Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (9 page)

Still, I was trying to keep an open mind. I asked where the Egyptians would have gotten the maps.

“I think the survivors of Atlantis are those that got the boats,” Flem-Ath told me. “On boats you have two things that are portable: astronomy and maps.”

He had a point. “Is there any way you could ever prove this?” I asked.

“Well, the easiest thing would be if a large part of ice fell off Antarctica and there were human structures underneath.”

The biggest problem I had with Flem-Ath’s theory wasn’t its audacity, nor was it his unshakable faith in diffusionism and catastrophism. It was that his forward-looking ideas were largely based on scientific information from the era of “Our Friend the Atom.” Hapgood’s original theory and Einstein’s noncommittal affirmation of it were proposed in the 1950s when the theory of continental drift was in its infancy, but Flem-Ath hasn’t updated his evidence much past that time. As we chatted, he kept citing data that was fifty years old and sometimes older. I started tapping my fingers when he began talking about how some ancient ruins near Lake Titicaca—very important to the World Ice Theory—had been built more than ten thousand years ago, an idea that has been disproven many times over. (The site’s structures seem to have been built several centuries after Plato died.) When he mentioned that ancient myths indicated Machu Picchu in Peru had been built by the Incas as a refuge from floods, I got impatient.

“Rand, all of this stuff you’re telling me is considered beyond the fringe. It’s been discredited.”

“Well, maybe, but that’s not a very important part of my theory,” he said. He admitted that some of his sources were old but insisted that the Earth Crust Displacement Theory was still ahead of its time. “I’m better off bypassing scientists and reaching for a general audience, maybe two or three generations down the road,” he said.

In the last line of his book
Atlantis Beneath the Ice
, Flem-Ath proposes what might happen at that future point: “Science and myth might merge.” It’s an idea that went out of style not long after Plato ended the
Critias
midsentence. It didn’t require the powers of an Einstein—or the foresight of an Edgar Cayce—to see that such a partnership was unlikely to make a comeback anytime soon.

Dr. Kühne, I Presume

Braunschweig, Germany

H
aving heard two very different versions of the Tartessos hypothesis from Richard Freund and Juan Villarias-Robles, I decided it seemed like a good idea to dig a little deeper by meeting Rainer Kühne and Werner Wickboldt, the German researchers who had reignited the search for Atlantis with their analysis of the Doñana satellite photos. Conveniently, both men lived in the same midsize city near Germany’s old east-west border. Inconveniently, they disliked each other intensely. I booked a flight to Düsseldorf and rode the train four hours to Braunschweig.

The week before my arrival in Germany I had reread Kühne’s
Antiquity
article and e-mailed to remind him of our appointment. I promised to send a confirmation note the day before I got there. “Hi Mark,” he replied, two days later. “I use a public PC only and cannot check my email every day.” This struck me as a little odd for a professor of physics. I agreed to telephone him at home when I arrived at the Braunschweig train station. It was an autumn Tuesday, but Kühne said he’d be home all day.

My taxi dropped me off in front of an apartment block. I pressed the buzzer, and Kühne met me at the door. He was in his early
forties, frightfully thin, with sunken freckled cheeks and thinning reddish hair with flecks of white in it. His old striped sweater hung loose on him. I thought of something the organizer of the Atlantis conferences had told me: “We invite Kühne every time, but he says he has no money.” We shook hands and he led me into his one-bedroom apartment. I’d been up late the night before and had caught a train at dawn, so I was hoping he’d offer me a cup of coffee and warm up with a little get-to-know-you chitchat. Instead, he motioned for me to take a seat and sat down across from me as if ready to play chess.

Between us was a coffee table covered with books, maps, and papers. The piles were so precisely lined up that they might have been laid out with surveying tools. A pen and paper had been attached to a clipboard for my use. Kühne sat up very straight on the edge of the sofa and folded his hands in his lap, then pushed the clipboard slightly in my direction.

“So, you have questions about my Atlantis theory,” he said.

“Um, yes. How did you become interested in Atlantis?”

“That was when I was a child, about ten years old. I read a cartoon book, a duck story where he had discovered Atlantis in the deep sea. This was the book here, just a moment.” He stood up and took two steps to his bookcase. One entire shelf appeared to be taken up by a row of identical bound volumes, presumably physics journals of some sort. Did he just say
duck
story? Maybe
düch
was a German word I could look up later, some category of Bavarian folklore. “It was this one here. You know it, perhaps?”

He opened the book,
The Secret of Atlantis
, and pointed out a cartoon of Scrooge McDuck, Donald’s wealthy uncle, encountering a vast undersea city inhabited by men-fish. I was indeed familiar with this work, having read it in the third grade. It had not, to the best of my recollection, been footnoted in his
Antiquity
article.

“I bet that’s just what Plato had in mind,” I said, an uncaffeinated
man’s sad attempt at a joke. Kühne stared at me blankly for two seconds.

“They are looking for a coin they have lost,” he said. “This is the story.” He placed the book back in its assigned spot on the shelf. “Then I looked up in the encyclopedia that Atlantis exists outside of the cartoon book. We know this because Plato reported on it.” Kühne began his boyhood research reading books from his local library that placed Atlantis in unlikely spots such as the Bahamas and England, before finding Jürgen Spanuth’s
Atlantis of the North
. Spanuth’s theory posited that Atlantis had existed on the island Helgoland, in the North Sea off of Germany.

Kühne told me he wasn’t convinced by Spanuth’s book, but he was impressed by two of his arguments. “First, Plato does not write only of Atlantis but also of its opponent, Athens. Spanuth thinks the Athens Plato describes is of the Mycenaean time”—that is, of the Greek Bronze Age between 1600 and 1100 BC. Plato’s story is really a tale of two cities, but this fact rarely comes up in discussions about Atlantis.

“Also,” Kühne continued, “Spanuth says the war Plato describes is a war between the Sea Peoples and Egypt.”

Like Atlantis, the Sea Peoples are one of the great unsolved mysteries of antiquity. Hieroglyphs on the walls of an ancient Nile temple tell the story of two invasions of Egypt during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC. The attacks were launched by a fearsome confederation of armies who arrived in boats from the Mediterranean. Kühne’s
Antiquity
article had carried forward Spanuth’s idea that the Sea Peoples were transformed into the Atlanteans sometime between their defeat and Plato’s writing of the
Timaeus
.

Intrigued by Spanuth’s new interpretation, Kühne tried to locate Atlantis. “Plato said exactly where Atlantis was,” he told me. “In the Atlantic Sea, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, facing the Gaderian country. This is pretty clearly west of Gibraltar, south of Spain, or
north of Morocco. Of course it cannot be in the center of the Atlantic Ocean because it is impossible, geologically. Plato described a great rectangular plain surrounded by mountains, but the capital of Atlantis was situated on the south coast, which later sank and became a mud sea. Where is the south coast in front of Gibraltar? What about Spain or Portugal?”

I assumed Kühne’s questions were rhetorical, since we were not actually having a conversation. He was delivering a monologue that sounded like a very technical PowerPoint presentation without the diversion of the visual aids. He had been speaking nonstop for about forty-five minutes. His body language was pure FORTRAN.

“The great plain that Plato described should be in Spain, between Cádiz and the border with Portugal, southwest of Seville. Plato also described the capital of Atlantis within the plain as fifty stades from the coast.” About nine kilometers, or six miles. “So you look nine kilometers from the southwest coast and you are directly in the marshes of the Doñana Park.”

Kühne removed a map from one of his piles and unfolded it on the table. He began to describe in detail the various features of the landscape in Doñana—marshes, rivers, dunes. I thought to interject and mention that I’d seen all these things in person, but Kühne seemed to be building momentum toward something. I wasn’t sure if I could stop him anyway. Finally, pointing to a spot I recognized from Werner Wickboldt’s satellite photos, he said, “And this is what I thought was the Temple of Poseidon. This was my hypothesis ten years ago, yes. I’m not certain now if this idea was right.”

The scientist whose article in
Antiquity
had launched two major projects in Doñana was having second thoughts about his theory! This detail had been left out of the
Finding Atlantis
documentary. Kühne’s thinking had evolved. He still thought Tartessos had been real. Atlantis was proving to be a little more complicated.

“What changed your mind?” I asked.

“Okay, first I say why I believe that Atlantis was not
only
fiction,” he said. Kühne explained that several of the details Plato gives about ancient Athens matched up with the Bronze Age city. For example, a long-lost spring that he locates on the Acropolis was rediscovered in the twentieth century. It had been smothered by an earthquake around 1200 BC. “Plato said that because of this earthquake, people who know the art of writing disappeared.” Scholars of ancient history agree that after an unexplained societal upheaval, Greece fell into a long period of illiteracy that also began around 1200 BC. Plato writes that before this cataclysm, the Acropolis had been many times its current size, stretching from the River Ilisos to its tributary the Eridanos, a distance of nearly a mile. “Of course, Plato cannot be entirely right because the Acropolis should be as large as Athens of his time. An impossibility, much too large. So Plato had a bit of fantasy. But it is clear he wrote about Athens and no city elsewhere.”

As for the Atlanteans, Kühne said, the priests of Saïs in Egypt had told Solon the story of “the war against the Sea Peoples, also about 1200 BC. These descriptions exist today in Medinet Habu in a temple.” This temple is part of the vast Theban necropolis built along the Nile. Its hieroglyphs have been a primary source of Egyptian history since the decoding of the Rosetta stone in the nineteenth century. “The similarities are that both the Atlanteans and the Sea Peoples came from islands; that they ruled over Libya; that they had armies, a strong navy, and a large number of troops; that they fought against all eastern Mediterranean countries; that they finally lost the war; and after the war there occurred floods and earthquakes.” Or at least the hieroglyphs could be interpreted that way.

“But it is not exactly the same because Plato wrote that the Atlanteans had triremes”—Greek warships with oars—“but the Sea Peoples had sailing boats. The Atlanteans had chariots that could not move without horses. The Sea Peoples had carts and no horses, but oxen. And of course the Sea Peoples were beaten by the Egyptians,
but the Atlanteans were beaten by Athens. So I don’t think that Plato has written about historical truths but has either taken historical truth and heavily distorted it or he made a fiction out of it.”

Kühne spoke excellent English—all Germans I met seemed to speak excellent English—but he pronounced the names of ancient peoples and places in his native accent. He rattled off long, comprehensive lists from memory. When he started rapidly naming the many tribes that had lived in the Middle East at the time of the Sea Peoples invasion, I couldn’t understand anything he said (not even weeks later when I repeatedly listened to a recording of it while simultaneously reviewing my interview notes and scanning websites about ancient history). It was a lot more detail than my tired brain could process. I thought about the three flights I had the next day, a twelve-hour journey to the Greek islands via Munich and Athens. I wondered if they served good coffee in Greece. It occurred to me that I needed to use the facilities.

“Rainer, may I use your bathroom?”

“And now we see an interesting thing!” he said, taking out a new stack of photographs.

Maybe I could wait. “What’s that?”

“When you look here, the cities have no similarity to Atlantis. No large concentric circles. No harbor. No triremes. Chariots, yes, perhaps. But everything else is completely different. No large plain. No channels. So something must be wrong.”

“So what you’re saying is it’s not really possible to search for Atlantis.”

“It depends. Can you search for Gotham City in the Batman comic? Of course, if you have only the Batman comic, you will say no. But if you dig it out, you can find New York. So is it Gotham City or not? If you know nothing of Gotham City you say, New York found. If you know New York first, and not Gotham City, you would
say this is New York but not Gotham City. It depends on your point of view. If you know about Atlantis but not the historical facts, some people would say it is Atlantis.”

I wasn’t so sure about Kühne’s either/or distinction; he seemed to be saying the Atlantis tale had to be either completely true or false. At the very least the Sea Peoples deserved a closer look. Instead of expressing my concerns, I asked again if I could use the bathroom. Kühne ignored the question and removed a satellite photo of Doñana from his pile and started to point out microscopic things he saw in it.

“Where did you find this picture?” I asked, crossing my legs.

He raised his head, startled by the interruption. “It is from the Internet. I don’t know where. I lost it.” He returned to pointing out features on the satellite photo. I couldn’t sit through another laundry list.

“How did you happen to publish that first article in
Antiquity
?”

Kühne looked up and smiled. “It was luck! Hee hee! I tried to publish something in
Antiquity
when I was twenty-two years old. I had not much success. It was rejected. Then in 2003 I restarted it with the idea that Atlantis maybe was referred to as Tartessos. I was rather certain then that they were the same.”

“And now?” I asked.

“Now? Mmmm, maybe it really was only Tartessos.” He pulled a new satellite photo from his stack. “Where are the circular harbors, the inner rings?”

“Hmm, good point. Rainer, I really need to use the bathroom.”

“This is only a cross section . . .”

“RAINER, I NEED TO USE THE BATHROOM,” I said, standing up.

Kühne stood up, too. “The bathroom, yes, it is in the hallway.”

As I was returning to my seat, I noticed that Kühne’s neatly made
bed was covered with stuffed animals, lined up in a neat row. Kühne was still standing, like an android in sleep mode while awaiting my return.

“Rainer, what do your friends and family think about your interest in Atlantis?” I asked, sitting down.

“They don’t know much about it. My parents are not scholars and friends are few. Of course I had students when I was doing physics. But they were talking about physics and not about Atlantis. I’m also staying alone for twenty years. My personality is a loner. Other people cannot be alone but I can. I have a great theory about magnetic monopoles. This is a generalization of quantum electrodynamics and also of general relativity. My paper was published in a scientific journal, but the prestige is nearly zero. It does not help to find a job. But I have the physics theory and maybe in one hundred years someone will prove it. Why not! Ha ha!”

“Maybe.”

“Other people also publish their theories not in the best journals but they are confirmed now.” He mentioned Alfred Wegener and Gregor Mendel, respectively the discoverers of continental drift and genetics. If Galileo and Copernicus are the icons of heretical Renaissance thinking, then Wegener and Mendel, whose ideas were rejected as too radical by scientists with more prestigious credentials, are their modern heirs. They were the patron saints of all amateur researchers whose work isn’t taken seriously, which would include almost anyone interested in Atlantis. “So maybe not during my lifetime but maybe after I am gone.”