Dr. Ulf Erlingsson connects Atlantis with Megalithic Ireland. What sets his research apart among Atlantis theories is that it has passed statistical significance tests. He found that with 99.98% probability, Plato based the description of Atlantis on the geography of Ireland.

He presents the study in the book “Atlantis from a Geographer’s Perspective: Mapping the Fairy Land,” which has recently also come out in Japanese on Hara Shobo.

At the conference, to be held on the island of Milos, Dr. Erlingsson will present the study to fellow scholars and students of Atlantis for the first time. He is looking forward to the opportunity, especially since he dismisses the early criticism he received from some Irish scholars as “ignorant.”

As he explains, they reacted emotionally with instinctive skepticism when they were faced with this unexpected explanation of Atlantis. The reason is obviously that Atlantis has turned into a myth the last century, a myth about an incredibly advanced civilization that went under. Several best-selling authors are spreading this notion, which scholars refer to as “Atlanticism.” Most people today apparently connect the word Atlantis with that myth rather than with Plato’s original Atlantis, at least in English-speaking countries.

In the view of that, it is not surprising that many scholars found Stone Age Ireland to be an unlikely candidate for Atlantis, to say the least. “In fact, those scholars dismissed my research for the same reason as the Atlanticists,” says Erlingsson. “Both groups used the Atlanticism myth as their frame of reference, rather than Plato’s original tale.”

As an expert in under-water exploration Erlingsson has helped marine archaeologists in the past, at the excavation of the Swedish Viking city of Birka. He expects that he will get use for that professional expertise again, since the oldest layers of the Atlantis tale appear to refer to the flooding of the North Sea over 8,000 years ago. The area is of great interest also for marine archaeologists, as it was the best place to live in NW Europe before the end of the Ice Age, when mammoths grazed the plains.