I know this is older, but wanted to contribute another possibly solution.
If you want to keep the project location, as I did, I found that copying the .project file from another project into the project's directory, then editing the .project file to name it properly, then choosing the Import Existing Projects into Workspace option worked for me.
In Windows, I used a file monitor to see what Eclipse was doing, and it was simply erroring out for some unknown reason when trying to create the .project file. So, I did that manually and it worked for me.