‘It’s definitely Atlantis’
By Jean Christou

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THE TEAM led by American researcher Robert Sarmast, who believes Cyprus is Atlantis, said yesterday they had found man-made structures in the area they had earmarked as the site of the underwater lost continent.
“It’s definitely Atlantis,” Sarmast was quoted as saying through his spokeswoman Angela Henderson. “It’s going to be impossible for the sceptics to prove me wrong.”

Henderson said that Sarmast, the author of Discovery of Atlantis: The Startling Case for the Island of Cyprus, launched a secret expedition last Monday and was due back at Limassol port last night. He is to reveal his findings at a news conference today, accompanied with visual data.
“All we can say right now is that we have found compelling new evidence from side-scan sonar that there are unnatural formations, i.e. man-made objects the details of which will be released on Sunday,” Henderson told the Sunday Mail.

She said the man-made structures that have been pinpointed by Sarmast and his team corroborated his previous research relating to Acropolis Hill, the centre of the ancient lost city. “It is definitely a discovery,” said Henderson.
Sarmast bases his theory that Cyprus is Atlantis on Plato’s writings Timaeus and Crititias, saying that almost every clue in Plato’s description of the legendary continent perfectly correlates with data obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, originally released to the international community a decade ago. The data was obtained in 1987 during a scientific survey of the Mediterranean.

Sarmast, who had been planning to launch his expedition during the summer, had recently been keeping a very low profile and was out of contact, as were his press team, giving rise to speculation that the expedition had been delayed, called off, or that funding may have run out.
Henderson said the secrecy had been a deliberate ploy to keep media attention at a distance in order to facilitate the smooth launch of the expedition.

“They set off on Monday with an international team, including Cypriots,” she said. The salvage vessel was the Flying Enterprise, managed by EDT, which has a history of successfully locating submerged objects. A film crew was also on board.
Henderson was unable to say how Sarmast was going to prove the existence of the legendary city.

In July this, year the Paphos-based organisation Psychognosia challenged Sarmast’s theory by inviting a one of the top US military former ‘psychic spies’, Joseph McMoneagle to carry out a remote viewing experiment at Sarmast’s co-ordinates for Atlantis.

McMoneagle was asked to describe what he saw within a two-mile radius of the co-ordinates, both 10,000 years ago and at the present time.

He said he could see a predominant city with a system of buildings; now it was under, he was able to perceive some ruins buried in muck and mud.
Psychognosia’s John Knowles said at the time it was very likely Sarmast would in fact uncover an ancient city because the Mediterranean is littered with them, but that this did not mean it was Atlantis.

Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2004