Free The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries by Colin Wilson

archaeologists and classical scholars alike. Yet anyone who has studied such evidence will agree that, while it is far from convincing, it still leaves a great deal to explain. How did Fawcett’s psychometrist come to think of Atlantis? For the evidence to be of any value, we would need to know a great deal more about the psychometrist – whether, for example, he had read Donnelly or Spence. And if he could convince us that his unconscious mind was not playing him tricks, there would still remain the possibility that he was somehow reading Fawcett’s mind. Yet anyone who is willing to study the evidence for psychometry with an open mind will end byagreeing that there are many cases that cannot be explained as unconscious self-deception or telepathy.
    Similar questions are raised by the detailed descriptions of Atlantian civilization produced by the “psychic healer” Edgar Cayce (pronounced Casey). When Cayce was twenty-two (in 1899) he suffered from psychosomatic paralysis of the vocal cords, which was cured by hypnosis. The hypnotist then asked Cayce some questions about his own medical problems, and Cayce’s replies revealed a medical knowledge that consciously he did not possess. Cayce’s ability to produce “trance diagnosis” soon made him a minor celebrity. In 1923 Cayce was questioned as to whether there is life after death; when he woke from his trance he was shocked to learn that he had been preaching the doctrine of reincarnation – as an orthodox Christian, he rejected the idea. Eventually he came to accept it. In 1927, giving a “life reading” on a fourteen-year-old boy, Cayce described his previous lives under Louis XIV, Alexander the Great, in ancient Egypt, and in Atlantis. For the remainder of his life Cayce continued to add fragments to his account of Atlantis.
    According to Cayce, Atlantis extended from the Sargasso Sea to the Azores, and was about the size of Europe. It had experienced two periods of destruction, in the first of which the mainland had divided into islands. The final break-up occurred, as Plato said, about 10,000 BC , and the last place to sink was near the Bahamas. What he says echoes Steiner to a remarkable extent: “. . . man brought in the destructive forces that combined with the natural resources of the gases, of the electrical forces, that made the first of the eruptions that awoke from the depth of the slow-cooling earth . . .” He claimed that archives dealing with Atlantis now exist in three places in the world, one of these in Egypt. In June 1940 Cayce predicted that the island called Poseidia would rise again, “expect it in ’68 or ’69”. It would happen in the area of the Bahamas.
    Early in 1968 a fishing guide called Bonefish Sam took the archaeologist Dr J. Manson Valentine to see a line of rectangular stones under twenty feet of water in North Bimini, in the Bahamas. Valentine was startled to find two parallel lines of stones about 2,000 feet long. They became known as the Bimini Road. But scientists disagreed from the beginning. John Hall, a professor of archaeology from Miami, said they were natural formations; John Gifford, a marine biologist, thought that if the stones were produced by “geological stress”, then there would be far more of them over a wider area; he concluded that “none of the evidence conclusively disproves human intervention”. One of theinvestigators, Dr David Zink, wrote a book called The Stones of Atlantis , and had no doubt whatsoever that some of the stones were hand-made – in fact, one object was a stone head. But even if the Bimini Road could be shown to be part of a temple, this would still not prove that it was built more than ten thousand years ago; it could be the product of a much more recent culture.
    Obviously, Cayce’s prediction that Atlantis would “rise again” has not been fulfilled. This in itself does not prove the prediction to have been pure imagination; parapsychologists who have studied