Riveting Riffs Logo One Producer Jack Kelley Talks About The Atlantis Puzzle
The Atlantis Puzzle Photo Two

 

Recently American filmmaker Jack Kelley (normally in Santa Fe) sat down with Riveting Riffs Magazine from Denmark to talk with us about his documentary film The Atlantis Puzzle, now streaming on Amazon. As the title suggests, the film explores the myth of Atlantis and sets out to prove its existence, drawing upon some experts on the subject and others in the scientific community to test the probability of the theories that are advanced both as to the existence and the disappearance of Atlantis. 

While the film advances the plausibility of the existence of the Atlanteans it also seems to leave us with the impression that these people were far from the advanced civilization that the ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote about. In fact, Jack Kelley’s research was so thorough that it has left us with as many questions, only different ones, from when we first started down this path. Perhaps that is fitting for a man whom we have known for several years and for whom puzzles have played a big role in his life. It is also fitting that Plato, the philosopher whose writings he leans most heavily on through Atlantis aficionado George Sarantitis, left us with layers of meanings in his stories and with many puzzles to solve.

Jack Kelley talks about separating the myths from the myth, “There are probably ten layers of stuff in this story and the question is which layer do you want to focus on. I think Hollywood picked up on this story (about Atlantis) and they focused on a lost advanced civilization, something underwater. Eventually over time it turned into something like Aqua Man and everything in between. There have been dozens of movies made about Atlantis. I even think, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Captain Nemo getting out and walking on the bottom of the sea and he sees ruins of some city, if I recall correctly.

This is a subject that has fascinated people for so long and people have put different spins on it. Then you say what is it in popular (culture) that people have utilized or put in a form to shape whatever story they wanted to tell. That is altogether good for them, but Aqua Man has zero to do with Plato, right?

We have come so far from the original story and then when you go back to the original story. This is where the subtlety lies that I haven’t been able to necessarily communicate to people. I cut a lot out of this film to get it to eighty-five minutes. The deepest level I have managed to penetrate to is Platonic philosophy. What is Plato actually doing with this story? I would be happy to go into that. There is a level above that, which I think George exhausted pretty thoroughly. Where the heck was this place and why was it there? How are we to actually interpret geography and what is it supposed to mean in this story? I never even heard of anyone who took this as seriously as George.”

The Atlantis Puzzle Photo ThreeThis is where Jack Kelley’s film becomes really interesting, especially if you enjoy ancient history, myths and stories of lost civilizations.  

We kept wondering, Jack, can we not just accept the easy way out here and go with one of the other theories about a huge volcanic eruption sinking a civilization or a flood or both events combined for destroying an advanced civilization to which we have given the name Atlantis?

No, of course not, that would not be satisfying to a puzzle solver like Jack Kelley.

Jack explains where and when this all started, “It was from the hand of fate. My wife and I were on vacation in 2019, pre-pandemic and on the island of Santorini. It was unrelated to anything. We were just there on vacation. In the past people have theorized that the destruction of Santorini was caused by a volcano that blew up around 1600 BCE. A lot of people have described that as a possible influence on Plato for the story of Atlantis, although it is debatable if he or any of the other Greeks knew that had happened as it was 1,200 years in the past. I wanted to go visit this place called Akrotiri, which is this buried city like Pompeii, but it is from 1600 BC and it is on Santorini, which used to be called Thera. It is a bit like the Minoan culture on Crete.

When the volcano erupted it destroyed and buried the civilization and blew up the center of Santorini, but it also preserved some of these villages under thirty feet of ash. Today they have excavated a small part of this, and you can go in and they have it all roofed over. It is like walking back in time. In very select areas you can walk through some of the city streets.

Anyway, that is where we were (on Crete). We were at the hotel waiting for a taxi. We were in the lobby and there was a bookshelf. I don’t think I was really paying attention, because I was waiting for the taxi and my wife was browsing at the bookshelf and she said hey, take a look at this, you might be interested. It was an academic conference book that was issued in 2008. It was the Atlantis Conference in 2008. I said what the heck is this and I was shocked that there apparently was an academic conference that had been held on the subject of Atlantis. For a second you think this is really weird and sure enough it was the real thing. Uncharacteristically of myself, I had not brought much reading material with me. I ended up reading this book by the pool and it was quite long. It was written by people who had written very serious papers on the subject of Atlantis. Some of them were utterly nonsensical material in my view. (However) I found a couple of papers by this guy named George Sarantitis.

I am a pretty classically educated person. I studied at Yale in their directed studies program, which is classics. I studied a lot of philosophy, ancient history and Latin in high school and college. I have a pretty strong classical background. I am reading this guy’s papers and immediately it stood out to me about what he had to say about Plato and his Greek grammar and this that and the other. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought this guy may have cracked the greatest mystery of human history. I couldn’t believe how credible this guy was.

I couldn’t stop talking about how incredible this guy was and my wife said, why don’t you just (send) him an email. I thought he probably gets (a lot) of emails from all kinds of nut jobs and I don’t want to bother the guy. This is also from some years in the past, so who knows if he is even around. I looked him up on the internet, found his website and I sent him an email. I didn’t hear anything for about four months or maybe five months and by that point the pandemic had hit. I got an email back from him and he had been quite ill with COVID. We set up a time to have a zoom call and we had a conversation. I think the first conversation lasted three or four hours and Sarantitis was everything I hoped he would be. He was wise and extremely well read. He was logical and thorough. He didn’t have an agenda of any sorts. He was a guy who loved classics, who had studied ancient Greek, and he loved Plato and philosophy. He also had an extremely high level of intellect. That is how I stumbled upon George.”

Much of the credibility for this film comes from the experts in their respective fields of study, whether they be George Sarantitis, scientists, archaeologists / anthropologists and academics. They validate what would otherwise be, well, dare we say it, more myths. Instead, The Atlantis Puzzle gradually builds up a compelling story, just not the one you likely expect.

To understand Plato’s account of Atlantis is where we must begin to peel back the layers.

“I can definitely speak to that. I have now gone back and read the different Platonic dialogues in different translations, from multiple angles. I spot checked George’s ancient Greek. My own ancient Greek is pitiful, like first year student level. Ancient Greek is very new to me.

Essentially if you go back and look at those two dialogues Timaeus and Critias, people forget that Plato said this or said that. He created a dramatic situation. Four guys were having a conversation, Socrates is talking with three other guys, Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates. They are just having a chat, and they are saying that Socrates gave such a good speech the other day that they are so thankful and now we are going to give speeches to pay you back. What would you like to hear about? Socrates recapped what he had talked about and for that reason most scholars believe that Plato refers back to his (Plato’s) book The Republic, because this was very similar to the society that was outlined in The Republic. Critias comes in and says, you know Socrates this story you told about the city state is almost the same as the story that I heard from my grandfather and he heard it from his father who is a friend of Solon and Solon first heard it from an Egyptian priest.

The story is about the Atlantean empire that was once defeated by the Athenians of 9,000 years earlier in about 9600 BCE. The Atlanteans were described as this ideal society, but then they became corrupt, greedy and they became thirsty for power and that is when they attacked North Africa and attacked the western Mediterranean. People did live in the Athens area at that time, but not at the level that is described.

Critias describes this ideal story about how ancient Athenians were combatting the Atlanteans and then the Athenians drove them all the way back to their capital city. They were about to have their final showdown, but then the gods decided to punish everybody. The entire Atlantean city was destroyed, but also the attacking Athenian army was buried in mudslides. I think the ancient Greek say something like they were covered by the earth,” explains Jack Kelley.

We mused, mostly in jest, it would be fascinating if ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Socrates were just sitting around and thought what kind of a story, we could come up with that people hundreds or perhaps thousands of years from now would believe, but we just made it all up.

Jack Kelley surprised us with his answer, “Well frankly, this story is not all false, but it definitely is not all true. What is real? Well, the geography is real. Was the city real? Not as it was described. Was there some kind of war? We know people were expanding and these hunter gatherers were moving across north Africa, but I bet you ten kronor (Jack was in Denmark at the time of the interview) that Plato is making an allusion to his own time and talking about the Carthaginian empire, which at the time controlled the north African and they controlled the western Mediterranean and they controlled part of Sicily. Who were they in direct competition with? The Greeks. Those two powers were competing against each other for trade and so forth. It sounds exactly like the Atlanteans and Carthaginians were doing at the time. They were the descendants of the Phoenicians.

A lot of people who haven’t read history miss that and those are layers that are closer to the surface. An educated audience of Plato’s time would immediately pick up on it. 

I don’t think that Plato’s story referenced any kind of historical or archaeological time frame. I think he set the story that far back in time as a deliberate commentary about the continuity of civilization and the story of how easily things can be lost. Shouldn’t we be preparing for when bad things do happen?

We did an incredible amount of, and we had to fact check Sarantitis’ story. I did a lot of scientific research for the green Sahara segment (we have deliberately left you in the dark on this, because even documentaries can have spoilers) to try and understand that. Do we have this right and are we using the correct time windows? Are we getting the phenomena right and what happened?

When people say what are the lessons for today, I think at minimum there are five or six layers or there could be ten or a dozen layers. This is the brilliance of Plato’s writing, because he figured out how to reach an audience on multiple layers.The Atlantis Puzzle Photo Four

Sarantitis came up with this idea of what he called the methodology of mythology, and he had also done work on the Iliad and the Odyssey. He had cracked some problems there working with astronomers to try and find out about the eclipses and things that happened in the Iliad and to match that up with astronomical records and to find out what year this actually took place. He has done some really interesting work along these lines of trying to dig into mythological works and to figure out what is true and what is not true. Of course you can have truth told within a fictional story. You read a Hemmingway novel, and you say wow that was really true, but of course the story is not true. He speaks to some true elements of human nature for example. That is all to say that the Iliad and the Odyssey were masterpieces, because those stories could be told over and over again.

Greek education was basically the Iliad and the Odyssey and maybe a few other ancient authors. Poetry and music were kind of the same thing. They were delivered in this metered verse. In a way poetry, music, philosophy, myth and education were all tied up in one package, which I think is super interesting. With that backdrop of the Iliad and the Odyssey those stories work if you are a kid with lots of sword fighting and then it works if you are an adolescent, boy I might be afraid to go to war and when you are an adult you are at a different level and you have to think about diplomacy, military alliances and tactics and formations. Then there is a fourth level, which is the philosopher initiate level and that is sort of the wise person who reads into the allegorical or parable nature of some of the stories. Plato loved using these multiple layered myths or allegories in his writing. This is how people were educated in the ancient world. Today we get these boring textbooks. In 1452, King so and so of Spain signed a treaty for this and he got this territory. Within a couple of years of graduating high school ninety-five percent of the people have forgotten every single thing they have learned in that history class. When it is taught in a puzzle and you have to figure it out and reason it out, this is one of the things that you said, that I love puzzles, so to me this was absolutely captivating to realize that Plato was also teaching in an allegorical or puzzled, multiple layered level where he meant it to be deliberately confusing. You were supposed to struggle with it and you were supposed to ask questions. There are other Platonic dialogues, where in The Republic I think he tells the Allegory of the Cave, and you can interpret that in multiple ways.”

Jack, since book publishing did not exist and only the privileged few had access to the teachings of Plato, who was his audience?

“That is a great question, and we touched about this briefly in the film. If you think about it, that was one of George’s first questions. He said wait a minute, who is Plato writing these books for? He is writing them a) for his students at the academy, which was the school at which they were taught and b) he was writing them for other highly educated, well-read people who could afford to purchase books. Books used to be quite expensive in the old days. It is because the only way somebody could get a book was for somebody to sit there and hand copy it. There were not any printing presses, so that is how you got a book. As you and I are well aware, paying a scribe to copy a book, must have been an expensive process. The (analogy) today would be maybe doctors, lawyers and university students would be the audience for the writings of Plato,” he replies.  

Continuing Jack Kelley says, “The thing that I hope people take away from this story is we have forgotten how to think in an allegorical or parable way. With his Allegory of the Cave Plato is not saying that people are literally chained up and this guy is behind them with torches making shadow puppets on the wall? (Jack chuckles) Then they literally bust out into the sun and they realize the truth and they have to go back down into the cave. Is he suggesting that actually took place? No. Is he suggesting that is exactly what happens when somebody realizes the truth? Maybe, but if so, what exactly does that mean? I think we have lost this understanding that stories operate on more than one level. I can’t figure out exactly why that has happened.”

We have talked a lot about how Plato educated others in ancient times and how George Sarantitis further educated Jack Kelley about Atlantis, much of which we have left out, so you will be compelled to watch the film. There was a part of this writer, however that wanted to know what Jack Kelley learned about himself during the making of The Atlantis Puzzle.

Thoughtfully he says, “A couple of things, one, you come face to face with your own ignorance. I just got a dose of the vastness of knowledge out there, which I only have the tip of the iceberg. That was a humbling experience. The second was learning from George and the respect I have for him. He didn’t make a dime from this. He put all of his work and effort into this and published a book, not expecting to make any money from it, but because he was fascinated by Plato. Once he realized he had hit on something and that this mistake had been made about the interpretation of the Atlantic Ocean. He took it all the way and I have a huge respect for people who take it all the way. Lastly, I would say with Plato I gained a whole new level of respect for Plato, and I realized how much I had missed when I was studying him in college. You realize there are layers here that you may only be able to access with life experience and repeated readings over decades. It is staggering and again a humbling experience. It was also an honor and a pleasure to bask in the glow of an intellect like that and to be able to grasp and participate with those questions. This is the only place where I may have a bit of arrogance, because now I feel like I have the right approach to it, to look at it in multiple layers to think about it in allegorical terms, to read on multiple levels, instead of just reading it on a superfluous level. Today we are taught in an uncritical way. Maybe that is the best thing I got from it.”

You can watch the trailer for The Atlantis Puzzle here. The Atlantis Puzzle documentary is streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi. You can follow updates about The Atlantis Puzzle on Instagram here.  Keep watching this space, because Jack Kelley has a few other films he is working on and he is writing a book.  

A word about the photos, Jack Kelley is the young guy in the top photo. The second photo is of George Sarantitis, and the third picture is an imagined one of how Plato may have looked. Return to Our Front Page

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This interview by Joe Montague  published September 17th, 2024 is protected by copyright © and is the property of Riveting Riffs Magazine All Rights Reserved.  All photos and artwork are the the property of  Jack Kelley unless otherwise noted and all  are protected by copyright © All Rights Reserved. This interview may not be reproduced in print or on the internet or through any other means without the written permission of Riveting Riffs Magazine.