Atlantis Ancient Civilization and UFO

Contemporary interest in the legend began with Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), in which he proposed that the human race and human civilization had begun on that island and had initially spread elsewhere by colonization, then by refugees when the island was destroyed by a natural cataclysm. Donnelly’s ideas were adopted as an integral element of theosophy in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. The most important author who spread interest in Atlantis was, however, Lewis Spence (1874-1955), a Scottish occult scholar who wrote five books on Atlantis between 1924 and 1943.

From these sources, the focus on Atlantis passed to Edgar Cayce, who used it as a parable, much as Plato had, in his readings. After Cayce’s death, two compilations of such material were released by the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Atlantis: Fact or Fiction, and Edgar Cayce on Atlantis. These two paperbacks were the source for most beliefs about Atlantis within the New Age movement.Cayce predicted that evidence for the historical existence of Atlantis would be found offshore from North America in the 1960s. To date, however, the most that has been discovered is a roadway-like series of stones on the ocean floor-stones that might be a natural phenomenon rather than an artifact of human design. In the early 1980s, Frank Alper, in Exploring Atlantis, extensively discussed the material he claimed to have channeled on how the Atlanteans used crystals to power their civilization. Discussions such as Alper’s further served to secure a place for the Atlantis legend in New Age thinking. For many contemporary metaphysical writers, Atlantis was a highly technological society that destroyed itself through misuse of its technology-perhaps even through misuse of its crystal technology.

In the late 1990s, however, these views underwent modification as the result of a new school of Atlantology, which champions the view that Antarctica was the site of the ancient nation. The assumption at work here, which is based on the geological theories of the late Charles Hapgood, is that the earth’s crust has been displaced in such a way that Antarctica was shifted from a temperate climate zone to its current location at the South Pole.

This perspective has been popularized by the relatively recent Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), which argues for the existence of a technologically advanced civilization-Atlantis-in the period preceding the earliest known citied societies. To support his point, author Graham Hancock examines the many artifacts and architectural monuments that are difficult to account for within the limits of our currently accepted scheme of history. Like Donnelly before them, for Hancock and other Atlantologists the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesoamerica were either Atlantean colonies or areas where survivors fled after the sinking of Atlantis.

The advantage of this new site for Atlantis is that it avoids the problem of the nonpresence of ancient ruins in the beds of the Atlantic Ocean:

Whatever remains of Atlantis is hidden beneath the southern polar ice cap. Given the inaccessibility of this new site for the antediluvian world, the legend of Atlantis is likely to continue to provide fuel for the human imagination well into the current millennium.

For roughly the same reasons, Antarctica is an ideal location for imaginatively placing a “secret” UFO base. One of the more well-known proponents of this notion was Albert Bender, who claimed to have visited a large extraterrestrial installation hidden beneath the ice of the southernmost continent. Antarctica was also supposedly the site of a portal through which UFOs passed, according to certain hollow-earth enthusiasts. If it has not already been asserted, it is only a matter of time before someone comes up with the idea that UFO bases existing at the South Pole represent the residue of Atlantean civilization.