CGA Instructor Believes Atlantis Is No Longer Lost
Ex-commander says maritime search yielded strong evidence

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New London — Merchant Marine Capt. Robert S. Bates scoffed when a friend tried to persuade him to join an expedition to find Atlantis, Plato's fabled lost continent under the sea.

But after reading Robert Sarmast's then-unpublished manuscript “Discovery of Atlantis” and meeting with the author in Colorado two years ago, Bates agreed to become the commodore of the maritime search.

“When I read the manuscript, I thought, ‘He's got it. He's really got it,' ” said Bates, who teaches calculus at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Now, after a six-day search in mile-deep waters of the eastern Mediterranean this month, he's convinced the lost continent has been found.

“We have found manmade walls, a canal and an Acropolis Hill that exactly fits the descriptions of Plato,” said Bates, a retired Coast Guard commander who has worked in oceanographic research for the Navy, the University of Rhode Island and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

Though there are still skeptics — there are uncounted claims to have “found” Atlantis in the past — the site they suspect could be the historical Atlantis is on a vast underwater plain between the island of Cyprus and the shoreline of Syria.

The area stretching from Syria to Cyprus has been dried out and inundated dozens of times over the millennia, according to studies showing alternating deposits of salt and silt, Bates said.

Sarmast, 38, who trained as an architect before giving up that profession in his 20s to study the legend of Atlantis, spent years plying more than 50 clues from Plato's “Timaeus” and “Critias” that hint at the location of Atlantis, and then he has tried to match what he found to the area.

Some of his early funding came from a private corporation involved in underwater oil exploration, but the $200,000 Mediterranean expedition was paid for by more than 100 supporters who gave varying amounts, up to $10,000.

Phoenix International, a marine services company, is now processing reams of side-scan sonar data into a comprehensive picture of the ocean bottom.

“We're all waiting to see what the finished mosaics look like after the data is processed,” Bates said. “But it is all very promising.”

Phoenix does manned and unmanned underwater operations around the world, including deep ocean search and recovery, surveys, ship repairs, submarine rescue and underwater welding. Five years ago, Phoenix found the long-lost Israeli submarine Dakar near where Sarmast believes Atlantis is located.

Bates said filmmaker Janelle Balnicke shot more than 50 hours of video for a planned documentary that the Sarmast team hopes will be finished in about six months. Sarmast is considering either expanding his book or writing another one with the new data.

There's also talk of mounting a second expedition, perhaps with a sub-bottom profile that can peer through centuries of accumulated silt, or with a remotely operated vehicle that can uncover artifacts.

“It will be very exciting to see how it all turns out,” Bates said.

Plato wrote more than 2,000 years ago of the fabled land of Atlantis, documented in the records of the 6th-century B.C. Greek ruler Solon, who in turn had heard about Atlantis from an Egyptian priest. The legend stated that the people of Atlantis, once favored by the Gods, became corrupt and the island was destroyed by giant waves that caused it to sink into the sea.

Sarmast gleaned clues about the island from the ancient texts and used modern oceanographic surveys in an attempt to locate a likely site for the sunken island.

Bates met Sarmast in July 2002 at a meeting in Colorado for potential investors in Sarmast's company, First Source Enterprises, and has been with the project ever since as commodore, in charge of the maritime portion of mission planning.

Bates, 68, is a 1960 graduate of the Academy who spent most of his 20-year career at sea aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker East Wind and the high-endurance cutters Bering Strait and Yakutat.

He has seen service in the Vietnam War, in the Cold War doing ocean surveillance for the Navy, and in Desert Storm. He was a chief mate or captain on the ocean research ships Endeavor, owned by the University of Rhode Island, and Oceanus, owned by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

He taught at the Academy in the early 1970s as a commissioned officer and was invited back as a retiree in 2000.

Bates spent most of June and July in Limassol, Cyprus, arranging for the ship and sonar equipment they would need. He returned to the Academy in August for the start of classes.

In early November he returned to Cyprus for what he thought would be a week of maritime search, but the start was delayed because the side-scan sonar gear was late arriving. He said Academy officials urged him to stay an extra week to see it through.

On Monday, Nov. 8, the survey ship Flying Enterprise set out from Limassol carrying Bates and six other people from First Source, four people from Phoenix, and a seven-man crew, including Capt. Duncan MacKenzie of South Africa, commander of the ship.

They made the 97-mile trip to the site by late afternoon and let the sonar sled out to a distance of about 4,600 feet, towing it about 20 feet off the sea bed and gathering images. As they began to reel it in to turn and make a second pass, a squall struck and shorted out the generator for the tow winch. The sonar system was stranded about 2,400 feet behind the ship.

“It looked like the mission was over,” Bates said. But MacKenzie got on the radio, arranged for a replacement generator to be brought out to meet them on a second ship, and then charted a path back toward Limassol in water at least 2,000 feet deep so they would not have to worry about the sonar hitting bottom.

The second ship hove into view just before midnight, and MacKenzie pulled within 10 feet of it, in rolling waves and pitch-black conditions. The generators were swapped.

“I saw some seamanship that I've never seen before,” Bates said. “It was absolutely magnificent ship-handling. Within a half-hour that generator was cooking, we brought the ‘fish' up and went back to the site.”

After the rough start, the expedition had two days of perfect weather, and they gathered an enormous amount of data about the area, focusing on what Sarmast believed was the Acropolis Hill in the center of Atlantis.

When Sarmast's book, published by Origin Press of California, came out last fall, it was met with a great deal of skepticism, Bates said, with most academics dismissing some of the features he wanted to investigate as “sea bottom anomalies.”

However, Bates said, the raw sonar images that have already been collected convince him that a civilization of some sort existed on that underwater plain at some point in the past. He hopes that the full analysis of the data will put the debate to rest.

No matter where it goes from here, Bates said, he's happy for Sarmast, who gave up a career in architecture 12 years ago to pursue his dream of finding Atlantis.

“He spent a lot of time and endured a lot of grief getting this project underway,” Bates said. “But he never gave up.”

r.hamilton@theday.com

For more information on the expedition, go to www.discoveryofatlantis.com