Atlantis calling! Atlantis calling!

Just sit right back and hear a tale...

I totally forgot to say something about Giorgio Tsoukalos's first episode of "In Search of Aliens."  It was called "The Hunt for Atlantis."  There's probably a good reason for this.  As much as I love to watch Giorgio, I was probably trying hard to stay awake.

I've been reading about Atlantis for very nearly forty years, either in books or articles in books.  I've also watched countless documentaries and television programs about it.   For me, Atlantis is a very old, very dead, and very well beaten horse.  I guess that's my problem for being an ancient! :-)

Still, when I saw the title of the first ever program starring Giorgio, I rolled my eyes.  Atlantis?!?  Really?!?  But that's just because, for me, its a topic more overplayed than a Phil Collins song. 

Still, the episode itself is very good.  Giorgio has a lot of energy and seems to really believe in what he's doing.  Hey, if I could be paid to travel the world and babble about aliens and 'ancient mysteries', I'd probably be pretty happy too!  Giorgio's take on Atlantis is that it was in the southwestern Iberian peninsula.  A variant on the 'Tartessos' theory that Atlantis was one of the ancient kingdoms in the region that would later be Spain and Portugal.   

Well, Giorgio ends up thinking that Atlantis itself may have been some sort of alien base on Earth.   It wasn't destroyed so much as left (cue MIB scene "No, Elvis is not dead, he just went home!)  

I enjoyed the program although I probably know as much, if not more, of the various how/who/where/when/what theories of Atlantis than even Tsoukalos himself.   I think that, if Atlantis did exist, it was an ice-age or post-ice age civilization contemporaneous with the builders of Gobeckli Tepe.  If it was anything more than a pure invention of Plato, it could be a distant memory of a prior civilization, probably totally built up by Plato in the telling.