Charles Berlitz is an interesting character. Scion to a worldwide language learning business, and an accomplished polyglot himself (I see estimates that he spoke between 20-30 languages), Berlitz could have just stuck to writing books about French, German, and Japanese acquisition and done just fine. However, he got bit by the conspiracy theory bug, and ended up writing a slew of books about the Bermuda Triangle, Noah's Ark, the Roswell crash, and a host of other unproven (and often, disproven) topics. I've decided to read a bunch of these works, and this 1969 entry on the Atlantis myth was the first he published.
The Atlantis story began with Plato, who described in both Timaeus and Critias a massive land that lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Straight of Gibraltar), somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. It boasted a massive army, and was a champion of culture and the arts. And yet, fatefully, Atlantis and its millions of inhabitants perished in one night, sinking into the sea (like landmasses do?), some 9,000 years before Plato heard about it. Most people just accept that Plato conjured an allegorical land as an object lesson about the ideal state, but little could Plato have known what trouble he would create and the lives he would derail: people who obsess over the Beast of Revelation, or the airspeed velocity of World Trade Center Tower 7, also love to speculate about how Atlantis might have been a real place.
One of the hilarious aspects of Atlantis theorizing is that the land has been located almost everywhere on the globe. The island of Thera (which is volcanic, but stubbornly in the wrong direction). Or right beneath the Azores, with the islands as the only peaks left. Or the Americas. Or sitting on the mid-Atlantic ridge. Or hidden under the Sahara. Or in the Arctic. Or even under Antarctica! There are about as many proposed locations as there are investigators, but the one that really cracked me up was the Bahaman island of Bimini, off the coast of Miami. Not only would that place one myth inside another (the Bermuda Triangle), but it was prophesied by psychic Edgar Cayce in the 1930s that Atlantis would arise again near Bimini in 1968. Or so the book jacket said. In the foreword, Cayce's prediction is extended to '68 or '69 (convenient, for a book released in '69). On page 11, Cayce's prediction is moved forward from the 1930s to 1940. But then, in the illustrations section in the middle of the book, Cayce's same prediction is said to have occurred back in 1924. Get your story straight, Berlitz!!
Being a student of language, Berlitz is quite taken with the similar names for various mythical lands in the sea. Avalon, Aztlán, Aralu, Attala (I'm taking his word on these), and of course the Atlantic itself. Berlitz would have been so excited to see the land "Ahtohallan" depicted in Frozen 2. Berlitz speculates about various cognate words across otherwise unrelated languages, and suggests that isolated languages like Basque may be remnants of Atlantean culture, or that we may have inherited our writing systems from Atlantis. There's a later chapter on "Atlantis, Language and the Alphabet", though it mostly sticks to things we know about language, and lets analogy do most of the heavy lifting. Berlitz even shoots down the wilder language-based speculation and errors of earlier theorists, such as Ignatius Donnelly. I find it telling that Berlitz is more reserved when speaking about a discipline he knows well. If only he knew more about geology.
Berlitz is able to admit that many scholars reject the idea of a literal Atlantis, and inserts the occasional statement that he knows this all relies on speculation. For example, "None of the above similarities or seemingly related architectural forms, however, furnishes any proof of the existence of Atlantis. It is, at present, only an assumption, or an 'informed guess' which, if true, would cause many seemingly disconnected bits of information to fall into place." Elsewhere he says, "As psychic research is not yet considered a reliable source for establishing the authority of history, the voluminous psychic material on Atlantis represents a section of Atlantean literature that elicit, at best, a 'no comment' from the archaeological or scientific community." Well done! And yet, one can also detect the constant thumb of the apologist pushing on each piece of evidence to exaggerate the connections and downplay the inconsistencies. It also doesn't matter that many of the proposed theories are contradictory to one another: as long as Berlitz has introduced a shred of likelihood, he's done his job. Berlitz also employs the usual smoke-and-mirrors of conspiracy logic: the condemnation of experts is dismissed by pointing to stories of other discoveries that were once mocked by so-called experts. The lack of corroborating evidence is explained away as evidence that there must have been supporting knowledge at some time, but it's now lost (insert counterfactual story about the sacking of the Library of Alexandria).
Which reminds me: often Berlitz promotes other myths as part of his synthesis. His story about "Amru the Muslim" burning Library of Alexandria scrolls for 6 months is a medieval fiction. In another illustration, he lists the evidence of animal behaviors that might explain the presence of an earlier-but-now-missing landmass, such as eels who swim out to mate in the Sargasso Sea, or birds that loop-de-loop over the Atlantic during their migration. The one that cracked me up was his speculation that lemmings follow each other into the sea, because perhaps in the past they used to swim to Atlantis together. That's silly not just for the nautical distances involved, but even more so because lemmings don't kill themselves en masse. That's a myth (which Disney helped popularize, alas). The Loch Ness Monster even gets a shout-out! Berlitz brings Nessie up as a credible phenomenon when discussing submersibles. In addition to language, he was a diving aficionado, so there's much here about the undersea exploration aspect of Atlantean research.
There's so much more I could mention, but hopefully any student of science and history should see this for the absurd speculation it is. At the very end, Berlitz marvels at all of the new technology for exploration, and says, "The near future will give us the answer." My thought, reading this 56 years later was, "Yeah, I guess it did."