The Atlantis Blueprint Read Free Page B

me in the quest is Colin Wilson, author of scores of books, including
From Atlantis to the Sphinx.
    Our collaboration had an unexpected beginning. Colin had written an introduction to
When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis,
the book that my wife, Rose, and I published in 1995. In the winter of 1997–8 he sent me a fax asking if I could verify Charles Hapgood’s signature on a copy of his first important book,
Earth’s Shifting Crust.
Colin knew that I was familiar with Hapgood’s signature because of my correspondence with him from 1977 to 1982. I was happy to be able to tell him that the book had indeed been signed by Charles.
    Colin and I stayed in touch and he sent me a copy of a documentary called
The Flood
that he’d introduced and in which I had appeared. It was around that time that I had decided to gather together the previous four years of research into a new book. Rose was occupied with working on her first novel5 and so I was temporarily without a co-author. I wondered if Colin would be interested in joining me in this adventure? To give him an idea about where the latest work had taken me, I sent him an article called ‘Blueprints from Atlantis’ that was about to be published in the American magazine
Atlantis Rising
(see Appendix 1). After reading the article Colin phoned to say he was keen to join me in the quest.
    We began with the death of a professor in New England.
    Author’s note: The text of
The Atlantis Blueprint
has been jointly written by Rand Flem-Ath and Colin Wilson. However, to enable the reader to distinguish between their individual voices, Colin Wilson takes the role of first-person narrator and Rand Flem-Ath contributes in the third person.

1
Hapgood's Secret Quest for Atlantis
    O N A RAINY night in December 1982, a retired New England professor of anthropology named Charles Hapgood stepped off the pavement without looking left and was hit by an oncoming car. He died in hospital three days later. 1
    Two months earlier he had sorted out his books and papers, and invited his sons to come and take what they wanted. He had been retired for sixteen years, and, at the age of seventy-eight, had the satisfaction of knowing that the last thirty years of his life had produced work of amazing originality.
Earth’s Shifting Crust
(1958), 2 written with the active encouragement and co-operation of Albert Einstein, had proposed a revolutionary new theory of the great ice ages: namely, that the crust of the earth can slide, 3 like the skin on cold gravy, under the weight of polar ice caps, and move whole continents around. But perhaps his most revolutionary book was
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
(1966), 4 which proved beyond reasonable doubt that civilisation is far older than historians had suspected; it should have brought him worldwide celebrity, since his arguments were irrefutable. He also produced a secondedition of
Earth’s Shifting Crust
(called
The Path of the Pole,
1970)5 with still more evidence for his theory of crust slippage.
    Born in 1904, Hapgood had graduated from Harvard in philosophy of science, then studied at Freiburg during the 1930s, when he witnessed the rise of the Nazis. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was inducted into the Office of Strategic Studies – the forerunner of the CIA – as an expert on Germany. When the war was over, Hapgood became a professor of anthropology at Springfield College in Massachusetts.
    He was a good teacher, who believed in involving his students as much as possible. When, in 1949, a student named Henry Warrington asked him about the lost continent of Mu, the legendary civilisation that is supposed to have been engulfed by the Pacific Ocean, Hapgood told him to go away to research it, then report back to the class. As an afterthought, he told Warrington to examine the evidence for Atlantis too. 6
    Warrington had only to consult any good encyclopaedia to learn that in the 1850s an English zoologist named P. L. Sclater had observed a