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- [00:00]
Vanessa Richardson
Foreign. This is crime house.
- [00:12]
Narrator/Storyteller
In 1905, a book called A Dweller on Two Planets was published in the United States. According to the author, Frederick Spencer Oliver, there was a secret city hidden inside Mount Shasta, a volcano in Northern California. It was built by the Lemurians, a highly advanced race of humans whose civilization had developed on a continent that was now at the bottom of the ocean. Oliver described the technologies the Lemurians had developed in extraordinary detail. Air conditioning, high speed trains, wireless communication. Keep in mind Oliver wrote this in 1886, when he was 20 years old. Air conditioning hadn't been invented yet. Neither had radio. High speed rail was decades away. Oliver died in 1899 before any of those things were created. But here's what's wild. His mother published the book in 1905, and by then, the world was starting to catch up. Air conditioning was patented in 1902. Commercial radio arrived in the 1920s. High speed rail took even longer. But one by one, the technologies Oliver described started showing up in the real world decades after he put them on the page. That's either an extraordinary coincidence or. Or something else entirely. But Oliver didn't think he was guessing. He believed every word he wrote. And he convinced an entire religious movement to believe it, too. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between facts and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. And remember, these Monday episodes will also be on YouTube with full video. You can find them every Saturday. Just search for conspiracy theories, cults and crimes, and be sure to like and subscribe. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think at the end of each episode. Leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review and follow conspiracy theories, cults and crimes to continue building this community together. And for early ad free access to all three episodes, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Today, I'm diving into a question that's haunted humans from the very beginning. Where do we come from? Most answers fall into one of two scientific or religious. But today's story is about a theory that lives in the strange space between those two things. In the late 1800s, the idea of a lost continent called Lemuria was a serious scientific hypothesis. Even after it was disproven, the idea refused to die. Occult movements adopted it. Religious groups built their faiths around it. And today, more than a century later, thousands of people still believe it's real and that its survivors are living in a hidden city beneath a California volcano. So how did a piece of Victorian era zoology turn into a modern New Age conspiracy? And is there any truth to it? All that and more coming up.
- [03:55]
Vanessa Richardson
On this show. We're always digging for the truth, yet modern healthcare remains one of the greatest mysteries of all. Everyone deserves real medical support. And that's why I want to talk about Mochi Health. Mochi is a nationwide platform that's bringing humanity and transparency back to healthcare by treating your unique biology. Not a fad. They've already helped 400,000 members lose over £5 million. And while they lead the way in weight loss, Mochi is now a full scale marketing Marketplace for over 120 treatments ranging from hair and skin care to longevity, mental health and specialized men's and women's health. After you complete an eligibility form, you'll receive a telehealth evaluation with a partnered provider on Mochi's platform to build a plan personalized for your specific body and goals. You'll have 24,7 access to your provider and specialized medications from a network of licensed pharmacies delivered right to your door. No waiting rooms or hidden fees. You just pay for your membership and your medication. It's personalized care that actually treats you like a human being. Stop leaving your health up to an algorithm. Go to joinmochi.com My name is Shannon Maldonado.
- [05:09]
Narrator/Storyteller
I'm the founder of Yaoi, a gift shop from the lens of artists and handmade objects. I chose Shopify because when I was testing other platforms, it was definitely one of the most user friendly. It was important to me to think about where we would be in the future. All of the tools for reading your sales, like planning inventory, they're just right there on your dashboard. And for anyone starting a small business, the biggest thing I can tell you, it doesn't have to be perfect. Shopify can help you build upon it. Start your free trial on shopify.com Around 315,000 years ago, a family of humans lived in a cave in what's now Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. They hunted gazelles. They made tools out of obsidian. That's sharp volcanic glass. And at some point, they died there together. Their bodies left close to one another. Their remains stayed buried for thousands of years. They weren't found until 1961. To this day, the fossils at Jebeliar Hood are the earliest known remains of Homo sapiens. Archaeologists believe our species first appeared in Africa around that time, with small nomadic tribes moving across the continent in search of food. Over the next several thousand years, those tribes spread across the globe. Then around 3500 BCE, the first known civilization rose up in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what's now Iraq. And as soon as people started building cities, they started asking one big question. Where did we come from? The first recorded creation myth is a familiar one. It's called the Eridu Genesis. It's a Sumerian epic about how the gods created the world and crafted humans out of clay to watch over the Earth. At some point the gods became fed up with humanity, so they decided to wipe everyone out with a great flood. One of those gods, Enki, disagreed. He warned a humble man named Ziusudra about the coming flood and told him to build a massive boat. Ziusudra built it, survived and was eventually granted immortality by the gods. That sound familiar? The Eridu Genesis predates the story of Noah by more than a thousand years. And scholars believe it's the inspiration for flood myths in dozens of other cultures. The idea of a great civilization being wiped out by water is one of the oldest stories humans have ever told. And as time went on, the those stories only got more elaborate. About 1500 years after the Eridu Genesis was written down, ancient Greece was in the middle of a golden age. Athens was a hub of philosophy, medicine and science. Around360 BCE, Plato, one of the founding fathers of Western philosophy, published a dialogue called Timaeus. In it, he told the story of an ancient enemy that had once threatened Athens. The a wealthy powerful island nation called Atlantis. According to Plato, Atlantis had conquered much of the known world. But after the Athenians outsmarted them in battle, the gods punished Atlantis for its arrogance and sank the entire island beneath the sea. Most historians today believe Atlantis was completely made up. That it was a thought experiment Plato invented to make a point about how civilizations destroy themselves through corruption and pride. But the image of a great society swallowed by the ocean was too powerful to forget. It stuck around for centuries and it would come back in a big way once Europeans started crossing oceans. After Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492, Europe went wild for the so called New World. But not every discovery was real. Plenty of explorers exaggerated their findings to impress their patrons and fund the next voyage. Cartographers drew imaginary islands. Some even claimed to have spotted the ruins of Atlantis back in Europe. People ate it up and nothing grabbed their attention more than the pyramids. The Mayan and Aztec sites looked remarkably similar to the ones in Egypt. And Europeans couldn't accept that indigenous people had come up with those designs on their own. In their minds, someone must have taught them. So they started guessing who. Some theorized that indigenous Americans were descended from the Welsh. Others said they came from the lost ten tribes of Israel or were refugees from Atlantis. The logic was always the the pyramids were too impressive to have been built independently, so there had to be some shared ancestor, preferably one Europeans had already heard of. Barely anyone considered the simpler explanation that humans in different places facing similar problems sometimes come up with similar solutions. In 1590, a Spanish missionary named Jose Acosta proposed something more grounded. He suggested that humans had migrated to the Americas across a land bridge connecting Asia to North America. Acosta was actually close to right. Most archaeologists today believe humans crossed from Siberia to Alaska during the last Ice Age when the Bering Strait was frozen over. But in the 1500s, his theory didn't get much traction. It would take another 300 years and a revolution in scientific thinking before the idea of a lost landmass would be taken seriously again. By the early 1800s, the world world had been mostly mapped and the colonial frenzy had cooled off. But a new frontier was opening up. Science. A generation of researchers wanted to understand the natural world on its own terms. No religious explanations, just evidence. Charles Darwin was one of those people born in England in 1809. Darwin was supposed to become a doctor, but he hated medical school. So he followed his grandfather's lead and studied the natural world world instead. In 1831, 22 year old Darwin set sail on the HMS Beagle. For five years he sailed the world studying coral reefs, animal species and rock formations. Then he spent more than two decades working through his notes, slowly building a theory that would change everything. In 1859, Darwin published on the Origin of Species. In his core idea, every living thing on earth descended from a common ancestor and evolved over millions of years through natural selection. It rewired the entire field of biology and it inspired a new generation of scientists to chase their own discoveries. One of them was a man named Philip Sclater. Philip Sclater was born in Hampshire, England in 1829. Like Darwin, he came from money. And like Darwin, Sclater grew up wandering his family's country estate, falling in love with nature. His thing was birds. He studied ornithology at Oxford, trained as a lawyer and Built a successful legal career in London. But he spent every spare minute at meetings of the Zoological Society, talking shop with the biggest names in natural science. Then Darwin's book came out, and Sclater knew he wanted to make a discovery just as big. By 1864, 35 year old Sclater was stuck on a puzzle. Lemurs and lemur like primates kept showing up in two places. Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa, and parts of South Asia, including India, but hardly anywhere in between. He'd cataloged dozens of related species across both regions. They shared bone structures, diets, behaviors. The similarities were too specific to be coincidence. But thousands of miles of open ocean separated them, and the water was far too deep for any lemur to swim or raft across. So how did they end up on opposite sides of the Indian Ocean? Sclater had an idea. The land bridge concept, proposed centuries earlier by Acosta, had been dusted off and was widely accepted by the 1860s. But to explain a connection across the entire Indian Ocean, Sclater would need something much bigger than a bridge. He'd need a whole continent. That same year, he published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Science called the Mammals of Madagascar. In it, he proposed the idea that a large landmass had once connected Madagascar and India and that it eventually sank beneath the waves. He called it Lemuria. It was a real scientific hypothesis. Sclater wasn't writing fantasy. He was trying to solve a genuine biological mystery. And his colleagues loved it. But Sclater had no idea what he'd just set in motion. Over the next 50 years, his theory would drift out of the hands of scientists and into the hands of people who had no interest in evidence at all.
- [14:33]
Vanessa Richardson
On this show, we're always digging for the truth. Yet modern healthcare remains one of the greatest mysteries of all. Everyone deserves real medical support. And that's why I want to talk about Mochi Health. Mochi is a nationwide platform that's bringing humanity and transparency back to healthcare by treating your unique biology. Not a fad. They've already helped 400,000 members lose over £5 million. And while they lead the way in weight loss, Mochi is now a full scale Marketplace for over 120 treatments, ranging from hair and skin care to longevity, mental health and specialized men's and women's health. After you complete an eligibility form, you'll receive a telehealth evaluation with a partnered provider on Mochi's platform to build a plan personalized for your specific body and goals. You'll have 24, 7 access to your provider and specialized medications from a network of licensed pharmacies delivered right to your door. No waiting rooms or hidden fees. You just pay for your membership and your medication. It's personalized care that actually treats you like a human being. Stop leaving your health up to an algorithm. Go to joinmochi.com hi listeners, it's Carter Roy, host of Murder True Crime Stories. I wanted to let you know that Crime House plus and True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can binge all of them right now ad free with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page.
- [16:39]
Narrator/Storyteller
In 1864, British zoologist Philip Sclater proposed a lost continent called Lemuria to explain the strange distribution of lemur fossils across across the Indian Ocean. It was a serious scientific theory and at first it got him exactly the recognition he'd been hoping for. He was elected president of the British association for the Advancement of Science. He joined the American Philosophical Society. Other researchers ran with his idea, citing Lemuria in their own papers and trying to connect it to Darwin's theory of evolution. But then one of them took it somewhere Sclater named Never Intended. After Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the hunt was on for the so called missing link, the fossil that would prove humans had evolved from earlier primates. Nobody could find it and nobody could explain why. In the late 1860s, a German zoologist named Ernst Haeckel offered a convenient answer. He argued that the missing fossils must have been on Lemuria and that they sank when the continent did. Then he went further. Haeckel claimed Lemuria had been the original home of humanity, our primeval home, as he put it. That was a huge leap from Sclater's theory about lemur distribution. But Haeckel had an agenda and it pulled the idea of Lemuria in a much darker direction. See, Haeckel wasn't just a scientist, he was a hardcore core racist who used biology to argue that different human races were actually different species descended from different animals with different levels of intelligence and value. This was called Social Darwinism. And to be clear, Charles Darwin never argued that some humans were more evolved than others. But Heckle and others used Darwin's name to dress up their racism in scientific language. They published elaborate family trees in academic journals showing white Europeans at the top and everyone else branching off below. In the late 1800s, at the height of European colonialism, plenty of powerful people were happy to treat those diagrams as fact. Haeckel used Lemuria to anchor the whole framework. He claimed that white Europeans were the most advanced descendants of the Lemurians, while other races were were less evolved branches that had broken off earlier. He said it openly, and his ideas had a long, ugly afterlife. Decades later, prominent Nazis cited Haeckel as a foundational thinker. One SS officer called him a pioneer in biological state thinking. Sclater tried to distance himself. He wrote that Lemuria had nothing to do with the order origins of humanity. But it was too late. The idea had taken on a life of its own. And then the actual science started to crumble underneath it. As far back as the 1500s, geographers had noticed something odd about the world map. The continents looked like they fit together like puzzle pieces. South America's east coast and Africa's west coast lined up almost perfectly. By the late 1800s, that observation was finally getting serious scientific attention. In 1885, about 20 years after Sclater proposed Lemuria, an Austrian geologist named Edward Zeus published his theory of Gondwana. He argued that a single supercontinent had once made up roughly 2/3 of the Earth's landmass, and that India, Africa, South America and Madagascar had all all been part of it. Gondwana solved Sclater's puzzle without needing a sunken continent. India and Madagascar didn't need an ocean floor connecting them. They used to be right next to each other. The lemurs hadn't crossed an ocean. The ocean had grown between them. Sclater's Lemuria was no longer needed. The theory should have died right there. But while scientists were quietly retiring it, a completely different crowd had picked it up. And they had no plans to let it go. The 1800s weren't just the age of Darwin and Zeus. They were also the golden age of spiritualism, seances, table tipping, communing with the dead. Across Europe and America, people were chasing what they called ancient wisdom, secret knowledge supposedly passed down from lost civilizations. A lot of these spiritualists came from the same wealthy, educated world as the scientists they'd read Darwin and Sclater. They knew the Atlantis story. And they were ready to believe that lost continents and Forgotten races were real. One of the people leading this charge was an adventurer named Augustus Le Plungeon. Le Plungeon hadn't been born wealthy. He shipped out to the Americas as a young man, got wrecked in Chile at 19 and 16, spent six years there developing a fascination with indigenous culture. Then he sailed to California during the gold rush, made a fortune in land speculation and poured the money into archaeology. He and his wife Alice were among the first people to systematically photograph the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza. They spent years in the jungles of the Yucatan, lugging heavy camera equipment through thick vegetation and oppressive heat. Their photographs documented temples, carvings and inscriptions that many Europeans had never seen before. As pioneering documentary work, it was genuinely important and still referenced by archaeologists today. His theories were not. Le Plongon became convinced that the Mayans were the world's original civilization. He argued they'd colonize the the globe, that the Egyptians had learned everything from them. And he claimed there'd once been a continent spanning the Atlantic Ocean which the Mayans used as a bridge between the Old World and the New. He called it Mu. Mainstream archaeologists dismissed him. The Mayans came thousands of years after the Egyptians. There was no way for them to have taught the Egyptians anything. But Le Planon's idea. It didn't need to convince scientists, it just needed to reach one very influential mystic. And eventually it did. Helena Blavatsky was a Russian born writer and self described mystic who claimed she'd spent years studying under secret spiritual masters in Tibet and India. Whether she actually traveled to any of those places is debatable. Modern historians are skeptical of the most of her claims. But the story she told was extraordinary. She said she'd left Russia as a teenager, traveled through Egypt, India and the mountains of Central Asia. She also claimed to have spent seven years in a hidden monastery in Tibet, learning from a group of enlightened beings she called the Mahatmas. She said these masters had chosen her to deliver their ancient teachings to the Western world. By the 1870s, Blavatsky was living in New York City, chain smoking, holding seances and writing dense esoteric books that blended Eastern mysticism with Western science. She was brilliant, charismatic and almost impossible to pin down. People either worshiped her or thought she was a complete fraud. But whatever you thought, there was no doubt that she was building a powerful movement. She called it Theosophy. The main idea that there'd once been a single ancient wisdom uniting all the world's spiritual traditions and that her mission was to bring it back. Science, religion and philosophy all merged into one grand worldview. To make that work, Blavatsky needed evidence that sounded scientific. So she went shopping in the academic world. She borrowed Sclater's Lemuria. She borrowed Le Plongeon's Mo. She borrowed Haeckel's racial hierarchy. And she stitched them together into something none of them had ever imagined. In Blavatsky's version of history, humanity had evolved through a series of what she called root races, each living on a different lost continent. The third root race lived on Lemuria. They were primitive animal, like. The fourth root race lived on Mu. They were giants. They had advanced technology and psychic powers. When their continents sank, the survivors became the ancestors of the Egyptians and the Mayans. And the fifth root race, Blavatsky called them the Aryans. Now, she didn't invent that word. Aryan comes from the Sanskrit term arya, meaning noble. By the 1800s, European linguists were already using it to describe the family of Indo European languages and the people who spoke them. But Blavatsky took the term and welded it to her racial hierarchy, placing white Europeans at the top of a cosmic evolutionary ladder that framing Aryans as a master race descended from an ancient advanced civilization would echo through the next century in. In horrific ways. Blavatsky had taken a dead scientific theory and turned it into something far more powerful. A story about where humanity came from, who mattered and who didn't. Lemuria wasn't a puzzle about fossils anymore. It was a religious origin story tangled up with race, prophecy and secret knowledge. Blavatsky died in 1891, somewhat discredited, after getting caught. Caught faking paranormal phenomena. But that didn't matter. Her ideas were already out there. And once a story like that gets loose, it doesn't need its author anymore.
- [26:40]
Vanessa Richardson
On this show, we're always digging for the truth. Yet modern healthcare remains one of the greatest mysteries of all. Everyone deserves real medical support. And that's why I want to talk about Mochi Health. Mochi is a nationwide platform that's bringing humanity and transparency currency back to healthcare by treating your unique biology. Not a fad. They've already helped 400,000 members lose over £5 million. And while they lead the way in weight loss, Mochi is now a full scale Marketplace for over 120 treatments ranging from hair and skin care to longevity, mental health and specialized men's and women's health. After you complete an eligibility form, you'll receive a telehealth evaluation with a partnered provider on Mochi's platform to build a plan personalized for your specific body and goals. You'll have 24. 7 access to your provider and specialized medications from a network of licensed pharmacies delivered right to your door. No waiting rooms or hidden fees. You just pay for your membership and your medication. It's personalized care that actually treats you like a human being. Stop leaving your health up to an algorithm. Go to joinmochi.com Such an ordinary thing
- [27:56]
Narrator/Storyteller
to walk home from high school. Her name was Mickey Costanzo.
- [28:01]
Vanessa Richardson
Just 16, she didn't have far to go. Seemed perfectly safe. Until it wasn't. What happened to Mickey?
- [28:10]
Narrator/Storyteller
I'm Keith Morrison and this is five Miles From Home, an all new podcast from Dateline. Search five Miles From Home to start listening now. By the time Helena Blavatsky died in 1891, the legend of Lemuria had drifted a long way from Philip Sclater's original theory about lemur fossils. It was now the foundation of a full blown religious worldview, complete with lost races, hidden masters and secret wisdom. And in the decades after her death, a new wave of writers picked up the story, each adding their own layer to the myth. The first was Frederick Spencer Oliver, the writer behind A Dweller on Two Planets, the book we talked about at the top of the show. In 1886, Oliver was a 20 year old living in Yreka, a tiny town in Northern California, right in the shadow of Mount Shasta, a 14,000 foot volcano. He claimed that one day while sitting at his desk, he fell into a trance like state he called automatic writing. He said a spirit was speaking through him, channeling words directly onto the page. The spirit identified itself as Philos, the Tibetan. The manuscript Oliver wrote described an entire underground civilization called Telos, the City of Light, hidden inside Mount Shasta. He claimed that the Lemurians had built it after their original continent sank. In Oliver's telling, the Lemurians hadn't just survived, they had the technology to migrate across across the globe and build a new home beneath a California mountain. This was a big shift. Earlier writers had described Lemuria as ancient and gone. Oliver said the Lemurians were still here, right under our feet, watching us. Oliver finished the manuscript in 1886 and died in 1899 at 33. His mother published the book in 1905 and it caught fire in occult circles almost immediately. Readers were astonished by how many of Oliver's Lemurian technologies seemed to be coming true. Air conditioning was patented in 1902. Wireless telegraphy was already in use. To believers, this was proof that Oliver hadn't been making things up. He'd been channeling real knowledge from an advanced civilization. The next major addition to the Lemuria myth came from a man named James Churchward. Churchward was a British American inventor who'd made a fortune from a metal plating patent. After retiring, he threw his money at his real ancient occult mysteries. He'd met Augustus Le Plongeon in person and was deeply influenced by his ideas about Moo. In 1926, Churchward published the Lost Continent of Mu, Motherland of Man. He argued that Mu and Lemuria were actually the same place, and he said his information came from a special source, an Indian priest who'd taught him a language spoken by only three people in the entire country. According to Churchward, this priest had shown him a set of ancient clay tablets written in the lost language of the Nak, hidden in a temple vault. Nobody else had ever seen the tablets. Nobody could verify the language, and Churchward never revealed the priest's name or the temple's location. It was, to put it mildly, a story that required a lot of faith. But Churchward told it with absolute confidence. In his version, Mu was the original Garden of Eden. The Nacles had built a highly advanced civilization 50,000 years ago and seeded the rest of the world with their knowledge. The Egyptians, the Mayans and ancient India were all just colonies of the lost motherland. Churchward had no proof for any of it. But he didn't need proof. He needed an audience. And in the 1920s, he had one. The 1920s were a peak moment for organized spiritualism in America. Thousands, thousands of people were attending seances, reading channeled wisdom and joining groups dedicated to exploring the supernatural. Theosophy. Blavatsky's movement hit its high water mark with around 45,000 worldwide followers by 1928. One theosophical group even built its own utopian community near San Diego called Loma land. Then, in 1931, two books pushed the Lemurian legend into its most lasting form. The first came from Harvey Spencer Lewis, an advertising executive who'd founded a group called the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross. Writing under a pseudonym, Lewis published Lemuria, the Lost Continent of the Pacific, which fleshed out the story of the Lemurians retreating underground beneath Mount Shasta. The second came from a mining engineer named Guy Ballard. Ballard claimed that he was hiking on Mount Shasta in 1930 when he met the Count of Saint Germain. This was an 18th century French aristocrat who, according to Ballard, was actually a Lemurian. Ballard said the Count was immortal and wanted to share his ancient wisdom with the world. Ballard's book, Unveiled Mysteries became a bestseller in occult circles. And between Lewis and Ballard, the Lemurian myth was now permanently rooted at Mount Shasta, a real place anyone could drive to. Then the Great Depression hit. People had bigger problems than chasing ancient wisdom in the woods. But the legend was already planted. It just needed a new generation to pick it up. That generation arrived in the 1960s. The counterculture movement started out political, anti war, civil rights, peace and protests. But as the activism got crushed or co opted, a lot of that energy turned inward. Drugs, meditation, spiritual exploration. Out of the ashes of the protest movement, the New Age was born. And the New Agers were perfectly primed to rediscover Lemuria. They were already interested in Eastern philosophy, alternative medicine, and the idea that Western institutions had been lying to them. A story about an ancient civilization whose wisdom had been suppressed by mainstream science that fit right into their worldview. It wasn't hard to convince people who already distrusted the establishment that the establishment had buried the truth about Lemuria too. They read Blavatsky, they read Churchward, they read Oliver and Ballard, and they made the trip to Mount Shasta. Today, multiple religious groups treat the mountain as sacred ground. The St. Germain foundation, which grew out of Guy Ballard's writings, holds an annual pageant on the mountain every August, A dramatization of the life of Jesus called I Am Come. They've been doing it since 1950. The Church Universal and Triumphant, based out of a compound in Paradise Valley, Montana, has woven the Lemurian masters into its theology. And the Great White Brotherhood, a network of believers in ascended masters, also claims Lemurian roots. It's a relatively small subculture, but it's remarkably persistent. And once you start looking, you find it everywhere. Books, YouTube channels, podcasts, and an entire tourist economy built around Mount Shasta. The town of Mount Shasta, population around 3,000, has leaned into its reputation. The main drag is lined with crystal shops, spiritual bookstores, and healing centers offering everything from Lemurian energy readings to guided meditations inside the mountain's energy vortex. Visitors come from all over the world. Some to hike, some to meditate, and some because they genuinely believe there's a city of ancient beings living beneath the peak. On any given summer weekend, you can find people sitting in circles on the mountainside, eyes closed, palms open, waiting for a message from below. Here's the thing. The real science does have some echoes of what Sclater was getting at. Even if his specific theory was wrong. There are really sunken landmasses under our oceans. New Zealand, for example, is just the visible part of a much larger continent called Zealandia, which is 95% underwater. It's real. Geologists have mapped it extensively. But the particular Lemuria that Sclater proposed, a continent in the Indian Ocean, sunk to explain lemur distribution, was replaced decades ago by plate tectonics. The continents weren't connected by sunken landmasses. About 335 million years ago, all of Earth's landmasses were fused together into one giant supercontinent called Pangaea. Then slowly, slowly, over hundreds of millions of years, Pangea broke apart. The pieces drifted in different directions, eventually becoming the continents we know today. India and Madagascar weren't linked by some lost bridge under the ocean. They used to be neighbors, and they've been drifting apart ever since. Through real science, we've learned a version of Earth's history that's even more dramatic than anything Sclater dreamed up. We just have to follow the evidence instead of filling in the blanks with myths. What's fascinating about the Lemuria story is that almost nobody involved knew what they were building. Philip Sclater was trying to explain lemur fossils. Augustus Le Plongeon spent years in California and never connected his lost continent to Mount Shasta. Frederick Spencer Oliver's book wasn't published until after he died. Helena Blavatsky never set foot in California. Each person picked up a piece of someone else's idea and added their own twist. Over the course of a century, those layered twists turned into something none of them set out to create. It's the same way the Sumerian myth of Ziusudra became the Christian story of Noah. The same way Plato's philosophical thought experiment about Atlantis became, for some people, a literal treasure map. Stories don't stay still. They get borrowed, reshaped, repurposed, and eventually somebody starts to believe them. So I'd love to hear what you think. Do you buy any part of the Lemuria theory? Have you ever been to Mount Shasta? And if so, did you feel anything strange up there? And what's the wildest version of the lost continent story you've come across? Let me know in the comments, wherever you listen. I love to hear your thoughts at the end of the day. The Lemuria story is about how human beings deal with mystery. When we hit something we can't explainstrange fossils, ancient ruins, gaps in our own history, we look for an answer. Sometimes we find it through science, sometimes through faith, and sometimes when neither one feels like enough, we end up with something in between, a theory that has the look of science and the feel of religion, and doesn't fully belong to either. Lemuria didn't survive 150 years because it was true. It survived because it was useful. Useful to scientists who needed an explanation, to ideologues who wanted a racial hierarchy, to mystics who wanted ancient secrets, and to seekers who wanted hidden masters under a California mountain. Every generation saw something different in it, and there's no telling who's going to pick up that story next or what. They'll make it mean. Foreign thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every every episode early and ad free. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Jake Natureman, Kaylee Pine, and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening. You know what they say. Early bird gets the ultimate vacation home. Book early and save over $120 with VRBO because early gets you closer to the action, whether it's waves lapping at the shore or snoozing in a hammock that overlooks. Well, whatever you want it to so you can all enjoy the payoff come summer with VRBO's early booking deals. Rise and shine. Average savings $141 select homes only.