The Atlantis Project
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
In the early days of the net, individuals with nutty ideas tended to be encouraged. This was before high-speed net access and MP3s so people needed something to keep themselves entertained online. One of the seemingly nuttier ideas to emerge on the net, and helped along by amused netizens, was a plan for the creation of a new country.
A group called the Atlantis Project, based in Las Vegas, started using the Internet in 1994 to promote the construction a floating, sovereign city state in international Caribbean waters. The project was led by a man named Eric Klien. It seems he was pissed off when he discovered election fraud at all levels of American government. Klien attempted to expose this massive deceit but he was stopped by death threats and intimidation at ever turn. Election officials even told him they were too tired to look at his five boxes filled with smoking-gun evidence.
His solution, simply enough, was to build a new nation. He correctly assessed no "collectivist" state on earth would sell him land. Lots of banana republic dictators probably read Lord of the Flies in their college days at Harvard. As well, after Jonestown, letting Americans carve out Utopias in your backwater swamps had fallen out of fashion.
Klien's nation, Oceania, would be an artificially constructed floating island anchored outside of the Hurricane belt. It would only cost a few billion dollars to build.
Netizens love a good conspiracy story. But what really gets Netizens excited is when someone's response to a conspiracy is a massive engineering project. This was no nutter who spends a couple years plastering phone polls with tracts loaded with Bible quotes. A mail list, a newsgroup, and then a web page (www.oceania.org) were started to promote Klien's Atlantis Project and get the word out that you too could be a founding father of a new nation for the low price of $250. You didn't have to pick up a musket and face down red coats. You just had to mail a check made out to a guy in Vegas, send him two passport photos, and you're an instant citizen and patriarch. There was no indication how much it would cost to have your profile minted on Oceania's coinage.
Of course, you can't fund a multi-billion dollar floating island by getting a couple thousand people to send you $250. The Atlantis Project wanted to attract savvy, big money backers who would be eager to set up a business in a country with a strict constitutional separation between the free market and the state.
Did you want engage in regulation free banking or conduct medical experiments in an atmosphere free of laws based on someone's outdated ethics? As the web page's FAQ notes, Oceania would not be a land where lawyers and legislators could tamper with your sanctity!
So go for it, dude.
In 1994, Klien predicted construction would soon get underway on Oceania. After all, Boating magazine did a story on the Atlantis Project. There was no where to go but up.
Unfortunately, by 1995, financial disarray set in. In what was an ironic twist of fate, plans collapsed when the project's backers, people pledged to forging a land where lawyers couldn't tamper with your sanctity, began suing each other.
