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America, in the North Pacific, in the South Pacific, oE the coast of Florida, and even in the Indian Ocean. Recently the ruins of an ancient temple of unknown origin were discovered in the blue waters off the Bahamas. The newspapers soberly revealed that Atlantis had been found at last. A year of so later a mysterious stone pillar was spotted by divers deep in the ocean off the coast of Peru. Atlantis rose again. This game has been going on for a very long time. Researchers wading through fifty-year-old newspapers have found them sprinkled with wondrous tales of Atlantean finds. Professors and PhD's nave frequently joined the clamour, bidding for publicity (and the often sizable foundation grants that follow such publicity), keeping alive one of the great fantasies of human history. It isn't even a myth or legend; there isn't enough evidence of any kind to give Atlantis such stature. Nevertheless, Atlantis has become an important part of our folklore. Even the famous prophet Edgar Cayce discussed the lost continent with the spirit world and passed along the prediction that it would rise again in the stormy Atlantic in 196S-9. While the reality of Atlantis can be viewed with considerable scepticism, the persistence of the belief in it provides some interesting farts about the weird mechanisms employed by the earth's phantom inhabitants to generate myths and camouflage their real existence. Atlantis is no more real than visitors from Mars. Yet there are millions of people who have believed wholeheartedly in both. The members of WOW have carefully sowed the seeds of such myths in their wake and have worked across the generations to nurture them. First, how did the story of Atlantis begin? It was launched by a single man named Plato (427-347 B.C.). In his two dialogues Timaeus* and 'Critias'. he offers a description of Atlantis and its demise nine thousand years earlier. His source, he states, is a man named Critias, who had heard the story from his great-grandfather Dropides, who had heard it from a sage named Solon, who had heard it from an Egyptian priest. So the whole foundation of the Atlantis fantasy is based upon what a ninety-year-old man told a ten-year-old boy (those are the ages given by Plato) about a tale spun by Solon years before. Rather like having your great-grandfather tell you the plot of a novel that someone else described to him after having heard it from someone else in a far-off land. And that someone else hadn't read the novel but had only heard about it, since the 1 . a 1 14 Incidentally, the final pages of Plato's discourse are missing, so even his record of this hearsay is incomplete. Scholars have devoted their lives to pondering Plato and searching for archaeological evidence to support the existence of Atlantis. Visit any library and you will find shelves of books on the subject. New pro-Atlantis volumes appear each year. A small, indefatigable cult of Atlantean believers has existed for a century or more, pouncing upon each new archaeological discovery as proof of Atlantis. Ruins throughout Central and South America have been credited to the Atlantis culture. Everything from Stonehenge in England to the Great Pyramid in Egypt to the monasteries in the Himalayas has been accepted by the believers as further evidence of Atlantis. novel was nine-thousand years old.