Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: David Edward served as a special Agent in the US
Speaker 1: Army nineteen eighties and nineties and is a veteran of
Speaker 1: multiple overseas combat tours. He was the Special Agent in
Speaker 1: charge of the nineteen ninety Panama Canal counter Terrorism Threat
Speaker 1: Assessment Report to the US Congress. He's a graduate of
Speaker 1: the United States Army Intelligence School, where he's studied Advanced
Speaker 1: Human Intelligence and Battlefield counter Intelligence, also completing training at
Speaker 1: the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama, Central America. He
Speaker 1: holds advanced degrees in engineering, including a doctorate in engineering,
Speaker 1: three related Masters of Science degrees, and has an undergraduate
Speaker 1: degree in business. He's the author of scores of books.
Speaker 1: Here's just a sampling a series called A Short History
Speaker 1: of which includes volumes on The Coral Castle, The Maya,
Speaker 1: and DMT, and his latest Atlantis Solved, The Final Definitive Proof.
Speaker 1: David Edward, Welcome back to Coast to Coast. How are you.
Speaker 1: I'm doing good, sir. How are you Richard. It's really
Speaker 1: great to talk to you. Yeah, I'm I'm great, Thank you,
Speaker 1: and it's great to have you aboard first of all,
Speaker 1: because this whole arena is so you know, well trodden.
Speaker 1: How do you even and as I mentioned, you're a
Speaker 1: physical historian, you're a research or you're familiar with the
Speaker 1: peer reviewed process, how do you even begin to review
Speaker 1: the research in this area? Because I'm just is there
Speaker 1: any quote end quote, serious academic research to review? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, that's that's a good opening question. Typically in
Speaker 1: an if you have an academic mindset or frame or methodology,
Speaker 1: that's the very first thing you do is you do
Speaker 1: what they call literature review when you when you have
Speaker 1: decided that you have questions a challenge with Atlantis. And
Speaker 1: it's where I can with that term physical historian. I
Speaker 1: really struggled on what to call myself. What the approach
Speaker 1: we took with Atlantis was to kind of turn it around.
Speaker 1: And usually people look at it, they see if they
Speaker 1: can find evidence that leads them to, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: find pieces of the story. We said, you know what,
Speaker 1: let's assume. Let's have an assumption. And that's okay. You're
Speaker 1: allowed to have assumptions as long as you statum. Let's
Speaker 1: assume that what Plato says, the physical attributes of what
Speaker 1: Plato says, well, let's assume he's right, or at least
Speaker 1: he thinks he's right. So if we assume all this
Speaker 1: stuff exists, is there a way to go start looking
Speaker 1: for it? And the approach there was to take all
Speaker 1: of the academic knowledge that we have and the data.
Speaker 1: There's lots of data, and many people have looked for it,
Speaker 1: and you know, use the data, but we feel very
Speaker 1: comfortable reaching our own conclusions. So we're not going to
Speaker 1: use established conclusions, but we are going to use established data.
Speaker 1: And when we did that, and we were very lucky
Speaker 1: because we have a lot of technical tools. We have
Speaker 1: a lot of technology. The people in the past even
Speaker 1: just that I mean people if we're looking for Atlantis
Speaker 1: in the nineties, nineteen nineties and before, I mean they
Speaker 1: didn't have the Google that we have and the you know,
Speaker 1: the Google Earth and the lighter and all different places
Speaker 1: that we can look. So when you go start grabbing
Speaker 1: all of those tools and you start with the dialogues,
Speaker 1: as the physical aspects is true, you just have to
Speaker 1: kind of push the other stuff away and do the
Speaker 1: research from the beginning, which is what we did. So
Speaker 1: you're very quick to credit Jim Corsetti a fellow veteran
Speaker 1: and his work on identifying the location of Atlantis, and
Speaker 1: David Stighanson as well. Just tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about about these two gentlemen, and I guess what they
Speaker 1: kind of pieced together in twenty eighteen, which but we're
Speaker 1: not able to prove definitively. Yeah, and that's and so
Speaker 1: and thank you. I always try and mention them because
Speaker 1: I you know, I'm not the sole author. None of
Speaker 1: us really are the soul anything anymore. You know, there's
Speaker 1: so much information out there. But yeah, Jimmy course said
Speaker 1: he here's a YouTube channel called bright Insight, and uh
Speaker 1: and Richard, you're a young guys. You don't know this,
Speaker 1: but I'm a little old. And it turns out the
Speaker 1: old guys can't sleep sometimes. So I was away from night.
Speaker 1: I'm beginning to have that problem. Well, yes, it's in
Speaker 1: front of you. It's a glimpse of stay it's in
Speaker 1: front of you. So I listened to all of the
Speaker 1: Coast to Coast day and weekend shows and all of
Speaker 1: the Strange World podcast that I could, and I and
Speaker 1: YouTube handed me Jimmy's one of Jimmy's videos about Atlantis,
Speaker 1: and I was like, uh, you know, I watched it,
Speaker 1: Actually I watched it three or four times. Like, I
Speaker 1: think this guy's onto something, but you know he's he's
Speaker 1: coming at this as a well intending lay person as
Speaker 1: opposed to someone who can kind of um knows how
Speaker 1: to combat the academic side and knows how to present
Speaker 1: data as evidence, not just as intriguing stuff. And then
Speaker 1: I later learned I was contacted by David steg Hanson,
Speaker 1: who actually is the one who sent Jimmy the original
Speaker 1: picture of this rich chat stressing thing, which is what
Speaker 1: Jimmy has kind of made his name being a proponent
Speaker 1: of it. But but David Stighanson, and David's been there
Speaker 1: a couple of times. He last time he was there
Speaker 1: was in October, and so he and I talk and
Speaker 1: when he goes there, there's a number of things that
Speaker 1: we look for. He's going to go back again this year.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so I definitely always credit them and thank
Speaker 1: you for bringing him up, because it starts with them.
Speaker 1: And then what I want to do is seal the
Speaker 1: deal because with Atlantis, you know, we've all fallen and
Speaker 1: we continue to fall for the kind of the standard
Speaker 1: Atlantis pitch, which is whether it's a book or a
Speaker 1: TV show or a feature link documentary is roughly the
Speaker 1: first half is kind of this whole setup where you
Speaker 1: see beautiful people in Greek islands and scuba diving and
Speaker 1: they kind of convince you they figured it out. And
Speaker 1: then the second half is, well, we got to change this,
Speaker 1: or maybe the years are wrong, or none of these
Speaker 1: seven places line up, but they're all interesting, and then
Speaker 1: it kind of fades away. I didn't want to do that.
Speaker 1: I wanted to come up with an answer, and with
Speaker 1: all those tools I mentioned, and having the work of
Speaker 1: Jimmy and David to start with, I was able to
Speaker 1: come up with what I think is, um, I'm calling
Speaker 1: out a hypothesis or you know, a view of Atlantis
Speaker 1: that's that's unified, which was something else I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: I wanted to have a unifying theory. When I first
Speaker 1: did the work on the risshat and it matches Plato.
Speaker 1: We'll get into all of that. I started telling people
Speaker 1: very naively, and the journey for me and all of
Speaker 1: this is learning how to communicate fairly complex topics around
Speaker 1: data that people hear lots of different ways, and how
Speaker 1: do you how do you communicate a new idea in
Speaker 1: that space, and I'm still learning how to do that,
Speaker 1: and talking to you and other people kind of helps
Speaker 1: me because it's very hard. You think it's easy, and
Speaker 1: you think, you know, you just say, well, well here's
Speaker 1: the answer, and then everyone's just going to jump on board.
Speaker 1: But that's not the Atlantis space at all. Atlantis has
Speaker 1: lots of things to lots of people, and right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's I don't know what, I don't know if
Speaker 1: the term fanboys is appropriate here, but they're I mean,
Speaker 1: the the legions of people that imbue the Atlantis legend
Speaker 1: with I guess all of their their own sort of
Speaker 1: personal hopes and aspirations and all of that. And we
Speaker 1: you know, free energy and flying cars, and they had
Speaker 1: nuclear submarines and they had a death ray and all
Speaker 1: of that. So I mean, here you wait into this
Speaker 1: with this very analytical mind, and it's you know, it
Speaker 1: ends up being still a remarkable story, but perhaps far
Speaker 1: more I don't know, prosaic or um. So you know,
Speaker 1: people are bound to be sort of disappointed, right, well
Speaker 1: they are, and part of it is because I'm not
Speaker 1: I'm not very good explaining it. And so you know,
Speaker 1: I'll do I'll do my best. But Atlantis what I
Speaker 1: believe Atlantis actually was, and at ninety nine point three
Speaker 1: two we have a hypothesis around Atlantis that doesn't require
Speaker 1: us to change anything we know about our history. Well
Speaker 1: doesn't REQUI we reinterpret our history. But we're using data
Speaker 1: that's well established um and it treats, you know, played
Speaker 1: a kind of respectfully to what happens is it becomes
Speaker 1: a very harmonious answer because I mean, if you look,
Speaker 1: some people think Atlantis is the richette eing, which is
Speaker 1: the word. I think that's the capital. But we're also
Speaker 1: told there are ten provinces, so put some people like Doggerland,
Speaker 1: Cadiz in Spain, the SEUs, Mesa and Morocco. They're like
Speaker 1: the Canary Islands, Cape Rode, people like the Azores, like
Speaker 1: the Viminy Road. They're like the Aztecs at Mexico. And think,
Speaker 1: I think the truth of the matter is when you
Speaker 1: when you look at the provinces of Atlantis, which which
Speaker 1: we have, it's basically an early version of a king's list,
Speaker 1: which became a historical norm. But we're dealing with the
Speaker 1: story this kind of prehistory. There is a way the
Speaker 1: King's List paints a kingdom, and it paints a technological
Speaker 1: progression that we've mapped out. And and you mentioned the book,
Speaker 1: and I appreciate that. I've also got the YouTube channel
Speaker 1: a history of I think I've got twenty nine videos
Speaker 1: on this, and I pretty much want anyone who's willing
Speaker 1: to spend seven hours listening to me talking on videos.
Speaker 1: I walk into the very very start of this word
Speaker 1: story come from all the way to the discoveries we've
Speaker 1: made on ground and all the physical evidence that that
Speaker 1: kind of answers the kingdom. All right, So let's let's
Speaker 1: basically let the cat out of the bag and then
Speaker 1: we'll sort of work backwards from there. Because you mentioned
Speaker 1: it already, the risch At structure a ka the eye
Speaker 1: of the Sahara. There I said it. This is Corsetti's
Speaker 1: David Stighanson's identifying the location in the western Sahara of Africa.
Speaker 1: It's not submerged, it's right there in the middle of
Speaker 1: the western Sahara desert. Just kind of give us a
Speaker 1: description of what does it look like today? Sure, and
Speaker 1: remember this is we're talking about the capital city. This
Speaker 1: is one of the things that we have done with
Speaker 1: Atlantis is everyone wants to win in the air quotes
Speaker 1: and so the big that And I did a survey
Speaker 1: by the way, so I was curious, you know, what
Speaker 1: do people believe in the survey? I think I have
Speaker 1: like two thousand people responded, did it on Reddit? So
Speaker 1: it is what it is. But the people didn't think
Speaker 1: it was this rish At structure in the western Sahara.
Speaker 1: About thirty three percent think it's the Azores, and then
Speaker 1: the rest kind of think it's everything else. When you
Speaker 1: look at the risch At structure, and there are some
Speaker 1: key points we'll get into. We can go we can
Speaker 1: go into the dialogues. One of the key dimensions that's
Speaker 1: given in the dialogues, it's often disregarded for disregards that right, disregarded, yes, okay,
Speaker 1: good is that it says that the capital city sat
Speaker 1: at the end of a gently sloping plane to the
Speaker 1: sea of three thousand stadia. And it's a line that's
Speaker 1: in there, and you have to do a lot of
Speaker 1: work around what a stadia is. And all of that
Speaker 1: turns out one measure you can use for a stadius,
Speaker 1: the Alexandrian measure, which would have been what Plato would
Speaker 1: have used in his lifetime, because both Plato and Alexander
Speaker 1: the Great War alive at the same time about a decade,
Speaker 1: so I think Alexander was eleven when Plato died. But this,
Speaker 1: so you multiply the six thousand or six hundred six
Speaker 1: point nine feet, which is what a stadius, the six
Speaker 1: hundred and seven feet to make easy mac multiplied by
Speaker 1: three thousand, and you get three hundred and forty five miles,
Speaker 1: and that's how far inland the Rischette structure sits. So
Speaker 1: that was like my first clue. And it's a gentle slope.
Speaker 1: You can measure a slope, it's basically the rise over
Speaker 1: the run. So you can take the run, which is
Speaker 1: three hundred and forty five miles, and the rise we
Speaker 1: know it shits about fifteen hundred feet above sea level.
Speaker 1: That puts the slope well below one percent, which fits
Speaker 1: the category of a gently sloping, gentle slope to the sea.
Speaker 1: There would have been a river where at a time
Speaker 1: when it's very much the green Sahara. And then we've
Speaker 1: found there's lots of physical remnants we've found on the
Speaker 1: ground around the Rishat structure. But as you mentioned what
Speaker 1: it looks like. The big thing with the rish Hate
Speaker 1: structure is it looks like Atlantis. It's the only place
Speaker 1: on Earth I've seen that that meets those dimensions of
Speaker 1: a center island and then alternating concentric rings of water
Speaker 1: and land. And you can type just type in eye
Speaker 1: of this hair or richest structure and google or duck
Speaker 1: duckt go or whatever you use to search, go to
Speaker 1: the images and you'll see hundreds of images of the thing.
Speaker 1: So it's got that look. And then all the other
Speaker 1: measurements you can start to line up. And then when
Speaker 1: you start with this in the center, this area which
Speaker 1: we'll call Atlas because he's he's the you know, the
Speaker 1: first king, and this is the capital. I mean, it
Speaker 1: aligns people like the Dogon tribe who know about the
Speaker 1: you know, the dog Star. We find patric lifts showing
Speaker 1: chariots in the westerns. The hair they didn't have any
Speaker 1: answers for. Well, we're told that they had a lot
Speaker 1: of farms in Atlantis, and one of the things they
Speaker 1: had to do is every farm had to contribute one
Speaker 1: six of a chariot. So you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: Once you can establish that first location, just about everything
Speaker 1: else lines up and you start to understand what was
Speaker 1: going on at the time, which is this transitory exchange
Speaker 1: of information people who are able to traverse the Atlantic
Speaker 1: and trade ideas and come back, which of course is
Speaker 1: very important to any trip. But I would just assume
Speaker 1: that after all this time, it would the desert would
Speaker 1: have completely overtaken any anything visible. Isn't it buried underneath
Speaker 1: the sand? I mean, what actually can you see? That's
Speaker 1: a good question. So the rist Shat is basically bedrock.
Speaker 1: So what I believe happened in the general consensus is
Speaker 1: that this thing is a collapsed volcanic dome, like a
Speaker 1: mud volcano, which fits kind of perfectly to this story.
Speaker 1: We know Plato tells us in the dialogues, and one
Speaker 1: of the things they had to do was when they
Speaker 1: were digging the channels for the boats to come in,
Speaker 1: they had to dig him three hundred feet wide and
Speaker 1: one hundred feet deep, which we all do today any
Speaker 1: canal or waterway. You have to constantly clear the the
Speaker 1: silt out so the boats can get through. But we
Speaker 1: know that he told us it's one hundred feet, so
Speaker 1: we know there was at least one hundred foot of
Speaker 1: top soil. If you look at where the rist Shat
Speaker 1: is and then you look just I hear more than
Speaker 1: halfway between where it sits and where the Atlantic Ocean is,
Speaker 1: there are a series of mud hills that are very tall.
Speaker 1: And I believe that Atlantis was the first recorded mud flood,
Speaker 1: which is basically the conditions that we're giving given we're told,
Speaker 1: you know, if a tsunami, saltwater came up the river,
Speaker 1: it flooded the volcano basically liquefied it. It turned, you know,
Speaker 1: we have a mud flood scenario. It slides down. We
Speaker 1: can see where those hills are and and for me,
Speaker 1: I think that's where we should start digging. People always
Speaker 1: wanted to know know where to dig. We know that a
Speaker 1: shall of mud blocked the waterway, so it aligns to
Speaker 1: the dialogues. And then frustratingly, the country of Mauritania, through
Speaker 1: a shell company, has been strip mining this area and
Speaker 1: there's just mud hills. You know, there isn't really any
Speaker 1: reason to be strip mining here, but they've been strip
Speaker 1: mining since two thousand and six. So I think I
Speaker 1: think culturally they found you know, the remnants are there
Speaker 1: and they've been collecting them and destroying them like like
Speaker 1: like happens to a lot of our history. Oh, dear lord,
Speaker 1: perhaps it could be arguably one of the greatest archaeological
Speaker 1: finds in history. And they're strip mining it as we speak,
Speaker 1: the strip mining as we speak. The workers revolted in
Speaker 1: like twenty thirteen and it's been inconsistently operated since then.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the map and you find
Speaker 1: you know, you go at halfway and you look at
Speaker 1: these mud hills, you can see the giant open strip
Speaker 1: mine it. It's the Mauritania Copper Mine INK, which is
Speaker 1: a shell subsidiary of some Canadian company. But if it's
Speaker 1: Classic Energy, you know, big energy coming in. They do
Speaker 1: this everywhere. But yeah, there's strip mining where I believe
Speaker 1: the remnants of the city ended up. Now we have
Speaker 1: lots of places to look and there's not that there's
Speaker 1: lots of things they can't destroy. But you know, if
Speaker 1: we're gonna find anything, we're gonna find writing or anything,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be where the remnants of the city sank
Speaker 1: below the waves. This area of Africa would have been
Speaker 1: underwater for years after tsunami hit Um. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: above it's above water now, but it's that's in the
Speaker 1: western Sahara. All right, So let's get into the Plato dialogues,
Speaker 1: which um Crittius, and to make the two dialogues, it's
Speaker 1: Curtius and Tomas. I will say Timius, because if I
Speaker 1: try and say Tameris, I'll stumble and I'll sound stupid,
Speaker 1: and I just say it. That's okay. I know I'm
Speaker 1: mispronouncing it. I mispnounced a lot of things, but this
Speaker 1: one I know I'm doing. But I have to. All right,
Speaker 1: So we got about three minutes here before the break,
Speaker 1: so we'll just start. We'll get into it slowly now,
Speaker 1: and then we'll come back after the break and discuss further.
Speaker 1: But so why was Plato in his dialogues talking about
Speaker 1: Atlantis in the first place. Well, Plato is recording conversations
Speaker 1: that his teacher, Socrates had, And what Plato is generally
Speaker 1: trying to do is two things. He's trying to capture
Speaker 1: what he thinks is important thoughts and emerging thoughts through Socrates.
Speaker 1: And then he's always trying to figure out if there's
Speaker 1: a way to understand whether governmental structures and how people
Speaker 1: manage themselves, is there a right and wrong to it?
Speaker 1: Or is it just always whoever's in charge sets the
Speaker 1: rules and we all have to kind of fall in line.
Speaker 1: And that's what he's always struggling with, those two things.
Speaker 1: And I guess he found the story of Atlantis compelling
Speaker 1: enough in both regards that he captured them. I don't.
Speaker 1: I can tell you, interestingly, with Critius, there's actually two Critiuses,
Speaker 1: and there's a whole story around Critius which we can
Speaker 1: get into maybe when we come back. It's still longer
Speaker 1: than hover long I have left here, right, So some
Speaker 1: people have basically sort of blown off the whole idea
Speaker 1: of Atlantis, the existence of Atlantis, and argued what that
Speaker 1: Plato was simply using it as an allegory. It was
Speaker 1: supposed to be some sort of a cautionary tale. Is
Speaker 1: that the idea? Yeah, and that's certainly in there and
Speaker 1: any any and remember Plato wasn't doing anything. Plato was
Speaker 1: recording what Socrates conversations. Socrates has, So Socrates was having
Speaker 1: conversations where Atlantis was being used as an allegory, and
Speaker 1: that that's certainly in there, But we don't, we don't
Speaker 1: the allegorical component. Something looks like I tell people the
Speaker 1: fact that Poseidon married a mountain girl, that's great, but
Speaker 1: I'm not going to go try and find where they
Speaker 1: got married, you know, I mean, I deal with that
Speaker 1: from Atlanta standpoint. So that's why we made the We
Speaker 1: did the assumption we're going to look for the physical
Speaker 1: aspects of what he's talking about. The rest of it,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know, and you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's not my thing. My thing is physically, is
Speaker 1: it possible for to have existed? And if so, what
Speaker 1: conditions would have to be meant, what technologies would they
Speaker 1: have to have? And where is it? And that's kind
Speaker 1: of where my focus is. Listen to more Coast to
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