Josh Gates "Sadly" Concedes Atlantis Wasn't Real on "Expedition Files"

​This week, Josh Gates’s Expedition Files, the Expedition Unknown spinoff composed of CGI and stock footage as Gates narrates rehashed content against a greenscreen, devoted its final half-hour to “new” discoveries that allegedly suggest Atlantis is a real place. Or, rather, Gates teased a possibility he knew he could not confirm, for as we will see, thinking about Atlantis not being real makes Gates sad. 

​Expedition Files S04E05 “Dark Waters” ran a segment called “Atlantis Found?” that starts out on a sour note by describing Plato as “a wearer of fine togas,” an anachronistic joke that underscores the lack of care put into the segment. Togas, of course, were Roman clothing. Plato, being Greek, would likely have worn a chiton and himation.
 
Gates tries to give a summary of the Atlantis story as Plato wrote it in the Timaeus and Critias, though some of his descriptions are a bit questionable. I’m not sure it’s fair to describe Plato’s Atlantis as “a technological utopia,” since no exceptional technology is described save, perhaps, the ability to forge orichalcum. Similarly, he describes the Atlantean navy as being “twelve hundred warships strong,” though technically Plato say that is but the navy of the capital city, while the other nine kingdoms that made up Atlantis has their own navies.
 
Gates describes Zeus as becoming enraged at the Atlanteans’ “thirst for conquest,” though here he mixes the Timaeus and Critias promiscuously. In the former, Atlantis is a conquering power, but there is no mention of Zeus ordering punishment. Indeed, the story in that dialogue has both Atlantis and the Athenian military destroyed by the earthquake that sank the continent. By contrast, the Critias reframes the story as a moral tale, but there is no mention of conquests. Plato writes that Zeus became angry because of the moral degeneration of the Atlanteans, who came to value luxury and wealth. Zeus wished them to become virtuous again, but there is no indication that conquest or war were considered sinful.
 
The connection between the two versions of the story is unclear because Plato never finished the Critias, so we do not know exactly what would have happened when Zeus unleashes his punishment. We can assume, based on the Timaeus and the Near Eastern Flood myth Plato’s story parallels, that the sinking in the Timaeus is the outcome, but how he would have resolved the contradictions between the two accounts, we cannot say.
 
Gates asks if Atlantis could be real, comparing it to the Trojan War myth and the real city of Troy. He lists a number of potential locations for Atlantis, from Tampa, Florida to Antarctica to the Bahamas, and we then cut to recycled footage from an old Expedition Unknown about the Bimini Road, the geological formation believers claimed was the walls of Atlantis. Gates correctly identifies it as natural.
 
He then moves on to the “Eye of the Sahara,” as the circular geological formation known as the Richat Structure in Mauritania is sometimes called. Gates again correctly identifies it as natural. Next, he looks at the “Yellow Brick Road to Atlantis” in the waters off Hawaii, which again he correctly identifies as a natural formation.
 
More substantively, he looks at the 2018 claim of evidence for Atlantis near the Spanish city of Cádiz, ancient Gades or Gadir, parts on land and parts under the sea. Regular readers will remember that the claim from the remote sensing company Merlin Burrows resulted in the documentary Atlantica that gained a lot of promotional publicity but not much else. Gates brings in Stel Pavlou from the unconvincing and terminally dull 2021 Discovery series Hunting Atlantis to opine about the claims. Pavlou and Gates explain that the circles Merlin Burrows found through satellite imaging were not Atlantean ruins but manmade ponds built two decades ago to study plankton.
 
Then Gates discusses the 2020 claim that Ireland was Atlantis, a story I covered twice. Gates and Pavlou don’t bother to discuss the arguments and instead dismiss them—correctly, but still glibly—as “trying too hard” to make Plato’s story fit their pet idea. You won’t know why the idea is wrong if you watch Expedition Files since they never told you what the claims were.
 
Pavlou, having tried to resuscitate his reputation by appearing reasonable and claiming there is no Atlantis that exactly matches Plato, nevertheless is given time to make his own bizarre claim—that a “pulse” of water from glacial melting in the “fifth millennium BC” (?) floods cities and causes “all kinds of chaos” which, he says, matches what Plato is talking about. Though, of course, Plato does not talk about chaotic coastal flooding or cities all over the known world vanishing. He talks about a single large island sinking and becoming a mud hole.
 
Gates says that Plato may have been inspired by natural disasters from “around his time,” citing the Thera volcano of 1600 BCE—1,300 years before Plato. That would be like saying Charlemagne lived “around the time” of Donald Trump. Better is the citation of the tsunami that destroyed the Greek city-state of Helike in 373 BCE and may have provided color for Plato, though it is obviously not Atlantis as the story of Helike remained current and well-known in Antiquity.
 
At the end of the show, Gates concedes—“sadly,” he says—that Atlantis wasn’t real.
 
I suppose it is sad for him because Gates was once an Atlantis believer. Almost exactly a decade ago, he told USA Today that he believed Atlantis to be real and to be connected to the (natural) rock formation off Yonaguni, Japan. At the time, he was “blown away” by what he wrongly claimed were Atlantean ruins. Now, thinking of Atlantis just makes him sad.