May 18, 2001: Atlantis in Cuba - Linda Moulton Howe | Open Lines
Reporter Linda Moulton Howe joins to present her investigation into the story, including her difficulty tracking down the company and her recorded interview with National Geographic spokeswoman Barbara Moffat. Moffat confirms that Zalitsky is known to National Geographic and has submitted a proposal for joint exploration with the Cuban Academy of Sciences, but states the project remains at a confidential stage. The 2,200-foot depth raises profound questions, as the last ice age only accounts for 300 feet of sea level change, leading to speculation about Atlantis or catastrophic geological events.
Open lines follow with callers sharing stories of time travel, possession, and earthquake predictions. A caller claiming to have been accidentally sent to the distant past through a university time experiment provides one of the more elaborate accounts of the evening.
Key Moments
Sonar finds an underwater city off Cuba: Art reads the Reuters report he has chased for three days: ADC's Paulina Zalitsky says high-resolution sonar at 2,200 feet off western Cuba has imaged limitless white sand plains broken by clear, man-made architectural shapes - pyramids, roads, buildings - and that nature does not produce planned, symmetrical architecture.
Nobody else is touching this story: Art notes with disbelief that he has been reading the Reuters wire copy on-air for three days and not a single other major news organization has picked it up. He challenges listeners to grasp the implications of a half-mile-deep urban site.
Edgar Cayce, Jr. on the Atlantis prediction: Linda Moulton Howe describes calling Edgar Cayce Jr., who confirms his father predicted that after the turn of the 21st century remnants of Atlantis would be discovered - the western edge near Bimini and Bermuda, the rest extending out from what is now the Cuban shelf. Howe links the find directly to Cayce's geographic placement.
Pre-classic city, possibly Teotihuacan-related: Howe quotes Zalitsky directly: 'we are discovering, among other things, possibly a sunken city built in the pre-classic period and populated by an advanced civilization similar to the early Teotihuacan culture of the Yucatan' - and notes the structures lie at a depth that no last-Ice-Age sea-level drop (~300 feet) can explain.
Choke in smog if the ozone hole heals: Art reads a New Scientist-style story warning that the ozone hole's UV bath is what now produces hydroxyl, the atmosphere's self-cleaning chemical; repair the hole and hydroxyl collapses and the world chokes in smog. He paints a 2070 future of bubble-dwelling rich and masked poor.