Free The Atlantis Blueprint by Colin Wilson

encouragement, the Flem-Aths were puzzled that he failed to react to the suggestion that Atlantis
was
Antarctica. If someone had taken the trouble to map the interior of Antarctica when it wasdivided into two islands, the people most likely to be responsible were, surely, its inhabitants? It was not until 1995, when Rand was investigating the Hapgood archives at Yale, that he realised that Hapgood thought he had already discovered Atlantis much further north, in the Rocks of St Peter and St Paul. Rand’s own view, however, was that Hapgood was mistaken. It was true that the mysterious island on the Piri Reis map looked about 250 by 350 miles, and that according to Plato the plain behind the city of Atlantis was about 229 by 343 miles, * but Plato also explained that the continent of Atlantis was as big as Libya and Asia (approximately North Africa and the Middle East) put together, the mountainous part of Atlantis being far greater than the plain. There is no sign of a continent as large as that beneath the Atlantic.
    Encouraged by Hapgood as Hapgood had been by Einstein, Rand and Rose began work on a book called
Atlantis At Last!,
which summarised the results of his research. It was finished in 1980. They began to look for a publisher and Rand continued to develop his own theories about ‘when the sky fell’.
    In 1981 Rand and Rose (who had been born in England) moved to London, where Rand was able to use the facilities of the British Museum Reading Room to continue his research on Atlantis. To support themselves, Rose found work as a temp, while he found work at the Conoco oil company.
    The job suited Rand; he was in daily contact with geologists and geophysicists, for it was his responsibility to provide them with maps of the North Sea bed, along with available geological evidence, in preparation for a government announcement about North Sea oil exploration. The information Rand was gathering would enable the company to decide which areas to bid for. He led a team of five people, and his skills in map-reading served him well. He also enjoyed discussing Hapgood’s shifting crust theory with professional geologists,and was pleased to find that so many were open-minded about it. All his spare time was spent in the British Museum. They found a publisher for
Atlantis at Last!,
but unfortunately it went out of business before publication. However, Rand’s days in the Reading Room were providing so much fascinating information that publication undoubtedly would have been premature and would have led to a sense of anticlimax. He worked on with an increasing excitement as new discoveries strengthened his certainty that Hapgood’s theory of earth’s shifting crust was sound.
    What continued to puzzle him was why Hapgood continued to be ignored by earth scientists, even though his arguments for ‘the path of the pole’ were backed with such a mass of scientific evidence and scientific acceptance of the theory of plate teton-ics had made his crust displacement theory far less controversial. While following up some remarks by Hapgood on the origins of agriculture, he stumbled upon a possible explanation in a book called
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
by Thomas S. Kuhn. Its arguments had made Kuhn famous – or infamous – in the scientific community when it appeared in 1962: Kuhn had proposed that scientists are mistaken to think of the pursuit of science as a detached and unemotional activity. Once they have become comfortably settled with a certain theory – Kuhn preferred to use the word ‘paradigm’ – they develop an emotional attachment to it, like a mother with a baby, and if anyone challenges it they become defensive, remaining totally convinced that their irritation is the annoyance of a reasonable man in the face of time-wasting absurdities. This is why the great scientific revolutions – of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein and quantum theory – encountered such furious resistance. Even into the 1960s, the