Another New Documentary Claims to Reveal the True Location of Atlantis ... Again

​A new three-part documentary series claims to have found the lost continent of Atlantis, but producers say that they won’t tell you where they found it until the film series premieres at some unspecified future date. “I’ve seen documentaries that are conjectures,” one member of the film team said. “We have something physical, which matches what Plato described.” Atlántica producers plan to present their film at the Cosmic Summit 2025, taking place on June 20. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait that long because the team behind Atlántica already shared their findings in 2018 and again in 2023, and they were, let’s say, not conclusive.

​The team behind the documentary, from the UK remote-sensing company Merlin Burrows, promoted their discovery of Atlantis seven years ago, when they claimed to have found the ruins of its capital near Cadiz in Spain, with the remains stretching from the coastal waters into Doñana National Park.
 
If that sounds familiar, it should. Richard Freund, a professor of Jewish Studies, made the same claim in 2011, when he identified the same location as both Atlantis and the Biblical Tarshish, spawning an infamous National Geographic documentary. It is also the same area where in 1973 Maxine Asher sparked an international incident when she claimed to have found Atlantis during an unauthorized expedition.
 
In 2023, Merlin Burrows claimed to have produced scans of the site that showed concentric rings and buildings similar to those of Plato’s description.
 
The ruins underwater off Cadiz are known to archaeology and are believed to be Greco-Roman, and the area served as the site for a succession of cultures going back thousands of years. (Researchers from the University of Seville said in 2022 that the massive lost temple of Hercules Gaditanus, originally a Phoenician site, was recently found underwater there, though other researchers disagree.) Ruins on land and in the water are known to date back into the first millennium BCE. The filmmakers claim that they are not from the first millennium BCE and instead Ice Age structures made from a “previously unknown” form of concrete and are covered in the remains of metals. “The results of the tests prove the age of the finds are older than Roman or Greek, and that they were more advanced,” the filmmakers told The Daily Mail back in 2018.
 
At the time, the filmmakers said that they had found 100 miles of ruins (!) and that they assumed they dated back to the Ice Age. They claim that each building and structure precisely matches Plato’s dimensions, “with no deviation.”
 
Naturally, they have published no evidence in support of their claims. Two named archaeologists are associated with the film. The first is Mercedes de Caso Bernal. According to her University de Cadiz profile, she has only one publication, and it is not related to Atlantis. The other is the film’s producer, Michael Donnellan, who owns the company producing and distributing the film. He describes the documentary as “life-changing” but also declined to publish any scientific findings before monetizing his work. He likes to post photos of himself on Instagram as Poseidon or as an Atlantis-hunter action figure.
 
None of the evidence that Donnellan provided in 2018 or 2023 was enough to convince other archaeologists that he had discovered Atlantis. Indeed, in 2018, Donnellan had to concede that his critics were correct and round features he initially identified as the bases of Ice Age Atlantean towers were in fact experimental irrigation structures modern researchers had built in 2004 and 2005. This does not fill me with great confidence about his judgment.
 
As Carl Feagans noted back in 2019, the research efforts by Merlin Burrows seem particularly slipshod, and dollars to doughnuts, they have unknowingly conflated a bunch of real things from different historical periods to create the illusion of “Atlantis.”
 
Fortunately, one of the divers said we don’t have to focus on whether it really is Atlantis because the documentary is, ultimately, “a story of friendship.” Or, more accurately, a record of a shared delusion.