Dateline: Atlantis by Lynn Voedisch Page B

rights. The road, Hewitt determined, was a medieval donkey cart trail, and the apparent continuations below the sea were nothing more than black, volcanic tufa—gravel pulled into the sea with each tide. The “road” looked straight but was as man-made as the sun.
    Atlantis seekers, Hewitt blows his nose into a large bandana. They make my life a misery. He’d never wanted to be a professional debunker, but circumstances keep leading him there. And then there is the Committee. They don’t pay his salary; the British Museum takes care of that quite nicely. But the Committee has an agenda, and on that all-important list is the task of extinguishing any talk of antediluvian civilizations. Somehow, Hewitt, with his multiple Ph.D.s, is usually the man they send to publish the official skeptic’s report.
    Well, either he or O’Laughry. But Professor Origen O’Laughry is not known for his orthodox methods, and the council prefers Hewitt’s clean dissections, autopsies, and burials of lunatic hoaxes.
    This time, the journalists have gotten into the fray. Mostly English, or a certain Englishman living in the United States, these men of no academic standing whatsoever have become wildly famous writing books about missing civilizations and a seven-thousand-year-old Great Sphinx. The public is enthused about their books—which Hewitt admits are meticulously researched—but lead to such foolishness as changing known history. If this keeps up, the textbooks will all have to be rewritten, careers ruined, the whole paradigm smashed beyond recognition. This simply cannot happen.
    Then there are the financial backers, a shadowy group of Americans who also have something at stake when it comes to Atlantis. It violates Scripture. In the tradition of Irish Archbishop James Ussher, fundamentalist Christians—and Orthodox Jews, too—count backward from Moses, generation by generation, to get a fixed date for the creation of the Earth. Ussher fixed it at sunset Sunday, Oct. 22, 4004 B.C. Others had placed it at various other dates, one improbably suggesting that the world was created at 9 a.m., although how he figured this fact, when there wasn’t even a sun yet to register night or day, remains a mystery. The most important thing to this bunch was that nothing was to have existed pre-4004 B.C. Atlantis, which most New Age crazies date around 10,000 to 12,000 B.C., is completely out of the question for the Bible-thumpers.
    Hewitt considers it all codswollop, pure rubbish. But because a heavily funded group from America is paying the Committee handsomely to quash any mentions of antediluvian civilizations, he has to swallow their nonsense. He considers Noah’s Flood to be a fairy tale, also, but no one has asked him to debunk this myth. The Committee, a group of scientists, is marching to the orders of a group that Hewitt finds most illogical, and dangerous in their obsessions. But they pay, and they pay well. Whether one accepts their theories or not, it’s to everyone’s benefit to thwart the Atlantis nuts, who are making troubling inroads with the general public.
    Already, the theory of land migration to the Americas via the Bering Straits passage has been seriously threatened. Publishers are removing the Beringian migration theory from school textbooks. That damned Thor Heyerdahl pulled a stunning publicity stunt with his famous Ra and Kon-Tiki experiments, Hewitt admits to himself. The late Scandinavian started a revolution. Many people, even respected scholars now believe that the peoples of America came by boat across great distances. “Diffusion” is the term they use. There is simply too much corroborating evidence—mitochondrial DNA and matching blood types between the peoples of the Americas and of Europe and Africa—to discount it anymore. Caucasian bones were dug up in North America. South American cocaine was found in Egyptian mummies. The list goes on and