . . .
ach
. I used the time in bed to read Plato.” Like so many others before him, he was struck by the level of detail in the Atlantis story. Rather than just ponder the lost city as a
Gedankenexperiment
, he said, “I made an Excel file and put the entire text of Plato into it.”

Because he was mathematically inclined, Hübner decided to locate the most probable site for Atlantis through a search procedure known as hierarchical constraint satisfaction. It was a statistical method of plugging variables—in this instance, data from the
Timaeus
and
Critias
—into a map overlaid with a grid. The more variables that matched a set of geographic coordinates, the higher the probability that particular square had once contained Plato’s lost island. The overall effect was like a game of Battleship, with the location of Atlantis as the prize.

Hübner started with the assumption that Atlantis must be “within a reasonable distance” of Athens, which he set at five thousand kilometers, or about thirty-one hundred miles. (His point of reference was the forty-seven hundred kilometers that Alexander the Great reached in his farthest military campaigns.) Such an area encompasses virtually all of Europe, Africa north of the equator, and the Middle East. Hübner then mapped this zone onto a twenty-by-twenty grid, creating four hundred possible subareas in which Atlantis might have been located. From there, he worked his way through seven geographical clues that Plato gave. Each subarea was awarded points for being on a coast; for being situated on a large body of water that was connected to the Mediterranean; for sitting west of Egypt and Tyrrhenia (modern Tuscany); for having tall mountains to its north (Hübner found nine such locations in his master zone); for sitting outside the Strait of Gibraltar (he didn’t consider any other candidates for the Pillars of Heracles); for containing elephants (not,
as some Atlantologists have posited, mammoths, because the flora and fauna Plato describes indicate a tropical or subtropical climate); and—because Atlantis was planning to attack Europe and Asia, two of the ancient Greek world’s three primary land masses—for sitting within Libya, or what we now call North Africa. (I thought this was the shakiest of his assumptions. Would the Maltese islands, which lay farther south than Carthage, have been considered part of Europe? Couldn’t a distant land such as Tartessos be a possibility?) When Hübner tallied up his scores, one of the four hundred squares clearly stood out—a chunk of modern-day coastal Morocco, just south of the Atlas Mountains, known as the Souss-Massa region.

When Hübner added his regional and local constraints, the evidence was even more compelling. Perhaps the most appealing part of his hypothesis was his comparisons with Plato’s strangely precise descriptions and measurements for the capital of Atlantis. Hübner had found a circular hill surrounded by three concentric
wadis
, or dry riverbeds. The measurements for the diameter of his outermost ring and the distance of his capital from the Atlantic Ocean varied by only about 10 percent from Plato’s numbers. On paper, at least, he made a compelling case.

“You know perhaps Six Sigma?” Hübner asked, referring to the quality-control term in which 99.999 percent of a company’s products are manufactured defect-free. Particle physicists must reach a Five Sigma level of certainty before they are credited with making a scientific discovery. He pointed to the map on his computer screen. “Well, if Plato’s criteria are real, this is better than Seven Sigma.”

If the numbers were on Hübner’s side, time was not. When Hübner started visiting the area several years earlier following his lower-lumbar epiphany, it had been covered in ancient ruins built from colored stone, but these were rapidly being dug up and pulverized to make pigment for paint. The only archaeological expert on the area that Hübner was able to locate was a professor at the University of
Agadir, who showed little interest in the Neolithic ruins. European scholars had even less interest in a Moroccan site.

“I tried to get some German experts involved, but in my experience it’s very hard to get scientists to look at this place,” he told me.

“Why?”

“I think I made a mistake by mentioning Atlantis. They are afraid of getting contaminated.”

Hübner had arranged for me to stay overnight at his father’s house in a nearby suburb of Bonn, so we climbed into his red Volkswagen, which seemed a couple of sizes too small for him. On the way out of town we talked about his use of sources other than Plato. Hübner was an admirer of the works of Diodorus Siculus, a Greek born in Sicily in the first century BC. Diodorus was the author of the
Bibliotheca Historica
, a forty-volume universal history of the world from mythological times to his present. One of the fifteen volumes that remain deals with the history of North Africa. Diodorus wrote of a land bordered by the Atlas Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, ruled by a king named Atlas. The land, which occupied the same space Hübner’s calculations had zeroed in on, was called Atlantis.

“I don’t think his work was much based on Plato because there are differences,” Hübner told me as we merged into rush-hour traffic. Where Plato says that Atlas is the eldest son of Poseidon, Diodorus said he was the son of the Titan Iapetus. Tony O’Connell agreed that this indicated separate sources for the two Atlantis tales, a rare case of possible corroboration.

“The names Diodorus used were a little different, too,” Hübner said, shifting gears. “He called the people the Atalantoi.
Scheisse!
” Hübner had been so involved in reciting his evidence that we had taken the wrong exit and were crossing a bridge over the Rhine. In Diodorus’s telling, a tribe of women warriors called the Amazons lived in Atalantoi territory on an island within a large freshwater North African lake. The island was eventually destroyed by
earthquakes, which caused most of the water to drain into the sea, leaving behind only a marsh.

Another ancient source that Hübner used, the second-century-AD writer Maximus of Tyre, also describes an area in West Africa that sounds a lot like the spot that Hübner had focused on. In this place, Maximus wrote, ocean waves had been known to rise “like a wall” and flood the coastal plain. The Souss-Massa was certainly susceptible to seismic disasters. A 1960 earthquake had leveled the regional capital of Agadir and killed fifteen thousand people.

When I’d first contacted Hübner, he’d briefly tried to explain where all his most important sites were located via GPS coordinates but soon sensed (correctly) that I would probably take a wrong turn at Marrakesh and vanish forever into the Sahara. He had agreed to meet me in Morocco to show me his evidence personally. To celebrate our forthcoming trip, his stepmother had prepared a traditional Moroccan tagine for dinner, and the smell of lamb and couscous followed us out onto the balcony, where we watched barges traveling up and down the Rhine. Hübner’s father, a stern-looking older man with thick white hair and a bushy mustache, joined us. He told me that he had been a little boy at the end of World War II. “The American GIs I met after the war were very kind,” he said. “They gave me a piece of chewing tobacco and I swallowed it.”

Over dinner, we chatted about Hübner’s hypothesis, which his family had evidently heard many times. He had a Pythagorean faith in numbers and no patience for ambiguous factors like Platonic allegories or fabricated myths. Either Atlantis was real and had almost certainly been located where he placed it, or it was complete fiction. “If my hypothesis was incorrect, the result would be a null set,” he explained.

Near midnight Hübner drove back to Bonn, and his father and I sat quietly in the living room looking out the large picture window. The commuter train that I was going to be running for in a few
hours rolled past along the riverbank. “I suppose Michael’s been to Morocco eight or nine times to search for Atlantis,” he finally said. “I know he thinks it’s real. But . . .” He looked tired, and for a moment I thought he might have dozed off.

“But what if it
isn’t
real?” he finally said.

•   •   •

At his apartment in Bonn, Hübner had offered me a little veteran advice about traveling to Morocco. “I wouldn’t tell the people at the airport that you’re a journalist,” he said. “They lock those people up in Morocco.” I’d figured out by then that Hübner was a little suspicious by nature, but even in the wake of the Arab Spring, his paranoia seemed overblown. About a week later, after a long day flying from Athens to Madrid to Casablanca—where crowds of people filled almost every foot of airport floor space, waiting for four flights that boarded simultaneously like rush-hour trains leaving Times Square—I arrived at Agadir Al Massira Airport around 1:30
A.M.
as tired as I have ever been. I approached an open immigration window, handed over my passport, and waited for the stamping sound as I squinted into the atrium beyond hoping to spot a currency exchange.

“You speak English?” the man behind the glass asked.

“Yes.”

“It says here you are a writer.” Oops. “What sort of writing do you do?” he asked. “Are you a reporter?
Why have you come to Morocco?
”

The answer, “to find Atlantis,” seemed inappropriate, so instead I mumbled something about vacationing and watched in silent terror as he slowly paged through my suddenly suspicious-looking passport: Ireland, Spain, Malta, Germany, Greece, now Morocco. My shoulder bag at this point contained two tape recorders holding hours of interviews that might require some explaining, several notebooks filled with similar material, and a laptop that if opened
would display a new file named
ATLANTIS INTERVIEW NOTES—MOROCCO
. I could imagine the US embassy official roused out of bed to handle this crisis. (“Male, traveling alone, looking for Atlantis? I’ll try to get back to you on that next week.”) Mercifully, the agent silently handed back my passport and allowed me to pass through.

In the morning, I took one of Agadir’s ubiquitous early-’80s-vintage Mercedes taxis to Hübner’s hotel in the foothills outside of the city. (He didn’t like Agadir, which caters to French package tourists who like sunbathing, and by the time I departed neither did I.) The main thoroughfare, Avenue Mohammed V, became the N10 highway, and once we turned north onto dirt roads, the only time the taxi slowed or stopped was to allow a herd of camels to cross. In the hotel parking lot I told Hübner about my odd airport entry and he seemed unsurprised. “
Ja
, they track you by your phone signal, too,” he said.

I have to assume that a moderately skilled secret police force could have nabbed us at any moment if they wanted to: a sunburned white guy with tortoiseshell glasses and a hulking white guy with a foot-long ponytail, driving around the desolate foothills of the Atlas Mountains in a gigantic Nissan Pathfinder 4 x 4, openly consulting the map that Hübner had downloaded to his oversize laptop.