Tony O'Connell

Tony O'Connell is an Irish pseudohistorian who owns the website Atlantipedia.Atlantipedia: About 
==Pseudoscientific ideas==
O'Connell argues that Atlantis was a real place and among his other fringe views is the discredited pseudoscientific idea of an expanding Earth. O'Connell claims that he is "sympathetic towards the idea of earth expansion finding it somewhat more credible than plate tectonics."Atlantipedia: Expanding Earth Hypothesis
Atlantipedia is chock full of other pseudohistory and nonsense. For example, O'Connell thinks that there was an ancient African settlement in the Americas based on "negroid" features of Olmec heads, supporting the dubious "research" of Afrocentrist crank Clyde Winters.Atlantipedia: Winters, Clyde Ahmad"The Negroid features that are clearly to be seen on some of the Olmec carvings are probably evidence of an ancient link with Africa and nothing more." Atlantipedia: Olmecs. O'Connell also claims the Chinese settled in the Americas (Pre-Columbian era).
Basically, Atlantipedia is an example of crank magnetism at work: If any cranky idea can be used to boost the case for a historical Atlantis, O'Connell will latch onto it, hence the various supportive entries on hyperdiffusionism ('cause Atlanteans came to the Americas, obviously). Thus O'Connell lavishly praises the Haig's Law hyperdiffusionist website Migration & DiffusionAtlantipedia: Migration & Diffusion and its founder, Christine Pellech,Atlantipedia: Christine Pellech who thinks the Greek tales of Jason and the Argonauts and the Odyssey depict a real life circumnavigation of the globe.Pellech's article from Migration & Diffusion Similarly, O'Connell, who believes that Altantis was a very ancient civilization destroyed by a flood, cites with approval the extremely ancient Sphinx nonsense of and others,Atlantipedia: Sphinx just like O'Connell believes that all the flood myths mean that there must have been a global flood and that indeed the only(!) possible explanations are:
Hence, O'Connell supports an extreme and pseudoscientific version of catastrophismAtlantipedia: Catastrophism involving the usual mangled misunderstandings of such otherwise real phenomena as pole shifts.E.g. this bonkers version Likewise, O'Connell seems to be supporting several (mutually exclusive) alternate historical chronologies, citing not only Schoch, but also Immanuel Velikovsky.Atlantipedia: Immanuel Velikovsky 
Of course, no lexicon on Atlantis would be complete without a fawning entry on the author who really set the toneJason Colavito: Donnely's Atlantis of modern "Atlantology", Ignatius L. Donnelly, replete with citations alleging that a conspiracy has hushed up exactly how amazing Donnelly's work was and is:
==Qualifications?==
O'Connell does not have any education or degrees in archaeology, history or classics (three subjects he usually writes about). He previously worked for a small electrical company but is now retired. According to the skeptic Jason Colavito "O’Connell is friendly and personable but clearly fancies himself the arbiter of acceptable evidence."Review of "Meet Me in Atlantis" by Mark Adams 
However, O'Connell is mentioned and his opinions cited in the New York Times bestseller travelogue Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City authored by his friend Mark Adams.Does New Theory Pinpoint Lost City of Atlantis?
==See also==
*Pre-Columbian contact hypotheses
==References==
Category:Internet kooks
Category:Living people
Category:Pseudohistory promoters
Category:Silly "Earth" theories