New Utopia
micronation
New Utopia, officially the Principality of New Utopia, is a micronation claiming the Misteriosa Bank, an unclaimed undersea rise of land in the Caribbean Sea off the Cayman Islands where it is hoped to build structures raised up from the underwater land. It was first proclaimed on 13 April 1999 by American businessman Howard Turney ("Prince Lazarus"), under the name Lazarus Long; the project has recently been revived (in early 2017).
History
The project was founded in 1995 when Lazarus Long, the founder of New Utopia, came across a shallow unclaimed underwater area in the Caribbean Sea. He then filed a claim with the United Nations. Long raised up to $100 million from investors from all over the world, with a majority coming from the United States. Then, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC) termed New Utopia a "fraudulent nationwide Internet scheme", and complained that Long had made "material misrepresentations and omissions concerning, among other things, the status of construction of the project, the companies associated with the project, the safety of the investment, and the status of the Commission's investigation into his activities." The SEC's case against Long (SEC v. Lazarus Long) ruled against Long.
New Utopia's project was restarted in early 2017 by Lazarus Long's daughter Elizabeth Henderson, who promised to have the Project completed by 2021. The project has not had any updates since.
Structure
The social model and trade system would have been hyper-capitalistic, modeled after the writings of Ayn Rand, Napoleon Hill, Robert Heinlein, Dale Carnegie, and Adam Smith.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “New Utopia” is micronation. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Utopia and micronation, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “micronation” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7012218. Authority coordinates are 18.480, -83.540. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2017, 1995 and 2021.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “New Utopia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.