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February 23, 2009

Atlantis splash proves if headline is question the answer is no

By Dominic wireposts

Friday’s Sun front page proves the old adage that if a headline ends in question mark the answer is almost certainly no.

Is this Atlantis, The Sun asked? Regarding criss-cross lines in the ocean over an area the size of Wales off the Canaries, revealed on Google Earth.

The answer from Google the same day was no, the lines were caused by the wakes of Google survey boats.

This didn’t The Sun from publishing a follow-up feature on Saturday saying:

“According to historian Lewis Spence in his 1924 book The Problem Of Atlantis, the Canary Islands and Madeira could be what was left of Atlantis after it was destroyed by a huge earthquake.

“This very much fits in with the Google Ocean pictures in yesterday’s Sun, as they were taken almost an equal distance west of the Canaries and Madeira.”

The paper did, however, quote a Google spokesman in the final par saying: “The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. But the fact that there are blank spots between these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world’s oceans.”

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The Sun didn’t use the caveat of question-mark when it claimed in January that a Lincolnshire wind turbine had been hit by a UFO on its front page.

Earlier this month investigators revealed that “material fatigue” rather than a collision was the cause of the damage to the wind turbine. This does not appear to have been reported by The Sun.

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