In June 1990, Egyptologist John West accompanied geologist Robert Schoch to Cairo, to take a closer look at the Sphinx. For almost two decades, West had been arguing that the erosion of the Sphinx revealed that it had been weathered by rain rather than windblown sand. If that was true, then the Sphinx had to be thousands of years older than Egyptologists believe - after all, Egypt has had no rain in thousands of years. They concluded that the Sphinx dates back to 7000 BC - a time when in fact there was not supposed to be any civilization anywhere in the world - and has been built by the survivors of the vanished civilization which Plato called Atlantis. Rand Flem-Ath and Colin Wilson's book crosses continents, arguing that this earlier civilization did exist but was destroyed around 9600 BC.