Maxine Asher - Atlantis Research

Atlantis Research

In 1973, Asher organized an expedition, sponsored by Pepperdine University, in search of the mythical continent of Atlantis off the coast of Cadiz, Spain. Consisting of 70 teachers, students, and other interested parties, the members of the expedition planned to skin dive along the coast of Spain and Morocco, seeking evidence of the lost island. Employed at the time by Pepperdine as an audiovisual instruction expert, Asher expressed confidence from the onset that the trip would be a success.

The group subsequently claimed to have discovered and photographed Atlantean artifacts, but they were forced to seek refuge in Ireland after running afoul of the Spanish government, who believed that they were spies. Asher claims that there were murder attempts, and that at one point she was forced to jump from a moving car to evade kidnappers. She has written an unproduced screenplay about her Spanish experiences. After arriving in Ireland, her group explored inland sites around Galway Bay, Craughwell, and the Dingle Peninsula, and conducted dives in the area of Galway Bay near the coast of the Aran Islands. These Irish investigations were conducted in the belief that ancient Irish megaliths are really the work of the Atlantean people.

Asher has continued her studies of Atlantis-related topics. She is the director of the Ancient Mediterranean Research Association, an organization she co-founded with Julian Nava, and she has written or co-written several books on Atlantis. Her car's vanity license plate is "ATLANTS".

Asher has claimed to have psychic abilities, and credits these abilities with helping her find Atlantis, as "the highly civilized people of Atlantis also were very psychic". According to her, Atlanteans used these psychic energies as a power source, characterizing them as being as strong as nuclear energy. She believes that the lost continent was enormous in scope, spanning the gap between Bimini and the Canary Islands, and stretching from Ireland to Newfoundland. Asher attributes its sinking to seismic upheavals, but also feels that these upheavals were the result of a cosmically ordained "Divine Retribution", a result of "negative forces" generated by its "evil" inhabitants.

She has also claimed that her discoveries have been suppressed by "the Jews and the Catholics" because the discovery of Atlantis would contradict the teachings of the Bible. According to her, the cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis was the same as the Great Flood described in the Bible. She also holds that there were actually twelve Noahs who survived the flood, and not just one, with each surviving Noah going on to found one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.