[Graham] If you look me up on Wikipedia,
you'll find that I am described as a pseudoarchaeologist or a pseudoscientist.
I find this frankly absurd.
I'm no more a pseudoscientist than a dolphin is a pseudo-fish.
I'm an investigative reporter.
My job is to investigate the official story.
What is there in the past
that the existing model of prehistory doesn't explain?
Anomalies and paradoxes are of great interest.
That's what's brought me here to the Bahamas.
I'm fascinated by parts of the world that haven't been looked at properly yet.
That's why I spend years scuba diving on continental shelves
'cause there's ten million square miles of land
that was above water during the Ice Age that's underwater today.
Including here, in the Bahamas.
These are the Bimini Islands.
Just under 60 miles off the coast of Miami,
Bimini is separated from the mainland of America
by a deepwater channel known as the Straits of Florida.
You might think this is an unlikely place
to search for clues to a lost civilization,
but something incredible has been discovered beneath the waves here.
Just half a mile off the shoreline, not far from the Gulf Stream current,
is a massive structure of carefully laid giant stones...
with every appearance of being a megalithic roadway or paved terrace...
which is how it earned its nickname, the "Bimini Road."
The formation was first discovered in 1968 by a group of divers
who'd been looking for the fabled lost city of Atlantis
beneath the waves of the Bahamas.
In their excitement, they announced to the world
that they had found the road to Atlantis itself.
This state of Atlantis is supposed to have existed in 8000 BC,
and supposed to have attacked Athens. Greeks didn't exist in 8000 BC.
This is all simply absurd.
I'm afraid there is no history in this story whatsoever.
[Graham] Predictably, all this talk of Atlantis caused archaeologists to discount
what seemed to be an underwater megalithic structure
as no more than breathless hype.
To this day, archaeologists insist
that this underwater formation is just a stretch of fractured beach rock
probably formed around 3,000 years ago by natural processes.
Unwilling to risk their reputations,
few scholars have seriously investigated it.
I have no such reservations.
Because whether or not
the Bimini structure is part of some underwater city,
it would be reckless to ignore it completely.
Which is why I've come here
with some state-of-the-art technology and a team of experts
to reopen this cold case.
My dive buddy is Dr. Michael Haley...
[Dr. Haley] Hand me the mask.
[Graham] ...a marine biologist who's been exploring the waters of the Caribbean
for over 40 years.
[Dr. Haley over comms] Graham, let's swim over here.
[Graham] The so-called Bimini Road lies just 18 feet,
five-and-a-half meters, below the surface.
An easy dive.
While Mike and I head for the mysterious structure,
up above, another member of our team, Kyle Dufault,
is preparing to scan the area using his sonar array.
Kyle's a marine investigator
with years of experience hunting the world's seabeds
for wrecks and anomalies.
[Kyle] Good to go.
[Graham] His sonar should reveal the road like an X-ray,
giving us a much clearer view
of how these blocks may originally have been laid out.
I'm hoping to show something that has never been seen before.
If this is in fact a man-made object, I'd like to see precise lines
because usually 90-degree angles do not occur in nature.
It's very rare.
All right, what I would like to do is just go right down the middle.
[Dr. Haley] Graham, look at this.
[Graham] Below, Mike and I close in on the line of massive blocks
on the otherwise empty seabed.
Recent storms have stirred up sediment, reducing visibility.
Even so, it's easy to spot the well-organized rows of megaliths.
[over comms] They are laid out perfectly symmetrically.
I can swim along the side of the row
and I can see absolute level and precision.
It's a very impressive sight.
The slabs are remarkably straight-edged and parallel.
These very large blocks are really enormous.
They're about 15 feet on one dimension,
and about 12 feet on the other dimension.
This isn't the top of any larger buried structure.
Most of the blocks are laid out directly on the ocean floor.
What's so unusual
is that some of the undisturbed sections of the structure
appear to be level, despite the massive size of the megaliths.
And when Mike and I take a closer look, we discover why.
There's something underneath them.
[Dr. Haley] Come over here, Graham. Look at this.
[Graham] A series of smaller stones are wedged beneath these huge slabs,
keeping them level above the sea floor.
[Dr. Haley] You can see these foundation stones very clearly.
[Graham] There's no way those stones could have gotten under these slabs,
some of which weigh up to ten tons,
unless they were put there intentionally.
There's no doubt about it, in my view.
Nature just cannot explain the regularity, the organization,
the planning and the precision of this structure.
It's clear that we're looking at a man-made structure.
Huge efforts were made to create
a leveled-off megalithic platform on a sloping land form.
And in order to level that platform,
they used foundation blocks underneath the large megaliths.
Up close, it was difficult to make out
what the overall intended shape of the formation might have been.
But Kyle's sonar scans should give us further perspective.
So, now you're starting to see the blocks of the main section of the road.
- [Graham] Okay. - And you can definitively see the cracks...
[Graham] Absolutely.
...and the uniform shape of the road.
[Graham] Definition is amazing.
- Most of the rocks are very uniform. - [Graham] Yeah.
They're usually about ten to twelve foot long,
by ten to twelve foot wide.
- [Graham] So, really substantial pieces. - [Kyle] Absolutely.
Look at this straight edge here.
[Kyle] Right, absolutely.
Yeah, you can definitively see the lines between the blocks
- like they were actually made... - [Graham] Yeah.
- ...and then laid into a road pattern. It... - Almost perfectly square.
Absolutely.
Like I said, you can definitively see that they're blocks.
[Graham] Yes.
[Kyle] I've scanned both sides on either side of the road
and there's nothing like that anywhere around.
[Graham] If this formation was simply the product of natural tidal forces,
as geologists insisted when it was first discovered,
why would the shorter section of the road lie at an angle to the main one?
Wouldn't they be parallel?
And why don't we see other such formations nearby?
I mean, not only the weathering or just the uniformity of them all,
- but nothing around it looking like this... - Yeah.
- Somebody put it there. - Yes.
So my personal opinion is that it is man-made.
So, Mike, what do you make of it?
What have we been looking at?
Well, I've dived all over the world
and it's the only structure I've ever seen like that.
Anyway, it's completely unique.
When I listen to the arguments of those who think it is a natural structure,
they argue that it's beach rock.
Oftentimes a shelf of beach rock will fracture into pieces
while still maintaining its overall shape.
But the blocks at Bimini are clearly distinct from one another
and uniformly pillow-shaped.
It's very hard for me to see how nature could have made it.
I've never seen beach rock fracture in that way.
- Have you? - Me neither.
And it speaks to me loudly of human workmanship.
Looks like it very well could be a man-made structure.
[Graham] If I'm right, it must have been made at a time
when this part of the Bahamas was above water.
And extrapolating from all the available data,
we can get a good idea of what it might originally have looked like
when it lay atop the coastline.
The hook-shaped formation runs roughly northeast to southwest,
about 1,600 feet long.
Nearly four-and-a-half football fields.
The biggest blocks are anywhere from ten to thirteen feet long
and seven to ten feet wide.
And on both terraces, there appear to be intentional gaps.
But there's no way to know if there was any wooden superstructure built on top.
All that remains are the blocks.
But the very existence of such a massive man-made structure here
has extraordinary implications.
Because this part of the Bahamas has been under water for thousands of years.
In fact, most of the islands making up what we now call the Great Bahama Bank,
were connected during the Ice Age
in places rising 100 meters above sea level.
Part of a vast rectangular Bahama Island,
just off the mainland of what today is Florida,
an island that existed here for more than 100,000 years.
Sea levels rose 400 feet at the end of the last Ice Age
and in the process,
swallowed up millions of square miles of some of the best land on Earth.
And if we're trying to tell the human story while not taking account
of those submerged continental shelves and what was happening on them,
then we could be missing a great deal of important information.
The new data we've gathered on the Bimini Road
strongly suggest to me an ancient date for this now underwater structure.
And yet, archaeologists have been slow to take up the challenge
of looking for evidence of older civilizations here in the Bahamas.
They refuse to consider the possibility.
If there was an advanced civilization that lived, say, 30,000 years ago,
which is what Graham thinks, okay,
where is their trash? Where are the homes?
You know, where are their stone tools or metal tools?
Where's their writing?
[Graham] There could be such evidence of an advanced civilization of the Ice Age
waiting to be found beneath the waves on land later flooded.
But you're not going to find it if you don't bother to look.
[Dr. Haley] You're not talking about a civilization on Bimini.
You're talking about civilization on the entire bank, which is huge.
- The research has simply never been done. - Yeah.
Because archaeology doesn't feel there's any point in doing that research.
Because archaeology feels that
the timeline of human civilization is already sorted out.
So, there's no reason to investigate that.
The Bimini Road does overlook the deepwater channel
that once ran between the Ice Age Bahama Island and North America.
A channel through which the Gulf Stream flows,
making it a hugely important landmark for any ships heading northward
out of the Gulf of Mexico toward the Atlantic.
Like the legendary boat with no paddles of Quetzalcoatl.
The stone slabs could have been part of some larger monument or place marker.
A legacy of a seafaring culture
that witnessed the rising waters at the end of the last Ice Age.
A culture that may actually have mapped this important spot.
I've asked Mike to join me on shore
to look over replicas of some of the oldest surviving world maps.
He may be a seasoned navigator,
but I'm betting he's never used maps like these.
The story of these maps is quite complicated.
These maps were typically drawn
in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries of our era.
But the mapmakers admitted freely that they were copying from older source maps
and compiling it together with new information from the Age of Discovery.
Let's start with this one, which is a very famous map.
This is the Piri Reis map drawn by a Turkish admiral...
- Right. - ...in 1513.
He tells us in his own handwriting on the map
that he based it on 20 older source maps.
In addition to those ancient sources,
Piri Reis also referred to charts from recent voyages to the Americas
by Christopher Columbus and others.
The end result was a world map,
but today, only the western third of it survives.
This is really interesting, Graham, because you got this coastline
showing the rivers in South America quite accurately.
[Graham] Yeah. Very good, really,
representation of the coast of South America.
But what stands out for me as a huge anomaly,
is this very large island
shown off the southeast coast of North America.
Parked off the coast of a truncated Florida,
is a large, vertically-oriented, rectangular island.
It doesn't look like anything Columbus should have encountered or drawn.
Efforts have been made to explain it as a badly drawn map of Cuba.
And that just doesn't fly for me because you can't get it wrong.
Well, it's long and thin and oriented on a different axis.
And oriented east-west. Whereas this is oriented north-south.
There is no such island and it didn't exist in 1513 either.
But an island of exactly that size and shape
did exist during the last Ice Age.
The large part of the Grand Bahama Banks that were above water.
And if you take a closer look at what Piri Reis drew along the island's spine,
it's a series of blocks lined up in a row.
Remind you of something?
This row looks to me
very much like the rows of megaliths on the Bimini Road.
That would not be uncharacteristic of maps of this period
because they took what they saw as a characteristic feature of that area.
Like we see this elephant in West Africa,
curious animals here in South America.
And this feature here, which is not mountains.
It's not how Piri Reis shows mountains. It's something else.
I think it's the Bimini Road.
I don't care whether the Bimini Road is natural or man-made.
My claim about the Bimini Road
is it's really fucking weird that it appears on a map above water.
[Joe] Yes.
A map that was drawn in 1513 based on older source maps.
This strange appearance of an Ice Age island
isn't the only unusual feature on Piri Reis' extraordinary map.
As you move to the south, you've got this large landmass here.
[Graham] Yeah.
And that seems extremely strange.
[Graham] You're putting your finger on
one of the most controversial aspects of the Piri Reis map.
It's a coastline extending out from South America
along the southern edge of the Atlantic.
No one should have known about it in 1513.
Take a look at this other world map.
The Pinkerton map, published in 1812.
It's impressively accurate except for one thing.
No Antarctica.
Because our civilization didn't discover Antarctica until 1820.
This is why historians refuse to acknowledge the possibility
that it might appear on a map drawn in 1513.
The area of the map which people say might be Antarctica,
well, it just isn't Antarctica.
It's South America.
All that happened is that Piri Reis was drawing the coastline,
the paper ran out, so he changed the direction.
[Peter Barber] He just did a doodle.
And I think we've been taken in by the doodle
into thinking it's something more.
[Graham] That might make sense, if the Piri Reis map was the only example.
But Antarctica shows up in other 16th century maps, as well.
Here it's clearly detailed and even labeled
on the Orontius Finaeus map drawn in 1531.
Once again, based on ancient sources,
before any modern explorer had ever laid eyes on it.
But if that is Antarctica on the Piri Reis map,
why is it so oddly oriented and connected to South America?
Have a look at Antarctica's coastline, not as it is today,
but as geologists think it was when sea levels were lower
and the southern ice cap extended north during the last Ice Age.
If you trace out Antarctica's Ice Age coastline,
it looks a lot like the one on the Piri Reis map.
Antarctica, its appearance rather accurately,
and much as it looked during the Ice Age on ancient maps,
is a real paradox and a problem which needs to be explained.
And to me, the obvious answer to that problem isn't coincidence,
it isn't fantasy on the part of the mapmakers.
It's those source maps they were drawing from.
I think these maps suggest
a major forgotten episode in human history.
In Indonesia, in Mexico, and on Malta,
we've seen advanced megalithic structures associated with civilizing heroes
who arrived by boat, teaching the locals about agriculture, laws and engineering.
Now, these maps suggest that long before Magellan's famous expedition,
an advanced culture did circumnavigate that Ice Age world.
This is all evidence that we shouldn't dismiss the possibility
that our ancestors had achieved a level of technology
where they could explore and map the world's oceans.
Shouldn't be dismissed.
Is there anything else compelling in the immediate area
that seems to indicate there was a man-made structure?
[Graham] There is another unexplained man-made wonder here.
Hidden deep inside Bimini's dense mangrove forest,
an area accessible only by boat.
Rising ten feet out of the swamp is a series of mounds
set off by empty stretches of sand, creating a curious 500-foot long shape.
Like the famed Nazca Lines in Peru,
it's a phenomenon best viewed from the air.
The unmistakable shape of one of Bimini's most famous ancient residents.
This effigy of a shark, carved into the mangrove swamp,
has been here as long as anyone remembers.
Though, archaeologists have never seriously studied it
since they cannot confirm its origins.
And yet it's a predator that any ancient seafaring culture,
including the lost civilization I've been looking for,
would certainly have feared and respected.
So, who were these ancient navigators?
Well, at the risk of yet again incurring the wrath of those in mainstream academia...
Let's talk about Atlantis.
I don't believe Bimini is the site of Atlantis,
or that Atlantis lies anywhere near the Bahamas.
But the legend of the drowned city is intriguing,
precisely because it offers us the most detailed description of something
I believe really existed.
A lost advanced civilization of the Ice Age.
The Greek philosopher Plato
is the oldest surviving source for the story of Atlantis.
Which he describes quite vividly.
Atlantis was a precocious civilization.
Boasting beautiful architecture, advanced technology,
and city planning on a monumental scale.
It also commanded a vast fleet capable of navigating the world,
projecting its power near and far across oceans.
Until the city was struck by a series of massive earthquakes and floods,
a truly cataclysmic event,
and sank beneath the waves.
Plato tells us that the story of Atlantis reached him through his ancestor, Solon.
That Solon visited Egypt.
And we know the date of that visit. It was 600 BC.
And during that visit, he visited a temple
and the priests spoke of a lost advanced civilization
which they called Atlantis,
which was destroyed in a flood
9,000 years before the time of Solon's visit.
So we have a date for the destruction of Atlantis, 9600 BC.
That's exactly the same time as an episode of global cataclysm
and catastrophic sea level rise
that occurred at the end of the Ice Age.
Coincidence? Maybe.
But for the tale of Atlantis to accord so precisely
with the latest scientific evidence on the end of the Ice Age,
should give even the harshest of skeptics pause for thought.
Isn't it much more likely it is just some sort of allegory?
I might think that if it wasn't for the fact that the Plato story
is echoed all around the world by people who had no contact with Plato.
And what I suspect is that they are all drawing on a common source,
a common memory of a real event.
When Plato tells us the story of Atlantis, he also tells us why Atlantis went down.
It wasn't just because of a cataclysm.
It was because of the arrogance, the hubris, the pride
that had grown up within Atlantis.
This is why Atlantis was destroyed.
Because it had fallen out of harmony with the universe.
And I think that our civilization today is in a very similar predicament.
We have fallen out of harmony with the universe.
Our conceit at our own achievements,
our willingness to impose our power around the world
on other less powerful peoples.
All of these things in mythological terms
would suggest that our civilization is in very great danger.
[explosion]
When I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995,
I thought that there was nothing more for me to say
about the possibility of a lost civilization.
I became aware of an enormous and really quite astonishing
newly-discovered megalithic site in Turkey.
One that proved that our Ice Age ancestors
were capable of far more than historians ever dreamed.
To me, it very strongly speaks of a lost civilization
that archaeology hasn't got to grips with.
It's a site now thought to be the oldest surviving
megalithic structure in the world.
One that also may have left us a warning encoded in stone,
that the ancient apocalypse of the last Ice Age
that nearly destroyed humanity...
[thunder rumbling]
could return.
So, Turkey is where I'm heading next.