Ubar "Atlantis of the sands" and Saffara metropolis were discovered by satalites searching for old camel trail routes

Recent discoveries have brought Iram out of the realm of fable into history.

In the early 1980s a group of researchers interested in the history of Iram used NASA remote sensing satellites, ground penetrating radar, Landsat program data and images taken from the Space Shuttle Challenger as well as SPOT data to identify old camel train routes and points where they converged. These roads were used as frankincense trade routes around 2800 BCE to 100 BCE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iram_of_the_Pillars

THE archeologists who recently announced the discovery of the legendary lost city of Ubar in the Arabian Peninsula have found the remains of another major emporium in the ancient frankincense trade: the ruins of an even larger city near the coast of the Indian Ocean.

The new discovery is considered a significant step in establishing the full scope of the frankincense traffic at its most prosperous time, at the height of the Roman Empire in the early centuries after Christ, and at one of its major sources, in the Qara Mountains of southern Oman. This seems to remove any remaining questions about how and where the prized commodity was shipped across the Arabian desert by a network of caravan routes to Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean and by ships across the sea to India.

The new find, at the base of the Qara Mountains, is at a site with the modern name of Ain Humran. The discoverers identified it as the ruins of the fortified trading center called Saffara Metropolis on the maps of Claudius Ptolemy, the Alexandrian geographer of the second century A.D.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/21/science/the-frankincense-route-emerges-from-the-desert.html