Welcome back to the show, fellow conspiracy realist, our classic. This evening takes us to one of the dream continents that Matt I have always wanted to visit. I got close one time.
Me too. This is the destination if you can get there. And not long ago, a large like a passenger sized plane landed for the first time on Antarctic iceful all of it. But really think about this. It is a massive continent that is covered in ice. But it wasn't always covered in ice.
Not always. And we're not just kicking new Schwabia conspiracy ideas here. It is still the most inhospitable, most mysterious of Earth's land masses. And I love that you're pointing out this was not always the case. We recorded this episode in twenty eighteen, so light Oar was still very much in play, but had not perhaps reached the levels
of affordability and scale that it has now. And so we looked into claims that have been around for centuries and centuries that once upon a time Antarctica was not a vast desert wasteland, but instead a home to civilizations that could give modern society a run for its money.
Oh my gosh, when ets get confirmed, I'm just I'm gonna bet right now this is gonna have something to do with Antarctica.
I think you know what. I'll be honest man, if you ask me, Ben, what if the long lost civilizations aren't real? I would still go to Antarctica. It just seems so cool. It's just kind of hard to get there right now.
But not for long. And let's jump in.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They call me Ben. We are joined with our super producer Paul Deckett. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Quick as we say, peek behind the curtain. The four of us are actually relatively well traveled people.
Although I have never been to Antarctica.
Right right, and that's the subject of today's episode. Very very few people have been. I got very close to going to Antarctica once a number of years ago, Matt. You may remember it was with a good friend of ours, friend of the show who does a lot of write ups on the House Stuff Works website about our podcast, Diana Brown. Check out our work if you get a chance.
She was going her family was going to go on a group expedition, and Antarctica is one of those places that is very, very expensive to go go to by your lonesome. You know, for sure, you gotta roll deep and get the price cuts. Unfortunately that didn't happen. But I'm hoping one day to get to this continent and I think, you know, it would be a cool thing for all of us to do, because of all of Earth's continents, Antarctica remains the most mysterious today. It's an
ice box, it's a gigantic ice desert. It's one of the last places in the world that is largely or somewhat the same as it was before what we call the anthropis scene or the age of humans. And you know, it's no wonder there's not much reason for human beings to be there, not that it stopped us before. And for a lot of people this may be weird to think about. Antarctica wasn't all ways a frozen wasteland. In fact, it was kind of balming for a while.
That's true. And just before we get into that, you can take a flight cruise to Antarctica. That's probably the easiest way. You got to fly somewhere that's closer and then get on a ship.
Right.
Just can't fly into Antarctica really.
Not not really, no, not easily. It's not a delta flight right. Yeah.
Even yeah, it gets worse when you're in Antarctica.
Even Spirit won't take you there.
What about virgin They go everywhere?
I don't know, Yeah, they do go. They are trying to go into space. Richard Brandson is trying to go to space.
So Anarctica is kind of like space.
On Earth, similar to the Marianna's trench. There's a lot of stuff we don't know about either environment. That's a very good point. What we do know about how Antarctica arrived at this strange position that works on multiple levels comes from a series of theories and a lot of research into timelines, so we can we can explore that just briefly. Here are the facts.
Yeah. The first thing you have to is subscribe to is continental drifts.
Yes, that's the first thing. You have to buy the idea that once upon a time or several different times throughout the history of Earth. In times they had nothing to do with human beings. We weren't even a twinkle in the ecosystem's eye. The continents as we know them today were actually part of larger things called super continents, super continents, perfect super continents because not because they had
extraordinary powers, they were just really big. And from what we understand, they shifted into each other a number of different super continents about one billion to maybe five hundred and forty two million years ago, and they formed this huge thing we call Pangaea, and the southern part of Angaia was a place that we call Gondwana. Of course, we made these names up after the fact because again, no people were there that we know of right, or
at least no life form capable of naming things. And Gondwana was made up of what we call South America, Australia, India, Africa, and Antarctica today. At this point in Antarctica's lifespan, it teemed with plant and animal life. It was lousy with it. It was actually pretty hot. But around one hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighty million years ago, Gondwana began to separate or drift, and eventually Australia, which was
still attached to Antarctica. Eventually Australia moved pretty quickly for continent speed towards Southeast Asia, while Antarctica finally became isolated about thirty four to thirty five million years ago. It went from a subtropical environment to a place just covered with ice, riddled with it.
Yeah, and the theories go here that as it was finally separated from all of these other continents and bodies of land, it's now surrounded by bodies of water in a place that so far from the equator, the ice just began to form, just starts forming, continues to form, and it keeps going.
Yeah, it keeps going. So any living creatures on this continent are facing an increasingly inhospitable environment.
And perhaps you eventually, because of this, get some evolutionary traits such as what we find in polar bears and some of the other Arctic life, although in Antarctica you don't find.
Much right, right, But maybe as it was transforming into this just frigid wasteland, the evolutionary pressures on the animals that lived there before resulted in things like you know, layers of body fat like a lot of seals have, you know.
But let's get back to the ice.
Yeah, okay, let's get back ice. Ice. Baby. How did
it get there? The exact story of the ice development is not certain, so we returned to another theory, and the theory is that the reduction in Earth's carbon dioxide levels, as well as the changes in its orbit, caused a high degree of cooling and that this with the formation of what you had mentioned before, Matt, the Antarctic circumpolar current, it's neat word, formed these glaciers on the land and they grew sizeable, They grew larger and larger and larger,
and they began carving deep valleys in the landscape, which if you check out the right satellite images you can see today.
Yeah, and you can also see that there's this massive ice sheet across almost all of Antarctica that is pretty much a plateau. It's an ice plateau, and then the highest peaks kind of peak out. See it works on levels there you go at the top of the ice. It's fascinating to see it and to understand how much ice is physically on the land there.
So what about people were there are people involved in this at all.
Yeah, here's the thing.
I mean, according to most of the records that we have, civilizations were pretty much completely ignorant that this place existed at all. And you know, humans were spreading across other continents, but Antarctica kind of hung out on its frozen lonesome, you know.
Yeah, And even in places like what we call the far north of North America today Alaska, Canada and stuff and Siberia on the other side, even in those also brutal environments, people were able to move around because they were able to go on land across things like the Bearing Strait or the tundra.
Re least shorter travels across across water if you had to.
Right exact, Yeah, and that can't happen due to the open ocean surrounding Antarctica.
It's like the perfect prison continent.
Hey, there we go, or if you're you know, perfect continent for a super villain to have their icy.
Layer absolutely absolutely.
Possibly hide a death ray of some kind beneath the Arctic ice.
There you go.
I like that idea.
And it's it's interesting because there are things that we know from various ancient cultures, some in South America, for instance. That can be interpreted as the people having some vague knowledge of a distant cold land to the south. But the problem is that they could be talking about islands. You know, there are a ton of frozen islands around
there in the ocean. So we can tell you the official story that you will read a most mainstream textbooks about humans in Antarctica, since you know, as you said, Noel, we don't have any proof from multiple civilizations that most of them had any idea that there was something down there, right, And also we get it, there's no up or down in space. They had no idea that there was something over there. We can't say for absolutely sure who got there first, but we know there's some noted expeditions to
the area. And these timelines will become more important as we go. Most of them start in the fifteen hundreds, the sixteenth century, when Europeans are trying to explore more of the world and claim it for their countries or their gods.
Yeah, take all of the stuff, make sure it's ours exactly. So we go to fifteen nineteen oh twas a good year, specifically in September, Ferdinand Magellan. He takes a trip. That's generally how you get anywhere on the seas. You sail from Spain towards the Indies. He's going in a westerly route, we shall say. So he's sailing down the coast of South America. You can imagine him going, or we're showing you a map right now. It's an old timey map
from the fifteen hundreds. And he discovers this narrow strait that passes through to the Pacific Ocean, which today bears his name, the Magellan Strait. Oh it's not the well, I don't think it's the Ferdinand Magellan Strait. I think it's just the Magellan Straight. Yeah. Sorry, Ferdinand, we didn't include that. But you do have a great story about
a cow named after you. Okay. Anyway, So to the south of this lies the Tierra del Fuego, which is, oh my gosh, this year early geographers assumed to be the edge of the southern continent of South America. So Tierra del Fuego. And we've talked about this before. It's what is it called the something of I know, obviously a fire. I forget the name of it. It's like it has a specific thing because it's it's got volcanic activity in it. The ring, the ring of fire.
That's what it is, Johnny Cash, That's what it is.
Yeah, the ring of fire. Very cool. So fifteen nineteen for an Imagellan goes a little bit south.
Right right, And at this point, for the majority of cartographers and the majority of map makers that we know of, they were ranging into what would be called terra incognita. Yeah.
If you've ever seen pictures of an old map, or if you were fortunate enough to have seen a very old map in person at a museum or in like the home of a wealthy eccentric, then what you'll see is, after a certain point, there's a blank space, and you might see like a sea serpent, and you'll see some kind of warning that translates roughly to something like, here be serpents. Yeah, because no one knew, no one editing for me.
It's like the fog of war. If you're playing video game or something and you have a mini map and a map setup, you can only see what you've explored so far, and the rest of it just say, who knows, who knows. But that was what humans were going through in real life.
And so in fifteen seventy eight. Many decades later, Francis Drake. Yes that Francis Drake passes through the Straits of Magellan only to find himself blown significantly further south than he intended due to a big storm in the Pacific. And this event proved that Tierra del Fuego was separated from any southern continent, and you could therefore sail around Tiara del Fuego if the wind was at your back and you had good fortune. This particular passageway came to be
known as the Drake Passage. And this has nothing to do with anything, But I have to ask, do you think these guys were naming this stuff after themselves, like saying I discovered this, therefore it's you know, like the Frederick Canal or something.
I think it's by the crown probably, or at least there's some decree that occurs shall be known as the Drake Passage.
Also unrelated, did it ever occur to you that almost any bio you read, if somebody was actually written by that person.
I think about that a lot. It's weird, Yeah, I think, especially in the modern day, it's absolutely true. Even if you're hearing an introduction like we would do on our show because we're not immune to this. That bio is usually going to be constructed of pieces of a bio that somebody else wrote about themselves. Right, Most bios are autobios, right, It's true.
We wrote our bios on our about page.
We hate writing bios. By the way, what do you because you have to write in third person? It feels so weird.
It's just very like strangely self aggrandizing.
Yeah, yeah, and you have to try to figure out what makes you sound legit to people.
Mm hmm.
I actually got asked when time at work to cut some jokes out of a bio. Yeah, and then.
They're like, yo, Bolin, you legit, and you were like.
But I thought that kind was good. No. I think there was one time. I don't know what bio problems you guys have had in the past, but I hated writing bios so much that for a couple of months here when we were asked for bios, I would try to turn in one that just said Ben Bolin was asked to write a bio nice and it never it never flew.
My favorite version of you for your bios is Ben Bolin is ex explores many varying and interesting pursuits or something to that effect. Oh yeah, just like just straight up, just like Ben is an interesting human. I would agree.
That's too kind. But watch out, I'm googling Matt Frederick Bio now.
Oh you won't find me.
We'll see. So Bio's aside. And whether or not these guys were self a grandie. I love that phrasal self aggrandizing enough to name these geographic features after themselves. We do know that they got stuck in modern culture, at least in the West. That's what we're known as today. And after the discovery of this passage, after they say, oh, Tierra del Fuego is the end of the world as we know it, other people try to push a little further.
In fifteen ninety two, an Englishman named John Davis discovers the Falkland Islands.
And this is messed up.
Yes, this is a very unfortunate experience.
Yeah.
So in August fifteen ninety two, this guy, John Davis, who was an Englishman, had a really really dope name for his ship. By the way, it was called the Desire, which I like a lot. He discovered the Falkland Islands, like you said, and This was not very happy expedition
at all. Things got pretty dire in terms of scarcity of supplies and food and podable water, and the crew was forced to take advantage of their surroundings and ended up having to eat somewhere in the neighborhood of fourteen thousand penguins.
That can't be right.
They attempted to eat them? Yeah, well, these are also these kind of penguins. They're smaller than like the maybe the Emperor penguins that you're And.
Aren't they really fatty like I would think that penguin. You don't hear about people eating penguin.
No, it's not a super fun food to eat. No, it's typically not a first choice found.
And they're hard to catch. Man, those things are so slippery.
They slide around their bellies, and they dance so well and tandem and crazy choreographed numbers.
And there's also a question of whether or not these penguins were familiar with humans as predators, so that may have made it easier to catch. But the reason you say attempted to eat them is because once the desire reaches the tropics, the penguin meat that they had tried to store has spoiled and it's poisoning these increasingly desperate crew members. Out of the original seventy six who went with John Davis to discover the Falkland Islands, only sixteen members of the crew survived.
Yeah, made a home.
That's crazy. Not good odds, No.
They're not. Although if you're if you're one of those lucky sixteen, you know you're probably riddled with scurvy. You've probably had just a series of bad years and you have to ask yourself for you're going to go back to the ocean or you're just gonna pack it up and be a landlubber. A surprising amount of people, by the way, do decide to go back on the seas.
Yeah, the sirens calling back in your.
Blood must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and sky right in if you remember that poem or that reference to that poem. So fast forward sixteen seventy five. In April, a guy named Antonio de la Rocca is blown south of Cape Horn and is the first person to see South Georgia.
Very nice. Jump forward a little bit seventeen thirty nine. A Frenchman you may recognize this name, Jean Baptiste Bouvet de Loosier, he discovers Bouve. There you go, he discovers Bouve is so crazy.
But that's such a great name, Bouvet de Loosier.
Yeah, exactly, Jean Baptiste Bouve deloz Man. That guy just had it all going for him. So who knows. Hey, I can't speak to his character, right, that's fair. The island is not this island that he discovers, Bouve. It's not sighted again until eighteen oh eight, so a while after he discovers it, and is due to these significant ike ice packs that end up on it and around it.
And the first landing didn't take place until the American Morel there Morel who another explorer landed there in eighteen twenty two, So that thing went almost one hundred years.
So Bouvet de Lozier is simply the first person to see it and report back that he saw it.
Yes, anyway, oh hey, it was definitely there right over there.
And then in seventeen twenty two, in February, frenchmen named Eves Joseph Day.
Here we go.
Kerguinre Mars discovers the isles Kergulin, so he just they get his name, and then in seventeen seventy three, Captain James Cook and company become the first people to cross the Antarctic Circle. They're still not they still no one has officially seen the continent known as Antarctica.
Yeah, but they're seeing all of these islands and places around them near them enough, but you.
Just still can't see it yet.
And they're all brutal.
Oh yeah, you don't want to be there. Why would you send another ship out there?
And it's like, again, if we want to do a video game reference, it's like when you're starting to go off the edge of a map and an RPG and things just get less and less and less friendly.
Yeah, or less and less interesting because the developers haven't put anything out there.
Yeah, like like in Skyrip. Yeah yeah, yeah, we don't want to spoil it for anyone, but it.
Is interesting how the on maps, the monsters be here kind of thing really does help prevent people from exploring out there in the same way a game developer will prevent you from being able to get any further. Sometimes it's just through an invisible wall. Other times it's like you have to turn back a huge mountain Yeah, it's really interesting.
Are there's some games where it'll just teleport you back to some other place?
Oh yeah, true, sure, nope, which can be irritating, especially because you have to go all the way to the edge in the first place.
Right. Well, that's the thing about Antarctica. If you actually get to the South Pole, you just hit the portal and you head back up like you probably go straight through the Earth and end up in the Arctic.
You're talking about the famed Antarctic Portal.
Yeah, well, I mean everybody knows that if you get to the South Pole, you just go.
Why do you think NASSA keeps covering up the images of the actual pole?
Yeah, exactly. If you didn't know this, The Earth is kind of like a doughnut and in the center it's hollow and it goes all the way through.
Come on, Yeah, used to be a great neighborhood, but now there are tons of Nazis there. We have a video about it. Check us out on YouTube or on our website. Stuff. Then once you know dot com. So it isn't until eighteen twenty, on January twenty seventh that a Russian explorer named Fabian goldlib von Bellingtausen becomes the first person to see Antarctica.
Very nice, Sir Fabian Godlib von Belenhausen and Shausen Chausen, Housen Housen.
So he again he just sees it. WHOA, something's there. It's way bigger than there's other islands that we heard about vaguely yes, and officially speculation over the existence of a quote southern land was not confirmed then until the early eighteen twenties, when these commercial expeditions from Britain and the US and these national expeditions from Britain and Russia started looking at the Antarctic Peninsula region and other areas
south of the Antarctic Circle. People just kept finding more remote, pretty pretty brutal islands. And it wasn't until twenty years after Bellinghausen that someone established that Antarctica was actually a continent and not just a group of islands or an area of ocean. That it wasn't just ice. There was land in them there glaciers.
Can you imagine just traveling the ocean in those frozen waters all the way around if it was even possible It wasn't at the time, but it's just traveling all the way around Antarctica.
Because they have ships now that will slice through Yeah the ice yea ice breakers.
Yeah, those are killer.
The US only has I think one to three in operation. Yeah, right, Ben, it's officially, it's true. It's it's going to change as trade passages open up in the North Pole. Did we ever do anything about that? Who's going to control the North Pole? No?
We we talked about who's going to No, wait, we did, we.
Did, didn't We remind us if we did.
This, man, it's it's on our list, and it hasn't been forever. We got a ton of links.
Yeah, okay, but but that's that's the state of affairs. And we can imagine, we can all imagine how bleak of a discovery that must have been. What a cold comfort it must be for all of these explorers finding these islands, because despite the somewhat alluring names, uh, the fact of the matter is that they weren't. They didn't have resources that the crews could successfully extract other than means of survival, like the story told Noel about the
penguins in the Falklands. Instead, I think the best way to understand it is to imagine in your own life listeners. Have you ever been on the way somewhere and got to your destination, arrived and realized that you forgot something important and you had to turn around? Oh god, I know right, Like, I live so close to where we work, and I lose my mind if I have to turn around and walk, you know, another twenty minutes home. I can't imagine sailing to Antarctica. Yeah, and then I.
Mean, I get irritated if I leave my wallet in the car and you have to walk all the way back down the hall.
To get the wallet.
So well, we can relate, dude, exactly. And if you can just imagine in the early nineteen hundred's, for several decades, there were numerous expeditions to to actual Antarctica where people were attempting to do this very thing, just like get pretty far and then they'd realize, oh, wow, we have to go back because we didn't pack enough, we stuff.
We just ate Neil.
Yeah, all the dogs have died and they were the ones who are supposed to carry us here. But it just happened over and over and over again and again. It's all part of the same motivation that we spoke about in the beginning of why Antarctica just became discovered in the Falklands and all these things because there was colonial expansion occur and in the nineteen hundreds it's written again trying to just expand.
What if you find a source of a rare spice or a strange animal, you know what I mean?
Yeah, what if you get past some of this ice and there is an actual place, some kind of oasis land like the Cave system.
Or yeah, like the Savage Land in Marvel Comics. Very much so, So without going too much further into the early history when to establish a timeline, We're going to take a quick break from for Capitalism and a word from our sponsors, and then we'll be back to explore the story of humans in Antarctica to day, because there actually are some all right Antarctica today.
You know who can really use the sponsors that we just talked about. These people that are living in Antarctica. Oh yeah, oh yeah, they're shipping for most everything we sell on this show. They're shipping involved.
That's true, that's shipping. We should tell them, we should tell them. Yeah, it's home, it's home to people. It's got the smallest human population of any continent. Surprise. But it also has a very international population because none of these people are citizens of Antarctica. Instead, they are scientists and staff from around thirty countries. They live on seventy different bases. About forty of those are year round bases, meaning someone's always there, Yeah.
Even when it becomes impossible to travel outside of that base.
Even when it's like the setting and John Carpenter's the thing someone an. The other thirty bases are only open in the summer. The entire population officially again of Antarctica is about four thousand people in summer, one thousand souls in winter.
Wow.
Eleven people have been born there.
That's incredible.
Also makes it the continent with the lowest birth rate.
Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. I can only imagine the circumstances that would lead to deciding to have your child there.
I mean, what if you can't get out, what if it's.
Winter there's Yeah, it would be pretty cool though.
Yeah, it's a good story if you make it out, you know, to be ah polar baby.
So okay, I know we don't necessarily have this information. Shit, I wonder in those instances of those children being born there, do they take the country that runs the base as it like the primary country that runs that base. You know, I know we don't have answers to this, but.
I believe in this is just speculation, but I believe they get the nationality of their parents.
Of the mother I guess right, Yeah, makes sense. It'd be cool if it was just there were eleven antarcticas.
You're like accidentally Argentinian. Yeah, that could get complicated real quickly. If you're one of those eleven people listening, are you related to them? Right? And let us know how that all works. Please? And so that's that's Antarctica today. That's how it got there. That's who who lives there now. And generally they're doing climate related research, but they're doing another of a number of other things as well, especially
because of that massive ozone hole. Yeah. But other people have a question that has haunted people since the eighteen hundreds, since the official western discovery of Antarctica, And the question is this, what if there was something else beneath the frozen wasteland, beneath all these glaciers and all these like howling abyssle winds. What if there was something there before? What if there were people there before. Here's where it gets crazy.
So the hollow Earth. No, I'm just kidding, donut. Yeah, in this case, it's the hollow Earth, though Donut theory slightly different. Things sometimes conflated with hollow Earth.
But yeah, we want to keep that straight, right, Well, okay, so.
I'm just kidding. That's where we're going. We should do it, we should No, no, no, we're going. We're jumping right into Graham Hancock, which is I think the correct place to start.
I'm we have to do hollow Earth at some point we will, okay, right, all right? So yeah, as we were saying, we're in a century, people have argued, with varying degrees of seriousness, that Antarctica may have once been the home to forgotten civilisms. In some cases, the stories of this ancient society are conflated with other stories of places they're generally thought to be mythical, like Atlantis or Lemurria.
Right, Yeah, it would make a lot of sense if a lost civilization was truly lost, because it's covered in ice and there's no way.
To find it, and it's on a lost content there you go, you gotta get there. And one thing we found pretty interesting it comes from Graham Hancock, who is a a fringe researcher who writes some really fascinating stuff.
I would say he is exciting to read, and I don't find any I don't find major problems with like sentence structure or thought structure. He veers off a little bit sometimes, but overall, if you're going to read somebody who is writing about these kinds of topics, Graham Hancock's.
A good choice. Oh man. He has a great take on DNA too. Oh yeah, which I don't know did we ever got?
I don't think so should do that?
That would be a good one. So he wrote a book called Magicians of the Gods, The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilizations and twenty incredible title. Yeah, which is not crazy, and it's an update. It's a sequel to a book you wrote in nineteen ninety five called Fingerprints of the Gods, The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilizations. This
book is massive. If you are interested in this sort of alternative history, revisionist stuff, this what iffery is a good thing to call it, then you have at least heard of this book Fingerprints of the Gods. If you are interested in this and you have not read it, I recommend checking it out. You can get a cheap paperback copy really easily.
And you can get it in pretty much whatever language you speak, with a lot of exceptions, but there is a good chance that you at least can somewhat speak a language that it's translated into.
Yeah, because it's in what how many twenty seven twenty seven languages sold more than three million copies of this book. So in the original book, Fingerprints, Vcock looks through all these creation myths in ancient texts, and he goes through these various geological scenarios, and his argument is that Antarctica moved to the south Pole much more recently than we are originally thought, and much more recently than the maintainstream
folks thing today. So instead of moving like thirty four to thirty five million years ago, getting covered with ice all that jazz, he says that it happened a little less than twelve thousan five hundred years ago, which means people were around yeah. Most importantly, and that it was moved not by a slow continental drift, but instead it was moved relatively suddenly by major quote crustal shifts, earthquakes, tectonic plates subducting and crashing together and tearing apart.
But like end of the world stuff, that scenario where if you were on planet Earth at that time and that was occurring, it's not good news.
Like yeah, like if the Pacific rim the ring of fire finally erupted and everything blew up at once. Kind like that the kind of thing that could end to
civilization if it did exist somewhere. And so, according to Hancock, when this cataclysm occurred, several remnants or groups or factions of this pre existing ancient civilization were able to survive, specifically on Antarctica, at least long enough to take there, to take trips to other parts of the world where people survived, and to give knowledge of things like agriculture, certain religious myth practices, and folklore and stuff like.
The symbolic nature of certain structures, and yeah, exactly, it's all the things you end up seeing in all these.
Places, right, and maybe to teach teach the concept of metaphor to people who were having a bicameral mind period of civilization, right.
There you go. So listen to our bicameral Mind episode featuring Jim McCormick.
Exactly it's a classic already a classic.
That's a good one, right, So yeah, his argument is based on perceived commonalities in ancient civilizations like Egypt, Babylon, meso America, the Omes, and on and on and on, things like why do so many people build pyramid esque structures, what's the deal with obelisk?
What's going on in go Beckley Tepeh. It's weird, it's super weird. It's super weird, and it pushed the timeline for humanity back much further than we thought, or at least for civilization.
And so in that first book he says the tectonic shifts were the source of the ancient civilization's large instruction, but the big differences. In the second book, Magicians of the Gods, he says, we looked back into it and it was actually a comet that caused the damage. So he went back and forth, and he points out things in you know, Megalith's Cairns tombs, this sort of stonework
in masonry you would see that are just everywhere. That's his argument, and it's not taken very seriously by a lot of mainstream archaeologists do an anthropologist, even due primarily to the fact that these are kind of like Chariots of the Gods by Eric von Danakin. These arguments are
made based on his interpretation of what he sees. No one's arguing that these ancient structures don't exist in these different parts of the world, but his argument is that, according to him, they are very similar.
Yeah, because he's he is making connections, because there there is no tangible connection, so he is kind of creating a theory about it, which is, you know, one of the things you do in anthropology, you try and connect things up. Yeah, but in his case it's it feels a little more out there and it doesn't go along with a lot of the other notions, or at least mainstream notions about how these civilizations formed.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely. And one of one of the things here that's very important for us to underline in the case of Graham Hancock is he's not trying to con people. He's not he's not saying things disingenuously.
He wants you to buy his book.
Well, of course he wants you to buy the book, but he also is not trying to purposely put the wool over people's eyes. He's not trying to build you.
I would agree with that.
Seems legit, sounds legit then, right, So we're gonna leave that there. The idea that's one ancient civilization in Antarctica, idea Atlantis.
Who do we have?
Now, we've got another guy who is an archaeologist and an engineer by the name of William James.
Veal with two l's yeah, two l's right.
Matt, you were in rare form to day my friend, Oh, I didn't have a response, It's fine.
Yeah.
So William James Viale and this guy uses satellite technology to find these ruins and kind of find where some of these monuments might be hidden by the ice. And he studied engineering at Basingstoke and Southampton Colleges of Technology and Archaeology at the University of Southampton.
In the UK.
And he is a bit of a tinkerer. He designs these unmanned drones for surveying these completely inaccessible areas, and he has a really pretty unique dial as far as I'm concerned, he is a satellite archaeologist.
That's my favorite title that I found researching this, because that's just got to sound great when you tell people for the first time.
Wait, hold on, you just get a hold of old satellites and you like figure out where the satellite came from, how long it's been up there, which country?
You get to forget about it, you those satellite archaeologist over.
So do you have to go to space and then you know you have your chisel?
No, okay, you go to Jersey. Okay, sorry, you go to Basingstoke in Southampton Colleges apparently, right, that's true. Yeah, that's it's spot on. He believes that a prehistoric civilization may have sculpted huge human heads, animals and symbols on the Antarctic terrain, and a very specific part of it, a part called Cape Adair, the northeasternmost peninsula of Antarctica.
And so it's kind of like the Nazca lines. That's his argument, those huge glyphs built out of earth that are only really discernible as pictures from the sky, right, which is itself a very interesting story or very interesting mystery. Still, and for him, these are clearly these are clearly, as Noel said, man made monuments and visible from the air. His interpretation knocks a whole lot of people for a loop, because instantly when you hear someone say, oh I found
a gigantic face on the land on right exactly. That's what you think about, right, and you know that's not his fault, but it's to a lot of people. It's similar to the claims that there's a huge face, so there's a pyramid on Mars, and skeptics see this as an example of we can make this our word for the day if you want, which is the tendency to see patterns in randomness, like when you're hanging out with people.
And I guess an innocuous version of this would be sitting with your friends and you know, saying, oh, this cloud looks.
Sort of like this a turtle.
Yeah, a turtle, and then someone else will be like, yeah, it's definitely a turtle, or someone might say no, no, that's clearly Christopher walking from pulp fiction during the watch speech.
Definitely, and then the last guy's like, nah, it's your mom. You're like, dude, and someone I find you have to say that every time, every time.
Yeah, So it could just be. The argument goes that, with the best of intentions is his brain is working over time to make order from chaos. But he's responded to this, and Veil says that he has quote research satellite imagery and rock cut inscriptive material for nearly forty years, and of necessity had to develop strict criteria to eliminate frequent accusations of periodolia. So's he's familiar with his accusation, and he says that he's been working on this for decades.
He knows the difference between a random shape and a cloud and actual language written on something. He also, to his credit, invites other experts, especially if they disagree, to evaluate his findings. The long and short of it is pretty simple. He thinks it's possible that about six thousand years ago, the ancient Sumerian culture that would be located in what's nowadays known as a rock landed in this location in Cape Adare, and the culture was the most
advanced of his time. And he did ask people for help.
And if you want to look at some of his research, you can go to nas codexcod ex dot com and you can go here and you can check out I mean, it's a text, it's a long text page essentially with some images in there. And this is from Williams James Vel's or Veil's it's it's his website Nasco d e X dot com.
And one of the people he contacted for help is a linguist named doctor Clyde Winters, and he said, doctor Winters, could you help me. I believe this is a language. Could you tell me what this language is, what it says, et cetera, Doctor Winters, there was a legit published academic received these images and symbols Veal had taken from his findings, and doctor Winters confirmed that these symbols did appear to be linear Sumerian, particularly passages that indicated they were talking
about some great person or profit. For some people. This is a smoking gun, but we have to remember it's possible that Winters was not viewing the actual satellite photos instead of viewing possibly recreations of the images. Veal thinks that he saw in the original photos, so it may have been it may have been a thing where he just got a series of symbols and said, yes, these are linear Sumerian. I can tell you a little bit about what that means.
Yeah, And if you go through the website and you look at some of these images, it is I can understand where where William is coming from, like seeing seeing the imagery that he is showing you. Because it will have some satellite imagery and then what he believes like sketched out next to it what he believes it is, and some of it does look similar. I can see the pattern that he is seeing in there if I if I look at his picture right, if I don't, if I cover up his picture, I see absolutely nothing
in the satellite imagery. So do you think that leaves I don't know. I mean, he's he's obviously been doing it forever, so he understands it much better than I. But I don't know. It's tough just looking at it.
Well, here's here's something interesting that I surprised the hell out of me. If okay, it sounds crazy, ancient Sumerians making it to Antarctica for most of the trip. It's pretty possible that they could make it because with the kind of maritime technology they had, they could get as far south as Tasmania, sticking mainly to coast and just
coast hopping. They would only really run into a tough, tough stretch when they try to go from Tasmania to Antarctica, because then they have to go over the open ocean and a very unfriendly neighborhood of the open.
Ocean basically don't do that, right.
But once they got there, that's where it becomes more difficult to believe, because they would need they would need tools, time and support work to build first structures in which they could live, and then they would need more help quarrying large amounts of stone, right because it sounds like stone is one of the things that Veal says he sees. And then they would have to be eating the entire time. Man cannot live on a penguin alone, right.
Yeah, unless they were having other ships come through with people they could eat.
But could you live on fourteen thousand penguins.
You could live for a while, but you probably encounter rabbit starvation, that's right. Yeah, that's a bummer. There are no sources of citrus, right, Well maybe seaweed, Yeah.
I could see, I could see seaweed working.
Seaweed is a citrus.
Oh it sources a vitamin seed, yeah, vitamin seaweed maybe maybe. But that's the thing. It's still it's still hard to believe that they would have been able to have an adequate food supply, adequate shelter.
And then just built all these rock monuments that are massive or at least carvings like the Nosca lines, or what if.
It's something where they traveled down from South America in the summer and then they leave in the winter and come back in the summer. You know, that's if we're trying to be as generous and fair as possible. But then there's this other question. So usually when we find ruins of an ancient culture, we're going to find foundations of old buildings structures, right, temples, houses, palaces, etc. Those are the majority of ancient cultural ruins. It's more rare
to just find monuments by themselves. So why would we see monuments but not see the homes of the people who lived in the nearby? Right? Maybe they're just so far covered by the ice. Maybe only the monuments are large enough to be visible.
Well maybe Graham Hancock's thirteen less than thirteen thousand years ago? Will you six thousand years ago? Maybe they're way off on how long ago structures were there, because we do know that over time nature takes over and will erase almost anything.
Yeah's like weathering and just like totally wearing down mountains over time. I mean, it's crazy, but yeah, I'd love to see a time lapse of that well, pretty cool.
Yeah, exactly, But then you have to start thinking, well, then, how old have humans or at least intelligent life actually been on this planet right right?
Which that date keeps. It seems to get pushed back further and further every decade, you know, new discoveries, new discoveries, going back as far as what sixty thousand years. I think it's one of the newer ones.
It's at least close to where we're at right now.
So there's also an argument that we've brought nature into this. There's also an argument that maybe the ice on Antarctica is not even if it formed millions of years ago, maybe it wasn't as constant a presence as we have initially assumed. Interesting, maybe the ice ebbed and flowed, you know what I mean, wax still waned. Maybe there were times when the glaciers were treated away from coastal areas, right and possible, and maybe they did that for long amounts of time.
Yeah, there are so many possibilities. I bet there are scientists out there going, no, absolutely not. It's studying this my entire life. And no, you guys can't say that, well, we don't know that's true.
We don't know, and we're not saying that the entire thing is covered with a glacier at this point. It's just it's still inhospitable. Yeah. So we can tell you, however, about a very particular map which for people who believe Antarctica may be more familiar to our species than we have always amed. This is sometimes seen as a smoking gun. Stay tuned after the break will introduce you to Puririus. So, map, what can you tell us about this map?
I can tell you to watch our YouTube video on it. I can't remember the name of that YouTube video.
Most sterious Maps.
Yeah, it's in the keywords. You can find it. Yeah, it's almost it's it's often referred to, incorrectly as the best map of the sixteenth century. That people will say that all the time.
Right, that it's and they say it's the best because the claims are usually that it's the most.
Accurate, the most complete and accurate.
Yeah, the most complete and accurate. Yes, thank you. That is not the case. But the puri Reus map r e I S p I r I r e I S was made in fifteen thirteen and and just to get the badger out in the open, here it appears to depict the coastline of Antarctica free of ice.
It appears to It appears to certainly, And it all depends on what you're looking at. If you're looking at the map itself generally, like I'm looking at it in a vertical way, And if you go to Wikipedia dot com, which is probably how you're gonna find an image of this thing, and you're looking at it, I'm trying to see which way is true north on here, and I can't tell, but it looks like it's oriented as though if you turned it ninety degrees to the left that
would be north. This is hard to do audibly, Yes you're doing it. But if you're looking at it, there is a land mass to the north, and then most of the rest of the map is ocean, and then you've got am I reading that incorrectly? No, I'm reading that correctly, And then you've got another land mass that is to the south like kind of I guess southeast to where that other land mass is above it, And it's thought that that land mass in the south is Antarctica. Sorry, just trying to let people see it.
If they can't see I mean, that's a really good explanation Eric walk through, and it's important to go look at it for yourself. We do want to hear your take on this. So this map has been around for a long long time, and it wasn't until nineteen fifty six that people began thinking it shows Antarctica. There was a guy named Captain Arlington Humphrey Mallory who first proposed this depicted the coastline of Antarctica. He was retired military
man at this time. He was an amateur archaeologist. He also believed in earlier Western arrival to the New World as it would be called at the time. So he thought Celts and Vikings and other groups of people, maybe some missionaries from early versions of the Church had arrived at the New World in various locations. What's more, maybe made maps in some cases, and that these maps were
lost to later ages. But they were accurate, far beyond what most of Europe would have known about at the time, and to his credit, the later research did prove like after the fifties, later research did prove that there were probably small groups of European descended people who at least made it to the far eastern coast of Canada. You know what I mean, Newfoundland and such.
Yeah, specifically the Vikings. Essentially he was right about that part well, And it makes you wonder if it's a long journey from the area where they would be from down to Antarctica. But it does make you wonder if maybe William from earlier who was looking at the satellite imagery, Yeah, maybe there is something there where just small groups of just ancient Europeans ended up there accidentally and then perished, But before they perished made some carvings.
Or got stranded due to the treacherous nature of the waves. Yeah, possibly, possibly, or even you know, I don't know. We see so many things about out of place artifacts in South America, in the Middle East, in China and far reaches of Russian stuff that we can say for sure that it's it's almost certain that different small groups of people interacted largely through trade and exploration in ways that we have yet to understand. It feels that's it is safe to
say that. It's actually very safe to say that.
And your word of the day is an achronism?
Is that a word of the day?
I think everybody should be.
Yeah, but it's fun to say. I think that's all it takes a word.
Of the day.
It is.
If you want to be a real pedantic, nerd insult person, you can always decide to call someone anachronistic when you think they're not being cool. Yeah, use it completely inappropriately too. But yeah, so all that aside, This map itself is an agglomeration of twenty twenty something other earlier maps that already existed before it was made in fifteen thirteen, and most cartographers and mainstream historians to day believe the map does not actually depict Antarctica. That's a bummer. It's a
bummer because it looks cool. You can see how it would. You can see how someone could look at that and say, holy smokes Antarctica. There's a group called Bad Archaeology and they have a great write up on this. We recommend visiting their website for more details, just to google Bad Archaeology Perie Race. But we do have a quote describing their conclusions about this map.
It shows no unknown lands, least of all Antarctica, and contained errors such as Columbus's belief that Cuba was an Asian peninsula who swinging amiss Yes, errors that ought to have been present if it derived from extremely accurate ancient originals.
And it also conforms to the prevalent geographical theories of the early sixteenth century, including things like balancing land masses in the north with others in the south to keep the earth from tipping over. Yeah, don't want to do that because it's balanced on on a turtle's back.
True story. Yeah, the idea that the Earth itself is sort of like a has its own geographical equilibrium. Too many continents on one air quote side or another will inevitably tip the scales because it's flat, right, right, Although it was relatively common knowledge at the time that the world was a globe, take that for what you will. The maps is based on are older, but they're they're
not ancient. It's not as if they found some six thousand year old Samarian map depicting lands that had never been heard of in the modern day and said, let's just copy this, right, at least according to the different experts who have examined the actual map. So unfortunately, perie Reus, while being an incredible, tantalizing possible indicator of ancient exploration of Antarctica, if not ancient civilizations in that continent, and
just a cool map and just a cool map. Unfortunately, it really is a tantalizing thing because it doesn't deliver. It doesn't it doesn't hold up. But we would be remiss if we did not shout out something completely different. I think the thing that we're all fans of, which is HP Lovecraft, the author of the Mountains of Madness, famous author terrible person, inspired millions of people with his story.
Matt.
I was so taken. I was hypnotized by your depiction of these of these ancient pre human races.
I was going a little mad there for a moment, but I'm feeling better now.
You're back off the mountain. Yep. Yeah, So it's it's I don't want to say it's a really well written story, but it's a it's a very it makes a great impression.
It's cool and it's cool.
Yeah, that's one of the best ways. It's so cool. And and the idea there is that there is an there are ruins of an ancient pre human civilization hidden in the hinterlands of Antarctica that has not been proven, despite what some people have tried to depict in earlier arguments on the fringes there. HP Lovecraft was writing fiction. He knew he was writing fiction and he liked it. But other you know, just kind of like we did. We did an episode on Grimase and we talked a
little bit about the Necronomicon, another HP Lovecraft creation. He's very adamant that's work of fiction. But people like the story so much that they want it to be real. In some cases they can kind of slender mandit and then.
It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, much like slender Man has at least once yep.
And then the last thing, which we don't have time for, but we'd love to refer you to one of the first videos we've ever done.
The Thule Society.
Yes, the idea that there is a civilization or ruins of a civilization that survives some great cataclysm by going underground, similar to the Benfolds five song, except with ancient technology, and that the Nazi Party and the US military were both aware of this possibility and as they were exploring the region through various various cover stories, through the use of various cover stories like Operation high Jump, but they
were instead actually exploring the possibility of these subterranean civilizations or waging war upon one another in secret at the South Pole. Those are fascinating tales.
And all in an attempts to gain the favor of whatever civilization is down there.
Yes, yes, and spoiler alert there, of course the Nazis in this tale. In this tale, the Nazi Party thought that the subterranean civilization would of course be arian and super into geopolitical happenings on the surface world.
Yeah, because it's you know, I have nothing to say there. It's just it's it's messed up.
It's an interesting story. And you know, a lot of Antarctica has not been fully explored, certainly not to the extent that other continents have. And we have to remember there's still parts of there's still very remote parts of the world where no human being has ever set foot that have nothing to do with Antarctica.
This is this is one of the concepts that early on when we started making this show Man really got me into even further into these subjects, some of these
especially ancient civilizations, this one in particular. Yeah, no, really, because I could imagine a world in where it was real, only because we found so many real things in this world where opposing powers have been in a race to achieve something first or get somewhere first, because the other team is going to get there for sure at some point. We just have to get there before them. And with everything from nuclear powers to psychic powers to all this stuff.
And so this was just another version of it for me, where maybe there was something there or at least to establish bases of some.
Yeah, I'm so sorry, man, I should said Operation Stargate oatarget correct and k Ultra. Yeah, that's a great point. This. If it's not a thing a government did, it's certainly in line with the mo of most world powers.
Yeah.
So this leads us to conclusions. Right, we don't at this point have any solid proof that there was some sort of permanent settlement in Antarctica, at least not in antiquity. And we don't have proof that there was even a notable temporary settlement, much less a civilization or remnants of an ancient civilization. And this problem, or this lack of knowledge, is compounded by the fact that it's just devilishly difficult
to do a lot of exploration in Antarctica. At least it becomes devilishly expensive.
Yes, and just straight up difficult just to get any kind of.
Transportation there, right, And now we're in a situation where our entire species and whatever eldritche species may await us under the ice, don't have to wait much longer because as the earth leaves well as temperatures shift around the planet. We know that glaciers are receding, they're losing mass. It's just getting a little warmer in most places. And we do know that we will see some pretty strange things when the ice actually melts, depending on where it melts.
For instance, we don't know very much about the dinosaurs or angient animals that roamed Antarctica when it's part of Gondwana, so all we found so far about from fossil life. There are going to be things that we could dig up on the margins of coastal islands or exposed mountains that have gone above the glaciers, you know, and they are the few places that don't have a thick layer of ice. We might also find sources of geothermal energy.
We are almost certain to find forms of life that are almost alien to us because they have been isolated for so long. They'll they'll probably also this may be a little disappointing. They'll probably also be really small. But then you know they might be they might be really big, like those several meter long worms. Have you seen those?
Yeah?
Uh, that will be the coolest if we were just giant giant creatures that we find.
Yeah, yeah, man. And one of the new groundbreaking tools that the three of us really love to talk about when we talk about this kind of exploration is something called light are. Light R allows us to detect otherwise invisible ruins that most people will fly over without a
second glance. If there is some remnant of an ancient civilization or an ancient settlement somewhere on Antiarctica, light are is probably the best way to find it right now as we record the twenty eighteen The other problem, but the light hoar is not perfect. It's also expensive crazy It's expensive in more accessible areas. It's crazy money once you try to take that out to Antarctica. In twenty seventeen,
a group did that. They were well, they did it in twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, but they released the data in twenty seventeen and it covered twenty seven hundred and seventy five point sixty five square kilometers of an area of Antarctica known as the McMurdo Dry Valleys. They did not find evidence of a pre existing civilization. But for those of us who still want to hold on to that belief that such a group, community, or society existed,
we can always remember this. Maybe, just maybe this first light oar crew was looking in the wrong place after all. Yeah, after all, what is twenty seven hundred and seventy five something where kilometers? That's not all of Antarctica.
No, no, no, no, no, no no.
Antarctica has a total land area of about fourteen million kilometers square.
Good god.
Yeah, yeah, And we would love to hear your thoughts on where people should be looking. First off, is this bunk? Is there something to it? The stuff we look through? You know, you can see some of the problems that people might have with these claims, but we want to know if you have something to add to the conversation, and we definitely want to know if you have visited Antarctica yourself. It's not it's actually not that hard to get a job there on staff.
Oh well, yeah, nobody the Antarctica staff. Yeah, you like to be a cook, that'd be cool. There's either they like are they like lodges out there? They're like vacation.
That's it.
That's it.
Yeah, that's what you got.
You can visit tour stuff as like, as Matt said, like a cruise or something like.
Look at these crazy signists spend their their days and their summer is down here, all right, Now, get out here, seriously, go leave now.
Hey, God test his blood first.
Yeah, squash. But honestly, the best stories are going to be the ones that are real being an Antarctica. And then I also want to hear the most far out ideas about what you think if there is anything beneath all the ice. I want to hear your really far out ideas specifically year. Yeah, go ahead, just write it, write it out, send it away, because I just want to eat popcorn and dig in. And that's the end
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