Stan Lee.
Just as Arneson and Gygax with their Dungeons and Dragons game were the inspiration and catalyst for entire genres of computer games and film, so was Stan Lee's original Marvel Universe, aided and abetted by Jack Kirby and his own cabbalistic tendencies, the inspiration for a lot of the popular culture acceptance of Atlantis, Lemuria, UFOs, government conspiracies and the rest.
Stan Lee didn't invent or formulate most of the stuff he wrote into his comics, in fact his prodigious reading of all flavours of publication let him synthesize a lot of strange strands- and it all came together in the Marvel Universe.
