Robert Sarmast

Robert Sarmast is a Persian American architect who claims to have found the legendary city of Atlantis on November 14, 2004, saying that by using sonar scans he was able to find man-made walls that matched the description of the structures described by Plato, CNN reports.Fact|date=September 2007 The site lies 1,500 meters deep in the Mediterranean Sea between Cyprus and Syria.

Sarmast's theory is that Cyprus was once a larger island, connected to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea by a land bridge, and that Atlantis was on the part of Cyprus that is now beneath the Mediterranean. He believes that Atlantis and the Garden of Eden are one and the same. Sarmast's research over the last fifteen years targeted the location of Atlantis, and his evidence was first reported in his book "Discovery of Atlantis: The Startling Case for the Island of Cyprus."

In 2004 he founded First Source Enterprises, LLC, to promote more extensive research near Cyprus, which led to the world's first scientific Atlantis expedition.Fact|date=September 2007 He is the leader of the Cyprus-Atlantis Project and currently resides on the island of Cyprus, where he organized a second underwater expedition.

A documentary about the second expedition aired on the History Channel on January 17, 2007. The documentary was broadcast as the season premiere two-hour long episode of the History Channel series Digging For The Truth. According to the episode, the underwater formations that Robert Sarmast believed were man-made structures of Atlantis were actually ocean floor sediment that had been shifted and appeared to be man-made structures. The findings that aired on the show appear to disprove Sarmast's current theory.

However, the shifted sediments that were thought to have possibly been manmade (due to their extremely unusual and geometrical shapes) are so ancient that they would have been there before any people settled on the island. In those distant times, therefore, people would have naturally used those natural formations to their favor and populated the hillside territory as a "natural fortess," an ideal place for irrigation and defence. There is currently no way of using current technologies (underwater research is still in its formative years) to find out for sure either way, although the answer will become clear in future years/decades. There are no sonar devices that can "x-ray" large areas in order to find geometrical structures that have rested under mud for thousands of years.Or|date=November 2007

The fact that this particular hill, claimed by Sarmast to be Atlantis's "Acropolis Hill," was pointed to among the many others in the region as the sole target is of particular interest because at the time, the available underwater maps were low resolution and the anomalies which later showed up could not be seen. In other words, the hill was chosen even before the so-called man-made structures could be seen, and these anomalies wound up being a perfect match with the detailed description of Plato's Acropolis Hill. The odds of this being coincidental were so low as to warrant the million plus dollars that were spent on the two expeditions in 04 and 06.Or|date=November 2007

External links

*http://www.discoveryofatlantis.com

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6502149/

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E0DB1F3FF931A15752C1A9629C8B63

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1206519,00.html

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2004/11/15.html

http://classiclit.about.com/od/atlantismythology/fr/aatp_discovery.htm?terms=Timaeus+Plato

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4011545.stm

http://www.geographic.hu/index.php/fotopalyazat/fotopalyazat/nyomtathato.php?act=napi&id=3640

http://english.pravda.ru/science/tech/07-10-2003/3852-atlantis-0

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1244592.htm

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1316022004