CLASSIC: Ancient Civilizations in Antarctica?

Among all the continents of Earth, Antarctica remains both the most inhospitable and the most mysterious. Today the only humans on the landmass are researchers and their support staff, charged with studying climate change, the local ecosystem and the unique creatures that call the freezing, ice-riddled continent home. Yet for centuries various researchers have argued there's more to the history of Antarctica -- that, before it was ever 'officially discovered', Antarctica was home to a long-forgotten civilization, the existence of which could fundamentally rewrite the story of human history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
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

(00:35):
always covered in ice.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
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

(00:59):
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

(01:23):
that could give modern society a run for its money.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
But not for long. And let's jump in.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Nolan.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
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.

Speaker 4 (02:35):
Although I have never been to Antarctica.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
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.

(03:00):
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

(03:20):
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

(03:41):
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,

(04:03):
it was kind of balming for a while.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
Right.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Just can't fly into Antarctica really.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
Not not really, no, not easily. It's not a delta
flight right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
Even yeah, it gets worse when you're in Antarctica.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
Even Spirit won't take you there.

Speaker 4 (04:33):
What about virgin They go everywhere?

Speaker 1 (04:34):
I don't know, Yeah, they do go. They are trying
to go into space. Richard Brandson is trying to go
to space.

Speaker 4 (04:39):
So Anarctica is kind of like space.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
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

(05:04):
research into timelines, so we can we can explore that
just briefly. Here are the facts.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah. The first thing you have to is subscribe to
is continental drifts.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
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,

(05:33):
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

(05:55):
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,

(06:19):
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

(06:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
Yeah, it keeps going. So any living creatures on this
continent are facing an increasingly inhospitable environment.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
But let's get back to the ice.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
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

(08:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
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

(09:04):
ice is physically on the land there.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
So what about people were there are people involved in
this at all.

Speaker 4 (09:12):
Yeah, here's the thing.

Speaker 5 (09:13):
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,

(09:34):
you know.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Re least shorter travels across across water if you had to.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
Right exact, Yeah, and that can't happen due to the
open ocean surrounding Antarctica.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
It's like the perfect prison continent.

Speaker 5 (10:13):
Hey, there we go, or if you're you know, perfect
continent for a super villain to have their icy.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
Layer absolutely absolutely.

Speaker 5 (10:21):
Possibly hide a death ray of some kind beneath the
Arctic ice.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
There you go.

Speaker 4 (10:26):
I like that idea.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
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.

(10:51):
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

(11:13):
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

(11:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
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,

(12:09):
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,

(12:29):
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

(12:50):
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.

Speaker 4 (13:07):
That's what it is, Johnny Cash, That's what it is.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Yeah, the ring of fire. Very cool. So fifteen nineteen
for an Imagellan goes a little bit south.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
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

(13:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
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

(14:35):
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

(14:56):
saying I discovered this, therefore it's you know, like the
Frederick Canal or something.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
I think it's by the crown probably, or at least
there's some decree that occurs shall be known as the
Drake Passage.

Speaker 5 (15:10):
Also unrelated, did it ever occur to you that almost
any bio you read, if somebody was actually written by
that person.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
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,

(15:40):
It's true.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
We wrote our bios on our about page.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
We hate writing bios. By the way, what do you
because you have to write in third person? It feels
so weird.

Speaker 4 (15:49):
It's just very like strangely self aggrandizing.

Speaker 1 (15:52):
Yeah, yeah, and you have to try to figure out
what makes you sound legit to people.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
I actually got asked when time at work to cut
some jokes out of a bio. Yeah, and then.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
They're like, yo, Bolin, you legit, and you were like.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
That's too kind. But watch out, I'm googling Matt Frederick
Bio now.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Oh you won't find me.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
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.

(17:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
And this is messed up.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
Yes, this is a very unfortunate experience.

Speaker 4 (17:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (17:39):
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

(18:03):
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.

Speaker 4 (18:18):
That can't be right.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
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.

Speaker 5 (18:29):
Aren't they really fatty like I would think that penguin.
You don't hear about people eating penguin.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
No, it's not a super fun food to eat. No,
it's typically not a first choice found.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
And they're hard to catch. Man, those things are so slippery.

Speaker 5 (18:41):
They slide around their bellies, and they dance so well
and tandem and crazy choreographed numbers.

Speaker 1 (18:48):
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

(19:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, made a home.

Speaker 4 (19:20):
That's crazy. Not good odds, No.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, the sirens calling back in your.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
But that's such a great name, Bouvet de Loosier.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
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

(20:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:58):
So Bouvet de Lozier is simply the first person to
see it and report back that he saw it.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yes, anyway, oh hey, it was definitely there right over there.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
And then in seventeen twenty two, in February, frenchmen named
Eves Joseph Day.

Speaker 4 (21:16):
Here we go.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, but they're seeing all of these islands and places
around them near them enough, but you.

Speaker 4 (21:45):
Just still can't see it yet.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
And they're all brutal.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
Oh yeah, you don't want to be there. Why would
you send another ship out there?

Speaker 1 (21:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah, or less and less interesting because the developers haven't
put anything out there.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, like like in Skyrip. Yeah yeah, yeah, we don't
want to spoil it for anyone, but it.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
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

(22:35):
really interesting.

Speaker 5 (22:35):
Are there's some games where it'll just teleport you back
to some other place?

Speaker 1 (22:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
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.

Speaker 4 (22:55):
You're talking about the famed Antarctic Portal.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
Yeah, well, I mean everybody knows that if you get
to the South Pole, you just go.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
Why do you think NASSA keeps covering up the images
of the actual pole?

Speaker 2 (23:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
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

(23:33):
first person to see Antarctica.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
Very nice, Sir Fabian Godlib von Belenhausen and Shausen Chausen,
Housen Housen.

Speaker 1 (23:46):
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

(24:09):
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

(24:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
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.

Speaker 5 (24:56):
Because they have ships now that will slice through Yeah
the ice yea ice breakers.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
Yeah, those are killer.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
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?

Speaker 2 (25:20):
We we talked about who's going to No, wait, we did, we.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
Did, didn't We remind us if we did.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
This, man, it's it's on our list, and it hasn't
been forever. We got a ton of links.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
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

(25:49):
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

(26:13):
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.

Speaker 5 (26:32):
Mean, I get irritated if I leave my wallet in
the car and you have to walk all the way
back down the hall.

Speaker 4 (26:36):
To get the wallet.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
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

(26:57):
to go back because we didn't pack enough, we stuff.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
We just ate Neil.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
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

(27:22):
again trying to just expand.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
What if you find a source of a rare spice
or a strange animal, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (27:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
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

(28:00):
actually are some all right Antarctica today.

Speaker 2 (28:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:22):
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

(28:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
Even when it becomes impossible to travel outside of that base.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Eleven people have been born there.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
That's incredible.

Speaker 1 (29:21):
Also makes it the continent with the lowest birth rate.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. I can
only imagine the circumstances that would lead to deciding to
have your child there.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
I mean, what if you can't get out, what if it's.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
Winter there's Yeah, it would be pretty cool though.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yeah, it's a good story if you make it out,
you know, to be ah polar baby.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
I believe in this is just speculation, but I believe
they get the nationality of their parents.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Of the mother I guess right, Yeah, makes sense. It'd
be cool if it was just there were eleven antarcticas.

Speaker 1 (30:14):
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

(30:36):
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

(30:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
But yeah, we want to keep that straight, right, Well, okay, so.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
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

(32:07):
generally thought to be mythical, like Atlantis or Lemurria.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
A good choice. Oh man. He has a great take
on DNA too. Oh yeah, which I don't know did
we ever got?

Speaker 2 (32:55):
I don't think so should do that?

Speaker 1 (32:57):
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

(33:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
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

(34:12):
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

(34:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
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

(35:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
The symbolic nature of certain structures, and yeah, exactly, it's
all the things you end up seeing in all these.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
Places, right, and maybe to teach teach the concept of
metaphor to people who were having a bicameral mind period
of civilization, right.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
There you go. So listen to our bicameral Mind episode
featuring Jim McCormick.

Speaker 4 (36:13):
Exactly it's a classic already a classic.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
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?

Speaker 2 (36:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:52):
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

(37:13):
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

(37:35):
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,

(37:57):
according to him, they are very similar.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
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

(38:22):
with a lot of the other notions, or at least
mainstream notions about how these civilizations formed.

Speaker 4 (38:29):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
He wants you to buy his book.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
I would agree with that.

Speaker 1 (38:55):
Seems legit, sounds legit then, right, So we're gonna leave
that there. The idea that's one ancient civilization in Antarctica,
idea Atlantis.

Speaker 4 (39:07):
Who do we have?

Speaker 5 (39:08):
Now, we've got another guy who is an archaeologist and
an engineer by the name of William James.

Speaker 4 (39:14):
Veal with two l's yeah, two l's right.

Speaker 5 (39:18):
Matt, you were in rare form to day my friend, Oh,
I didn't have a response, It's fine.

Speaker 4 (39:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (39:28):
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

(39:48):
and Archaeology at the University of Southampton.

Speaker 4 (39:51):
In the UK.

Speaker 5 (39:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
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?

Speaker 1 (40:23):
You get to forget about it, you those satellite archaeologist over.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
So do you have to go to space and then
you know you have your chisel?

Speaker 1 (40:31):
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,

(40:53):
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,

(41:14):
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.

(41:34):
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

(41:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
Sort of like this a turtle.

Speaker 1 (42:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
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,

(42:57):
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

(43:19):
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

(43:43):
advanced of his time. And he did ask people for help.

Speaker 2 (43:46):
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

(44:07):
Vel's or Veil's it's it's his website Nasco d e
X dot com.

Speaker 1 (44:13):
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

(44:34):
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

(44:55):
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

(45:16):
about what that means.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
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,

(45:39):
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

(45:59):
it forever, so he understands it much better than I.
But I don't know. It's tough just looking at it.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
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

(46:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:48):
Ocean basically don't do that, right.

Speaker 1 (46:50):
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.

(47:14):
And then they would have to be eating the entire time.
Man cannot live on a penguin alone, right.

Speaker 2 (47:20):
Yeah, unless they were having other ships come through with
people they could eat.

Speaker 4 (47:24):
But could you live on fourteen thousand penguins.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
I could see, I could see seaweed working.

Speaker 4 (47:39):
Seaweed is a citrus.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:53):
And then just built all these rock monuments that are
massive or at least carvings like the Nosca lines, or
what if.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
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

(48:20):
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

(48:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (48:54):
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.

Speaker 5 (49:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:24):
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?

Speaker 1 (49:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
It's at least close to where we're at right now.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
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

(50:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:37):
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

(50:59):
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?

Speaker 2 (51:18):
I can tell you to watch our YouTube video on it.
I can't remember the name of that YouTube video.

Speaker 1 (51:23):
Most sterious Maps.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
Right, that it's and they say it's the best because
the claims are usually that it's the most.

Speaker 2 (51:43):
Accurate, the most complete and accurate.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (52:12):
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

(52:32):
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

(52:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
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

(53:39):
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

(54:01):
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

(54:24):
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

(54:45):
know what I mean, Newfoundland and such.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
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,

(55:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
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

(55:43):
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

(56:03):
say that. It's actually very safe to say that.

Speaker 2 (56:06):
And your word of the day is an achronism?

Speaker 1 (56:13):
Is that a word of the day?

Speaker 4 (56:15):
I think everybody should be.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
Yeah, but it's fun to say. I think that's all
it takes a word.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
Of the day.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
It is.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
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

(56:46):
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.

(57:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
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.

Speaker 5 (57:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
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

(58:25):
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

(58:45):
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

(59:06):
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

(59:27):
is HP Lovecraft, the author of the Mountains of Madness,
famous author terrible person, inspired millions of people with his story.

Speaker 4 (59:44):
Matt.

Speaker 1 (59:45):
I was so taken. I was hypnotized by your depiction
of these of these ancient pre human races.

Speaker 2 (59:53):
I was going a little mad there for a moment,
but I'm feeling better now.

Speaker 1 (59:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
It's cool and it's cool.

Speaker 1 (01:00:12):
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

(01:00:34):
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

(01:00:55):
story so much that they want it to be real.
In some cases they can kind of slender mandit and then.

Speaker 2 (01:01:01):
It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, much like slender Man
has at least once yep.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
The Thule Society.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
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

(01:01:36):
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

(01:01:58):
South Pole. Those are fascinating tales.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
And all in an attempts to gain the favor of
whatever civilization is down there.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
Yeah, because it's you know, I have nothing to say there.
It's just it's it's messed up.

Speaker 1 (01:02:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
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,

(01:03:14):
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.

(01:03:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:04:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:04):
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

(01:04:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:04:45):
Yes, and just straight up difficult just to get any
kind of.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
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.

(01:05:09):
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

(01:05:32):
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

(01:05:53):
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

(01:06:17):
then you know they might be they might be really big,
like those several meter long worms. Have you seen those?

Speaker 3 (01:06:23):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:06:24):
Uh, that will be the coolest if we were just
giant giant creatures that we find.

Speaker 1 (01:06:30):
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

(01:06:51):
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

(01:07:12):
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

(01:07:33):
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,

(01:07:54):
after all, what is twenty seven hundred and seventy five
something where kilometers? That's not all of Antarctica.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
No, no, no, no, no, no no.

Speaker 1 (01:08:06):
Antarctica has a total land area of about fourteen million
kilometers square.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
Good god.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
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,

(01:08:34):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:08:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:52):
That's it.

Speaker 4 (01:08:52):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):
Yeah, that's what you got.

Speaker 1 (01:08:54):
You can visit tour stuff as like, as Matt said,
like a cruise or something like.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:09:09):
Hey, God test his blood first.

Speaker 2 (01:09:11):
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

(01:09:34):
to eat popcorn and dig in. And that's the end
of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or
questions about this episode, you can get into contact with
us in a number of different ways. One of the
best is to give us a call. Our number is
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If you don't want to do that, you can send

(01:09:54):
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Speaker 1 (01:09:56):
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