Atlantis Ancient Civilization and UFO

The Atlantis story is part ancient myth and part modern legend. Atlantis, as an island in the Atlantic, first appears as a parable in two of Plato’s Dialogues. Plato asserted that the story of Atlantis had been brought to Athens from Egypt by the Greek poet Solon, so many have supposed there may have been some historical basis for Plato’s tale. However, it could also be that Plato was simply using the legend of Atlantis as a narrative leadin to the meat of his analysis-without being particularly concerned about the legend’s historical truth-as he does with other myths elsewhere in his Dialogues.

For the Greek philosopher, the story of Atlantis was primarily a morality tale: In many ways parallel to the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, Plato’s narrative of Atlantis describes a kind of earthly paradise that was destroyed by the gods after its rulers became puffed up and greedy.Thus, as with many other versions of the flood myth that is told worldwide, the Atlantean deluge was explained as a form of divine punishment.

However, it should also be noted that the cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis was not just confined to the island nation; it devastated other areas of the world as well. In particular, in Critias, Plato indicates that the Athenian army that threw back the Atlantean invaders was destroyed in the same cataclysm:“But afterward there occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of rain all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared, and was sunk beneath the sea.” Thus, the Atlantean cataclysm was presumably also a universal cataclysm that had an impact on the entire world, or at least that with which Plato was familiar, namely, the Eastern Mediterranean.

Several contemporary scholars have proposed alternate sites for the legendary isle. Most compelling is the theory, originally advanced early in the twentieth century, that Plato’s story of Atlantis actually describes the destruction of Cretan civilization by a volcanic explosion in 1470 B.C.E. An alternative argument, put forward by Eberhard Zangger in The Flood from Heaven (1992), is that the myth refers to the Achaean destruction of Troy in the fourteenth century B.C.E.

There has been some interest in Atlantis over the centuries, but the Christian civilization of traditional Europe tended to discourage such speculation. After the Americas were encountered by Europeans, several writers penned works arguing that the newly discovered continents were Plato’s Atlantis. Subsequently, interest in the ancient tale of a sunken isle waned. In terms of belief in the existence of an antediluvian world, Atlantis is more of a modern than a traditional myth-a myth that did not achieve widespread currency until the late nineteenth century, more than two millennia after Plato’s time.