Every Town - Antarctica’s Lost World: The Forbidden History They’ve Tried to Erase

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Today we’re heading to the coldest, most secretive place on Earth. And what we’ve uncovered might just rewrite everything we thought we knew about human history. This is The Forbidden History of Antarctica. Visit MintMobile.com/everytown and get 3 months of unlimited wireless for just $15 a month at mintmobile.com/everytown 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/9f9lmeXGl5g 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY for FREE! ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvtlOlODQ8g&t=5238s⁠ ⁠https://tubitv.com/movies/100029672/an-angry-boy⁠ International & Other Ways To Watch: ⁠https://www.anangryboy.com/⁠ 💀 MERCH: ⁠https://scary-mysteries.teemill.com/⁠ 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries⁠   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠ 👁Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠   🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the true crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts, and pondering the age-old question, why do people do what they do? Now, sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. From the Green River Killer to the Mothman incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out.

Subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Into the dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. Every town has a dark side. They say Antarctica is empty. Just ice, snow, and silence. But that's a lie. Because right now beneath miles of frozen stillness,

something is moving. Over 5,000 people are stationed at the bottom of the world right now, not tourists and not thrill seekers. We're talking scientists, engineers, families. Entire community is quietly building something permanent. Structures that don't look like research stations, they look like cities. And that's just what they let you see. Because here's the part nobody talks about. If we're capable of building civilization, out there now? Well, what was here before? Antarctica is the last frontier. It holds our imagination. Old maps that said, here be monsters.

The last remaining territory on the planet that could have such a designation is Antarctica. Something seems to be going on on this mysterious continent at the South Pole. And it has been theorized by a number of people that Antarctica is some kind of alien, The deeper you dig into Antarctica's history, the stranger it gets. When you put it all together, like we will today, one interesting and possibly terrifying idea emerges. We weren't the first, and whoever came before us, never left. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and welcome back to another episode of Everytown Where Today, we're heading

to the coldest, most secretive place on Earth, and what we've uncovered might just rewrite everything we thought we knew about human history. And this is the forbidden history of Antarctica. Have you ever heard of McMurdo Station? If not, no worries, most people haven't, but on any given day, this place is home to about 1,000 people. Might not sound like a whole lot compared to most places, but when you consider that this spot is in Antarctica,

well, that's a pretty respectable number. During the summers down there, that number grows to about 1,500. McMurdo is a fully full. functioning city complete with dormitories, labs, medical facilities, a fire station, library, even recreational clubs. It processes 8 million gallons of fuel every year, and it operates three ice runways for planes to come in and out of and as its own harbor. This place has been running continuously since 1955, which means 70 years of permanent human presence in Antarctica, and McMurdo isn't alone.

If you keep heading south all the way to the very bottom of the planet, you'll find another station, a Munson Scott. It's perched right at the geographic south pole or compasses spin uselessly and the sun disappears for months. In the summer, around 150 people are there and in winter maybe 50 stay behind. Imagine being one of them. Locked in with no way in or out while the world above moves on. You don't leave, you just wait. And further out, there's Vostok, a Russian station, built in one of the coldest places Earth has ever recorded, minus 128.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

That kind of cold is hard to imagine because, well, nobody's ever truly felt it. If you did, say, plopped down naked in those temperatures, the pain on your skin would be instant. It would feel like fire, but would actually be a cold burn. The moisture in your eyes, nose, and mouth, well, that would flash freeze. Crospite will begin in less than 30 seconds, and the air you breathe in would be so cold it would damage your lungs and cause them to shut down. But still, people work there, though they are wearing proper protection. And they drill through miles of ice to study an ancient lake sealed off for millions of years. The deeper they go, the more it feels like they're digging into another planet.

And then there's Esperanza Base. This one's different. It's not just scientists and specialists. There are families here. Kids, a school, a radio station, even a chapel. Eleven babies have been born there since 1978. Real lives, real homes, all in Antarctica. Zoom out for a second, and the scale gets wild,

because most people believe that Antarctica is a desolate, unhabitable piece of land. But that's not the case, and that's important to remember for what we're about to get into. I mean, there are more than 70 stations across the continent, operated by over 30 countries. In the warmer months, around 5,000 people live there across the whole of Antarctica. These aren't just isolated dots on a map. They're connected by air routes, satellite comps, supply chains. You're looking at an invisible infrastructure that's been quietly growing for decades. A network of outposts stitched across a frozen desert bigger than the U.S.

in Mexico combined, and barely anybody talks about it. Which leads us to one very interesting question. If this many people are living and working there, building, flying, digging, raising families, then what else could be happening there that we don't know about? And who else could possibly be living there? Those exact questions take us back to 1929 when a German theologian named Gustav Disman was doing some routine archival work and is, Istanbul. Nothing unusual, just cataloging old documents in the top Kappi Palace Library,

until he stumbled across something that would haunt cartographers to this very day, the Perry-Rees map. Drawn in 1513 by an Ottoman admiral, this wasn't just a beautifully preserved antique, this thing showed the entire coastline of Antarctica with detail. Which is insane, because that's a full 300 years before Antarctica was supposedly discovered. In 1513 is 21 years after Columbus discovered America. Until then, Europeans didn't even know what the Americas were. They thought they landed in Asia. Back then, it was also common knowledge that the earth was flat.

Officially, Antarctica wasn't discovered until 1820, yet here was a map drawn on gazelle's skin, showing geographical features of a continent no one knew existed at the time. So how's that possible? You know it doesn't belong in your epic summer plans? Getting burned by your old wireless bill. While you're planning, backyard barbecues, and long weekends on the beach, your cell phone bill shouldn't be the thing holding you back.

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on unlimited plan, taxes and fees extra, cement mobile for details. Well, Perry Reese was a naval admiral, practical man who documented his sources meticulously. He inscribed right on the map that he used 20 different source maps, including charts from Christopher Columbus, charts that are now mysteriously lost, by the way. But he also had access to geographical knowledge that we're told didn't exist at the time, which means previous mapmakers had somehow explored Antarctica. Now, the argument by some as to why this land mass shows up on older maps is not because it was actually found, but because it wasn't supposed to be Antarctica.

It was actually meant to represent Terra Australis, a theoretical continent that ancient Greeks believed had to exist in order to balance the Earth's weight. Every map from that era showed this imaginary southern land, Except Perry Reese's map showed details that matched the real Antarctica with disturbing accuracy. So when scholars tried to dismiss this as coincidence, they ran into some problems. I mean, the map showed geographical features that wouldn't be officially discovered until the 20th century. Coastal information too detailed to be made by chance. Charles Hapgood spent years analyzing this map and others like it.

His conclusion was that someone had... mapped Antarctica somehow when it was ice-free. Someone had been there before, and someone had surveyed that continent with precision and matched modern techniques, and that knowledge had been passed down through ancient sources until it reached Perry Reese. So, pick your poison. On the one side, you have the official conventional explanation, which requires you to believe in an extraordinary series of coincidences. That Perry Reese just guessed and nailed the outline of the continent by chance. The alternative requires you to believe that someone was in Antarctica long before we've been

told by the history books. And if you believe that, isn't it possible that people have been visiting that land for a long time and possibly living there too? And if so, well, where? In 2016, satellite images started circulating on the internet, the ones you've probably seen at some point. And there were pictures from Antarctica showing something that frankly shouldn't exist, perfect pyramids. Not pyramid-shaped rocks and not natural formations that vaguely resemble pyramids.

Structures with four distinct faces, precise angles, and proportions that matched human-made pyramids found across the globe. Recently, there have been a number of reports of pyramids, huge great pyramids, in ancient. Antarctica. They jut out of the ice and snow, and they look perfect, just like those in Egypt, but they dwarf those in Egypt, like the Great Pyramid. The largest one here measured 1.2 miles across at its base and rose over 3,937 feet high. The coordinates are publicly available, 7958 south and 8157 wet. Now, admittedly, if that's a pyramid, that's huge. And the Great Pyramid of Giza, for comparison, is about 755 feet at the base and rises 480 feet.

But still, the official explanation came quickly, too quickly. These were Nunitics, they said. Natural rock formations carved by glacial erosion over millions of years. The result of ice moving in different directions, creating angular peaks. through freeze-thaw cycles and natural weathering. And Dr. Eric Ringnell from NASA explained it like this. And these formations occur when glacial cirques converge on a central point and carving the rock into pyramidal shapes, natural process, so nothing to see here.

But if you look closer, and you should because it's crazy, you can see that these formations display a level of geometric precision that approaches what human architects achieve. One has a perfectly square face that is two kilometers square in each direction. There are multiple structures showing similar characteristics across different parts of the continent. The Ellsworth Mountains, where these formations are located, contain 13,000 meters of folded rock strata formed roughly 150 million years ago. The area shows evidence of massive geological forces and contains fossils from when

Antarctica was a warm, habitable continent. But it also contains these structures and make even scientists acknowledge why people might question their origins. Is it possible, therefore, that our ancestors did actually reach the Antarctic continent and perhaps even settle there? A man-made pyramid beneath the Antarctic ice? If such an incredible notion is true, Then it naturally begs some questions. How was such a massive structure built on Antarctica? When was it done? And by whom?

In a world where we know ancient civilizations built massive stone pyramids on every inhabited continent, or we're supposed to just believe that nature happen to create perfect pyramid-shaped replicas on the one continent where no one is supposed to have lived. And yet, as a reminder, people do. live there, many of them right now. Now what if we've always lived there, or at least some former humans? Well that might not be in the textbooks, it's definitely mentioned in many other books. And this civilization is called Agarta. Agarta, is the name given to a legendary, highly advanced civilization said to exist beneath the earth's surface, accessible through openings

at the poles. It's a mythos that predates the internet, satellite imaging or even modern science fiction. Yet it paints a picture of a world as detailed and immersive as any today. The story begins in 1873 with Luis Jekhaliot, a French colonial judge stationed in India. He claimed to have accessed ancient Sanskrit texts that spoke of a hidden capital beneath the earth, a lost city brimming with advanced technology and ancient wisdom. But it wasn't until Alexandra St. Eves, a French mystic and political thinker, entered the picture, that Agarta became something much more unsettling.

In 1886, St. Eves published Michon de Linde in Europe, where he described Agartha as a real place, an underground kingdom hidden beneath the Himalayas, ruled by beings of immense intelligence and power. He claimed to have learned all of this from a mysterious figure named Prince. Hardige Sherip, who taught him an unknown language, Batanian supposedly spoken by the subterranean race. According to St. Eves, Agartha was a society far ahead of ours. Its people had gas lighting, railways, even air travel, centuries before such technologies appeared on the surface.

And their libraries were carved into stone, preserving the forgotten knowledge of ancient worlds. They had their own religion, a sovereign government and a technology base that made surface civilization look primitive by comparison. But then, St. Eve's trying to erase everything. Shortly after its publication, he became terrified of what he had revealed. He attempted to destroy every copy of the book, all 200 editions, making it so rare that it wasn't republished until after his death in 1910. And what exactly had he uncovered that drove him to silence?

Why the sudden fear? And more importantly, how did a story about a secret world beneath the Himalayas end up tied to the frozen edge of Antarctica? Well, that part begins with Admiral Richard E. Bird, a real American naval officer and explorer who led five major expeditions to Antarctica. His achievements are well documented, but in the 1970s a strange story surfaced.

A secret diary, allegedly written by Byrd himself, detailing a mysterious flight over the South Pole in February of 1947. This story is said to come from his diaries, not his published account of the trip, but something he held back and then later was suppressed by government authorities that found it frightening. In this diary, which has never been authenticated, Bird supposedly describes flying beyond the pole and into an impossible place. Admiral Bird curved there was an entrance to the center of the earth through the South Pole. And he took planes into the South, under the South Pole.

And when he did that, he discovered that as he flew over the pole, suddenly he's looking at things that shouldn't be there. I mean, it was temperate. He had a squadron flew under the earth, into the earth. It turns into this lush and green area, and he can't even believe his eyes. But that's just the beginning of his extraordinary story. He tells how all of a sudden he starts to see a shimmering rainbow city that's made of crystal. Even more bizarre with the beings he encountered.

His airplane has taken control of when he suddenly sees these flying disc-shaped objects around them that lead him to the ground. whereupon he's escorted into a cavernous type of an area where he meets a being he refers to as the master in his diary. The master tells him that they're highly disappointed in what humans are doing with nuclear weapons and how they've recently destroyed Hiroshima in Nagasaki and they really are concerned about what is going on on the surface of the planet. The Bird Polar Research Center has repeatedly stated

that there is no record of such a flight and no such diary, and yet the legend persists. And something the U.S. government covered up whatever birds saw, which, let's face it, if he did see that, they most certainly would. Others believe he really did enter Agartha, not through the Himalayas, but via a hidden gateway in Antarctica. Whatever the truth is, the story has refused to die, and it's become part of a deeper mythology. when we lost civilizations, forbidden knowledge, and polar secrets all converge beneath miles of ice. Maybe it's just a story, or maybe a garter never needed to be found, because it's always been watching from below.

Now, if that all sounds too outlandish for you to believe, I get it. It's a pretty fantastical story, but interesting nonetheless. But something that is very interesting and very real about Antarctica is that that the this place has always had an issue with transparency. Why is that? That's the question no one seems willing to answer. Every single path in this investigation seems to hit the same wall, a lack of transparency wrapped in a layer of official protocol.

But the deeper we dug through obscure documents, buried policies and decades of international agreements, we uncovered something super interesting that makes you wonder if there really is something to the whole Agartha story. It's something that governs everything about the world's most mysterious continent, and it's called the Antarctic Treaty System. On paper, it's just a diplomatic agreement, 58 nations pledging peaceful cooperation on the coldest, harshest continent on Earth.

But in practice, it's a sweeping control mechanism, a geopolitical firewall that regulates every aspect of human activity across Antarctica. At first glance, the treaty promotes openness. It mandates scientific transparency, requires all research data to be publicly shared, and allows for unrestricted inspections. Military activity is banned, except for logistical support. Antarctica is officially designated a natural reserve,

devoted to peace and science. But look closer. There are 75 Antarctic specially protected areas, An entry into any of them requires a special permit. Mining? Permanently prohibited. Waste disposal is tightly regulated. Every activity, even walking on certain stretches of ice, requires a formal environmental impact assessment.

While tourism is technically allowed, it's heavily restricted. Just 122,000 visitors last season, all traveling through approved operators under strict monitoring, So no, you can't just go wandering around there. What this creates is a system where access is controlled, filtered, and documented. True independent exploration is nearly impossible. Everything is surveilled. Every move is accounted for, and it's a level of oversight that suggests they're guarding more than just glaciers and penguins.

At the center of the United States operations here is Operation Deep Freeze, a long-standing military logistical program that manages everything from transportation to infrastructure. They fly the planes, fuel the stations, and move the supplies. But they're not allowed to set up combat operations or permanent military bases. Their role isn't to fight wars. It's to keep a tight lid on what happens down there. Yes, data is shared, inspections take place. But when it comes to physically getting to Antarctica, it's a different story.

Access is buried underneath bureaucratic red tape, limited to approved personnel on approved missions, all following pre-approved research agendas. And the justification for all of it, always the same. Environmental protection, scientific preservation, safeguarding Antarctica for future generations. And here's the deeper layer. That environmental narrative serves another purpose too.

It reinforces the belief that Antarctica has been frozen and unhabitable for millions of years, a place where no ancient civilization could possibly have existed. Because if people start questioning that narrative, they start thinking someone might have lived there long before us, then the entire framework of secrecy begins to crack. So the restrictions aren't just physical, they're psychological. It's not just about keeping people out, It's about making sure no one ever thinks there's anything worth going in for.

The science tells us the continent has been frozen for millions of years, making human habitation impossible throughout the entire span of human evolution. Ice core data extending 800,000 years, shows continuous glacial conditions. The last time Antarctica was habitable was 35 million years ago, long before humans existed. This creates an insurmountable chronological. problem if you want to believe people live there. Humans evolved 350,000 years ago, give or take, Antarctica became uninhabitable 35 million years ago, so the math doesn't work for ancient civilizations. And study after study seems to say the same thing. It's been locked in glacial conditions that

entire time. No warm periods, no window for human life. Throughout that entire stretch, CO2 levels stay between 180 and 300 parts per million, too loud to allow ice-free conditions. Even during the warmest interglacial periods, Antarctica stayed frozen. The science sounds solid, airtight, and definitive. But science has been wrong before. Big ideas have collapsed when one unexpected discovery changed everything. The way this particular narrative is delivered so certain and so absolute, it almost feels like a defense. as if questioning it would open a door to something much bigger than just climate records.

Of course, you can't deny, the archaeology seems to back it up. No artifacts older than the early 1800s have ever been found here. No ancient structures for sure, nothing man-made beneath the ice. And it's not for lack of trying. For more than 65 years, researchers from dozens of countries have studied the continent up close, and all that time they say they found nothing. But here's the thing. Absence of evidence isn't the same as evidence of absence. Antarctica, as a reminder, is bigger than the U.S. and Mexico combined, and it's buried under more than one

and a half miles of solid ice. So how much of it has actually been seen? More importantly, who is doing the looking and what exactly were they looking for? This climate narrative is reinforced by another argument. Even if Antarctica was just half a lot of the way of the way of enough in the past. Survival there would have been impossible for any ancient civilization. Modern Antarctic research stations highlight just how difficult survival would be. In current facilities, despite advanced technology, faced temperatures reaching minus 100 degrees in polar nights last four months. Hurricane forest winds exceed 125 miles per hour regularly. Extreme isolation requires year-long supply deliveries.

McMurdo's station alone costs millions of dollars annually and requires 8 million gallons of fuel just for basic operations. Now imagine trying to do all that without fossil fuels, without global supply chains, without antibiotics, modern building materials, or machines to move everything through ice and storms. The idea that a pre-industrial society could have made it here sounds impossible, unless they had something we don't. Some kind of energy source we haven't discovered or maybe one we've forgotten. Maybe those old stories about underground civilizations aren't as far-fetched as they sound if they veered off of our technological path and found one that's entirely different.

Top Antarctic researchers unanimously reject the idea of any sort of hidden past, and fair enough, it's a wild pill to swallow. Dr. Peter Neff calls such theory, outright fiction. Professor Eric Rignaud offers scientific explanations for every anomaly people point to. Professor Tina Vanda Flirt confirms that no geological or climatological data supports habitable conditions during any era of human existence. So, the verdict from science is clear and the case is closed. No credible evidence, no ancient cities, no lost civilizations. Still, this might just be one of those places that doesn't give up its secrets easily.

The ice preserves everything, but reveals almost nothing. Unless you know exactly where to look and have the means to get there, some believe there's hidden evidence buried beneath that ice that challenges everything we know about human history. And maybe not just traces of survival, but proof of something more. Technologies we've forgotten, and cultures we've never imagined. Civilizations that learn to live in a world we now call unlivable. Or maybe not, maybe science is right.

Maybe Antarctica has always been exactly what it appears to be, a vast frozen desert, home only to snow, wind, and microscopic life clinging to the edges of survival. But with all we've seen, the ancient maps, the perfect geometric formations, the tightly controlled access, the stories that refuse to die. Can we really say that without a doubt, We know the whole truth. In Antarctica, everything is locked beneath layers of silence and snow, and anything could be possible.

Whatever the truth is, it's still down there, waiting for someone brave enough or foolish enough to dig it up. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. Hope you all enjoyed it. If you like this type of work we do and you want more, check out some more episodes and subscribe. If you want to support us, consider checking us out on Patreon,

where we have over 200 exclusive videos for you to go through. Appreciate you all very much, so thanks for tuning in. Remember to come back next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.