What is Happening at the South Pole?

"Frankly doctor, we've been receiving reports that a rather serious epidemic has broken out at Clavius.
 Is this in fact what has happened?

Dr. Floyd -- "I'm sorry. As I said, I'm not at liberty to discuss it."

-- Scene from 2001 - a Space Odyssey

In recent weeks, a series of disturbing and mysterious reports have been coming out of Antarctica, centered around a strange "anomaly" recently detected on that perpetually frozen Continent. The stories, covered extensively by internet news sources (like Kent Steadman's Cyberspace Orbit site), draw eerie parallels to material as diverse as a French novel, the "X-Files" movie, and as we shall see, even Arthur C. Clarke's "2001 - A Space Odyssey."

All the intrigue centers around a fairly recent, but potentially "breakthrough" discovery on that faraway Continent. In 1957, the Russians built a base in eastern Antarctica which they named "Vostok" (East), which also happens to be the name of the first series of manned Russian spacecraft. In the 1970's, via airborne radar surveys, they belatedly began to suspect that they had "inadvertently" (as the story goes) built their base at the tip of a large subglacial lake. In the years since, orbital radar mapping (shown below) combined with surface seismological measurements have confirmed that "Lake Vostok," under over two miles of solid ice, is the largest lake discovered in the last 100 years -- roughly the size of Lake Ontario but much deeper in places (more than 3000 feet!), with about four times the volume.

The Lake, which is still liquid and not frozen, has been isolated under the ice sheet since anywhere from 13,000 to 14 million years ago, depending on who you talk to (thus, who's estimating precisely "when" the ice last completely covered the Continent). The water in the Lake (determined by surface thermal scans) ranges from 50 to 65 degrees F, clearly indicating a sub-terranean heat source. In addition, the whole Lake is covered by a sloping air "dome" several thousand feet high that has formed (from the "hot" water melting the overlying ice) just above the Lake's surface. Core samples taken by the Russians a couple years ago at their Vostok Base -- when they drilled down very close to the bottom of the ice sheet -- have revealed the presence of microbes, nutrients and various gases -- like methane -- embedded in the clear, refrozen Lake water just above the "dome." Such items are typical signatures of biological processes. The Lake, therefore, has all the ingredients of an incredible scientific find: a completely "isolated" eco-system -- water, heat, respired gases and (judging from the unique microorganisms that scientists were actually able to culture in the United States and Russia, when retrieved from their icy prison) ... current biological activity. As the actual scope and composition of the Lake became clearer from about 1998 on, NASA began to see it as an ideal test bed for its eventual plans to drill through the ice and search the oceans of Jupiter's moon, Europa. Accordingly, JPL received NASA grants to develop unique "sterile" drilling technology, conduct actually drilling and probe experiments in other terrestrial environments, and to prepare a Plan to actually enter Lake Vostok by 2002.

But, coincident with a stunning new discovery, JPL has evidently now backed off these ambitious exploration plans. 

According to Scientific American, the National Science Foundation has now suddenly cancelled plans to penetrate the Lake with a robotic probe by that target date: 2002. The ostensible reason is "concern over environmental contamination." As noted earlier, core samples returned from the ice refrozen just 100 yards above the Lake's "air dome," contained a plethora of microorganisms of various categories,  including some never seen before.

A new, uncategorized microbe from the Lake Vostok ice core samples.

These new, exotic life forms have raised concerns among the environmental lobby that exploration of Lake Vostok might "contaminate" an otherwise pristine eco-system. All this seems quite reasonable, until you factor in what happened in February, and the reaction to it.

A team of scientists from Columbia University, working under the auspices of the NSF, early in 2001 began a series of unprecedented low-altitude aerial surveys over Lake Vostok, designed to chart gravitational, magnetic and thermal activity under the ice. In the course of doing so, they made a stunning find. A huge magnetic anomaly was discovered covering the entire Southeast portion of the shore of the Lake. This remarkable anomaly, which is discrepant from the background by over 1,000 nanoteslas (a significant variance, compared to daily variations in the Earth's magnetic field), could of course be caused by "natural" processes.

One possibility, voiced by Columbia's Michael Studinger, is that the Earth's crust in the vicinity of the Lake is simply thinner under this section of Antarctica, having been stretched during the formation of the lake bed itself. This, according to Studinger, would result in a "local magnetic anomaly." Others, like Enterprise consulting geologist Ron Nicks, have serious difficulty with this theory. Nicks explains that such a thinning would heat the underlying rock and thus diminish (rather than increase -- as observed) the crust's ability to locally amplify the Earth's magnetic field.

There is, as always, an equally viable alternative explanation. An anomaly like this could also be caused by an accumulation of metals -- the kind you would get if you found the ruins of an ancient, buried city! 

An "ancient city under the ice?" Such a discovery would be absolutely dazzling, sending shockwaves through our world as profound as the discovery of "artifacts on Mars" or "ruins on the Moon." And the notion is not as improbable as you may think.

There is a growing trend toward the acceptance of the notion of "catastrophism" as a viable alternative to conventional geologic models. This is in opposition to the current (but retreating) geological model, called "gradualism" -- the concept that geologic changes only happen slowly, over eons. However, more and more evidence has mounted (from the Vostok ice cores, for example) that climatological changes can happen rapidly. Some attribute these "catastrophic" changes in the record to sudden polar shifts. Many researchers, from a variety of evidence, have put the last such sudden shift at around ~13,000 years ago.

Under this "catastrophic" model, Antarctica might well have been a temperate, even a jungle Continent, as recently as that 13KYA time frame. A sudden change in the Earth's alignment relative to the sun would have plunged this once hospitable land into a perpetual freezing hell, as cold as Mars in some places. Indeed, it is easy to see Antarctica as Hitler did, as the source of worldwide "Atlantis" legends we have all heard and read. According to  least one source, Dr. Werner Von Braun of NASA was convinced that Hitler's belief in an "Atlantis below the ice" was correct.

This admittedly far-fetched notion, however, begins to take on an air of viability when viewed in the extraordinary context of recent events.

Almost immediately after the discovery of the Columbia "Vostok magnetic anomaly," word began to leak out that JPL was inexplicably "pulling back from its Vostok exploration program." The reason given was the previously stated "environmental concerns." This was all well and good, until unconfirmed reports began to surface that a JPL spokesperson had admitted at a February press conference that the National Security Agency (NSA) had literally taken over the JPL polar research program at Lake Vostok. It was this report which created something of a firestorm on the Internet.

Several sources immediately pointed to the fact that the location of the "Vostok anomaly" is quite close to coordinates shown in the "X-Files" movie regarding the fictional location of a massive, "buried alien spacecraft." In fact, the Russian Vostok Base is the closest base of any kind to the coordinates given in the movie. (All this reminded us, of course, of our own previous suspicions about the true source of some of X-Files creator Chris Carter's story ideas ....)

The discovery of the peculiar Vostok anomaly underneath the ice -- encompassing an area almost 3,000 miles in area -- was also eerily reminiscent of a French novel, "Subterranean," in which Antarctic scientists discover an inhabited "Lost City" under the ice.

And there were even stranger stories suddenly coming from the "bottom of the world" in this same time frame ....

A December 2000 report, carried on this Continent by NPR, stated that "someone at McMurdo had become disoriented" and began to spread the rumor of a "UFO landing" in Antarctica. There was even a poster circulating though the Base, depicting a giant spacecraft hovering directly over McMurdo! The individual supposedly responsible was promptly "deported" from the Continent -- literally put on the next plane back to New Zealand (the official gateway to McMurdo)! Equally bizarre, at least three scientists -- including the Russian discoverer of a remarkable set of geometric "dunes," seen directly above the strongest region of the Vostok anomaly -- have died on the Continent in the past two years. Curiously, the causes of these deaths -- all of them young men in their thirties and forties -- have not been reported.

McMurdo Station

Whether the story about the JPL press conference is, in fact, the truth (we have yet to substantiate the actual report), still stranger things began to happen down South. Initially, it was reported that the doctor at the South Pole (the second replacement in two years at the Amundson-Scott Base) needed an unprecedented airlift extraction (this late in the season) -- because of "complications from a gall stone." Then, coincident with that, other reports began to surface of the need for four more medical extractions, in an equally unprecedented fashion, from the coastal base at McMurdo Station, the largest US base on the entire Continent. Again, as with the previously reported deaths, the reasons were somewhat mysterious as to the precise need for these "emergency medical extractions." Public speculation has hinged on the idea that someone coming into McMurdo from New Zealand brought "something" with them from home, some kind of infectious disease, that was subsequently spreading among the isolated population there.

However, this is extremely unlikely. Precisely because of the isolated population in Antarctica, immigrants are screened for a wide range of diseases before being allowed on the Continent. In fact, upon arrival, they are quarantined for a number of days -- to ensure they have not brought any "friends from home" with them. And, as is well known, the environmental conditions in Antarctica are so harsh that normal viruses and other microbial life cannot readily survive (even common colds are vanishingly rare), virtually guaranteeing that nobody in this instance caught a case of the "Antarctic flu."

So what's happening? Two thoughts immediately spring to mind:

One is that some "Special Project" has, against all scientific and environmental prudence, indeed drilled through the ice into the Lake Vostok eco-system (clandestinely, of course). And, the participants have suddenly found themselves exposed to "something" for which their bodies literally have no immunity -- something not extant in the rest of Earth's biosphere for between 13,000 and several million years! After the initial reports of "four emergency extractions," the number changed to five ... and now twelve McMurdo personnel are supposedly in need of a dangerous, "emergency medical evacuation" well into the Antarctic winter season. At one level, this has all the earmarks of "something" virulently spreading among the limited winter population at the Base, something that even the fairly complete medical facilities at McMurdo can no longer cope with. Complicating the picture is the fact that the "extractees" are not research scientists or long-term support personnel, but are all employees of Raytheon Corporation -- a high-tech firm that is deeply involved in a variety of black-ops programs for the U.S. government all around the world.

This idea (that these two simultaneous "emergencies" are actually due to some kind of "black ops fiasco" in Antarctica) is reinforced by another little noticed story coming out of the Amundson-Scott Base -- that the doctor being brought in (to replace the ailing doctor) has been asked to also bring in "an emergency supply of salt." She's even been asked to "stuff her own pockets full of salt packets," ostensibly because there is "no room on the rescue aircraft itself." This is obviously a silly, thinly-veiled "cover story" ... designed to tell someone "outside" ... "something." Salt is crucial to survival in outdoor conditions in Antarctica. The air is so dry, that unless someone exposed to the outdoors there has a good supply of salt, they are likely to face the possibility of death by mineral depletion and dehydration. Obviously the Base, after years of operation, would have a pretty good handle on just how much salt is needed until the next re-supply plane arrives. So how is it that they suddenly find themselves desperately without any of it left?!

Maybe, because they suddenly had a unique situation. Maybe because a team of scientists and engineers from Raytheon spent a lot of unplanned days out on the windswept ice, frantically drilling against the clock, in an all-out effort to break through to the Lake below -- and in the process, used far more than the normal complement of salt to survive.

The other possibility for the sudden, simultaneous "evacuations" is even more extraordinary.

What if these Raytheon black ops personnel did indeed find "something" in their secret drilling under Vostok -- and needed to get it back to civilization ASAP for in-depth study. Under this scenario, the whole idea of an "outbreak" is simply a ruse to cover the need for a large airplane (a New Zealand C-130 Hercules) dramatically visiting McMurdo at a time never attempted in all its years before: the only "way out" for something very important from the Continent. How do you cover such an operation? Put all the medical hints out there, and wait for the Internet conspiracists to "figure out" that there has been some kind of outbreak at McMurdo (there has been NO official confirmation of this theory, by the way), all the while covering your real agenda -- which is to get your hands on a genuine artifact from "Zep-Tepi" before the dead of the Antarctic winter makes any such attempt this year impossible!

This "conspiracy within a conspiracy" would seem a little far-fetched even to us were it not for one inescapable reality --

-- It's 2001.

This whole weird scenario, the discovery of a magnetic anomaly at an isolated location, the secret digging to uncover an ancient artifact, the danger of shattering social consequences if the information is not properly contained, the concoction of an epidemic as a cover story for the secret activities around the extraction of the artifact -- is straight out of Clarke's "2001" playbook! The only real difference is the location of the artifact, Antarctica, instead of the Moon! Indeed, even the date -- 2001 -- is dead on. Anybody wonder if maybe Clarke knew something about "AMA-1" when he wrote his story more than three decades ago?

The parallels to us are striking. Remember, we have been warning all along that "2001" was Special, that a veil would begin to lift in this most crucial year .... All of us have been looking to Mars. Maybe, we should have been paying more attention to our own backyard.

Rest assured, we will be watching developments at the South Pole with great interest the rest of the year. After all, it is 2001.               http://www.enterprisemission.com/antarctica.htm

MEANWHILE, IN ANTARCTICA…

I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted from the American referendum. And while all the broohaha was going on, there were other stories taking place last week and in the run-up to it, that would be good to review this week. Some of them, as we'll see, may or may not have something to do with the election, and some of them not.

But somehow, this one, I think, may have something to do with it. Or - as seems more likely - it may have something to do with the strange goings-on in Antarctica over the past few years, or possibly both. Just by way of a brief review of those goings-on, a few years ago there began to be rumors being shared that the Russians had found or discovered something in the large under-ice lake, Lake Vostok, on that continent. Whatever was going on, the Russians weren't talking, but there seemed to have been by some accounts a minor flurry of activities there as they were flying planes in and out of the polar continent. Then, of course, we've seen the strange stories of sudden illnesses over the years, and of emergency flights having to go down and fetch people and fly them back to civilization for treatment of whatever mysterious illnesses they were suffering. But we never hear any follow up to these, on exactly what these people might have contracted. Then there was, of course,the Nazi expedition to that continent in 1938-39, under the auspices of Nazi Party Reichsleiter Rudolf Hess and Reichsmarschall Herman Goering. The expedition stayed several months, made surveys of Queen Maud Land or, as the Nazis called it, Neuschwabenland (New Swabia), and the expedition returned to Germany by a curious zig-zag route through the southern Atlantic. Medallions were struck, and then everyone pretty much forgot about it, and the Nazis weren't saying very much either.

After the war, of course, was Admiral Richard Byrd's Operation High Jump expedition, outfitted for several months' stay, a battalion of specially trained Marines, some destroyers and destroyer escorts, and a small light aircraft carrier. After a few weeks, the expedition departed in a rather hurried fashion, and Admiral Byrd gave an interview - now well-known in various histories - to the El Mercurio of Santiago de Chile, in which he allegedly stated that the USA would have to prepare itself to defend against "enemy fighters" which could fly from pole to pole with tremendous speed. This in turn fueled all sorts of "Nazi UFO-flying saucer" speculations which still get a lot of traction in certain circles, though this author disagrees with it strongly, for reasons I've articulated in several interviews and in some of my books. In any case, however, it is an indicator of more high strangeness in Antarctica. And rounding out all this high strangeness, reports and stories have run in various magazines such as Nexus of post-war British and America covert operations on the southern continent, shooting it out with Antarctic SS troops in caverns deep beneath the ice. More recently, pictures have occasionally surfaced on various internet sites of alleged giant pyramids beneath the ice, and so on.

As if it couldn't possibly get any stranger, even more recently the Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill III, visited the polar continent a few months ago, had his picture taken with some penguins, shortly after his historic meeting in Havana with Pope Francis I, where the two hierarchs signed a joint declaration calling for an end to the genocide of Christians in the Middle East. Ostensibly, Kirill III's visit to the continent was to bless a Russian Orthodox Church on the continent, serving the Russian contingent there. That was a story that may have had some traction for the moment, but now there's been another high-level visitor to that continent, and that was none other than the US Secretary of State, John "Ketchup" Kerry, whose visit moreover occurred during what surely must rank as one of the most hard fought and important elections in US history. This raises the question, why such a visit now? Perhaps they were planning to fund another chapter of Isis or Al Qaeda, but I doubt it.

Here's the story:

John Kerry lands in Antarctica becoming the highest US official to visit the continent

There is of course not much of any detail here, save the mention that Mr. Kerry, a former US Senator, has made "climate change" one of "his" issues, thus hinting that this may have been a possible purpose of his visit. The official announcement from the US Department of State also highlights the climate change angle:

Secretary Kerry Travels to Antarctica

Note that the State Department bulletin indicates that this is a component of a global tour... no problem, we'll just make a stop along the way in Antarctica.

You know me: I just can't help the high octane speculation impulse. Consider only the wide context here, and the strange associations of the southern continent's visitors in the past eight decades: Nazis, whose expedition was sponsored by Herman Goering and Rudolf Hess, the latter of whom flew to the United Kingdom in May 1941 to seek out a peace with that country, or so we're told. Hess -or at least, someone looking pretty much like him, though his British physician expressed doubts, since the "Spandau Prison Hess" did not have any scars from the wounds he supposedly suffered as a soldier in World War One - then spent the rest of his life in Spandau Prison, until he supposedly hoisted his frail body up and hung himself. And this was after Mr. Gorbachev apparently reversed the veto on his release, placing the ball firmly in Britain's court, and apparently they weren't buying. In any case, that's the circumstances, in a nutshell, of Hess's death. Then there was Admiral Byrd and his Marines, the Patriarch of Moscow, and now, a few months later, John Kerry.  And if one believes those stories reported in Duncan Rhodes' Nexus magazine a few years ago, one can add a list of secret British and American commandos and some Nazi SS troops.

In that context, the "climate change" explanation doesn't seem to be carrying much water. I can believe Kerry might have such an agenda, but Rudolf Hess and Herman Goering? Ausgeschlossen! Patriarch Kirill of Moscow was there to indulge a secret "climate change" hobby? Nyet! Admiral Byrd a "global warming guru"? Not a chance.

The US Secretary of State is the USA's chief diplomat. And notably, his visit occurred within the context of an extended diplomatic tour to other countries, suggesting that his purpose in Antarctica might have been of a diplomatic nature. That in its turn suggests that perhaps Kirill III's visit may have had a similar purpose, ex officio. But diplomacy with whom? Well, since we're crawling way out on to the end of the speculation twig where the weight on the twig far exceeds the evidence to bear it, it would perforce have to be "with someone else", since all the countries on the continent have relations with each other. Antarctica, a continent on virtual lock down from all the nations with a presence there, would be an ideal for such "beginning negotiations" and "diplomatic relations" to be worked out.

The question is, who might that someone else be? Well, having tossed out the possibility - again far beyond any evidence supporting it - I'll leave it for you to tell me.

But one thing seems clear, whatever is taking place down there, something is going on, and we're not being told the whole story.                                      https://gizadeathstar.com/2016/11/meanwhile-in-antarctica/

 

Wikileaks Photos, John Kerry Visit and UFOs in Antarctica

• http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2016/11/wikileaks-photos-john-kerry-visit-and-ufos-in-antarctica/
•  November 15, 2016
•  Paul Seaburn

 

Just days after the shocking U.S. presidential election, Secretary of State John Kerry became the highest-ranking U.S. government official to ever set foot on Antarctica (although there are rumors President Obama made a secret visit there earlier this year). This visit came just a few weeks after Wikileaks released a large set of photos from Antarctica. Does this mean that there’s worldwide cover-up of UFOs in Antarctica? Let’s see how some people connected the dots to reach that theory.
The Secretary of State landed in Antarctica on November 11th. This was leg 2 on a multi-stop trip that started in New Zealand and included a stop at the international climate change meetings in Marrakech, Morocco, where Kerry was to speak on the dangers of global warming. The five-hour flight to Antarctica on a C-17 Globemaster military cargo plane had Kerry mysteriously spending most of his time in the cockpit. Sure, he’s a pilot but doesn’t the plane have windows for him to look out of? Was he giving the pilots secret directions?

Where is Kerry walking to?

After landing on the Pegasus Ice Runway at the U.S.’s McMurdo Station, Kerry toured by helicopter the McMurdo Dry valleys, which are considered to be as close to the environment of Mars as any place on Earth (coincidence or plans for Mars trip?). He also saw the mysterious red glacier known as Blood Falls and the hut where the famous Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton (the Shackleton crater on the moon is named for him – coincidence?) lived in 1908. While he didn’t report any UFOs or aliens, Shackleton was in Antarctica at the time of the Tunguska event and was said to have seen displays of aurora lights both before and after the event.

Blood Falls in Antarctica

Kerry got to see things that are banned from the public view due to the newly-signed (October 28, 2016) agreement to make the Ross Sea the world’s largest marine protected area, blocking ships without permission from entering the area for 35 years. Fortunately, Wikileaks mysteriously released a set of 23 photographs of various locations in Antarctica on October 18th as part of its John Podesta-related leaks. They seemed to be more scenic than expository (although one appears to show a UFO and another a mysterious fog) and a couple are suspected to be from someplace other than Antarctica.

UFO in one of the Wikileaks photos

The photos were numbered and a couple of numbers appeared to be missing. Could these have shown the long-rumored evidence (purportedly in Wikileaks’ possession) of a secret war between the U.S. and UFOs based on the floor of the waters around Antarctica – the very same waters now protected by the new agreement?

Mysterious cloud or fog in one of the Wikileaks photos

And there you have it! Kerry visits top secret locations in Antarctica, after a new (and not yet universally trusted or UFO-savvy) U.S. president is elected, to assess the war against UFOs and secretly share the info with other nations in Morocco. Throw in Antarctic photos from Wikileaks to John Podesta – who promised to open the UFO files if Hillary Clinton was elected – and you have all the makings of an Antarctic UFO conspiracy and cover-up.
Or maybe Kerry really IS concerned about the environment and is trying to save what’s left of the slowly-melting formerly-pristine world of Antarctica.
Which do you think it is?