Great Atlantis Rising Book Review

 

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A Classic Gets Its Well-Deserved Rebirth!   "If the highest compliment any book can receive is that it continues to influence both readers and authors long after its release, then Atlantis Rising merits such an accolade. First published in 1973, it not only reignited public interest in a virtually moribund subject, but perpetuated popular fascination for the lost civilization, an engrossment that continues to expand on an international scale thirty-four years later...Atlantis Rising still holds up...because it is among the best written volumes in that vast library of Atlantology, with its estimated 2500 books."   From the Foreword by Frank Joseph, author of Atlantis in Wisconsin and other books on Atlantis.   "Atlantis Rising is a landmark book in the study of lost civilizations and alien contact. It was the very first work to suggest that ancient peoples were visited by extraterrestrial beings in spacecraft who helped shape an antediluvian global culture. The historical impact of Atlantis Rising has been grossly underrated and all subsequent studies in this area like Chariots of the Gods?, When the Sky Fell and From Atlantis to the Sphinx are merely "Johnny come Latelies" compared to Brad Steiger's pioneering and seminal book."   William H. Kennedy, Sphinx Radio host, author of The Da Vinci Code Cabal.   Atlantis Has Risen Again Has It Been Beneath Our Oceans All These Years?   By Brad Steiger 12-19-7   As someone said to me not long ago, "I'll bet there is an interesting story to go with each of your books."   Here are a couple to go with Atlantis Rising, recently republished by Galde Press (http://www.galdepress.com/books/alternativescience/ atlantisrising.html):   Although the book was first published by Dell Books in 1973 and as Frank Joseph, who wrote the Foreword to the new edition, observed, it "reignited public interest" in Atlantis, and as William H. Kennedy notes, it "was the very first work to suggest that ancient people were visited by extraterrestrials who helped shape an antediluvian global culture," the book was actually written in 1969-'70. An editor who had been advancing up the literary ladder, moving from smaller houses to larger ones, called me when she assumed editorship at Dell Books and said, "Let's do that big book on Atlantis that we've talked about."   After I had completed the book, I learned that Dell had exciting news for me. Walt Disney studios wanted to option Atlantis Rising for a motion picture. We met with a number of executives at Disney in New York, and it seemed a sure thing that my book would be the basis for a film. Publication of Atlantis Rising would, however, be delayed in order to coincide more closely with the release of the film.Although any author worth his ink is eager to see a completed work in print, to be linked to a Disney film seemed a small sacrifice of ego to make for a delay in publication. However, as many an author has learned to his dismay, there is a world of difference between an option and the actual production and release of a film. I have had many of my books optioned. The only one to make it to the screen thus far has been one completely outside the realm of the paranormal, UFOs, or Atlantis-- Valentino, the biography of the great silent screen lover, optioned and actually made by Ken Russell. The only tangible thing with which I was left from the Disney experience was a fistful of Mickey Mouse pens for my children.   My Dell editor moved on to another publisher, and the years passed. Disney finally made Atlantis: The Lost Empire in 2001, which bombed at the box office-- the studio's rightful Karma, I felt for not filming Atlantis Rising. But back in 1970-'72, my inquiries to Dell about the fate of my book were met with confused and awkward patches of silence. My agent guessed that they had lost the manuscript and that the book would never be published.   Then, incredibly, with but a couple of weeks to go on their contractual rights of possession, someone at Dell found the manuscript of Atlantis Rising and announced that it would be published as soon as possible. Within a few months after publication in 1973, Atlantis Rising had gone into eleven printings.   Another interesting story that occurred during the writing of the book was the strange telephone call that I received while working late one night on the manuscript from someone who claimed to be an Atlantean and who was calling from one of their undersea bases. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Why should I be surprised if I, an author of the strange and unusual, received a call from a nut who believed that he was living in a city under the ocean? Maybe. But I just happened to be working on Chapter Five: "Mighty Teachers from an Undersea Kingdom" when he called.   If Atlantis should still exist, I am convinced that the most likely place for its domain would be under our seas. In 1969, Dr. Roger W. Wescott, chairman of the anthropology department at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, published The Divine Animal, in which he presented a well-reasoned theory that extraterrestrials had landed on Earth circa 10,000 years ago, intending to teach humankind a better way of life. The anthropologist feels that the space travelers were viewed as gods by our human ancestors, but when Earth's dominant species continued to demonstrate their avaricious and destructive nature, the extraterrestrials gave up in disgust and withdrew to establish undersea bases.   Although the cosmic tutors were temporarily thwarted in their attempts to build a better world here on Earth, they did not give up hope, and they emerge from time to time to conduct certain spot- checks to see if humans are advancing intellectually and becoming less barbaric. Such monitoring forays explain the sightings of UFOs which have been reported for thousands of years.   Dr. Wescott also suggests that when the UFOnauts withdrew from the Earth's surface, they took some humans along with them to train and to tutor according to their advanced extraterrestrial principles. Dr. Wescott conjectures that some of these specially tutored humans might have been returned to the surface at certain intervals to have become leaders. Some of these apprentices worked to change humankind for good, while others, corrupted by a combination of their secret knowledge and the malleability of the less-advanced surfaced humans, only brought additional chaos and confusion to the world. Dr. Wescott speculates that such individuals as Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, Genghis Khan, and Attila the Hun might have been sent up to the surface by the UFOnauts with varying degrees of success.   In Dr. Wescott's view, such a theory helps to explain two of the most widespread and persistent legends found among nearly all peoples and all cultures: 1.) There was a time when gods walked the earth and tutored humankind. 2) There was a culture called Atlantis, whose thriving civilization met with catastrophe and sank beneath the sea.   Dr. Wescott also theorizes that there may not have been a catastrophic destruction of a continent, but, rather, an orderly withdrawal of the "gods," the cosmic teachers, as they transferred their bases from the land to the sea floor. If such a theory as the one he proposes may be true, Dr. Wescott suggests that the many reputable sea captains who have seen UFOs going in and out of the ocean might well be seeing aerial vehicles from undersea bases constructed by advanced beings.   ******   Ever since I began an intensive study of the UFO phenomenon in 1956, I have been intrigued by those reports from individuals who claim to have witnessed strange aerial craft entering and leaving large bodies of water. What is more, the mystique and the reality of undersea USO (Unidentified Submarine Objects) bases seems to grow more convincing with each passing year.   In mid-February 1942--five years before Roswell--Lt. William Brennan of the Royal Australian Air Force was on patrol over the Bass Strait south of Melbourne, Australia, on the lookout for Japanese submarines or long-range German U-boats. Fishermen in the area had reported mysterious lights bobbing on the sea at night, and after the Japanese attack on Darwin on February 19, the Allied High Command was urging the strictest vigilance.   The air patrol was flying a few miles east of the Tasman Peninsula about 5:50 P.M. on a sunny evening when a strange aircraft of a glistening bronze color suddenly emerged from a cloud bank near them. The object was about 150 feet long and approximately 50 feet in diameter. Lt. Brennan saw that the peculiar craft had a dome or cupola on its upper surface and he thought that he might have seen someone inside wearing a helmet.   The unidentified aerial craft flew parallel to the RAAF patrol for several minutes, then it abruptly turned away and dived straight down into the Pacific. Lt. Brennan emphasized that the USO made a dive, not a crash, into the ocean; and he added that before the craft left them, he noticed what appeared to be four finlike appendages on its underside.   ******   For many years now I have received regular reports of UFO harassment of shrimp boats. An early account that I received from Ira Pete, owner of the Ruby E., a sixty-seven-foot shrimp boat, who had his vessel sink under mysterious circumstances in the first week in July, 1961, was considerably more serious than the accounts of UFOs surfacing beside the shrimp boats or buzzing the crews.   According to Pete, he was fishing in the Gulf of Mexico off Port Arkansas with his two-man crew when something hooked into the boat and ripped off its stern. Fortunately for the three shrimpers, there was another fishing vessel close by.   ******   On February 5, 1964, the 105-foot yacht Hattie D. was rammed by an underwater something near Eureka, California. Ten men and one woman were lifted from the fast-sinking yacht in a dramatic Coast Guard helicopter rescue.   The survivors all agreed that the Hattie D. had been run into by something big made of steel. When Crewman Carl Johnson was informed that no submarines were reported in the area and that the yacht had sunk in 7,500 feet of water, he adamantly replied that he didn't care how deep it was in that area--and he knew that whatever "holed" the yacht had been a very long piece of steel.   ******   On January 12, 1965, Captain K, an airline pilot on a flight between Whenuapai and Kaitaia, New Zealand, spotted a USO when he was about one-third of the way across Kaipara Harbor. As he veered his DC-3 for a closer look at what he had at first guessed to be a stranded gray-white whale in an estuary, it became evident to him that he was now observing a metallic structure of some sort.   Captain K saw that the object was perfectly streamlined and symmetrical in shape. He could detect no external control surfaces or protrusions, but there did appear to be a hatch on top. Harbored in no more than thirty feet of water, the USO was not shaped like an ordinary submarine. He estimated its length to be approximately 100 feet with a diameter of 15 feet at its widest part.   Later, the Navy stated that it would have been impossible for any known model of submarine to have been in that particular area due to the configuration of harbor and coastline. The surrounding mud flats and mangrove swamps would make the spot in which Captain K saw his USO inaccessible to conventional undersea craft.   ******   On July 5, 1965, Dr. Dmitri Rebikoff, a marine scientist making preparations to explore the Gulf Stream's depths, found himself faced with a most unusual challenge when he detected and attempted to photograph a fast-moving undersea USO on the bottom of the warm water stream that flows from the Florida Keys to Newfoundland and onward to northern Europe. Dr. Rebikoff told Captain L. Jacques Nicholas, project coordinator, that the object was pear-shaped and moving at approximately three and one half knots.   The peculiar object was moving beneath various schools of fish, and at first, judging from its size, Dr. Rebikoff thought it to be a large shark. As he monitored it, however, he noted that the USO's direction and speed were too constant.   The marine scientist theorized that the object was mechanical and running on robot pilot, but since they were unable to receive any signal from the USO, he really had no idea what it might have been.   ******   In the summer of 1969, Englishman John Fairfax rowed his way across the Atlantic, docking in Fort Lauderdale after six harrowing months alone on the sea. When asked by journalists to name the most impressive thing that had happened to him during the ocean adventure, Fairfax replied rather reluctantly that the answer to that question would have to be the appearance of objects that could not have been anything other than flying saucers.   Emphasizing that he had never believed in such things, he went on to explain that there was much more involved in his experience than simply observing UFOs. There was a force he told reporters; it was as if the objects kept asking him if he wanted to come with them.   "And I was fighting [the force] and saying back, 'No, no, no,'" Fairfax said. "It was like telepathy, like being hypnotized. Then these luminous saucers swooped down over the ocean, rose and swooped down again." ******   In December, 1997, a massive craft was seen emerging from the sea next to an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. According to engineer Jeremy Packer, the sighting was witnessed by 250 oil rig workers.   At about 7:58 A.M., Packer said that everyone got frightened when they heard a rumbling noise that they knew couldn't be the engines that ran the platform bore. Looking toward the west, they sighted twenty-five to thirty helicopters on maneuvers. This was not unusual, Packer said, except that the rig commander said that he had not received the usual alert regarding Coast Guard maneuvers.   Then, according to Packer, they all saw something that totally changed their lives. All of the helicopters stopped in midair and a huge metal cigar-shaped object about the size of the oil platform surfaced beneath them. The massive craft, about as long as two football fields, soared straight out of the water and into the air, where it hovered above the helicopters for about two minutes.   Packer described the object as concave on its underside with four large domes on its bottom. The topside of the cigar-shaped craft was encircled by beautiful lights of every color that one could imagine.   And then, as if someone had turned off a light switch, the giant craft had disappeared. One second everyone was studying the object through binoculars or telescopes, then, in the literal blink of an eye, it was gone.   As an interesting sidenote, Packer said that the crew noticed that their watches were 30 minutes later than the actual time when they got back to the mainland.   ******   In 1990, on a dark night somewhere in the Andes near the ancient site of the sacred Incan city of Ollantaytambo, Peru, my wife Sherry and I watched numerous illuminated UFOs emerge from the surface of a lake, soar into the night sky in a peculiar zigzag flight pattern, then descend once again beneath the water. Obviously quite accustomed to the sight, the Peruvian villagers went about their tasks of carrying grain and water to their families in jars atop their heads, paying little attention to the USO phenomenon. In answer to our queries regarding the glowing objects, the villagers' answers were consistent: "Angelsthe Old Onesthe grandfathers, who have never left us."     ATLANTIS RISING By Brad Steiger Galde Press, 2007 193 pages, $14.95   Inexplicata gives this book five stars (* * * * *)   About thirty years ago, a schoolboy walked into a local bookstore and noticed a misplaced book: a paperback with a Frank Frazetta cover had been inadvertently placed in the science fiction section when it should have been in the esoterica aisle (as it was called back then). Intrigued, he leafed through it and found himself spending at least half an hour reading at the store, too irresistible to put down. After buying it, he continued perusing its contents on the bus back home; the next day, the book accompanied him to school, where he read it during class time, keeping it from the watchful, restless eyes of Sister Lewis Marie.   The book with the Frazetta cover was called Atlantis Rising, its author was Brad Steiger, and the inquisitive schoolboy was me.   Atlantis was always a name to charm anyone with an interest in antiquity, real or legendary. Comic books like Korg: 70,000 BC pitted cavemen against red-tunicked Atlanteans with high technology, Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian was set in the centuries after the fall of Atlantis. Movies about Atlantis and its lethal death rays filled the afternoon hours: Captain Nemo found Atlantis; James Bond destroyed it in The Spy Who Loved Me. In the 19th century, supporters of the lost continent rioted in the streets for love of their idealized paradise. But all of these references were clearly framed in the realm of fiction. Atlantis Rising was the first book in paperback form to reach an audience who knew about Atlantis, but not nearly enough. A book that reach deep into the bag of mystery to give its readers a feel for the multiple and marvelous theories regarding the lost continent in what we tentatively refer to as the 'real world'.   It took Brad Steiger's gift of making the arcane accessible to the unspecialized reader, supporting his texts with facts, figures and dates, to make the drowned continent emerge from its watery grave on paper. A reader who might have heard of Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World was now treated to the prophecies of Edgar Cayce, the underwater research of Dr. Manson Valentine, the possibility of Atlantis still surviving in our day and age as an undersea civilization responsible for UFO phenomena, and the possibility that certain mystics among us were in touch ' through what later became known as 'channeling' ' with entities from the lost continent. No longer was Atlantis confined to the sword-and-sandal world of Harryhausen's Atlantis: The Lost Continent (and its convincing ray gun) but a place, or at least a concept, approached by these multiple theories.   Particularly stunning was a chapter whose title still carries a distinctive ring in later years ' An Inner Earth Empire of Masters and Monsters.' It is quite possible that to many readers, this was their first taste of the writings of Richard Shaver and theories involving the Elder Race and their descendants: the Apollonian Teros and the insanely Dionysian Deros, misguidedly using the 'mech' of the Elder Race to cause mayhem among surface dwellers and further debase themselves. No concept or image could be further from the concept of a pseudo-Grecian Atlantis whose towers, brave warriors and fair ladies slipped into the drink after a storm that forever changed the world and made the Atlantic Ocean supposedly unnavigable for generations.   It's difficult to render an objective opinion on a work that has meant so much to so many over the past three decades, and is now available to a whole new readership thanks to Galde Press. My own reading of Atlantis Rising was set against the background of Puerto Rico's nearly constant UFO activity in the 1970s and the belief that the island was one of the remnants of the lost continent, a notion bolstered by the presence of the enigmatic mountain rainforest of El Yunque and the affirmations of many sensitives and mystics of its affiliation to the sunken continent. Human disappearances at this site, and the reports of impish beings, could easily feed into a belief of Dero mischief. The contemporary reader will be treated to theories and cases that go beyond the routine paranormal fare of ghosts and Roswell, and those who read it in the past may find themselves remembering concepts that faded from memory over the years under the weight of new information and insights.   The bottom line: if you are a student of the paranormal, read Atlantis Rising. If you are interested in the possibility of a pre-human civilization whose legacy surrounds us in the shape of inexplicable works of architecture and strange artifacts, read Atlantis Rising. If you are an enthusiast of the Atlantis of fiction, expand your horizons by reading this book and you may never think about comics, movies or boardgames the same way again. I can only hope that thirty years from now, some other young person sets aside whatever electronic entertainment the future has in store for them and comes across a copy of this seminal work. Read it and be enlightened!   -- Scott Corrales, INEXPLICATA   Atlantis Rising (FIVE STARS) Vintage, Wonderful Steiger - February 19, 2007 Michele B "Dreamseeker" (Olympic Peninsula, WA)   "Brad Steiger is one of a handful of writers in this difficult field who is able to keep a clear head, tell a great story, and inspire a person to think for him or herself. He has elegant common sense and is a man who writes very, very, well. Many people have borrowed his research and ideas and then written poor imitations of the original work. This is the real thing. If you haven't read this book yet, be sure to do so."     Atlantis Rising December 20 Steiger on Atlantis UFO Mystic   A guest-post from famed author Brad Steiger, who penned Atlantis Rising, a seminal look at the legend of the lost continent that is credited with reawakening the Atlantis mystique in the 1970s. The recent republication of Atlantis Rising gives Steiger an opportunity to relive the events that surrounded the book's original publication and to recount the reports of Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs) that seem to indicate a presence under the world's oceans that could be tied to the vanished continent.