Once a year someone is claiming to be on the trail of Atlantis, a science-fiction city or nation or whatever in which super-smart people from the past were somehow wiped out and took a whole lot of cool technology with them.

Last year, it was at least interestingly supposed to be in Spain. 

This year, it was maybe in the Baltic Sea - but if you are also searching for Atlantis make sure you use the right fuzzy language so you don't look silly when it turns out not to be aliens from the past. A "discovery" can be a "strange" and "mysterious" seafloor object and no one will object to that.  Then you just hint it might be Atlantis and hope National Geographic gives you a show.

"If this is Atlantis, that would be quite amazing," said Peter Lindberg, head of the Ocean X Team. "It has these very strange stair formations, and if it is constructed, it must be constructed tens of thousands of years ago before the Ice Age." 

So if it turns out to be a glacial deposit, well, there is always next year. 

"It's good to hear critical voices about this 'Baltic Sea mystery,'" Volker Brüchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University, wrote to Natalie Wolchover of Life's Little Mysteries in an email. "What has been generously ignored by the Ocean-X team is that most of the samples they have brought up from the sea bottom are granites and gneisses and sandstones."

Better luck next time. If you want to support the search for Atlantis, please buy a t-shirt from the Ocean X website, because no government agency wants to fund them.  Maybe the Big Lemuria conspiracy is secretly pulling the strings to block them out.