Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Was Atlantis A Real Place?

Episode Date: March 16, 2019

While the search for Atlantis has been pushed to the fringes since the 19th century, archaeologists have quietly pursued cities that may have inspired Plato to fabricate the mythical city. It looks like a team in Greece has found it. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello there, it's me, Josh. And for this week's S-Y-S-K Selects, I've chosen our episode, Was There a Real Atlantis? And it turns out, they're very well may have been. At the very least, there's a very exciting lost city

that archeologists found that, well, it may have been the model for the Atlantis legend. I don't wanna ruin anything. I don't wanna spoil anything. So just kick back and enjoy this adventure episode. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast on Josh Clark, back in the saddle again with Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

We share a horse. We do. I have a horse sidecar, actually. It's a small mule. Yeah. That's attached to your horse. Yeah. And I have to lean into the corners.

It's more of a hay cart than a side car. Oh, okay. Back in the saddle, meaning we are back from Texas and back in the recording booth for the first time in what, two weeks? Yeah, it feels nice, dude. To be back in this smelly little dimly lit room. Yeah, it's strangely.

At least it's not like blood colored, you know? Yeah. That'd be weird. So, Chuck. Yes? I guess we should get started, huh? You don't have an intro? Well, I mean, I was going to use the intro as the intro.

Go ahead then. Have you ever heard of a place called Atlantis? I have. You read like the Brutal Triangle. The vacation getaway? No, where like, Britney Spears stayed for free for like a month when they opened to try to generate buzz. Wow.

I'm sure they were packing them in after that. I think they have been. I don't know. I can't discuss the financial estate of Atlantis, the resort in the Bahamas. But what I can discuss is Atlantis, the possibly fictitious place. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and go on record as fictitious.

Are you? Well, after reading this, and by the way, this was awesome. I had no idea about the secret surprise that's coming. Which one? Well, the other place, the real place. Oh, gotcha, okay. Which I meant to ask you before how we pronounce that, but we'll just get to that and I'll let you say it first.

Okay. But yeah, I'm going to say it's fictitious and based on that. Okay, I think I kind of go with that to you. Mainly because one of the things about Plato is he was the only person ever mentioned Atlantis. Plenty of people have mentioned it after him, but it was based on what he said.

Right. Which kind of makes you think like, oh, okay, is this, this is an allegory, probably. It's about wickedness. Yeah, what was his book in, Timaeus? Yeah. That was the book where he first mentioned it. Yeah, and it was written in 360 BC,

and Timaeus is one of his dialogues, I believe. And Plato has a thing where he likes to take real places, real people, real events, and then just kind of use some literary license. Sure. He's a philosopher, okay? Yeah, he was not a documentarian of real things. Right.

But along the way, somewhere, that idea got lost, right? Right. So for example, Sodom and Gomorrah. I would wager that a lot of people think that Sodom and Gomorrah, something really happened, and that it was taken eventually. It was used as allegory that these people were punished by God.

Right. But really, something really bad happened to him, and somebody decided, hey, this is a great, great chance to use this as a life lesson for everyone. Yeah. So there's a really strong possibility that Plato did the same thing, because as he describes Atlantis,

they had gotten kind of a hubristic, I guess. It does mimic other things in the Bible, that's for sure. It does. And the great God Poseidon, who is the God of the sea and of earthquakes, decided that he was kind of tired of the people of Atlantis, which was the seat of a cult that worshiped him, right?

So he, using the techniques at hand, he, I guess, created an earthquake that generated a tsunami that sunk Atlantis beneath the waves lost forever. Yeah, I think the quote from the book was, it sank into the sea in a single day and night of misfortune. Yeah.

That's putting it lightly. So... And he placed it too, didn't he? Actually, it's where? Off Spain? The Pillars of Hercules, which is now called the Strait of Gibraltar. And there's people looking in Spain now, right?

Yeah, like, legitimate, right? Bonafide archeologists. They're fun. Yeah. So Plato, I guess, part of the problem is he's saying, like, yes, this was at the Strait of Gibraltar. Right. In his parlance at the time,

he's saying, is at the Strait of Gibraltar, the problem is, is Atlantis was this magnificent ring city. Yeah. And it had like fantastic technology and architecture. And it was just an amazingly advanced place. But he also says that this has happened 9,000 years ago. Right? Right.

So 9,000 years before him. So they're aliens. Well, that is thanks to a guy named Ignatius Donnelly. Yeah. So this guy, so Plato writes about Atlantis, goes about his business, right? Dies. And apparently nobody back then took it seriously.

That's like modern man were the first people to say, ooh, maybe there wasn't Atlantis. Yeah. Back in the day, everyone's like, nah, it's just Plato going off again. Right. It was this one guy, Ignatius Donnelly. Oh, he's the one.

You can lay it all at his feet. Jerk. Because in 1882, he published a book called Atlantis, the Anti-Diluvian World. And in it, he's saying, okay, the Azores, the Azores. Man, I wish I'd looked that one up. I think that's right. The islands in the middle of the Atlantic.

That's actually the highest peaks of the highest mountain tops of Atlantis. And wait, there's more. The incredibly advanced civilizations in Egypt and high up in the Andes of Peru, Pre-Inca, those were colonies set forth by Atlantis that survived because they weren't there for the sinking of Atlantis.

So basically, we have civilization to thank. We have Atlantis to thank for civilization. The problem is all of this is totally unfounded, but it just kicked off the occultization of Atlantis. Yeah, it's been placed everywhere from South China Sea, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Canary Islands, Antarctica, supposedly.

Switzerland? Oh, really? Yeah, I didn't chase that one down, but I saw somewhere that somebody said Switzerland. Let's go ahead and say everywhere. Yeah, everywhere. Atlantis is everywhere. There's Edgar Cayce, who is known as

the sleeping prophet of Virginia Beach. He was a psychic. He said that Atlantis stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Spain. And that the Bermuda Triangle, there are a lot of, you know, if there is mystery in the Bermuda Triangle, it's due to Atlantis' energy crystals.

I will say though, he said it would rise off Bimini. And then when they discovered the Bimini Road, everyone was like, see there? Yeah. And then it's too bad Cherry's not here because she's like, I dove the Bimini Road. Yeah, guest producer Maddie is in the house. Hey, Matt.

We didn't mention that. So once Donnelly comes along and kind of takes up the mantle of searching for Atlantis and making it as far out as possible, it just becomes more and more the domain of like fringe dwellers, right? Sure. But that is not to say that there aren't

legitimate archaeologists searching for something like Atlantis. That doesn't mean that there isn't something that inspired Plato. Right. And we probably know what that is actually. That's where my money is. And now you're gonna make me say it

even though I asked you to say it. Heeliki? Heeliki. Heeliki. Heeliki. Heeliki. Yeah, okay. Heeliki.

Spelled he like. Yeah. I saw some weird pronunciation things that I didn't understand when I looked it up. So I just figured I'd hear it from you. That was Greek to you. It was indeed. That was Greek to me.

That was Greek to me. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

["I Heart Radio App"] So, yeah, the cat's out of the bag. As far as I'm concerned, it is Heliki. Well done. Case closed. End of podcast. It was a super interesting story, though. This was well documented by lots of people, not like a single source like Plato.

Single made up source. Exactly. And it was a lost Greek city. It suffered a fate much like Atlantis supposedly did. Yeah, so Heliki was this very powerful city in ancient Greece on the Gulf Corinth. Very nice in that area. Yeah, I imagine.

Have you been? No. I wanna go. Glad to do. It was powerful enough to have its own colonies. So imagine if Atlanta had colonies in like Germany. This was very much the case for Heliki. And it was the seat of power for a 12 city league

called the Achaean League, which is kind of like the Confederacy in the South. Yeah. Would that be like having a bar in a different city that's like your home bar? Like, you know, they have like, it's usually football based. There's like a New York Jets bar in Atlanta. Yeah, maybe.

There's a Pittsburgh Steelers bar in Atlanta. Maybe. Is that the same thing? I thought it was more like the capital of like a number of states. Oh, okay. I don't think it's the same thing, but I like that analogy.

I'm just being coy. So the Achaean League, now I've just realized that I've missed something. No, that's right. New joke. Yeah. So the Heliki is the city, or the center of the Achaean League, it controlled like the shipping around there.

And by the time Play-Doh came about, it was hundreds of years old already. Yeah, very active port. They had their own coinage. Yeah. And it looked very cool too. I looked up the coins, like dolphins and Poseidon and pitch,

or not pitchforks, what do they call the? Tridents. Yeah. And it had Poseidon on the coin because this was like the seat of a cult of Poseidon, just like Atlantis. Exactly. And it had a very prominent,

well-known statue of Poseidon, just like Atlantis, right? That's right. So the similarities are starting to mount up. They are, and they really mount in a big way in December of 373 BC, when the townspeople started noticing, wait a minute, all these small animals

are scurrying for the hills. And that's never a good sign because we did talk about in another podcast how animals can sense underground trimmers. I had to have been in how earthquakes worked. Yeah, I think that's what it was. And sure enough, earthquake came in the middle of the night on the fifth day.

And that was followed by an enormous wave. And just like that overnight, just like Atlantis, it was submerged. Yeah. To the bottom of the sea. Well, not the bottom, but. No, and not necessarily the sea either, as we'll see in a second.

This is getting more mysterious. So this really happened. This is pretty, it was a pretty well-known event. One of the, I guess we should say there were no survivors. Like people from the surrounding cities got together like a search party, a rescue party that set out at dawn, just a few hours after this happened.

And a boat, I guess. There was, well, I think they walked as far as they could and were like, oh, well there's now like a sea where there used to be this city, it's gone. There was no one there. Apparently the only thing visible were the tops of the trees in Poseidon's sacred grove. That's creepy.

I would guess all of the trees. Yeah. And there were 10 ships, and this will come up later too, from Sparta that were docked there in the port, and they were gone as well. Just gone. And that will play an important part here coming up soon. Yeah, so imagine like there's a city.

It's a very powerful, rich city, and you live out in the boondocks, and you just know something happened, there was an earthquake, so you go to check on the city, and then the city's gone, and it's just silence, and there's 10 ships that aren't there anymore. Everything is just gone. Creepy.

What was even creepier though, is you could look down into the city underwater and see it all there still. Yeah, including the statue of Poseidon, which apparently still stood erect and in place. All right, and local fishermen and ferrymen reported having their nets get caught in Poseidon's statue all the time, which is kind of ironic.

Yeah. But so you could see Heliki for hundreds of years, which is one of the reasons why it's so well documented, because there were, it was kind of like, have you heard of Thanatourism, dark tourism or death tourism? Yeah, yeah. So, it was kind of like an early version

of a dark tourism site. Come into this mass cemetery. Yeah, exactly. And you could go check it out, and travelers and writers and scholars did, and they documented what they saw. Pretty specifically too. Yeah.

Like in Stadia, they said, well, here's the, this is where the city is now. This is where it was in relation to this river, that river. Right. So like the sources are pretty abundant, and they're pretty specific. Speaking of abundant, and rivers, and sources, look at you. That area was unique in that it had these three rivers

that met there, bringing freshwater in. So you got some good freshwater. You got some good seawater with tons of good seafood. You got very rich land for crops. You got irrigation, because you got the freshwater. The weather's gorgeous. So it's right here on the lovely seaside, and that's what made it an ideal spot

for people to say, hey, maybe we should settle down here. Yeah. Let's hang out here for a while and get fat on shrimp. Unfortunately, it's also a bad spot, because there are two fault lines that run parallel through the area, and they have been known to call some major disruption through the years.

Like the earthquake that destroyed Haleke. Exactly. And generated the tsunami. So it's kind of like this whole place is like made to produce a lost city, right? Yeah. Because there's other places around the world where there's violent tectonic activity,

and it's coastal. So that means that it's in danger of a tsunami. Well, California, not with a tsunami, I don't think. Japan. Yeah. The Malaysian tsunami in 2004. Yeah, there's a lot of places, but to produce a... So that will ruin a coastal city, right?

Yes. But for it to become lost, it has to be covered up somehow. And Haleke is in a really unique situation for this, because of those three rivers that formed the Haleke Delta, where Haleke was situated, right? So you've got the earthquake, you've got the tsunami.

So you have a ruined city, it's now submerged. And then these three rivers bring a lot of silt to the area. And so eventually, Haleke was covered up over the centuries. Yeah, you put it in the article about how if you bought a house, or not bought a house, let's say built a house, along the shore in 1890, it would be 1,000 feet inland, which I imagine is quite a rub for people that build that lovely house right on the water.

Yeah, because within a century or so, it's gonna be a couple of streets back. And there's like 10 jerks in front of you that have built houses. Exactly, and it's kind of like, what's that game where you like leapfrog? Oh yeah, I thought you were gonna say Monopoly. Where you build bigger houses than the other guy.

Oh yeah, that would work too. Yeah, sure. So you've got the tsunamis, you've got the river, you've got the- The silt. The silt. You also have the delta itself, because of this violent activity,

is moving up their finding. Over time, it's rising. So you have a rising delta, which is low, it's like right at sea level, but it's getting bigger. And silt is piling it up and making dry ground even further jut out into the coast. Well, what it made was a nice little surprise

for archeologists. And I imagine archeologists just went berserk with this place. Yeah, they had no idea. They just thought Haleke itself was there, they knew it was there. And that, they suspected it would be kind of like a Pompeii. But even more, they considered it even more vital to archeology or the archeological record in Pompeii even.

Well, what they found though, as you know, Josh, but we're gonna spring it on you now, is six other distinct occupied horizons besides six other ones or seven total? Six total. Six total, five others besides Haleke. Yeah. And underneath one on top of the other

that had been settled and civilized and wiped out and covered up. And like just kind of captured in time. That is crazy. Yeah. Which one, what were they? So there was one from the Byzantine period, which was pretty long.

I think it ran from like 200 AD to the 15th century. And then beneath that, there is a Roman ruin, which is from the second to the fourth AD. And that one even features a Roman road. Oh yeah. Which is the road that travelers and writers used to come look at Haleke, the ruins. And that one also, Chuck, this just blows my mind.

It's so captured in time that there's a human skeleton atop a like a cattle skull that like it was knocked on top of this beast and killed like by rock and rubble and just kept there. So their skeletons are intertwined now. Crazy. Isn't that nuts? So the Roman cities on top of Haleke,

then beneath Haleke, they found even more stuff. They found a settlement from the Bronze Age, 2600 to 2300 BC. And before that, they kept digging and found a prehistoric Neolithic period civilization, possibly as old as 12,000 years. I wonder if there's something beneath that even. I don't know.

This makes me think they should start digging in Los Angeles or other like seaside retreats to see what you could find. Well, there's this whole idea, especially among Atlantis hunters, that it's extremely intuitive because of rising sea levels that anything that was established around the last ice age or even at about the end of it,

the sea levels have ridden like more than a hundred feet since then. So any coastal cities now under water, that's like a big thing that they hunt for now or that archeologists are kind of starting to try to get into is looking for human habitation under water. Wow. Like there's this whole area off of Wales, I think,

Northern Wales, Northern Ireland, maybe, or Scotland. Anyways, it's called Doggerland. And it's like just this submerged area that used to be above ground and they're finding like Neolithic settlements there. Isn't that cool? Well, and the earth has changed so much over the course of its existence

that what's here didn't used to be here and what was there was something else. And so yeah, I think it's, there's no telling what's down there. But that idea and the fact that you can find Neolithic settlements under water supports, ironically, the notion that there could be something like Atlantis that's lost somewhere.

Like Heliki. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, yeah, so these guys, they found this, this area. And once they found Heliki, it all started to, they just, it was like jackpot, jackpot, jackpot. But finding Heliki itself proved a little more difficult than they thought, especially considering all the documentation they had.

Yeah, they supposedly knew where it was, quote unquote. Like it's not like they were searching for a needle in a haystack. They were searching for like a pool cue in a haystack. So in the late 80s, a couple of Cornell professors started looking for it for realsies. And they had a little bit of misinterpretation for the word, for the translation for body of water.

And lucky enough, they had a Greek woman with them. Well, she's one of the Cornell professors. Oh, she was? Yeah. Oh, well then lucky that she was Greek. Well, yeah. Cause she translate, she was like, wait a minute. She's like, it may not be in the Gulf after all.

It may be inland. Yeah. And they were like, what? Yeah, everybody had been thinking that this was the, the Gulf had swallowed them up, swallowed up the city. Which would make sense. Right, it turns out it was an inland lagoon that did.

So I think it was very much akin to the, you know, the Noah's Ark episode we just did. Yeah. What is it, the Dead Sea, I think, where they think that the Dead Sea used to be fresh water. Right. Now it's salt water. Right.

Because that's evidence of the flood happening. Right. And probably what they think is the Mediterranean overwhelmed the straight, I can't remember what straight it was. You're searching the reaches. Yeah. Anyway, I think it was much the same way. Like the city used to be around a lagoon

and then the lagoon got a lot bigger thus swallowing the city. Right. So they looked under land and all of a sudden they had to ditch their scuba gear for shovels and they found the first Roman city, the first ruins, like wait a minute, 12 feet, just 12 feet below the land.

Which doesn't seem like that far at all. No, it's not. Cause the Roman ruins were like four or five feet. Yeah. I would think that someone would have accidentally found it before that even, you know? Well, that kicked it off. There was a German archeologist who was traveling in the area

and found a heliki coin with Poseidon on it and was like, holy cow, this is significant. Right. So I think that's kind of how it started. Gotcha. Yeah. So they found, have found a lot of stuff since then. Buildings, industrial buildings, kilns, looms,

intersecting streets. Yeah, with buildings along these streets. Yeah, like a real city. Yeah. What else? Buildings, of course, jugs. Jugs with the original contents. And those are from the Bronze Age.

Right. They found a storehouse of like jugs of different sizes and types from the Bronze Age. So we're talking like 5,000 years old. Crazy. They don't have any idea about these civilizations, but this was contemporary to like ancient Troy. Right.

Which itself was considered a legendary city until a Hierarch Schleeman found it. Right. So just finding this stuff is amazingly awesome. Well, and there's more. Yeah, there is. Supposedly. Yes.

So they think that they found the outskirts of Haleke and that there's a lot more left and that it's intact. Oh, they're not actually at Haleke yet? No, they're in Haleke, but they're not in the city center. They don't think. Oh, OK, I got you. Yeah. So they're just out in the outskirts.

That's what they think. Wow. Yeah. And when they were looking for Haleke out in the Gulf, they found something cool too, didn't they? I don't think I know this. You do know it. They found a seawall, an ancient seawall of the city.

Oh, really? And they also found what they think are the Ten Spartan ships. Oh, yeah, that's right. I thought you were going to say the statue of Poseidon. That would be like... Well, they'll find it eventually. The mother load.

If they found that thing still standing upright under the earth. So they keep following. They started by following the Roman road. Right. So basically they're unearthing. Like imagine this, dude. They're unearthing like three lost cities at once.

That's crazy. Isn't that insane? Do you know what an archeological treasure trove that is? Yeah. So they're unearthing them. And as long as they don't intersect, right? As long as the Roman town isn't built directly over the statue of Poseidon to where

getting to Poseidon would undermine the Roman town, then they should be able to get it all. And they're going to be doing it. They'll excavate this for decades. So this has been ongoing since the late 80s? Well, no. They really started uncovering stuff in like 2000. Wow.

But they started in 1988. So awesome. Yeah. Very cool. So that's a heliki. So of course, Chuck, this doesn't mean that anybody has stopped searching for Atlantis. Like the archeologist in Spain.

Yeah. He's looking inland now, which comes from this theory. So maybe he's on to something. It's possible. He's going to start digging up in Barcelona. Yeah. And people are going to say, what are you doing? Yeah.

Drink some wine. So you were saying that you think that Plato was inspired by heliki. Sure. I think there's substantial evidence in what we've said. But also, keep in mind, heliki happened in 373. Plato wrote his book in 360 13 years later. And he lived in the area.

This is a pretty well-known catastrophe. So I think you're probably right. But we would not have had the awesome TV show Man from Atlantis had it not been for Plato. No, I guess that's true. Did you watch that? No. That was a little before your time.

And there's an awesome HP Lovecraft short story about a German U-boat that ends up in Atlantis. That's awesome. I tried to find YouTube stuff of Man from Atlantis. There's plenty out there. You had the webbed hands when I was a kid. Oh, really? Yeah, I had webbed hands and feet.

It's not Prince Nemo, is it? The Submariner? Prince Nemo? Nemo? No, Prince Nemo. Nemo. No. He's a Marvel comic guy.

No, no, no. It was a schlocky. It ran for like one year. Was he like a detective? Was he his mom? He had superhuman strength and could breathe underwater. Had gills. And he had webbed feet and hands.

And I think some government agencies snapped him up to do investigative undersea work for them. I know you're talking about. Welcome back, Cotter. It was a dude from Dallas. Patrick, what's his face? Patrick Ewing. Patrick Duffy.

You're thinking JR Ewing. Patrick Ewing is a basketball player. Patrick Duffy, yeah. That's him. It was good stuff. I have never heard of that show. Yeah, it was only around for one year, I think. But boy, I was into it when I was like seven.

Good stuff. You had webbed hands. Yeah, it got me into Play-Doh. You hadn't been eating it for years now. Funny guy. All right, so that's it. You got anything else? I got nothing else.

Thank you for doing this one with me. It was awesome. Thank you for opening my eyes to coolness. Any time. If you want to know more about Haleke, you should search for, was there a real Atlantis? By typing that into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And I said that, which means it's time for a listener mail.

That's right. Josh, remember when we did a little TV pilot recently? We tried to get these bookends onto the show. They arrived a little late. We weren't able to. But I want to tell everyone about this project, because that sounds very cryptic. This is from Mike.

Hey, guys. I've been a big fan for a couple of years. And I especially like that some of your causes you have taken on and considered and done podcasts about them, Kiva and the Cooperative for Education in particular. So our Guatemala podcast gave him an idea for a Facebook fundraising idea

to raise awareness for co-op, our buddies, Cooperative for Education, Cincinnati, who do the awesome textbook programs in computer center labs in Guatemala. And he proposed to them. And they said, hey, Kiel, let's do this. So his idea was to create, quote unquote, celebrity bookends with just this basic idea,

take an ordinary set of bookends, although they are pretty fancy looking. I got to admit, and make them super famous pop culture icons through social media, and then sell them for a million bucks and give it all to co-ed. So that's the plan. It's a good plan. I don't know if we added anything to that.

We added at least $0.70. OK, good. He says, I know it sounds crazy, but crazy is usually what it takes to get people to notice things. The rational thinking behind this is that to get famous, all you need to have are a ton of people believing that you're famous.

Yeah, I mean, what else is celebrity? Yeah, exactly. So they're trying to drum up celebrity for these bookends to raise awareness. They have sent them around the world to meet people and to be on TV shows and in movies. They're documenting this on Facebook, the travels of these bookends, and Twitter, and blogs

for people to follow. And our big, audacious goal is to get as many Facebook fans as Kim Kardashian. She has 9 million fans. Can you believe that? Sadly, yes. So what we're hoping for your listeners is that they will like the idea enough to want to help.

All you have to do, it can be as simple as going to the Facebook page, follow you on Twitter, the celebrity bookends, that is, tweet about us, blog about us, tell your friends to like us, and hook us up with any celebrity friends that you might have. They have been in the hands of Danny DeVito, Matt Berninger of The National.

I didn't know how to pronounce that, but I do love The National. And I believe I saw Jeff Bridges holding these things. Did you really? Yeah. Wow. Is that before us? Yeah.

Sweet. So we actually got a little DeVito Bridges stank on our hands, unless they clean these things. And they sent it to us, originally to get it in our cubicles on the TV pilot, but they arrived a little late. We weren't able to, so we just did some pictures. And maybe on down the road, if we do any more TV stuff, we can get them on television and do our part

to help raise awareness. Nice, man. So facebook.com slash celebrity bookends or Twitter at celebrity bookends or send an email to celebrity bookends at Gmail. And that raises awareness to eventually sell these things to Danny DeVito to raise money for Coed. For a million bucks.

Well, I certainly don't have a million bucks. Well, we also have our own Twitter handle. And you can get in touch with us, too, while you're talking to celebrity bookends. You can tweet to us whatever you want. There's no rules, except there has to be 140 characters or less just that rule. That's SYSK podcast.

We're also on Facebook at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can send us an email as well at stuffpodcast.com. MUSIC For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. MUSIC On the podcast, hey dude, the 90s called David Lashley

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.