IN THE child’s imagination or in the whimsical plots of the cult 1970s television series, Atlantis exists, variously, on the tip of a Bolivian volcano, beneath the sands of the Arabian desert or in the Fourth Dimension somewhere off the coast of Bermuda.

Now the Utopian civilisation described in 400BC by Plato and supposedly submerged in a deluge 11,600 years ago, has been “definitively located”, for the 47th time in recent years.

Robert Sarmast, an American researcher, is “absolutely convinced” that he has discovered the lost city after finding what he claims is evidence of man-made structures submerged in the sea between Cyprus and Syria.

Mr Sarmast, who has nurtured an obsession with Atlantis since he was a young boy, said that the dimensions and configuration of straight walls and a canal on a hillside above a rectangular plain on the sea-bed “perfectly” matched Plato’s description of the fabled city consigned to the deep by earthquakes and flooding. “We have proven this is a match that cannot be coincidental,” he said.

The self-proclaimed scientist from California is the latest maverick explorer to have disregarded prevailing academic wisdom that Plato’s Atlantis was allegorical and not based on historical fact. Instead, interpreting clues from Plato’s Critias and Timaeus dialogues, Mr Sarmast, 38, manned a secret expedition last week in which he dragged a three-mile cable over the sea bed 50miles off the southeast coast of Cyprus.

The “walled hillside” was located about a mile beneath the surface of the sea and Mr Sarmast intends to publish findings after he has processed the detailed computer imaging data into a three- dimensional model.

His findings have been greeted with scepticism by reputable students of ancient mythology, who say that it goes against Plato’s most fundamental belief: that reality was not to be found in this world.

Alan F. Alford, one of the world’s leading experts in the field, has long contended that the philosopher invented the Atlantis myth — wherein the city’s inhabitants are punished for their decadence by floods — as a metaphor for the ancient version of the “Big Bang” theory.

Sofronis Sofroniou, a professor of Greek philosophy in Cyprus, said yesterday: “It’s not possible that through the ages nobody mentioned Cyprus in connection with Atlantis. It’s incredible really. My intuition is there is nothing in it, but fantastic things have come out true before.”

Repeated alleged sitings of the “great and wonderful empire” and more than 800 books written on the subject have so far failed to turn up any reliable evidence. So far the city has been “found” in different locations from Sweden to Palestine, Central Asia, Antartica and Ireland. In the 1970s, a Soviet Institute of Oceanography survey ship claimed to have discovered the ruins of an immense sunken city on a deep plateau in the Atlantic, 450miles west of Gibraltar.

Two decades later, Jim Allen, a former RAF cartographer, convinced that he had found the city 300km south of La Paz, Bolivia, proclaimed: “South Americans shouldn’t call themselves South Americans but rather Atlantans.”

The inhabitants of that continent decided against following Mr Allen’s advice.

In 1998 another British team delighted tour operators in the West Country when they said that they had located Atlantis lying off the Cornish Coast. It is a theory strongly denied by those who contend that Atlantans were extra-terrestrial beings who destroyed themselves with nuclear bombs.

In Plato’s discussion of Utopian societies, he describes how an Egyptian priest told Solon, an Athenian statesman, about Atlantis. Speaking yesterday, Mr Sarmast argued that Plato’s detailed account is far more than an allegorical tale of hubris and human corruption.

Priests in Ancient Egypt were not myth-makers, but “keepers of history”, Mr Sarmast said. “We’re verifying this story they’ve handed on to us.”

Others place the lost city in Crete, Cuba, the Andes, Azores, Caribbean, Mediterranean, Aegean, and Tyrrhenian seas and off the Devon coast. Some searched Mexico, Nigeria, Sweden, the Sahara and the bottom of the Atlantic

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