Speaker 1: Welcome back to the show, fellow conspiracy realist, our classic.
Speaker 1: This evening takes us to one of the dream continents
Speaker 1: that Matt I have always wanted to visit. I got
Speaker 1: close one time.
Speaker 2: Me too. This is the destination if you can get there.
Speaker 2: And not long ago, a large like a passenger sized
Speaker 2: plane landed for the first time on Antarctic iceful all
Speaker 2: of it. But really think about this. It is a
Speaker 2: massive continent that is covered in ice. But it wasn't
Speaker 2: always covered in ice.
Speaker 1: Not always. And we're not just kicking new Schwabia conspiracy
Speaker 1: ideas here. It is still the most inhospitable, most mysterious
Speaker 1: of Earth's land masses. And I love that you're pointing
Speaker 1: out this was not always the case. We recorded this
Speaker 1: episode in twenty eighteen, so light Oar was still very
Speaker 1: much in play, but had not perhaps reached the levels
Speaker 1: of affordability and scale that it has now. And so
Speaker 1: we looked into claims that have been around for centuries
Speaker 1: and centuries that once upon a time Antarctica was not
Speaker 1: a vast desert wasteland, but instead a home to civilizations
Speaker 1: that could give modern society a run for its money.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, when ets get confirmed, I'm just I'm
Speaker 2: gonna bet right now this is gonna have something to
Speaker 2: do with Antarctica.
Speaker 1: I think you know what. I'll be honest man, if
Speaker 1: you ask me, Ben, what if the long lost civilizations
Speaker 1: aren't real? I would still go to Antarctica. It just
Speaker 1: seems so cool. It's just kind of hard to get
Speaker 1: there right now.
Speaker 2: But not for long. And let's jump in.
Speaker 3: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 3: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 3: learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Nolan.
Speaker 1: They call me Ben. We are joined with our super
Speaker 1: producer Paul Deckett. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
Speaker 1: and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1: Quick as we say, peek behind the curtain. The four
Speaker 1: of us are actually relatively well traveled people.
Speaker 4: Although I have never been to Antarctica.
Speaker 1: Right right, and that's the subject of today's episode. Very
Speaker 1: very few people have been. I got very close to
Speaker 1: going to Antarctica once a number of years ago, Matt.
Speaker 1: You may remember it was with a good friend of ours,
Speaker 1: friend of the show who does a lot of write
Speaker 1: ups on the House Stuff Works website about our podcast,
Speaker 1: Diana Brown. Check out our work if you get a chance.
Speaker 1: She was going her family was going to go on
Speaker 1: a group expedition, and Antarctica is one of those places
Speaker 1: that is very, very expensive to go go to by
Speaker 1: your lonesome. You know, for sure, you gotta roll deep
Speaker 1: and get the price cuts. Unfortunately that didn't happen. But
Speaker 1: I'm hoping one day to get to this continent and
Speaker 1: I think, you know, it would be a cool thing
Speaker 1: for all of us to do, because of all of
Speaker 1: Earth's continents, Antarctica remains the most mysterious today. It's an
Speaker 1: ice box, it's a gigantic ice desert. It's one of
Speaker 1: the last places in the world that is largely or
Speaker 1: somewhat the same as it was before what we call
Speaker 1: the anthropis scene or the age of humans. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's no wonder there's not much reason for human beings
Speaker 1: to be there, not that it stopped us before. And
Speaker 1: for a lot of people this may be weird to
Speaker 1: think about. Antarctica wasn't all ways a frozen wasteland. In fact,
Speaker 1: it was kind of balming for a while.
Speaker 2: That's true. And just before we get into that, you
Speaker 2: can take a flight cruise to Antarctica. That's probably the
Speaker 2: easiest way. You got to fly somewhere that's closer and
Speaker 2: then get on a ship.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Just can't fly into Antarctica really.
Speaker 1: Not not really, no, not easily. It's not a delta
Speaker 1: flight right. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Even yeah, it gets worse when you're in Antarctica.
Speaker 1: Even Spirit won't take you there.
Speaker 4: What about virgin They go everywhere?
Speaker 1: I don't know, Yeah, they do go. They are trying
Speaker 1: to go into space. Richard Brandson is trying to go
Speaker 1: to space.
Speaker 4: So Anarctica is kind of like space.
Speaker 1: On Earth, similar to the Marianna's trench. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff we don't know about either environment. That's a
Speaker 1: very good point. What we do know about how Antarctica
Speaker 1: arrived at this strange position that works on multiple levels
Speaker 1: comes from a series of theories and a lot of
Speaker 1: research into timelines, so we can we can explore that
Speaker 1: just briefly. Here are the facts.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The first thing you have to is subscribe to
Speaker 2: is continental drifts.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's the first thing. You have to buy the
Speaker 1: idea that once upon a time or several different times
Speaker 1: throughout the history of Earth. In times they had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with human beings. We weren't even a twinkle
Speaker 1: in the ecosystem's eye. The continents as we know them
Speaker 1: today were actually part of larger things called super continents,
Speaker 1: super continents, perfect super continents because not because they had
Speaker 1: extraordinary powers, they were just really big. And from what
Speaker 1: we understand, they shifted into each other a number of
Speaker 1: different super continents about one billion to maybe five hundred
Speaker 1: and forty two million years ago, and they formed this
Speaker 1: huge thing we call Pangaea, and the southern part of
Speaker 1: Angaia was a place that we call Gondwana. Of course,
Speaker 1: we made these names up after the fact because again,
Speaker 1: no people were there that we know of right, or
Speaker 1: at least no life form capable of naming things. And
Speaker 1: Gondwana was made up of what we call South America, Australia, India, Africa,
Speaker 1: and Antarctica today. At this point in Antarctica's lifespan, it
Speaker 1: teemed with plant and animal life. It was lousy with it.
Speaker 1: It was actually pretty hot. But around one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty to one hundred and eighty million years ago, Gondwana
Speaker 1: began to separate or drift, and eventually Australia, which was
Speaker 1: still attached to Antarctica. Eventually Australia moved pretty quickly for
Speaker 1: continent speed towards Southeast Asia, while Antarctica finally became isolated
Speaker 1: about thirty four to thirty five million years ago. It
Speaker 1: went from a subtropical environment to a place just covered
Speaker 1: with ice, riddled with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the theories go here that as it was
Speaker 2: finally separated from all of these other continents and bodies
Speaker 2: of land, it's now surrounded by bodies of water in
Speaker 2: a place that so far from the equator, the ice
Speaker 2: just began to form, just starts forming, continues to form,
Speaker 2: and it keeps going.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it keeps going. So any living creatures on this
Speaker 1: continent are facing an increasingly inhospitable environment.
Speaker 2: And perhaps you eventually, because of this, get some evolutionary
Speaker 2: traits such as what we find in polar bears and
Speaker 2: some of the other Arctic life, although in Antarctica you
Speaker 2: don't find.
Speaker 1: Much right, right, But maybe as it was transforming into
Speaker 1: this just frigid wasteland, the evolutionary pressures on the animals
Speaker 1: that lived there before resulted in things like you know,
Speaker 1: layers of body fat like a lot of seals have,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: But let's get back to the ice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, let's get back ice. Ice. Baby. How did
Speaker 1: it get there? The exact story of the ice development
Speaker 1: is not certain, so we returned to another theory, and
Speaker 1: the theory is that the reduction in Earth's carbon dioxide levels,
Speaker 1: as well as the changes in its orbit, caused a
Speaker 1: high degree of cooling and that this with the formation
Speaker 1: of what you had mentioned before, Matt, the Antarctic circumpolar current,
Speaker 1: it's neat word, formed these glaciers on the land and
Speaker 1: they grew sizeable, They grew larger and larger and larger,
Speaker 1: and they began carving deep valleys in the landscape, which
Speaker 1: if you check out the right satellite images you can
Speaker 1: see today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can also see that there's this massive
Speaker 2: ice sheet across almost all of Antarctica that is pretty
Speaker 2: much a plateau. It's an ice plateau, and then the
Speaker 2: highest peaks kind of peak out. See it works on
Speaker 2: levels there you go at the top of the ice.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating to see it and to understand how much
Speaker 2: ice is physically on the land there.
Speaker 1: So what about people were there are people involved in
Speaker 1: this at all.
Speaker 4: Yeah, here's the thing.
Speaker 5: I mean, according to most of the records that we have,
Speaker 5: civilizations were pretty much completely ignorant that this place existed
Speaker 5: at all. And you know, humans were spreading across other continents,
Speaker 5: but Antarctica kind of hung out on its frozen lonesome,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And even in places like what we call the
Speaker 1: far north of North America today Alaska, Canada and stuff
Speaker 1: and Siberia on the other side, even in those also
Speaker 1: brutal environments, people were able to move around because they
Speaker 1: were able to go on land across things like the
Speaker 1: Bearing Strait or the tundra.
Speaker 2: Re least shorter travels across across water if you had to.
Speaker 1: Right exact, Yeah, and that can't happen due to the
Speaker 1: open ocean surrounding Antarctica.
Speaker 2: It's like the perfect prison continent.
Speaker 5: Hey, there we go, or if you're you know, perfect
Speaker 5: continent for a super villain to have their icy.
Speaker 1: Layer absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 5: Possibly hide a death ray of some kind beneath the
Speaker 5: Arctic ice.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 4: I like that idea.
Speaker 1: And it's it's interesting because there are things that we
Speaker 1: know from various ancient cultures, some in South America, for instance.
Speaker 1: That can be interpreted as the people having some vague
Speaker 1: knowledge of a distant cold land to the south. But
Speaker 1: the problem is that they could be talking about islands.
Speaker 1: You know, there are a ton of frozen islands around
Speaker 1: there in the ocean. So we can tell you the
Speaker 1: official story that you will read a most mainstream textbooks
Speaker 1: about humans in Antarctica, since you know, as you said, Noel,
Speaker 1: we don't have any proof from multiple civilizations that most
Speaker 1: of them had any idea that there was something down there, right,
Speaker 1: And also we get it, there's no up or down
Speaker 1: in space. They had no idea that there was something
Speaker 1: over there. We can't say for absolutely sure who got
Speaker 1: there first, but we know there's some noted expeditions to
Speaker 1: the area. And these timelines will become more important as
Speaker 1: we go. Most of them start in the fifteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: the sixteenth century, when Europeans are trying to explore more
Speaker 1: of the world and claim it for their countries or
Speaker 1: their gods.
Speaker 2: Yeah, take all of the stuff, make sure it's ours exactly.
Speaker 2: So we go to fifteen nineteen oh twas a good year,
Speaker 2: specifically in September, Ferdinand Magellan. He takes a trip. That's
Speaker 2: generally how you get anywhere on the seas. You sail
Speaker 2: from Spain towards the Indies. He's going in a westerly route,
Speaker 2: we shall say. So he's sailing down the coast of
Speaker 2: South America. You can imagine him going, or we're showing
Speaker 2: you a map right now. It's an old timey map
Speaker 2: from the fifteen hundreds. And he discovers this narrow strait
Speaker 2: that passes through to the Pacific Ocean, which today bears
Speaker 2: his name, the Magellan Strait. Oh it's not the well,
Speaker 2: I don't think it's the Ferdinand Magellan Strait. I think
Speaker 2: it's just the Magellan Straight. Yeah. Sorry, Ferdinand, we didn't
Speaker 2: include that. But you do have a great story about
Speaker 2: a cow named after you. Okay. Anyway, So to the
Speaker 2: south of this lies the Tierra del Fuego, which is,
Speaker 2: oh my gosh, this year early geographers assumed to be
Speaker 2: the edge of the southern continent of South America. So
Speaker 2: Tierra del Fuego. And we've talked about this before. It's
Speaker 2: what is it called the something of I know, obviously
Speaker 2: a fire. I forget the name of it. It's like
Speaker 2: it has a specific thing because it's it's got volcanic
Speaker 2: activity in it. The ring, the ring of fire.
Speaker 4: That's what it is, Johnny Cash, That's what it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the ring of fire. Very cool. So fifteen nineteen
Speaker 2: for an Imagellan goes a little bit south.
Speaker 1: Right right, And at this point, for the majority of
Speaker 1: cartographers and the majority of map makers that we know of,
Speaker 1: they were ranging into what would be called terra incognita. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you've ever seen pictures of an old map, or
Speaker 1: if you were fortunate enough to have seen a very
Speaker 1: old map in person at a museum or in like
Speaker 1: the home of a wealthy eccentric, then what you'll see is,
Speaker 1: after a certain point, there's a blank space, and you
Speaker 1: might see like a sea serpent, and you'll see some
Speaker 1: kind of warning that translates roughly to something like, here
Speaker 1: be serpents. Yeah, because no one knew, no one editing
Speaker 1: for me.
Speaker 2: It's like the fog of war. If you're playing video
Speaker 2: game or something and you have a mini map and
Speaker 2: a map setup, you can only see what you've explored
Speaker 2: so far, and the rest of it just say, who knows,
Speaker 2: who knows. But that was what humans were going through
Speaker 2: in real life.
Speaker 1: And so in fifteen seventy eight. Many decades later, Francis Drake.
Speaker 1: Yes that Francis Drake passes through the Straits of Magellan
Speaker 1: only to find himself blown significantly further south than he
Speaker 1: intended due to a big storm in the Pacific. And
Speaker 1: this event proved that Tierra del Fuego was separated from
Speaker 1: any southern continent, and you could therefore sail around Tiara
Speaker 1: del Fuego if the wind was at your back and
Speaker 1: you had good fortune. This particular passageway came to be
Speaker 1: known as the Drake Passage. And this has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with anything, But I have to ask, do you
Speaker 1: think these guys were naming this stuff after themselves, like
Speaker 1: saying I discovered this, therefore it's you know, like the
Speaker 1: Frederick Canal or something.
Speaker 2: I think it's by the crown probably, or at least
Speaker 2: there's some decree that occurs shall be known as the
Speaker 2: Drake Passage.
Speaker 5: Also unrelated, did it ever occur to you that almost
Speaker 5: any bio you read, if somebody was actually written by
Speaker 5: that person.
Speaker 1: I think about that a lot. It's weird, Yeah, I think,
Speaker 1: especially in the modern day, it's absolutely true. Even if
Speaker 1: you're hearing an introduction like we would do on our
Speaker 1: show because we're not immune to this. That bio is
Speaker 1: usually going to be constructed of pieces of a bio
Speaker 1: that somebody else wrote about themselves. Right, Most bios are autobios, right,
Speaker 1: It's true.
Speaker 2: We wrote our bios on our about page.
Speaker 1: We hate writing bios. By the way, what do you
Speaker 1: because you have to write in third person? It feels
Speaker 1: so weird.
Speaker 4: It's just very like strangely self aggrandizing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and you have to try to figure out
Speaker 1: what makes you sound legit to people.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: I actually got asked when time at work to cut
Speaker 1: some jokes out of a bio. Yeah, and then.
Speaker 2: They're like, yo, Bolin, you legit, and you were like.
Speaker 1: But I thought that kind was good. No. I think
Speaker 1: there was one time. I don't know what bio problems
Speaker 1: you guys have had in the past, but I hated
Speaker 1: writing bios so much that for a couple of months
Speaker 1: here when we were asked for bios, I would try
Speaker 1: to turn in one that just said Ben Bolin was
Speaker 1: asked to write a bio nice and it never it
Speaker 1: never flew.
Speaker 2: My favorite version of you for your bios is Ben
Speaker 2: Bolin is ex explores many varying and interesting pursuits or
Speaker 2: something to that effect. Oh yeah, just like just straight up,
Speaker 2: just like Ben is an interesting human. I would agree.
Speaker 1: That's too kind. But watch out, I'm googling Matt Frederick
Speaker 1: Bio now.
Speaker 2: Oh you won't find me.
Speaker 1: We'll see. So Bio's aside. And whether or not these
Speaker 1: guys were self a grandie. I love that phrasal self
Speaker 1: aggrandizing enough to name these geographic features after themselves. We
Speaker 1: do know that they got stuck in modern culture, at
Speaker 1: least in the West. That's what we're known as today.
Speaker 1: And after the discovery of this passage, after they say, oh,
Speaker 1: Tierra del Fuego is the end of the world as
Speaker 1: we know it, other people try to push a little further.
Speaker 1: In fifteen ninety two, an Englishman named John Davis discovers
Speaker 1: the Falkland Islands.
Speaker 2: And this is messed up.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is a very unfortunate experience.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So in August fifteen ninety two, this guy, John Davis,
Speaker 5: who was an Englishman, had a really really dope name
Speaker 5: for his ship. By the way, it was called the Desire,
Speaker 5: which I like a lot. He discovered the Falkland Islands,
Speaker 5: like you said, and This was not very happy expedition
Speaker 5: at all. Things got pretty dire in terms of scarcity
Speaker 5: of supplies and food and podable water, and the crew
Speaker 5: was forced to take advantage of their surroundings and ended
Speaker 5: up having to eat somewhere in the neighborhood of fourteen
Speaker 5: thousand penguins.
Speaker 4: That can't be right.
Speaker 1: They attempted to eat them? Yeah, well, these are also
Speaker 1: these kind of penguins. They're smaller than like the maybe
Speaker 1: the Emperor penguins that you're And.
Speaker 5: Aren't they really fatty like I would think that penguin.
Speaker 5: You don't hear about people eating penguin.
Speaker 1: No, it's not a super fun food to eat. No,
Speaker 1: it's typically not a first choice found.
Speaker 2: And they're hard to catch. Man, those things are so slippery.
Speaker 5: They slide around their bellies, and they dance so well
Speaker 5: and tandem and crazy choreographed numbers.
Speaker 1: And there's also a question of whether or not these
Speaker 1: penguins were familiar with humans as predators, so that may
Speaker 1: have made it easier to catch. But the reason you
Speaker 1: say attempted to eat them is because once the desire
Speaker 1: reaches the tropics, the penguin meat that they had tried
Speaker 1: to store has spoiled and it's poisoning these increasingly desperate
Speaker 1: crew members. Out of the original seventy six who went
Speaker 1: with John Davis to discover the Falkland Islands, only sixteen
Speaker 1: members of the crew survived.
Speaker 2: Yeah, made a home.
Speaker 4: That's crazy. Not good odds, No.
Speaker 1: They're not. Although if you're if you're one of those
Speaker 1: lucky sixteen, you know you're probably riddled with scurvy. You've
Speaker 1: probably had just a series of bad years and you
Speaker 1: have to ask yourself for you're going to go back
Speaker 1: to the ocean or you're just gonna pack it up
Speaker 1: and be a landlubber. A surprising amount of people, by
Speaker 1: the way, do decide to go back on the seas.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the sirens calling back in your.
Speaker 1: Blood must go down to the seas again, to the
Speaker 1: lonely sea and sky right in if you remember that
Speaker 1: poem or that reference to that poem. So fast forward
Speaker 1: sixteen seventy five. In April, a guy named Antonio de
Speaker 1: la Rocca is blown south of Cape Horn and is
Speaker 1: the first person to see South Georgia.
Speaker 2: Very nice. Jump forward a little bit seventeen thirty nine.
Speaker 2: A Frenchman you may recognize this name, Jean Baptiste Bouvet
Speaker 2: de Loosier, he discovers Bouve. There you go, he discovers
Speaker 2: Bouve is so crazy.
Speaker 1: But that's such a great name, Bouvet de Loosier.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Jean Baptiste Bouve deloz Man. That guy just
Speaker 2: had it all going for him. So who knows. Hey,
Speaker 2: I can't speak to his character, right, that's fair. The
Speaker 2: island is not this island that he discovers, Bouve. It's
Speaker 2: not sighted again until eighteen oh eight, so a while
Speaker 2: after he discovers it, and is due to these significant
Speaker 2: ike ice packs that end up on it and around it.
Speaker 2: And the first landing didn't take place until the American
Speaker 2: Morel there Morel who another explorer landed there in eighteen
Speaker 2: twenty two, So that thing went almost one hundred years.
Speaker 1: So Bouvet de Lozier is simply the first person to
Speaker 1: see it and report back that he saw it.
Speaker 2: Yes, anyway, oh hey, it was definitely there right over there.
Speaker 1: And then in seventeen twenty two, in February, frenchmen named
Speaker 1: Eves Joseph Day.
Speaker 4: Here we go.
Speaker 1: Kerguinre Mars discovers the isles Kergulin, so he just they
Speaker 1: get his name, and then in seventeen seventy three, Captain
Speaker 1: James Cook and company become the first people to cross
Speaker 1: the Antarctic Circle. They're still not they still no one
Speaker 1: has officially seen the continent known as Antarctica.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but they're seeing all of these islands and places
Speaker 2: around them near them enough, but you.
Speaker 4: Just still can't see it yet.
Speaker 1: And they're all brutal.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you don't want to be there. Why would
Speaker 2: you send another ship out there?
Speaker 1: And it's like, again, if we want to do a
Speaker 1: video game reference, it's like when you're starting to go
Speaker 1: off the edge of a map and an RPG and
Speaker 1: things just get less and less and less friendly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or less and less interesting because the developers haven't
Speaker 2: put anything out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like like in Skyrip. Yeah yeah, yeah, we don't
Speaker 1: want to spoil it for anyone, but it.
Speaker 2: Is interesting how the on maps, the monsters be here
Speaker 2: kind of thing really does help prevent people from exploring
Speaker 2: out there in the same way a game developer will
Speaker 2: prevent you from being able to get any further. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it's just through an invisible wall. Other times it's like
Speaker 2: you have to turn back a huge mountain Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: really interesting.
Speaker 5: Are there's some games where it'll just teleport you back
Speaker 5: to some other place?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, true, sure, nope, which can be irritating, especially
Speaker 1: because you have to go all the way to the
Speaker 1: edge in the first place.
Speaker 2: Right. Well, that's the thing about Antarctica. If you actually
Speaker 2: get to the South Pole, you just hit the portal
Speaker 2: and you head back up like you probably go straight
Speaker 2: through the Earth and end up in the Arctic.
Speaker 4: You're talking about the famed Antarctic Portal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean everybody knows that if you get
Speaker 2: to the South Pole, you just go.
Speaker 1: Why do you think NASSA keeps covering up the images
Speaker 1: of the actual pole?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. If you didn't know this, The Earth is
Speaker 2: kind of like a doughnut and in the center it's
Speaker 2: hollow and it goes all the way through.
Speaker 1: Come on, Yeah, used to be a great neighborhood, but
Speaker 1: now there are tons of Nazis there. We have a
Speaker 1: video about it. Check us out on YouTube or on
Speaker 1: our website. Stuff. Then once you know dot com. So
Speaker 1: it isn't until eighteen twenty, on January twenty seventh that
Speaker 1: a Russian explorer named Fabian goldlib von Bellingtausen becomes the
Speaker 1: first person to see Antarctica.
Speaker 2: Very nice, Sir Fabian Godlib von Belenhausen and Shausen Chausen,
Speaker 2: Housen Housen.
Speaker 1: So he again he just sees it. WHOA, something's there.
Speaker 1: It's way bigger than there's other islands that we heard
Speaker 1: about vaguely yes, and officially speculation over the existence of
Speaker 1: a quote southern land was not confirmed then until the
Speaker 1: early eighteen twenties, when these commercial expeditions from Britain and
Speaker 1: the US and these national expeditions from Britain and Russia
Speaker 1: started looking at the Antarctic Peninsula region and other areas
Speaker 1: south of the Antarctic Circle. People just kept finding more remote,
Speaker 1: pretty pretty brutal islands. And it wasn't until twenty years
Speaker 1: after Bellinghausen that someone established that Antarctica was actually a
Speaker 1: continent and not just a group of islands or an
Speaker 1: area of ocean. That it wasn't just ice. There was
Speaker 1: land in them there glaciers.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine just traveling the ocean in those frozen
Speaker 2: waters all the way around if it was even possible
Speaker 2: It wasn't at the time, but it's just traveling all
Speaker 2: the way around Antarctica.
Speaker 5: Because they have ships now that will slice through Yeah
Speaker 5: the ice yea ice breakers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those are killer.
Speaker 1: The US only has I think one to three in operation. Yeah, right, Ben,
Speaker 1: it's officially, it's true. It's it's going to change as
Speaker 1: trade passages open up in the North Pole. Did we
Speaker 1: ever do anything about that? Who's going to control the
Speaker 1: North Pole? No?
Speaker 2: We we talked about who's going to No, wait, we did, we.
Speaker 1: Did, didn't We remind us if we did.
Speaker 2: This, man, it's it's on our list, and it hasn't
Speaker 2: been forever. We got a ton of links.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, but but that's that's the state of affairs.
Speaker 1: And we can imagine, we can all imagine how bleak
Speaker 1: of a discovery that must have been. What a cold
Speaker 1: comfort it must be for all of these explorers finding
Speaker 1: these islands, because despite the somewhat alluring names, uh, the
Speaker 1: fact of the matter is that they weren't. They didn't
Speaker 1: have resources that the crews could successfully extract other than
Speaker 1: means of survival, like the story told Noel about the
Speaker 1: penguins in the Falklands. Instead, I think the best way
Speaker 1: to understand it is to imagine in your own life listeners.
Speaker 1: Have you ever been on the way somewhere and got
Speaker 1: to your destination, arrived and realized that you forgot something
Speaker 1: important and you had to turn around? Oh god, I
Speaker 1: know right, Like, I live so close to where we work,
Speaker 1: and I lose my mind if I have to turn
Speaker 1: around and walk, you know, another twenty minutes home. I
Speaker 1: can't imagine sailing to Antarctica. Yeah, and then I.
Speaker 5: Mean, I get irritated if I leave my wallet in
Speaker 5: the car and you have to walk all the way
Speaker 5: back down the hall.
Speaker 4: To get the wallet.
Speaker 2: So well, we can relate, dude, exactly. And if you
Speaker 2: can just imagine in the early nineteen hundred's, for several decades,
Speaker 2: there were numerous expeditions to to actual Antarctica where people
Speaker 2: were attempting to do this very thing, just like get
Speaker 2: pretty far and then they'd realize, oh, wow, we have
Speaker 2: to go back because we didn't pack enough, we stuff.
Speaker 1: We just ate Neil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all the dogs have died and they were the
Speaker 2: ones who are supposed to carry us here. But it
Speaker 2: just happened over and over and over again and again.
Speaker 2: It's all part of the same motivation that we spoke
Speaker 2: about in the beginning of why Antarctica just became discovered
Speaker 2: in the Falklands and all these things because there was
Speaker 2: colonial expansion occur and in the nineteen hundreds it's written
Speaker 2: again trying to just expand.
Speaker 1: What if you find a source of a rare spice
Speaker 1: or a strange animal, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah, what if you get past some of this ice
Speaker 2: and there is an actual place, some kind of oasis
Speaker 2: land like the Cave system.
Speaker 1: Or yeah, like the Savage Land in Marvel Comics. Very
Speaker 1: much so, So without going too much further into the
Speaker 1: early history when to establish a timeline, We're going to
Speaker 1: take a quick break from for Capitalism and a word
Speaker 1: from our sponsors, and then we'll be back to explore
Speaker 1: the story of humans in Antarctica to day, because there
Speaker 1: actually are some all right Antarctica today.
Speaker 2: You know who can really use the sponsors that we
Speaker 2: just talked about. These people that are living in Antarctica.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah, they're shipping for most everything we
Speaker 2: sell on this show. They're shipping involved.
Speaker 1: That's true, that's shipping. We should tell them, we should
Speaker 1: tell them. Yeah, it's home, it's home to people. It's
Speaker 1: got the smallest human population of any continent. Surprise. But
Speaker 1: it also has a very international population because none of
Speaker 1: these people are citizens of Antarctica. Instead, they are scientists
Speaker 1: and staff from around thirty countries. They live on seventy
Speaker 1: different bases. About forty of those are year round bases,
Speaker 1: meaning someone's always there, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Even when it becomes impossible to travel outside of that base.
Speaker 1: Even when it's like the setting and John Carpenter's the
Speaker 1: thing someone an. The other thirty bases are only open
Speaker 1: in the summer. The entire population officially again of Antarctica
Speaker 1: is about four thousand people in summer, one thousand souls
Speaker 1: in winter.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Eleven people have been born there.
Speaker 2: That's incredible.
Speaker 1: Also makes it the continent with the lowest birth rate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. I can
Speaker 2: only imagine the circumstances that would lead to deciding to
Speaker 2: have your child there.
Speaker 1: I mean, what if you can't get out, what if it's.
Speaker 2: Winter there's Yeah, it would be pretty cool though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a good story if you make it out,
Speaker 1: you know, to be ah polar baby.
Speaker 2: So okay, I know we don't necessarily have this information. Shit,
Speaker 2: I wonder in those instances of those children being born there,
Speaker 2: do they take the country that runs the base as
Speaker 2: it like the primary country that runs that base. You know,
Speaker 2: I know we don't have answers to this, but.
Speaker 1: I believe in this is just speculation, but I believe
Speaker 1: they get the nationality of their parents.
Speaker 2: Of the mother I guess right, Yeah, makes sense. It'd
Speaker 2: be cool if it was just there were eleven antarcticas.
Speaker 1: You're like accidentally Argentinian. Yeah, that could get complicated real quickly.
Speaker 1: If you're one of those eleven people listening, are you
Speaker 1: related to them? Right? And let us know how that
Speaker 1: all works. Please? And so that's that's Antarctica today. That's
Speaker 1: how it got there. That's who who lives there now.
Speaker 1: And generally they're doing climate related research, but they're doing
Speaker 1: another of a number of other things as well, especially
Speaker 1: because of that massive ozone hole. Yeah. But other people
Speaker 1: have a question that has haunted people since the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: since the official western discovery of Antarctica, And the question
Speaker 1: is this, what if there was something else beneath the
Speaker 1: frozen wasteland, beneath all these glaciers and all these like
Speaker 1: howling abyssle winds. What if there was something there before?
Speaker 1: What if there were people there before. Here's where it
Speaker 1: gets crazy.
Speaker 2: So the hollow Earth. No, I'm just kidding, donut. Yeah,
Speaker 2: in this case, it's the hollow Earth, though Donut theory
Speaker 2: slightly different. Things sometimes conflated with hollow Earth.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we want to keep that straight, right, Well, okay, so.
Speaker 2: I'm just kidding. That's where we're going. We should do it,
Speaker 2: we should No, no, no, we're going. We're jumping right
Speaker 2: into Graham Hancock, which is I think the correct place
Speaker 2: to start.
Speaker 1: I'm we have to do hollow Earth at some point
Speaker 1: we will, okay, right, all right? So yeah, as we were saying,
Speaker 1: we're in a century, people have argued, with varying degrees
Speaker 1: of seriousness, that Antarctica may have once been the home
Speaker 1: to forgotten civilisms. In some cases, the stories of this
Speaker 1: ancient society are conflated with other stories of places they're
Speaker 1: generally thought to be mythical, like Atlantis or Lemurria.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, it would make a lot of sense if
Speaker 2: a lost civilization was truly lost, because it's covered in
Speaker 2: ice and there's no way.
Speaker 1: To find it, and it's on a lost content there
Speaker 1: you go, you gotta get there. And one thing we
Speaker 1: found pretty interesting it comes from Graham Hancock, who is
Speaker 1: a a fringe researcher who writes some really fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2: I would say he is exciting to read, and I
Speaker 2: don't find any I don't find major problems with like
Speaker 2: sentence structure or thought structure. He veers off a little
Speaker 2: bit sometimes, but overall, if you're going to read somebody
Speaker 2: who is writing about these kinds of topics, Graham Hancock's.
Speaker 1: A good choice. Oh man. He has a great take
Speaker 1: on DNA too. Oh yeah, which I don't know did
Speaker 1: we ever got?
Speaker 2: I don't think so should do that?
Speaker 1: That would be a good one. So he wrote a
Speaker 1: book called Magicians of the Gods, The Forgotten Wisdom of
Speaker 1: Earth's Lost Civilizations and twenty incredible title. Yeah, which is
Speaker 1: not crazy, and it's an update. It's a sequel to
Speaker 1: a book you wrote in nineteen ninety five called Fingerprints
Speaker 1: of the Gods, The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilizations. This
Speaker 1: book is massive. If you are interested in this sort
Speaker 1: of alternative history, revisionist stuff, this what iffery is a
Speaker 1: good thing to call it, then you have at least
Speaker 1: heard of this book Fingerprints of the Gods. If you
Speaker 1: are interested in this and you have not read it,
Speaker 1: I recommend checking it out. You can get a cheap
Speaker 1: paperback copy really easily.
Speaker 2: And you can get it in pretty much whatever language
Speaker 2: you speak, with a lot of exceptions, but there is
Speaker 2: a good chance that you at least can somewhat speak
Speaker 2: a language that it's translated into.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it's in what how many twenty seven twenty
Speaker 1: seven languages sold more than three million copies of this book.
Speaker 1: So in the original book, Fingerprints, Vcock looks through all
Speaker 1: these creation myths in ancient texts, and he goes through
Speaker 1: these various geological scenarios, and his argument is that Antarctica
Speaker 1: moved to the south Pole much more recently than we
Speaker 1: are originally thought, and much more recently than the maintainstream
Speaker 1: folks thing today. So instead of moving like thirty four
Speaker 1: to thirty five million years ago, getting covered with ice
Speaker 1: all that jazz, he says that it happened a little
Speaker 1: less than twelve thousan five hundred years ago, which means
Speaker 1: people were around yeah. Most importantly, and that it was
Speaker 1: moved not by a slow continental drift, but instead it
Speaker 1: was moved relatively suddenly by major quote crustal shifts, earthquakes,
Speaker 1: tectonic plates subducting and crashing together and tearing apart.
Speaker 2: But like end of the world stuff, that scenario where
Speaker 2: if you were on planet Earth at that time and
Speaker 2: that was occurring, it's not good news.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, like if the Pacific rim the ring of
Speaker 1: fire finally erupted and everything blew up at once. Kind
Speaker 1: like that the kind of thing that could end to
Speaker 1: civilization if it did exist somewhere. And so, according to Hancock,
Speaker 1: when this cataclysm occurred, several remnants or groups or factions
Speaker 1: of this pre existing ancient civilization were able to survive,
Speaker 1: specifically on Antarctica, at least long enough to take there,
Speaker 1: to take trips to other parts of the world where
Speaker 1: people survived, and to give knowledge of things like agriculture,
Speaker 1: certain religious myth practices, and folklore and stuff like.
Speaker 2: The symbolic nature of certain structures, and yeah, exactly, it's
Speaker 2: all the things you end up seeing in all these.
Speaker 1: Places, right, and maybe to teach teach the concept of
Speaker 1: metaphor to people who were having a bicameral mind period
Speaker 1: of civilization, right.
Speaker 2: There you go. So listen to our bicameral Mind episode
Speaker 2: featuring Jim McCormick.
Speaker 4: Exactly it's a classic already a classic.
Speaker 1: That's a good one, right, So yeah, his argument is
Speaker 1: based on perceived commonalities in ancient civilizations like Egypt, Babylon,
Speaker 1: meso America, the Omes, and on and on and on,
Speaker 1: things like why do so many people build pyramid esque structures,
Speaker 1: what's the deal with obelisk?
Speaker 2: What's going on in go Beckley Tepeh. It's weird, it's
Speaker 2: super weird. It's super weird, and it pushed the timeline
Speaker 2: for humanity back much further than we thought, or at
Speaker 2: least for civilization.
Speaker 1: And so in that first book he says the tectonic
Speaker 1: shifts were the source of the ancient civilization's large instruction,
Speaker 1: but the big differences. In the second book, Magicians of
Speaker 1: the Gods, he says, we looked back into it and
Speaker 1: it was actually a comet that caused the damage. So
Speaker 1: he went back and forth, and he points out things
Speaker 1: in you know, Megalith's Cairns tombs, this sort of stonework
Speaker 1: in masonry you would see that are just everywhere. That's
Speaker 1: his argument, and it's not taken very seriously by a
Speaker 1: lot of mainstream archaeologists do an anthropologist, even due primarily
Speaker 1: to the fact that these are kind of like Chariots
Speaker 1: of the Gods by Eric von Danakin. These arguments are
Speaker 1: made based on his interpretation of what he sees. No
Speaker 1: one's arguing that these ancient structures don't exist in these
Speaker 1: different parts of the world, but his argument is that,
Speaker 1: according to him, they are very similar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because he's he is making connections, because there there
Speaker 2: is no tangible connection, so he is kind of creating
Speaker 2: a theory about it, which is, you know, one of
Speaker 2: the things you do in anthropology, you try and connect
Speaker 2: things up. Yeah, but in his case it's it feels
Speaker 2: a little more out there and it doesn't go along
Speaker 2: with a lot of the other notions, or at least
Speaker 2: mainstream notions about how these civilizations formed.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And one of one of the things here
Speaker 1: that's very important for us to underline in the case
Speaker 1: of Graham Hancock is he's not trying to con people.
Speaker 1: He's not he's not saying things disingenuously.
Speaker 2: He wants you to buy his book.
Speaker 1: Well, of course he wants you to buy the book,
Speaker 1: but he also is not trying to purposely put the
Speaker 1: wool over people's eyes. He's not trying to build you.
Speaker 2: I would agree with that.
Speaker 1: Seems legit, sounds legit then, right, So we're gonna leave
Speaker 1: that there. The idea that's one ancient civilization in Antarctica,
Speaker 1: idea Atlantis.
Speaker 4: Who do we have?
Speaker 5: Now, we've got another guy who is an archaeologist and
Speaker 5: an engineer by the name of William James.
Speaker 4: Veal with two l's yeah, two l's right.
Speaker 5: Matt, you were in rare form to day my friend, Oh,
Speaker 5: I didn't have a response, It's fine.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So William James Viale and this guy uses satellite technology
Speaker 5: to find these ruins and kind of find where some
Speaker 5: of these monuments might be hidden by the ice. And
Speaker 5: he studied engineering at Basingstoke and Southampton Colleges of Technology
Speaker 5: and Archaeology at the University of Southampton.
Speaker 4: In the UK.
Speaker 5: And he is a bit of a tinkerer. He designs
Speaker 5: these unmanned drones for surveying these completely inaccessible areas, and
Speaker 5: he has a really pretty unique dial as far as
Speaker 5: I'm concerned, he is a satellite archaeologist.
Speaker 1: That's my favorite title that I found researching this, because
Speaker 1: that's just got to sound great when you tell people
Speaker 1: for the first time.
Speaker 2: Wait, hold on, you just get a hold of old
Speaker 2: satellites and you like figure out where the satellite came from,
Speaker 2: how long it's been up there, which country?
Speaker 1: You get to forget about it, you those satellite archaeologist over.
Speaker 2: So do you have to go to space and then
Speaker 2: you know you have your chisel?
Speaker 1: No, okay, you go to Jersey. Okay, sorry, you go
Speaker 1: to Basingstoke in Southampton Colleges apparently, right, that's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it's spot on. He believes that a prehistoric civilization
Speaker 1: may have sculpted huge human heads, animals and symbols on
Speaker 1: the Antarctic terrain, and a very specific part of it,
Speaker 1: a part called Cape Adair, the northeasternmost peninsula of Antarctica.
Speaker 1: And so it's kind of like the Nazca lines. That's
Speaker 1: his argument, those huge glyphs built out of earth that
Speaker 1: are only really discernible as pictures from the sky, right,
Speaker 1: which is itself a very interesting story or very interesting mystery. Still,
Speaker 1: and for him, these are clearly these are clearly, as
Speaker 1: Noel said, man made monuments and visible from the air.
Speaker 1: His interpretation knocks a whole lot of people for a loop,
Speaker 1: because instantly when you hear someone say, oh I found
Speaker 1: a gigantic face on the land on right exactly. That's
Speaker 1: what you think about, right, and you know that's not
Speaker 1: his fault, but it's to a lot of people. It's
Speaker 1: similar to the claims that there's a huge face, so
Speaker 1: there's a pyramid on Mars, and skeptics see this as
Speaker 1: an example of we can make this our word for
Speaker 1: the day if you want, which is the tendency to
Speaker 1: see patterns in randomness, like when you're hanging out with people.
Speaker 1: And I guess an innocuous version of this would be
Speaker 1: sitting with your friends and you know, saying, oh, this
Speaker 1: cloud looks.
Speaker 2: Sort of like this a turtle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a turtle, and then someone else will be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's definitely a turtle, or someone might say no, no,
Speaker 1: that's clearly Christopher walking from pulp fiction during the watch speech.
Speaker 2: Definitely, and then the last guy's like, nah, it's your mom.
Speaker 2: You're like, dude, and someone I find you have to
Speaker 2: say that every time, every time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So it could just be. The argument goes that,
Speaker 1: with the best of intentions is his brain is working
Speaker 1: over time to make order from chaos. But he's responded
Speaker 1: to this, and Veil says that he has quote research
Speaker 1: satellite imagery and rock cut inscriptive material for nearly forty years,
Speaker 1: and of necessity had to develop strict criteria to eliminate
Speaker 1: frequent accusations of periodolia. So's he's familiar with his accusation,
Speaker 1: and he says that he's been working on this for decades.
Speaker 1: He knows the difference between a random shape and a
Speaker 1: cloud and actual language written on something. He also, to
Speaker 1: his credit, invites other experts, especially if they disagree, to
Speaker 1: evaluate his findings. The long and short of it is
Speaker 1: pretty simple. He thinks it's possible that about six thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, the ancient Sumerian culture that would be located
Speaker 1: in what's nowadays known as a rock landed in this
Speaker 1: location in Cape Adare, and the culture was the most
Speaker 1: advanced of his time. And he did ask people for help.
Speaker 2: And if you want to look at some of his research,
Speaker 2: you can go to nas codexcod ex dot com and
Speaker 2: you can go here and you can check out I mean,
Speaker 2: it's a text, it's a long text page essentially with
Speaker 2: some images in there. And this is from Williams James
Speaker 2: Vel's or Veil's it's it's his website Nasco d e
Speaker 2: X dot com.
Speaker 1: And one of the people he contacted for help is
Speaker 1: a linguist named doctor Clyde Winters, and he said, doctor Winters,
Speaker 1: could you help me. I believe this is a language.
Speaker 1: Could you tell me what this language is, what it says,
Speaker 1: et cetera, Doctor Winters, there was a legit published academic
Speaker 1: received these images and symbols Veal had taken from his findings,
Speaker 1: and doctor Winters confirmed that these symbols did appear to
Speaker 1: be linear Sumerian, particularly passages that indicated they were talking
Speaker 1: about some great person or profit. For some people. This
Speaker 1: is a smoking gun, but we have to remember it's
Speaker 1: possible that Winters was not viewing the actual satellite photos
Speaker 1: instead of viewing possibly recreations of the images. Veal thinks
Speaker 1: that he saw in the original photos, so it may
Speaker 1: have been it may have been a thing where he
Speaker 1: just got a series of symbols and said, yes, these
Speaker 1: are linear Sumerian. I can tell you a little bit
Speaker 1: about what that means.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And if you go through the website and you
Speaker 2: look at some of these images, it is I can
Speaker 2: understand where where William is coming from, like seeing seeing
Speaker 2: the imagery that he is showing you. Because it will
Speaker 2: have some satellite imagery and then what he believes like
Speaker 2: sketched out next to it what he believes it is,
Speaker 2: and some of it does look similar. I can see
Speaker 2: the pattern that he is seeing in there if I
Speaker 2: if I look at his picture right, if I don't,
Speaker 2: if I cover up his picture, I see absolutely nothing
Speaker 2: in the satellite imagery. So do you think that leaves
Speaker 2: I don't know. I mean, he's he's obviously been doing
Speaker 2: it forever, so he understands it much better than I.
Speaker 2: But I don't know. It's tough just looking at it.
Speaker 1: Well, here's here's something interesting that I surprised the hell
Speaker 1: out of me. If okay, it sounds crazy, ancient Sumerians
Speaker 1: making it to Antarctica for most of the trip. It's
Speaker 1: pretty possible that they could make it because with the
Speaker 1: kind of maritime technology they had, they could get as
Speaker 1: far south as Tasmania, sticking mainly to coast and just
Speaker 1: coast hopping. They would only really run into a tough,
Speaker 1: tough stretch when they try to go from Tasmania to Antarctica,
Speaker 1: because then they have to go over the open ocean
Speaker 1: and a very unfriendly neighborhood of the open.
Speaker 2: Ocean basically don't do that, right.
Speaker 1: But once they got there, that's where it becomes more
Speaker 1: difficult to believe, because they would need they would need tools,
Speaker 1: time and support work to build first structures in which
Speaker 1: they could live, and then they would need more help
Speaker 1: quarrying large amounts of stone, right because it sounds like
Speaker 1: stone is one of the things that Veal says he sees.
Speaker 1: And then they would have to be eating the entire time.
Speaker 1: Man cannot live on a penguin alone, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, unless they were having other ships come through with
Speaker 2: people they could eat.
Speaker 4: But could you live on fourteen thousand penguins.
Speaker 1: You could live for a while, but you probably encounter
Speaker 1: rabbit starvation, that's right. Yeah, that's a bummer. There are
Speaker 1: no sources of citrus, right, Well maybe seaweed, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I could see, I could see seaweed working.
Speaker 4: Seaweed is a citrus.
Speaker 1: Oh it sources a vitamin seed, yeah, vitamin seaweed maybe maybe.
Speaker 1: But that's the thing. It's still it's still hard to
Speaker 1: believe that they would have been able to have an
Speaker 1: adequate food supply, adequate shelter.
Speaker 2: And then just built all these rock monuments that are
Speaker 2: massive or at least carvings like the Nosca lines, or
Speaker 2: what if.
Speaker 1: It's something where they traveled down from South America in
Speaker 1: the summer and then they leave in the winter and
Speaker 1: come back in the summer. You know, that's if we're
Speaker 1: trying to be as generous and fair as possible. But
Speaker 1: then there's this other question. So usually when we find
Speaker 1: ruins of an ancient culture, we're going to find foundations
Speaker 1: of old buildings structures, right, temples, houses, palaces, etc. Those
Speaker 1: are the majority of ancient cultural ruins. It's more rare
Speaker 1: to just find monuments by themselves. So why would we
Speaker 1: see monuments but not see the homes of the people
Speaker 1: who lived in the nearby? Right? Maybe they're just so
Speaker 1: far covered by the ice. Maybe only the monuments are
Speaker 1: large enough to be visible.
Speaker 2: Well maybe Graham Hancock's thirteen less than thirteen thousand years ago?
Speaker 2: Will you six thousand years ago? Maybe they're way off
Speaker 2: on how long ago structures were there, because we do
Speaker 2: know that over time nature takes over and will erase
Speaker 2: almost anything.
Speaker 5: Yeah's like weathering and just like totally wearing down mountains
Speaker 5: over time. I mean, it's crazy, but yeah, I'd love
Speaker 5: to see a time lapse of that well, pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, But then you have to start thinking, well, then,
Speaker 2: how old have humans or at least intelligent life actually
Speaker 2: been on this planet right right?
Speaker 1: Which that date keeps. It seems to get pushed back
Speaker 1: further and further every decade, you know, new discoveries, new discoveries,
Speaker 1: going back as far as what sixty thousand years. I
Speaker 1: think it's one of the newer ones.
Speaker 2: It's at least close to where we're at right now.
Speaker 1: So there's also an argument that we've brought nature into this.
Speaker 1: There's also an argument that maybe the ice on Antarctica
Speaker 1: is not even if it formed millions of years ago,
Speaker 1: maybe it wasn't as constant a presence as we have
Speaker 1: initially assumed. Interesting, maybe the ice ebbed and flowed, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, wax still waned. Maybe there were
Speaker 1: times when the glaciers were treated away from coastal areas,
Speaker 1: right and possible, and maybe they did that for long
Speaker 1: amounts of time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are so many possibilities. I bet there are
Speaker 2: scientists out there going, no, absolutely not. It's studying this
Speaker 2: my entire life. And no, you guys can't say that, well,
Speaker 2: we don't know that's true.
Speaker 1: We don't know, and we're not saying that the entire
Speaker 1: thing is covered with a glacier at this point. It's
Speaker 1: just it's still inhospitable. Yeah. So we can tell you, however,
Speaker 1: about a very particular map which for people who believe
Speaker 1: Antarctica may be more familiar to our species than we
Speaker 1: have always amed. This is sometimes seen as a smoking gun.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned after the break will introduce you to Puririus. So, map,
Speaker 1: what can you tell us about this map?
Speaker 2: I can tell you to watch our YouTube video on it.
Speaker 2: I can't remember the name of that YouTube video.
Speaker 1: Most sterious Maps.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's in the keywords. You can find it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's almost it's it's often referred to, incorrectly as the
Speaker 2: best map of the sixteenth century. That people will say
Speaker 2: that all the time.
Speaker 1: Right, that it's and they say it's the best because
Speaker 1: the claims are usually that it's the most.
Speaker 2: Accurate, the most complete and accurate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the most complete and accurate. Yes, thank you. That
Speaker 1: is not the case. But the puri Reus map r
Speaker 1: e I S p I r I r e I
Speaker 1: S was made in fifteen thirteen and and just to
Speaker 1: get the badger out in the open, here it appears
Speaker 1: to depict the coastline of Antarctica free of ice.
Speaker 2: It appears to It appears to certainly, And it all
Speaker 2: depends on what you're looking at. If you're looking at
Speaker 2: the map itself generally, like I'm looking at it in
Speaker 2: a vertical way, And if you go to Wikipedia dot com,
Speaker 2: which is probably how you're gonna find an image of
Speaker 2: this thing, and you're looking at it, I'm trying to
Speaker 2: see which way is true north on here, and I
Speaker 2: can't tell, but it looks like it's oriented as though
Speaker 2: if you turned it ninety degrees to the left that
Speaker 2: would be north. This is hard to do audibly, Yes
Speaker 2: you're doing it. But if you're looking at it, there
Speaker 2: is a land mass to the north, and then most
Speaker 2: of the rest of the map is ocean, and then
Speaker 2: you've got am I reading that incorrectly? No, I'm reading
Speaker 2: that correctly, And then you've got another land mass that
Speaker 2: is to the south like kind of I guess southeast
Speaker 2: to where that other land mass is above it, And
Speaker 2: it's thought that that land mass in the south is Antarctica. Sorry,
Speaker 2: just trying to let people see it.
Speaker 1: If they can't see I mean, that's a really good
Speaker 1: explanation Eric walk through, and it's important to go look
Speaker 1: at it for yourself. We do want to hear your
Speaker 1: take on this. So this map has been around for
Speaker 1: a long long time, and it wasn't until nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: six that people began thinking it shows Antarctica. There was
Speaker 1: a guy named Captain Arlington Humphrey Mallory who first proposed
Speaker 1: this depicted the coastline of Antarctica. He was retired military
Speaker 1: man at this time. He was an amateur archaeologist. He
Speaker 1: also believed in earlier Western arrival to the New World
Speaker 1: as it would be called at the time. So he
Speaker 1: thought Celts and Vikings and other groups of people, maybe
Speaker 1: some missionaries from early versions of the Church had arrived
Speaker 1: at the New World in various locations. What's more, maybe
Speaker 1: made maps in some cases, and that these maps were
Speaker 1: lost to later ages. But they were accurate, far beyond
Speaker 1: what most of Europe would have known about at the time,
Speaker 1: and to his credit, the later research did prove like
Speaker 1: after the fifties, later research did prove that there were
Speaker 1: probably small groups of European descended people who at least
Speaker 1: made it to the far eastern coast of Canada. You
Speaker 1: know what I mean, Newfoundland and such.
Speaker 2: Yeah, specifically the Vikings. Essentially he was right about that
Speaker 2: part well, And it makes you wonder if it's a
Speaker 2: long journey from the area where they would be from
Speaker 2: down to Antarctica. But it does make you wonder if
Speaker 2: maybe William from earlier who was looking at the satellite imagery, Yeah,
Speaker 2: maybe there is something there where just small groups of
Speaker 2: just ancient Europeans ended up there accidentally and then perished,
Speaker 2: But before they perished made some carvings.
Speaker 1: Or got stranded due to the treacherous nature of the waves. Yeah, possibly, possibly,
Speaker 1: or even you know, I don't know. We see so
Speaker 1: many things about out of place artifacts in South America,
Speaker 1: in the Middle East, in China and far reaches of
Speaker 1: Russian stuff that we can say for sure that it's
Speaker 1: it's almost certain that different small groups of people interacted
Speaker 1: largely through trade and exploration in ways that we have
Speaker 1: yet to understand. It feels that's it is safe to
Speaker 1: say that. It's actually very safe to say that.
Speaker 2: And your word of the day is an achronism?
Speaker 1: Is that a word of the day?
Speaker 4: I think everybody should be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's fun to say. I think that's all
Speaker 2: it takes a word.
Speaker 1: Of the day.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: If you want to be a real pedantic, nerd insult person,
Speaker 1: you can always decide to call someone anachronistic when you
Speaker 1: think they're not being cool. Yeah, use it completely inappropriately too.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so all that aside, This map itself is
Speaker 1: an agglomeration of twenty twenty something other earlier maps that
Speaker 1: already existed before it was made in fifteen thirteen, and
Speaker 1: most cartographers and mainstream historians to day believe the map
Speaker 1: does not actually depict Antarctica. That's a bummer. It's a
Speaker 1: bummer because it looks cool. You can see how it would.
Speaker 1: You can see how someone could look at that and say,
Speaker 1: holy smokes Antarctica. There's a group called Bad Archaeology and
Speaker 1: they have a great write up on this. We recommend
Speaker 1: visiting their website for more details, just to google Bad
Speaker 1: Archaeology Perie Race. But we do have a quote describing
Speaker 1: their conclusions about this map.
Speaker 2: It shows no unknown lands, least of all Antarctica, and
Speaker 2: contained errors such as Columbus's belief that Cuba was an
Speaker 2: Asian peninsula who swinging amiss Yes, errors that ought to
Speaker 2: have been present if it derived from extremely accurate ancient originals.
Speaker 5: And it also conforms to the prevalent geographical theories of
Speaker 5: the early sixteenth century, including things like balancing land masses
Speaker 5: in the north with others in the south to keep
Speaker 5: the earth from tipping over. Yeah, don't want to do
Speaker 5: that because it's balanced on on a turtle's back.
Speaker 1: True story. Yeah, the idea that the Earth itself is
Speaker 1: sort of like a has its own geographical equilibrium. Too
Speaker 1: many continents on one air quote side or another will
Speaker 1: inevitably tip the scales because it's flat, right, right, Although
Speaker 1: it was relatively common knowledge at the time that the
Speaker 1: world was a globe, take that for what you will.
Speaker 1: The maps is based on are older, but they're they're
Speaker 1: not ancient. It's not as if they found some six
Speaker 1: thousand year old Samarian map depicting lands that had never
Speaker 1: been heard of in the modern day and said, let's
Speaker 1: just copy this, right, at least according to the different
Speaker 1: experts who have examined the actual map. So unfortunately, perie Reus,
Speaker 1: while being an incredible, tantalizing possible indicator of ancient exploration
Speaker 1: of Antarctica, if not ancient civilizations in that continent, and
Speaker 1: just a cool map and just a cool map. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: it really is a tantalizing thing because it doesn't deliver.
Speaker 1: It doesn't it doesn't hold up. But we would be
Speaker 1: remiss if we did not shout out something completely different.
Speaker 1: I think the thing that we're all fans of, which
Speaker 1: is HP Lovecraft, the author of the Mountains of Madness,
Speaker 1: famous author terrible person, inspired millions of people with his story.
Speaker 4: Matt.
Speaker 1: I was so taken. I was hypnotized by your depiction
Speaker 1: of these of these ancient pre human races.
Speaker 2: I was going a little mad there for a moment,
Speaker 2: but I'm feeling better now.
Speaker 1: You're back off the mountain. Yep. Yeah, So it's it's
Speaker 1: I don't want to say it's a really well written story,
Speaker 1: but it's a it's a very it makes a great impression.
Speaker 2: It's cool and it's cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's one of the best ways. It's so cool.
Speaker 1: And and the idea there is that there is an
Speaker 1: there are ruins of an ancient pre human civilization hidden
Speaker 1: in the hinterlands of Antarctica that has not been proven,
Speaker 1: despite what some people have tried to depict in earlier
Speaker 1: arguments on the fringes there. HP Lovecraft was writing fiction.
Speaker 1: He knew he was writing fiction and he liked it.
Speaker 1: But other you know, just kind of like we did.
Speaker 1: We did an episode on Grimase and we talked a
Speaker 1: little bit about the Necronomicon, another HP Lovecraft creation. He's
Speaker 1: very adamant that's work of fiction. But people like the
Speaker 1: story so much that they want it to be real.
Speaker 1: In some cases they can kind of slender mandit and then.
Speaker 2: It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, much like slender Man
Speaker 2: has at least once yep.
Speaker 1: And then the last thing, which we don't have time for,
Speaker 1: but we'd love to refer you to one of the
Speaker 1: first videos we've ever done.
Speaker 2: The Thule Society.
Speaker 1: Yes, the idea that there is a civilization or ruins
Speaker 1: of a civilization that survives some great cataclysm by going underground,
Speaker 1: similar to the Benfolds five song, except with ancient technology,
Speaker 1: and that the Nazi Party and the US military were
Speaker 1: both aware of this possibility and as they were exploring
Speaker 1: the region through various various cover stories, through the use
Speaker 1: of various cover stories like Operation high Jump, but they
Speaker 1: were instead actually exploring the possibility of these subterranean civilizations
Speaker 1: or waging war upon one another in secret at the
Speaker 1: South Pole. Those are fascinating tales.
Speaker 2: And all in an attempts to gain the favor of
Speaker 2: whatever civilization is down there.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, and spoiler alert there, of course the Nazis
Speaker 1: in this tale. In this tale, the Nazi Party thought
Speaker 1: that the subterranean civilization would of course be arian and
Speaker 1: super into geopolitical happenings on the surface world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because it's you know, I have nothing to say there.
Speaker 2: It's just it's it's messed up.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting story. And you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: Antarctica has not been fully explored, certainly not to the
Speaker 1: extent that other continents have. And we have to remember
Speaker 1: there's still parts of there's still very remote parts of
Speaker 1: the world where no human being has ever set foot
Speaker 1: that have nothing to do with Antarctica.
Speaker 2: This is this is one of the concepts that early
Speaker 2: on when we started making this show Man really got
Speaker 2: me into even further into these subjects, some of these
Speaker 2: especially ancient civilizations, this one in particular. Yeah, no, really,
Speaker 2: because I could imagine a world in where it was real,
Speaker 2: only because we found so many real things in this
Speaker 2: world where opposing powers have been in a race to
Speaker 2: achieve something first or get somewhere first, because the other
Speaker 2: team is going to get there for sure at some point.
Speaker 2: We just have to get there before them. And with
Speaker 2: everything from nuclear powers to psychic powers to all this stuff.
Speaker 2: And so this was just another version of it for me,
Speaker 2: where maybe there was something there or at least to
Speaker 2: establish bases of some.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm so sorry, man, I should said Operation Stargate
Speaker 1: oatarget correct and k Ultra. Yeah, that's a great point. This.
Speaker 1: If it's not a thing a government did, it's certainly
Speaker 1: in line with the mo of most world powers.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this leads us to conclusions. Right, we don't at
Speaker 1: this point have any solid proof that there was some
Speaker 1: sort of permanent settlement in Antarctica, at least not in antiquity.
Speaker 1: And we don't have proof that there was even a
Speaker 1: notable temporary settlement, much less a civilization or remnants of
Speaker 1: an ancient civilization. And this problem, or this lack of knowledge,
Speaker 1: is compounded by the fact that it's just devilishly difficult
Speaker 1: to do a lot of exploration in Antarctica. At least
Speaker 1: it becomes devilishly expensive.
Speaker 2: Yes, and just straight up difficult just to get any
Speaker 2: kind of.
Speaker 1: Transportation there, right, And now we're in a situation where
Speaker 1: our entire species and whatever eldritche species may await us
Speaker 1: under the ice, don't have to wait much longer because
Speaker 1: as the earth leaves well as temperatures shift around the planet.
Speaker 1: We know that glaciers are receding, they're losing mass. It's
Speaker 1: just getting a little warmer in most places. And we
Speaker 1: do know that we will see some pretty strange things
Speaker 1: when the ice actually melts, depending on where it melts.
Speaker 1: For instance, we don't know very much about the dinosaurs
Speaker 1: or angient animals that roamed Antarctica when it's part of Gondwana,
Speaker 1: so all we found so far about from fossil life.
Speaker 1: There are going to be things that we could dig
Speaker 1: up on the margins of coastal islands or exposed mountains
Speaker 1: that have gone above the glaciers, you know, and they
Speaker 1: are the few places that don't have a thick layer
Speaker 1: of ice. We might also find sources of geothermal energy.
Speaker 1: We are almost certain to find forms of life that
Speaker 1: are almost alien to us because they have been isolated
Speaker 1: for so long. They'll they'll probably also this may be
Speaker 1: a little disappointing. They'll probably also be really small. But
Speaker 1: then you know they might be they might be really big,
Speaker 1: like those several meter long worms. Have you seen those?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Uh, that will be the coolest if we were just
Speaker 2: giant giant creatures that we find.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, man. And one of the new groundbreaking tools
Speaker 1: that the three of us really love to talk about
Speaker 1: when we talk about this kind of exploration is something
Speaker 1: called light are. Light R allows us to detect otherwise
Speaker 1: invisible ruins that most people will fly over without a
Speaker 1: second glance. If there is some remnant of an ancient
Speaker 1: civilization or an ancient settlement somewhere on Antiarctica, light are
Speaker 1: is probably the best way to find it right now
Speaker 1: as we record the twenty eighteen The other problem, but
Speaker 1: the light hoar is not perfect. It's also expensive crazy
Speaker 1: It's expensive in more accessible areas. It's crazy money once
Speaker 1: you try to take that out to Antarctica. In twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: a group did that. They were well, they did it
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, but they released the
Speaker 1: data in twenty seventeen and it covered twenty seven hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy five point sixty five square kilometers of an
Speaker 1: area of Antarctica known as the McMurdo Dry Valleys. They
Speaker 1: did not find evidence of a pre existing civilization. But
Speaker 1: for those of us who still want to hold on
Speaker 1: to that belief that such a group, community, or society existed,
Speaker 1: we can always remember this. Maybe, just maybe this first
Speaker 1: light oar crew was looking in the wrong place after all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: after all, what is twenty seven hundred and seventy five
Speaker 1: something where kilometers? That's not all of Antarctica.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 1: Antarctica has a total land area of about fourteen million
Speaker 1: kilometers square.
Speaker 2: Good god.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And we would love to hear your thoughts
Speaker 1: on where people should be looking. First off, is this bunk?
Speaker 1: Is there something to it? The stuff we look through?
Speaker 1: You know, you can see some of the problems that
Speaker 1: people might have with these claims, but we want to
Speaker 1: know if you have something to add to the conversation,
Speaker 1: and we definitely want to know if you have visited
Speaker 1: Antarctica yourself. It's not it's actually not that hard to
Speaker 1: get a job there on staff.
Speaker 4: Oh well, yeah, nobody the Antarctica staff. Yeah, you like
Speaker 4: to be a cook, that'd be cool. There's either they
Speaker 4: like are they like lodges out there? They're like vacation.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 4: That's it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what you got.
Speaker 1: You can visit tour stuff as like, as Matt said,
Speaker 1: like a cruise or something like.
Speaker 2: Look at these crazy signists spend their their days and
Speaker 2: their summer is down here, all right, Now, get out here, seriously,
Speaker 2: go leave now.
Speaker 1: Hey, God test his blood first.
Speaker 2: Yeah, squash. But honestly, the best stories are going to
Speaker 2: be the ones that are real being an Antarctica. And
Speaker 2: then I also want to hear the most far out
Speaker 2: ideas about what you think if there is anything beneath
Speaker 2: all the ice. I want to hear your really far
Speaker 2: out ideas specifically year. Yeah, go ahead, just write it,
Speaker 2: write it out, send it away, because I just want
Speaker 2: to eat popcorn and dig in. And that's the end
Speaker 2: of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or
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