I must confess that the first thing I did when I received a manuscript copy of Frank Joseph’s The Atlantis Encyclopedia was to check for myself just how thorough the text really was. I started with Viracocha, the early Inca culture-hero, who has fascinated me since our trip to Peru, where I stood at his legendary tomb site at Machu Picchu. I thought it unlikely that many researchers would associate Viracocha’s “rising” from the great depths of Lake Titicaca with his possible arrival from Atlantis after the deluge, but there he was. Score one for Joseph.

Next, I tried an even more obscure reference—Balor, the king of the giant Sea People in Irish folklore. Another hit for Joseph. And so it went with name after name, geographical location after geographical location, until I put the manuscript aside and agreed that there was no single reference work on Atlantis quite as complete as this unique work. The vast majority of the thousands of books and magazine articles published about the lost civilization of Atlantis present a particular researcher’s pet theory about where the place was; whether it was really a continent, an island, or a metropolis; and where we might find bits and pieces of the vanished world to prove the validity of the author’s hypothesis.