Episode Details

In the mid-1800s, a British naturalist named Philip Sclater proposed the existence of a vast sunken continent — Lemuria — to explain a gap in the fossil record. What began as a genuine scientific hypothesis was seized upon by occultists, racists, and spiritual movements, mutating over 150 years into a living religion practiced at the foot of a California volcano. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces how one man's theory about lemur fossils became the foundation for a conspiracy touching Atlantis, Theosophy, Nazism, and the New Age.

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