Cut your reporting. Now a lost city under the sea--for centuries the stuff of myth--now, possibly, a reality. An Oceanographer in Japan says he is convinced he's found evidence of an ancient civilization that must have slipped into the ocean thousands of years ago and has released pictures that he thinks proves that. Sally Gould reports.

These steps of a submerged ancient city lost thousands of years ago to the Pacific Ocean. At least according to a Japanese Oceanographer, who's spent 2 decades studying the site, alerted by some scuba-diving tourists who noticed the area's rocks were unnaturally smooth and seemed to form a stone staircase. Professor Masaaki Kimura believes the area contains the ruins of a lost city, which would've had a road, a castle, a shrine, statues, even a coliseum.

Judging by the design and disposition of the ruins, the city must have looked just like an ancient Roman city, I can envisage that a Triumphal Arch-like statue stood on the left side of the coliseum, and a shrine over the hill.

Professor Kimura thinks the city probably sank in an earthquake about 3,000 years ago, and that the myth of the lost continent of Mu and Atlantis, developed out of actual ancient cities like this one. But scientific opinion is divided. Skeptics believe the ruins could be explained by natural phenomena, and point out very few artifacts like weapons, for instance, have been found to prove humans lived among these rocks.

When you look at the images, it's very hard not to think that these might have been something man-made, but all the other scientists that've gone to look at this site, can't find any evidence of human habitation. There is no man-made pots, there is no other signs that people lived there. That makes people much more cautious. So the other ideas are possibly that the natural phenomena, either volcanic activity or wave activity or water currents are of eroded features to, to look like this. It is something that I think all of us would,would love to see to be true, and to be fair, many archaeologists would love to stumble on as well. It's one of these things though that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

But so persistent are these myths of lost sunken cities, speculation has even crossed over to the search for alien life. In the 1960s and 70s, a cottage industry of books emerged, postulating that an ancient civilization could have been, and in fact still be, a base for UFOs.

Any chance you reckon on coming across Atlantis and really the amazing lost cities perhaps with aliens that are living inside them or?

Be fantastic if we could. That there are examples in South and Latin American jungle I think of, um, of temples that have been discovered ever now and then in the jungle , and simply just a question of people getting to these sites, and finding them. Aliens is a whole different ball game, we'll see.
Sally Gould, our Manha(ttan),

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1.scuba-diving:the sport of swimming under water while breathing through a tube that is connected to a container of air on your back