The Land of Mu
A lost Pacific continent, home to sixty-four million people and the source of all human civilisation, which sank without trace. It originates in a nineteenth-century mistranslation of Maya script, and was then developed at length by a retired British officer working from tablets nobody else was permitted to see.
Why it was classified
Not concealed, just wrong from the start. Augustus Le Plongeon, attempting to read the Maya Troano Codex in the 1860s before the script was decipherable, produced a translation describing a land destroyed by volcanism, and named it Mu after a supposed queen. The reading has no basis in the actual text. James Churchward then published 'The Lost Continent of Mu' in 1926 and several sequels, citing sacred tablets shown to him by an Indian priest which he alone had translated and which have never been located or examined.
Why it matters
Plate tectonics is unhelpfully specific about this. The Pacific basin is oceanic crust; there is no drowned continental landmass under it, and seafloor spreading rates leave no window in which one could have existed and disappeared within human history. Mu survives regardless, absorbed into later esoteric writing and periodically attached to Yonaguni, Nan Madol and Easter Island. Its real distinction is being one of the few lost civilisations whose exact moment of creation can be dated — to a man confidently reading a language he could not read.
Where was it, then?
Where, then? The fringe literature has never let a missing continent stay missing. One school relocates Mu inland altogether, arguing that the deserts of the American Southwest and the Gobi are the drained, sun-baked remains of the old Pacific realm, on the reasoning that a place with no water now must have lost it somewhere. A second school abandons the Pacific entirely for the Bimini Road, the half-mile line of rectangular limestone blocks lying in shallow water off North Bimini in the Bahamas, discovered in 1968 and promptly enrolled as a harbour wall, a road, or a rooftop belonging to whichever lost civilisation the author prefers. Geologists who have cored the blocks describe naturally jointed beachrock. This has settled nothing. It should be said plainly that both theories are speculation, that they place Mu in two different oceans, and that neither is troubled by the other existing.