IN DEFENCE OF ATLANTIS

Press, 21 October 1978, Page 10

IN DEFENCE OF ATLANTIS

The Secret of Atlantis. By Otto Muck, translated by Fred Bradley. Collins. 272 pp. $17.95. (Reviewed by D. H. Gilmore)

The vanished island of Atlantis has been the subject of myth and legend since the days of Plato. More books have been written about it than about any subject short of the Bible, but, as must be the case with al' pre-history beyond archaeological research, the books must perforce be speculative in their scope. The late Otto Heinrich Muck, a distinguished German physicist, engineer, and the inventor of the World War II U-boat schnorkel, is no starry-eyed speculator, but presents an array of known and proven facts to support his case: that not only did Atlantis exist in the vicinity of what are now the Azores Islands, but also that Plato’s version of its destruction “in a single dreadful day and a single dreadful night” was not mere rhetoric, but cataclysmic fact. ■ Geological, palaentological, archaeological, oceanographic and climatological data are called upon to provide a net of circumstancial evidence from which the most hardened sceptic should find it difficult to escape. Muck presents

facts from which he aduces theories so plausible that they become almost irresistably convincing, although, when he “pinpoints” the disaster to “8 p.m. on June sth, 8498 8.C.,” one’s scepticism stirs slightly. Muck has been fortunate in his translator for, in spite of the mass of scientific data which it includes, this is an extremely “readable” book for the layman. If one accepts Muck’s hypothesis that the Atlantis disaster was caused by one of the Adonis group of asteroids colliding with Earth, then today’s reader may give thanks he is here to do so. According to the author, a similar visitor approached perilously close to our planet as recently as February, 1936 — a sobering thought.