You definitely have to be a conspiracy theorist to buy any of the myriad contemporary Atlantis myths and the veracity of Plato's claims. The history podcast Our Fake History has an excellent three episode arc about Atlantis, including Plato's account.

https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-2/

The upshot is that his account does not match up with any real world location, unless you are willing to engage in cherry-picking and an extremely generous interpretation of various things, and there is no credible explain of how he alone could have gained such detailed knowledge of a civilisation that existed thousands of years before his birth. One which no other historical writer mentioned.

In reality, Plato's description of "Atlantis" was considered as plainly allegorical by his contemporaries and subsequent scholars. A situation that continued for hundreds of years, and only began to change in the relatively recent past, with the rise of pseudo-history and conspiracy theorists.

Would you have said the same of Troy right up until they found it a few years ago?

Can you point me to where in those podcast they discredit that the Richat structure in Africa does not fit the description of Atlantis?

This documentary is pretty sober and not at all fanciful, lays out how the Richat matches Plato's description exactly:

https://visitingatlantis.com/

You absolutely don't need to buy into the fanciful myths of Atlantis to speculate that is probably was an ancient bronze age city located at the Richat.

I assume you are aware of and have real refutations for the proposition that the Eye of the Sahara could be a location for Atlantis?

And you are absolutely incorrect about Plato's description being considered allegory at the time. Anyone during his time could have gone to Egypt and asked the same questions Solon did and gotten the same answer from the same temple.

You are repeating wrote cultural knowledge as if you had real research to back it up.

"definitely have to be a conspiracy theorist" might be going to far. History gets a major rewrite every so often somehow at each turn there's no room for heterodoxy . . .

The whole field is full of dogmatists. The timeline of human history probably looks a lot different than the one we have written in textbooks.

_But_, take any of Graham Hancock's claims with a spoon-full of salt. He's not from a scientific background nor has he published any scientific work. It's easy to be lulled by the grandeur of the tales he tells on JRE.

Although I never mentioned Hancock, I don't buy much of what Hancock is selling. They originally just had Randall on, then later they had Randall and Hancock. I think Randalls research has WAY more foundation to it, and Hancock is riding his coat tails. I do find his commentary intriguing sometimes.

Tangentially related and may be of interest, I was recently reading about the Ramayana (or Ramakien), and reference to "Vimana"[1] ancient flying ship-palaces.

Compare contrast Lucian of Samosata's "True History", sometimes considered the prototypical sci-fi story, describes a lunar voyage borne on wind and water (I am reminded of a taller ladder to the moon),

"a waterspout suddenly came upon us, which swept the ship round and up to a height of some three hundred and fifty miles above the earth. She did not fall back into the sea, but was suspended aloft, and at the same time carried along by a wind which struck and filled the sails...it was an island with air for sea, glistening, spherical, and bathed in light"[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimana

2. https://lucianofsamosata.info/TheTrueHistory.html

That's true. Until it was discovered, Troy was considered to be mythical. Now most people think we have Homeric Troy.¹

But how far do we go? We practically have the specifications for Noah's ark ² - so do you expect us to find it, large enough to house every animal except dinosaurs, cruelly left out? ³

So at first I thought you made a pretty good case, but I don't know, man. There's a lot of weird stories that are super specific, like the one I just quoted.

--

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy

² https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&versi... - "The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it..." etc.

³ https://alvinalexander.com/sites/default/files/styles/previe...

On the Egyptians...only Manetho claims this; he lines up all the dynasties in sequential order to make it appear Egypt went that far back. When everybody knew at the time, and even more so today, that many dynasties ruled concurrently. So...there is that.

Another item is dating based on the stars. If you want to record a date you can record the position of the stars and planets. Such dating is attempted for the mahabharata and other Indian epics, but the language is very flowery so it is difficult to ascertain exactly.

To be fair the local people seem pretty close-minded about the origins of Gunung Padang. The local scientific community insists most of it is natural, and that because they found later evidence of less advanced technology, it is then impossible there was a more advanced culture previously there. However, this has been known to happen over and over again, with the most known example being the Mayans. At the same time, for a body of scientists, they seem pretty uninterested in finding the truth.

> At the same time, for a body of scientists, they seem pretty uninterested in finding the truth.

There's no reason anyone who believes the accepted truth is wrong can't go do some research to prove otherwise. (Like Schliemann did.)

Expecting others to be obliged to investigate one's own crackpot theories isn't fair. Their reluctance to do so is not evidence of a conspiracy against the truth.

For example, in the 1970's a popular theory was that 100 mpg carburetors existed, and a vast conspiracy by Big Oil was suppressing all information about them. The proof of this conspiracy was, naturally, nobody was able to find any evidence of such carburetors.

Just to add to that, scientists (especially young ones) would love to make their careers by proving existing theories wrong. Every physicist wants to be Einstein, every archaeologist wants to find a lost city, etc.