Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 13: Nazis & UFOs [Pt 3]: Antarctica, Atlantis & Alien Bases

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

In part 3 of the Nazis & UFOs series we explore the soure of some of the most outlandish and intriguing stories in UFO lore—Antarctica.In 1938, Nazi Germany made an expedition to Antarctica where they claimed territory. What could have compelled them to make that investment of time and resources in the lead up to WWII? Were they looking for something? And could they have found it?After the war, rumors swirled that what remained of the Third Reich escaped to secret bases in Antarctica, and from there the mystique only grew. Since then, a baroque mythology has sprung up around the southernmost continent, with each new twist and turn only adding to mystery.Today, we’ll dive into some of the most popular—and bizarre—theories as to what the Nazis may have found in Antarctica—including the lost city of Atlantis, an unknown ancient culture from the distant past, secret alien bases, and more.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up NowGOOGLE EARTH LINKSThe AzoresThe Pyramid in AntarcticaGET THE EPISODE BRIEFBECOME A PATRONGET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookMUSICTheme: Cabinet of Curiosities by Shaun FrearsonBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I took a knife away from a guy once that was intent on killing me. I choked up on the knife and I tacked to a circle around his heart, lasting circle. And that was a very intimate act. He said, here's a list of all Aaron Brotherhood dropouts. Go through this list, sent a letter to each one of these M-Fing rats, and ask them if you could come and interview them for me. He has created this illusion of who he is. If you believe anything he tells you, you're just growing up.

You want to send me to Michael Thompson, who bucked the whole AB, dropped out, and testified against them. And you think I'm going to go there and convince him to recant? My mom told me, Eric, he's kind of a borderline con person most of your life too. But you got conned by a con man. Blood memory. A new podcast series from love and radio. Podcasts. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. Today, we're diving into part three of our series on Nazi UFO lore. This episode was supposed to complete the

trilogy, but once I started writing, it immediately became clear that that wasn't going to happen. That's because today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite topics in UFO lore, Antarctica. As you'll see, some of the most outlandish and bizarre stories come out of Antarctica. And as if a remote frozen continent at the bottom of the world wasn't enough on its own to create an air of mystique and intrigue. The lore around Antarctica is especially compelling because of the ways in which it bumps up against real historical people and events, making it hard to tell where history ends and fantasy begins. And there's so much to dig into. Even after giving Antarctica a full episode, I feel like we'll barely scratch the surface of all that's there.

So let's not waste any more time and just get to it. There is perhaps no region on Earth more remote and more mysterious than Antarctica. Covered in a layer of ice with an average thickness of 1.2 miles, the fifth largest continent sits at the southern pole in the middle of the equally enigmatic Southern Ocean. The Southern Ocean is different from other oceans on Earth in a few distinct ways. Perhaps the most notable is that it's the only ocean that is surrounded on all sides by water. It's defined by a swift undertow called the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, or ACC, that flows from west to east around Antarctica. The current extends out to 60 degrees south

latitude and acts as an invisible wall separating the freezing Southern Ocean from the warmer, saltier, Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. This separation makes both the continent and the Southern Ocean, ecologically distinct, hosting countless diverse life forms, many of which have likely not even been discovered. The reason for the mystery surrounding the southernmost continent, beyond its remoteness, is that it has what is undoubtedly the least hospitable climate on Earth. With high temperatures on the coasts peaking at just 50 degrees Fahrenheit or 10 degrees Celsius, and lows at the interior of the continent plummeting to negative 112 degrees Fahrenheit or negative 80 degrees Celsius, Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, and driest place on Earth. So what was it about

Antarctica that drew both the attention and the resources of Nazi Germany down to the very bottom of the world in the critical years leading up to World War II? What were they looking for? And more importantly, what did they actually find? And most intriguingly, could what was left of the Third Reich have really escaped to secret bases in Antarctica at the end of World War II? We'll spend the next two episodes attempting to answer those questions. So let's begin by talking through the various theories about what Nazi Germany may have found during their expedition to Antarctica in 1938. One of the most notorious of these theories is that they discovered that Antarctica was the site of the lost city of Atlantis and the highly advanced civilization from which it

sprang. But how could Antarctica be Atlantis? Does that even make sense? First, we need to take a step back. Before we can determine if Antarctica could really be the lost civilization of Atlantis, we first have to determine if Atlantis was real in the first place. And as you might imagine, that's a matter of some significant debate, with most mainstream scholars falling on the side that says that Atlantis is nothing more than a myth. And considering how little direct evidence we have of the existence of Atlantis, it's easy to understand why. The closest thing that we have to a primary source regarding the existence and history of Atlantis appears in the works of Plato from the 4th century BC. Specifically in his dialogues, Temaeus and Critias,

all other known references to Atlantis are based on the limited amount of information that can be found in those two texts. But if Atlantis was real, and if its history was known to the ancient Greeks, how could this be all that remains of this mighty civilization? One explanation, and the one that is most commonly accepted among mainstream scholars is that the story of Atlantis is just an allegory. It's a literary device employed by Plato to tell a story about the dangers of greed, hubris, and moral bankruptcy, and how those vices can destroy a civilization. In other words, it's just a story, and it was never meant to be taken literally. But there's actually another explanation that is given in Tomeas for why this might be the case,

and given everything that we explored in the rational approach to ancient animals, series, I found this explanation to be particularly compelling. Plato's dialogue to Mayas is primarily focused on the nature of both the physical world and of human beings and dives into topics such as the purpose and properties of the universe. And in the midst of all of this, there is the first mention of Atlantis through a story about the Athenian statesman and poet Solon and his travels to Egypt. In this story, Solon goes to an ancient Egyptian city in the western Nile Delta called Sayas. The founder of the city was said to be a goddess whose name was Neith in the Egyptian tongue,

but the people of the city recognized that this was the same goddess who was called Athena by the Greeks. Because of this connection, the citizens of Sayas are big fans of the Athenian culture and believe themselves to be in some way related to them. Solon is received with great honor by the local priests. Being a scholar of history and antiquity himself, he tries to get the priest to speak with him on these topics. He starts by laying out his own understanding of history. thinking that this will draw them into the conversation, but it becomes clear very quickly that they are not impressed.

The priests tell him that he and all of his countrymen are basically like children without an old man among them. Solon asks what they mean by this, and they tell him that his people only remember one great flood, but that in fact there have been many destructions of mankind. The most catastrophic of these events have been caused by water, as with the Great Flood, or by fire, but that there have also been innumerable other smaller catastrophes that have come about due to other causes as well. The priest tells Solon that some of these catastrophes are recorded in what Athenians believe to be myths, but that these myths actually point to real events. The example is given of the story of Pathan, the son of Helios, who, having yoped the steeds of his father's chariot,

because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. they tell Solon that although this story has the form of a myth, that it describes real events that involve things falling from the skies that cause massive, widespread, catastrophic fires, and that this happens at regular intervals over long periods of time. The priests say to him, quote, The fact is that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer does not prevent, mankind exists, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser numbers. And whatever happened, either in your country or in hours,

or in any other region of which we are informed. If there were any actions noble or great, or in any other way remarkable, they have all been written down by us of old and are preserved in our temples. Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and other requisites of civilized life

after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education, and so you have to begin all over again, like children. and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves, end quote.

Crazy, right? There are a couple of things here that jump out at me. The first is that the cycles of catastrophic events that occur at regular intervals and serve as a sort of reset on human civilization by knocking most of the people on the planet back to the Stone Age sounds a lot like what has been proposed by proponents of catastrophism in more modern times. As you'll recall, catastrophism is a geological, theory that the earth has been largely shaped by sudden, short-lived, violent events that were

worldwide in scope, much like Noah's flood in the Bible. In episode 10, we talked about the works of Charles Hapgood and Chan Thomas, who each believed in some version of catastrophism that involved the earth's crust periodically slipping on the mantle, dramatically changing and resurfacing the earth through devastating global fires and flooding. And though these theories can sound a little far-fetched, particularly given that we're generally taught in school, that major geological changes happen slowly over millions of years. The ideas of these men were taken seriously by notables ranging from Albert Einstein to the CIA. These men were all writing about their theories in the mid-20th century. And while the roots of catastrophism are traditionally

traced back to the works of French scientist George Cuvier in the early 18th century, This account in Tamaeus, which was written in 360 BC, suggests that this idea has its roots in the distant past. So is this story in Tamaus really just an allegory? Or could it be that we are like the Athenians whose history has been washed away, burned, and buried by a series of cataclysms? The second thing that jumped out at me is this line that begins, whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized lives, life. The word provided here is definitely interesting, though perhaps not surprising. After all, we know that basically all ancient peoples had stories of wisdom and knowledge, including things

like the use of fire and the development of written language, being given to humans by the gods. The ancients didn't believe, as we do now, that the development of civilization was the result of a long, slow, linear progression. Rather, they believed that the sparks of civilization were lit within groups of early humans by the gods themselves, causing massive quantum leaps forward in the areas of language, mathematics, astronomy, geometry, architecture, and other cornerstones of human civilization. And as we explored in the rational approach to ancient aliens series, there is some significant evidence to suggest that human civilization did, in fact,

emerge in rapid, surprising, and nonlinear ways for which we don't have any good explanation. And when we also consider what we learned in episode, this becomes even more intriguing, because as you'll recall, Tom DeLong has said that the thing that got his high-level government advisors to take him seriously on the topic of UFOs was the idea that the phenomenon represents multiple gods with a little G that have played a major role in shaping human history. I don't know what I was expecting to find when I went back and read Plato's dialogues looking for information about Atlantis, but it wasn't all of that. And while none of this is enough to really prove anything decisively about Atlantis, the UFO

phenomenon, massive cataclysms, or really anything else, it's hard not to be intrigued by the congruency between these different stories, or to wonder about the extent to which they might be true. So, getting back to the matter at hand, what else do we know about Atlantis? While the idea of Atlantis is first introduced into Mayas, most of the details of the history and location of Atlantis are found in another of Plato's dialogues, Criteus. Crteus is the primary speaker in this dialogue, and he conveys the story of Atlantis that he claims was told to his great-grandfather by Solon himself. Combining the details contained in Temeus with the accounts in Crotias, this is the story of Atlantis that emerges.

The tale begins 9,000 years before the dialogues were written, so approximately 9,500 B.C. At this time, the whole region surrounding what we now know is the Mediterranean Sea was ruled over by the ancestors of the Athenians, who were a great and noble civilization. The world beyond what the ancient Greeks knew as the pillars of Hercules and what we now call the Strait of Gibraltar, which connects the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean, was ruled over by the Atlanteans. The Atlanteans launched a war of aggression in an attempt to conquer and enslave the people living around the Mediterranean, but the ancestors of the Athenians managed to defeat them and secure the freedom of the entire region. However, following their victory, there occurred violent earthquakes and floods,

and in a single day and night of misfortune, the lands belonging to both the victors and the defeated Atlanteans sank into the sea. So we know how the story ends, but what else do we know about Atlantis? According to the story conveyed to Solon, in the early days of man, the earth was presided over by the gods, who divided up the world into different allotments over which they ruled. The god Poseidon was given the island of Atlantis. The island was long and almost perfectly oval-shaped and was located just beyond the pillars of Hercules in the Atlantic Ocean. At the center of the island was a large, flat, fertile plain,

which was ringed by towering mountains that were said to be taller and more magnificent than any mountains known today. There were primitive humans living on the island, and Poseidon fell in love with a young woman named Plato. And because they were in love, they did what adult people do when they love each other very much, which obviously is to ask each other what you want to eat for dinner forever until one of you dies. Just kidding, they had sex. From this union came five sets of twins, all male, who became the ten kings of Atlantis, and the kingdom was divided up among them. The first born

of the oldest set of twins, Atlas, was given the beautiful capital city, which Poseidon had built for Plato. The city was laid out in a set of concentric rings, three of water and two of land, with the main palace sitting at the center. Bridges connected each of the rings, and a wide canal was dug from the center of the city out to the sea. The entire city was built from the red, black, and white rocks that were quarried from the surrounding mountains, and the walls and temples were covered with silver and gold.

The kingdom was wealthy and prosperous. The surrounding land was fertile and provided everything the people could need, and their mighty kingdom drew traders from around the world, who brought what little else they might desire. They even had a bunch of free-roaming elephants, which I think we can all agree is a luxury. And the descendants of Atlas were a strong and honorable family that maintained the kingdom through generations of relative peace. However, over many generations as they became further and further removed from their celestial progenitors, the divine nature of the Atlanteans began to fade.

They became greedy, materialistic, and power-hungry. This drew the attention of Zeus, the god of gods, who decided that he needed to punish the Atlanteans. So he gathered all of the gods together, and he said, and that's where it ends. The rest of Gratius was lost, and no known record of it remains. We don't know what Zeus said to the gods, or how all of this relates to the war that preceded their ultimate sinking into the sea, or even exactly what caused it to sink in the first place. All of those details are lost to the sands of time. So now that we know what remains of the story of Atlantis, what evidence is there that Atlantis was actually real? First of all, while direct evidence of Atlantis itself may be scarce, I'd argue that there is considerable evidence for the

existence of pockets of highly advanced civilization before the last Ice Age around 12,000 years ago. In fact, I have made that argument across the three episodes in the rational approach to ancient aliens series, and so I won't spend too much time on that here. But suffice it to say that whether or not Atlantis literally existed or not, the myth of an ancient advanced civilization that was destroyed in a massive cataclysm seems to point to something real in our remote past, a secret history that we have forgotten, and the evidence of this startling reality can be found in virtually every far-flung corner of the globe. However, if one wants to look for evidence of the literal existence of Atlantis, the ultimate proof would be finding the sunken capital city itself.

And given the precise details given in Plato's work and the unusual layout of the city with its concentric rings of canals, if it was ever found, it would hypothetically be easy to identify. And some believe that we actually have found it. In the western Sahara Desert, there is a large geological anomaly called the Eye of the Sahara, or more commonly, the Ritchat structure. First discovered in 1965, when it was spotted from space, this large circular structure consists of a series of concentric rings. At 25 miles across, it bears what some have argued is a striking resemblance to the lost city of Atlantis. Originally thought to be an impact crater, it's now believed that it was created by underground volcanic activity that made a dome of molten rock around 100 million years ago.

As the layers of the dome eroded over time at different rates, it created the concentric circles that we see today. But regardless of how it was created, could this possibly be the fabled sunken city? Though there are some interesting similarities between the richout structure and Atlantis, I'd argue that there's more than enough evidence to debunk this idea. First of all, Atlantis is described as an island in the Atlantic lying somewhere just beyond the pillars of Hercules. So for the richout structure to possibly be Atlantis, the Sahara would have needed to be underwater 10,000 years ago. However, there's simply no evidence that this was the case. And in fact, the Sahara Desert has been a desert for at least the last several million.

years, so that alone should disqualify the Ritchot structure as the possible site of Atlantis. There are other issues with this theory as well. For example, there appears to be four rings where water would have been, as opposed to the three rings described Nocratius. And there's no evidence of a giant canal that would have connected the center of the city to the sea. So we'll have to look for evidence of Atlantis elsewhere. There have been many different theories about where Atlantis may have been located, ranging from the Black Sea to the Caribbean to the North Atlantic. However, I'd argue that the most obvious place to look for Atlantis would be exactly where Plato says that it was, which is just beyond what is now the Strait of Gibraltar,

somewhere in the Mid-Atlantic. This description isn't ambiguous, and is described in detail in both Tameas and Cretius, and in Temaeus we find this particularly interesting passage, giving details about the location of Atlantis. Quote, for history's tell of a mighty power, which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable, and there was an island situated in front of the Straits, which you called the Pillars of Hercules. The island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite

continent, which surrounded the true ocean. For this sea, which is within the Straits of Hercules, is only a harbor having a narrow entrance, but that other sea is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. End quote. And then after describing the details of the war, it goes on to say, quote, but afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods,

and in a single day and night of misfortune, all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea, for which reason the sea and the sea and the sea, parts is impassable and impenetrable because there is a shoal of mud in the way, and this was caused by the subsidence of the island." End quote.

I find this passage to be really interesting for a few reasons. First of all, the description of the Atlantic Ocean being surrounded by a boundless continent was surprising because it seems to suggest that the ancient Greeks were aware of America. Most of us were taught in school that Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover what lies on the other side of the Atlantic in 1492. So to find a casual mention of his existence in this text for more than 1,800 years earlier was unexpected. But then again, maybe I'm just reading too much into this.

Maybe my interpretation of the text is being colored by the fact that I know what lies on the other side of the Atlantic, and so I'm assuming that Plato is referring to the thing that is familiar to me. I recognize that's a distinct possibility. After all, it's not like it would be impossible to get it. that there might be a continent on the other side of the ocean. Of all the possible things that could be over there, more land is probably the most intuitive and logical guess.

And if the ancient Greeks knew about the Americas, it feels like we should have more evidence than this casual mention in a story that may not even have been meant to be taken literally. So does this evidence exist? It actually does. And though it's far from definitive, it's worth mentioning because this evidence has a startling connection to the mysterious icy realm

realm that got us here in the first place, Antarctica. And no discussion of Antarctica would be complete without discussing the Piri-Ris map. Compiled in 1513 by the Ottoman Admiral and Cartographer, Piri-Ris, the one-third of the map that still remains shows the western coasts of Europe and North Africa and the coast of Brazil with reasonable accuracy. Various Atlantic islands, including the Azores and Canary Islands, are depicted as well. Having been created two decades after Columbus first sailed to America. It's not particularly surprising with the details of North America,

the Caribbean, and the northern portion of South America have a few anomalies, but they are more or less correct. So why do I bring this map up? The Piri-Rees map is significant for a couple of different reasons. The first is that, despite showing the coastlines of the other continents

with a relatively high degree of accuracy for the time period, there is a large and peculiar flaw in the map. Although the northern portion of South America, is accurately represented, the Piri-Rees map shows the horn of South America turning sharply eastwards, almost at a 90-degree angle, as if South America wraps around the Atlantic at the bottom of the map. So that is definitely weird.

But what does that have to do with Antarctica? Arlington H. Mallory, a civil engineer and amateur archaeologist who was a supporter of a pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact hypothesis, was the first to notice the striking similarities between this puzzling section of the map and the Queen Modland coast of Antarctica. And they do indeed look very similar, except that instead of being covered in ice, the map suggests a much more temperate climate with flowing rivers and forests. Although Mallory's ideas were not well received, they were given new life by our old friend Charles Hapgood, the author of Earth's Shifting Crust, in his 1966 book, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. Based on his analysis of this

and other ancient and late medieval maps. His book proposed a theory of global exploration by a pre-classical, undiscovered civilization. Even more controversially, these claims were repeated in Eric von Danikin's Chariots of the Gods, a classic in the genre of ancient astronaut theory. And unsurprisingly, von Daniken attributed the seeming knowledge

of the Antarctic coast to extraterrestrials. We'll come back to what all of this has to do with Atlantis in just a minute. But the other reason that the Peary-Rees map is notable is because of claims that it was compiled using sources dating back to the 4th century BC, right around the same time that Plato was writing as dialogues. The argument is basically that although the map was compiled 20 years after Columbus sailed to America, that really wasn't enough time for the coastline of the Americas to be recorded as accurately as they were with the technology of the time.

Therefore, the accuracy of the map must be due to other much older sources that were also consulted, and therefore, there must have been ancient seafaring civilizations who had already discovered these lands. So could it be that the ancient Greeks really did know about the Americas, and had they perhaps even ventured as far as Antarctica? Or could those maps from the 4th century BC have been based on even older maps from an even more remote past? It's certainly interesting to consider. However, the whole thing hinges on the idea that Piri-Ris consulted maps from the 4th century, BC, and I had a very hard time finding anything beyond anecdotal evidence to back that up, as none of the original source maps still remain.

And the claim that these maps came from the famed Library of Alexandria, which would lend some credence to their antiquity, has been called into question by scholars. Some have made the case that Piri Rees made the common mistake of confusing Ptolemy I, who ruled Alexandria in the 4th century BC, and Claudius Ptolemy, the Greek geographer and cartographer who lived in Alexandria during the second century AD. I mean, who hasn't made that mistake? And this would mean that the original maps would have been made at least six centuries later

than initially claimed. And further doubt was cast on the fourth century origins of the Peary-Rees source maps in an analysis done by Gregory McIntosh, a historian of cartography, who examined the map in depth in his book, the Peary-Ree's map of 1513. In it, McIntosh outlined

how he was able to find sources for much of the map, in Columbus's detailed writings, making the inclusion of ancient, more accurate maps unnecessary to explain the Piri-Rees' map's accuracy. So while the Piri-Rees map is extremely interesting, I don't personally think that it rises to the level of definitive proof that the ancient Greeks knew about the Americas, or of anything else, really. So going back to that passage in Tamaes about the location of Atlantis, there was something else there that struck me as being particularly interesting. The idea that after Atlantis, sank, the waters that covered it were still shallow enough to make a large region of the Atlantic

ocean muddy and unnavigable. This fact is mentioned very casually within this passage, which is meant to explain the reason for something that seems to be common knowledge. And if the fact that the Atlantic was unnavigable because of a giant muddy shoal was common knowledge to Plato and his contemporaries, we should be able to find evidence for that, right? And if we had that, it might not be definitive proof of the existence of Atlantis, but it would at least give us some idea of where that myth may have come from. However, I was unable to find anything that would confirm that this was actually the case. If this was, in fact, something that was common knowledge among the ancient Greeks, it appears to have been lost to the sands of time. Although there is some evidence that this muddy

shoal in the Atlantic could have once existed. According to Christopher Columbus's own accounts, when his ships reached the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, he and his men were surprised. He and his men were surprised to find themselves almost impossibly tangled in seaweed and floating algae. The vegetation was so dense that they had assumed that they must be close to shore. It took them a week to finally break through to the other side, and when they did, they were surprised to find only more open ocean. Could this strange account of shallow waters in the middle of the Atlantic be describing the last remnants of the muddy shoal, referred to by Plato? some have argued that what Columbus and his men ran into was what we now call the Sargasso Sea.

The Sargasso Sea is a region in the Atlantic Ocean, and similar to the Southern Ocean, it is surrounded by water on all sides. But whereas the Southern Ocean is bordered on all sides by other oceans, the boundaries of the Sargasso Sea are formed by four currents in the Atlantic. The reason that people believe that this is what Columbus's ship encountered is that this is a region that is known for having a region. lot of seaweed and calm waters. And this could be the case, though generally the seaweed in this area isn't known to be so dense as to tangle up a ship, but who knows what it was like in 1492. So that's one possibility. But could there really have been a shallow spot in the middle of the Atlantic in the time of Plato, one that could have made the waters of the Atlantic Ocean unnavigable to ships coming from the Mediterranean? It's impossible to know for sure, but if there were,

there should still be some evidence of it under the water, right? And I'd argue that the best candidate for this, if it is in fact the case, is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. One to two miles below the waters of the Atlantic, and running lengthwise north to south down its center is the longest mountain range in the world, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. These massive mountains are the place where tectonic plates come together. In the South Atlantic, it separates the African and South American plates.

And in the North Atlantic, almost precisely due west from the Strait of Gibraltar, is a massive elevated area called the Azores Triple Junction, where the boundaries of three tectonic plates intersect, the North American plate, the Eurasian plate, and the African plate. And right at this junction, there is an archipelago of nine islands called the Azores. To me, this area is by far the most likely location for the mythical Atlantis, if it did exist. It's exactly in the right spot that if this region, had been much closer to the surface of the ocean in the distant past, it would have made much of the Atlantic inaccessible to any ships coming from the Mediterranean. And considering that the places where tectonic

plates come together are some of the most geologically active places in the world, it's not unthinkable that this part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge could have been, at one time, above sea level, and that something very much like an earthquake described in Plato's dialogues could have plunged this entire region into the sea. I'll link to the coordinates on Google Earth in the episode brief so that you can look at it for yourself and draw your own conclusions. And this brings us back to our original question that got us here. Is Atlantis real? And I got to tell you, when I started down this rabbit hole, I didn't think that there was any way in hell that I was going to answer that question in the affirmative. I mean, everyone knows that Atlantis is just a myth

and a silly one at that. But having looked at the evidence, it suddenly doesn't seem so far-fetched to think that the story of Atlantis might point to real events. I don't know about Poseidon or the ringed city or its temples with gold walls, but it seems reasonable to believe that there could have been more of what is now the Azores above the water in the distant past. And if that region was plunged into the ocean by the shifting of tectonic plates, whether in a single day and night, as described in Plato, or over a longer period of time, that is something that likely would have been remembered in our myths. And if there were pockets, of high civilization before the last ice age, as the evidence increasingly suggests, perhaps the

Atlanteans were one of them. To say that I believe in Atlantis would be too strong of a word, but I no longer think it's crazy. And there's more than one piece of evidence that points to the possibility that Atlantis once existed in what is now the Azores. In 2013, a sailor using a bathymetric navigation system, which shows the depth of subsurface objects while fishing on his yacht, discovered a perfect four-sided pyramid under the water between the islands of Sao Miguel and Tresera in the Azores. The pyramid is 40 meters deep and has a base larger than a football field. And strikingly, it is oriented exactly to the cardinal directions north and south, just like the pyramids at Giza and elsewhere around the world.

I'll link to images and news footage in the episode brief so you can check it out for yourself. However, as stunning as this discovery was, it quickly fell out of the news, and there has been seemingly very little interest from the Portuguese government in investigating this pyramid further. Much like the pyramid and other structures found off the western tip of Cuba that we discussed in episode nine, mainstream scientists and academics have largely dismissed the possibility that the pyramid could have been man-made. Their reasoning? The last time the area where the pyramid was found was above sea level was still. 20,000 years ago. So we've more or less come to an answer about whether or not Atlantis could have been real. But in doing so, we've seemingly also answered our next question. Could Atlantis actually have been in Antarctica? And having looked at the evidence, the answer is pretty clearly no. It just doesn't

make sense for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it's nowhere near the place where Atlantis was said to have been. Add to that the fact that most of Antarctica is covered by a layer of ice up to three miles deep, and that it has been so for almost 100 million years. And you might be wondering why anyone would have ever thought that Antarctica could be Atlantis in the first place. The arguments for the idea that Antarctica is actually Atlantis are primarily based on two things with which we are already familiar, the Piri-Rice map and the work of Charles Hapgood. As we discussed, the Piri-Rice map shows a landmass that extends off the horn of South America

at an almost 90-degree angle. And this landmass bears a striking resemblance to the coastline of Antarctica. And to be clear, I do think that's significant, even if we don't know exactly what it signifies. According to our current understanding of history, Antarctica wasn't discovered until 1819. So finding something that looks so much like the coastline of Antarctica in a map from 300 years earlier is interesting,

even if it's in completely the wrong place. At the very least, it suggests that we're missing a piece of the puzzle somewhere. However, some have taken the Piri-Rees map as proof, not only that Antarctica was known to humans much earlier than we previously thought, but that it was actually once located much farther north near the equator between South America and Africa. And the fact that the map shows it as a land with rivers and other suggestions of a much more temperate climate is used as further evidence that Antarctica must have once been much further north. And that's where the work of Charles Hapgood comes in.

You'll recall that Hapgood proposed in his book, Earth Shifting Crest, that the crust of the earth can slip dramatically on the mantle, almost like the peel of an orange if it could move independently of the fruit inside. And so the argument is basically that due to a dramatic shift in the Earth's crust, what is now Antarctica was relocated to the South Pole. And the stories of Atlantis sinking were just a misunderstanding of events. It didn't disappear under the waves, but rather it was yanked thousands of miles south.

But there are a couple of reasons why I think this theory is untenable. The first, which I've already mentioned, is that Antarctica has been buried under miles of ice for almost 100 million years, or 35 million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs. Scientists are able to date the ice by taking core samples, so the timing on that is something that we're actually pretty sure about. And although scientists do believe that the climate in Antarctica was once as warm as Italy, and was covered in a rich rainforest, it was so long ago as to be utterly irrelevant to any discussion of Atlantis. The second reason that I don't think Antarctica could be Atlantis can be found by looking at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

The coastlines of South America and Africa are interesting because of the fact that there is almost nowhere else on Earth where the effects of plate tectonics are more obvious. Even before elementary school students learn about plate tectonics, it's not unusual for them to notice after years of staring at the world map on their classroom wall, that the coastlines of these two continents fit together almost like puzzle pieces, despite the fact that they are separated by 5,000 miles of ocean. So whatever else may or may not have happened to the Earth's crust in the past, it seems pretty safe to say that South America and Africa haven't moved relative to each other. For a landmass that was located between South America and Africa to have been shifted approximately

6,000 miles south, while the continents on either side, stayed in the same place relative to each other, would require something entirely different than the orange peel-type movement described by Habgood. It would mean that the Earth's crust was capable of moving more like a Rubik's cube, where you can rotate the center section while the two side section stays stationary. That doesn't just sound unlikely, but it looks unlikely as well. If you look at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge on Google Earth, you can clearly see these two continental plates perfectly budding up against each other to form the towering under water mountain range. It's hard to imagine that an entire other continent could have been positioned

between these plates just 10 to 20,000 years ago, and that we wouldn't be able to see evidence of that massive shift on the ocean floor, but that evidence simply isn't there. And we could say the same for much of the evidence of Atlantis. It simply isn't there. So why does humanity keep coming back to this story? Why does this myth speak to us? They say that absence of evidence, isn't evidence of absence. But in the case of Atlantis, the evidence is in the absence. Atlantis exists in the holes in our narratives and the gaps in our history. Atlantis is the negative space that we fill with our imagination and our longing. It exists in the place where God stops talking mid-sentence.

And while the story of Atlantis, as told in Plato's dialogues, is largely considered to be an allegory and a cautionary tale warning against the dangers of materialism, greed, and hubris. I'd argue that there's another deeper and more poignant warning there as well. A warning that, despite all of our scientific mastery, we are still like children in the world with much to learn. It's a warning against the dangers of forgetting, not just our history, but ourselves, that even the mightiest civilizations are delicate and contingent things that can easily slip beneath the waves and be swallowed by the unfathomable depths of time. And that, though we know not the day nor the hour, eventually our time will also come.

While it seems pretty clear that Antarctica is not Atlantis, some claim that there is evidence that Antarctica was once the home of an even more ancient civilization from a much more remote chapter of the distant past. Located on the western side of the Kotlitz Glacier in Antarctica, there is a near-perfect stone pyramid. Mainstream scientists will tell you that this pyramid is just an unusually shaped mountain, and that its pyramidal appearance is the result of natural freeze-thaw erosion. Freeze-thaw erosion happens when snow or water fills up cracks within a mountain during the day. When night falls and temperatures drop, the snow freezes and expands turning into ice.

The expanding ice causes the cracks to grow. After this happens countless times, the cracks get bigger and bigger, and can eventually cause entire sections of the mountain to break off. And according to scientists, this is how the flat faces the pyramid were formed. However, there are those that believe that this pyramid is too perfect to possibly be the result of natural processes, and that it serves as undeniable proof that an advanced civilization once thrived on what is now a desolate continent.

And listen, there's almost nothing that I would like to believe more. I mean, pyramids in Antarctica, yes, please, I want to read. every Reddit manifesto and watch every sketchy YouTube video on this that there is. I want to buy every poorly written and wonkily formatted e-book I can find on the subject, and honestly, I basically have. But as objectively awesome and entertaining as I find this topic to be, and as much as I want to believe it, I can't really say that I was convinced. It's fun to think about, but there are three main facts that make it hard to accept that this

wasn't intentionally and intelligently built pyramid. The first is obviously, that in Arctica has been a frozen wasteland for almost 100 million years, whereas by the latest estimates, Homo sapiens appeared around 300,000 years ago. So if this is a pyramid from a lost civilization, it wasn't even remotely human. And given the vastness of space and the unfathomable expanse of time between now and 100 million years ago, I'm open-minded enough to consider the possibility that Earth may have been colonized at one time by an advanced species of pyramid builders. But without Without further proof, that's just too big of a leap to take, especially if it could just be a mountain. The second reason I have a hard time believing that this is an intelligently built pyramid

is its sheer size. At around 4,000 feet, or 1,200 meters, it would be a very modestly sized mountain, but it would be an absolute monster of a pyramid. At 10 times the size of the great pyramid of Giza, or as tall as 3.3 Empire State buildings stacked on top of the world. of each other, the construction effort of this scale would be virtually unfathomable, even with our current technology. And the third reason is that, unlike other megalithic pyramids found throughout the world that are constructed from large blocks of quarried stone, this pyramid appears to be made out of one solid, relatively uniform piece of stone. And while conceivably, this could be a mountain that was intentionally shaped to form a pyramid, there's no reason to automatically assume that,

given that there are natural processes that could explain this just as easily. So as much as it saddens me, I had to let go of my dream that the pyramid in Antarctica was actually a thing. RIP and Arctic Pyramid, we hardly knew thee. But then something very strange started happening that made me reconsider. And to be perfectly honest, I actually hesitate to tell you this. It's my intention with this podcast to never put anything in front of you that I can't corroborate. And I can't prove what I'm about to say. I'll link up everything that I can find in the episode brief, but none of it is conclusive.

There is no smoking gun. And as always, I would recommend that you never take anyone's word for anything, including mine. So take everything that I'm about to say with a big grain of salt. If you find it interesting, you can put it on the shelf and see if something comes of it later. Okay, so, when I first started to dig into the UFO phenomenon in the summer of 2021, the whole topic of Antarctica was one of the first major rabbit holes I went down. And for a couple of weeks, I was obsessed. I got really into looking at Antarctica on Google Earth

and would spend hours zooming in on mountain ranges, coastlines, and other features just to see what I could see. There were lots of other people at the time on Reddit and other places who were doing the same kind of thing and sharing coordinates from what they found. And I remember some weird ones. There was a spot that looked like there might be half of a crashed, saucer-shaped craft sticking out of the snow, and another place on the side of the mountain that seemed to have a UFO-shaped hole going into its interior. And of course, there was the pyramid.

I found all of this endlessly interesting, but I also didn't put a lot of stock in any particular theories or conclusions. I feel the same way about photos of supposed anomalies or intelligently designed objects on the moon and Mars. It's all in good fun, but I don't really know what I'm looking at. Our brains are wired to recognize shapes, faces, and patterns and things that aren't necessarily there, like seeing a cloud shaped like a duck or the Virgin Mary on a burnt piece of toast. And frankly, pyramids and crash saucers feel a little too on the nose to be credible. And before long, a new topic caught my attention and I moved on. But then when I began the outline for what would eventually become this episode,

I went back to find all these anomalies, and the pyramid in particular, only to find that they were gone. And while I can't prove conclusively what it looked like before, if you go to Google Earth, there are still some major clues that something strange is going on here. If you go to Google Earth and type in Pyramid Antarctica, it will take you to a location in Antarctica, but there's nothing there. And not in the sense that it's Antarctica, and there isn't a Starbucks or a 7-Eleven to be found. I mean there's nothing. Not snow, not ice, not rocks.

Just a blank white expanse. There are mountains that surround the area that can be seen quite clearly, but in the place for the pyramid used to be, in which Google Earth seems to still recognize as a legitimate location, there is nothing. The landscape is as featureless as a blank word document. When you zoom out far enough that the pyramid is only just barely visible, the detail of the ground reappears.

It's very strange. Stranger still is that this doesn't happen everywhere. If you zoom out just a little further, You'll see McMurdo Station nearby where you can easily zoom in and see buildings and even vehicles, objects that are much smaller than a 4,000-foot pyramid. Another interesting detail is that, as recently as early April, when you looked at the pyramid on Google Earth, although it showed nothing on the ground, the little summary that pops up about the area you searched for still showed an actual picture of the pyramid and a description of it.

But as of the publishing of this episode in July of 2022, the image is some kind of of a hut in what looks to be a tropical location. Is the Antarctic pyramid being slowly erased? I honestly don't know. I think it's important to note that what I'm describing about how the pyramid looks on Google Earth can be said for most of the continent. From a distance, you can see the details of the landscape, but as you zoom in, huge areas look like they were sloppily whited out in Microsoft Paint. So it would be an overreach to assume that if this was done intentionally, that it was done specifically because of the pyramid. So maybe there is some logical, non-conspiracy reason

for why so much of the continent is unviewable when you zoom in. It's possible. Maybe the reflection of the snow or its location at the bottom of the globe make it hard to photograph. Maybe it just isn't a priority. But based on the evidence, it also seems entirely possible that there is something in Antarctica

that the powers that be don't want us to see. What could that be? And could the Nazis have stumbled across? whatever it was in the lead-up to World War II? We've already discussed some of the possibilities for what they may have found, including the remnants of Atlantis or some other advanced civilization in the distant past. But there are other possibilities that have been suggested, and you better strap in because they only get more bizarre.

And one of the strangest of these is the idea that there is a secret alien base located under the ice in Antarctica. This is an idea that pops up throughout the UFO Nazi lore, but perhaps the most famous and intriguing source for this has been presented by Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist and Grand Dame of Uphology, Linda Moulton Howe. So let's start with that story. Linda Moulton Howe reported in her 2019 documentary, Antarctica, Alien Secrets Beneath the Ice, that she was approached by an alleged whistleblower within the military about the existence of massive, mysterious structures under the ice in Antarctica. This whistleblower was a Navy seal lieutenant commander. who asked Moulton Howe to refer to him as Spartan 1 and to not reveal his seal team number.

He claimed that in August of 2003, he was sent to Antarctica. His mission was to extract a scientist who was there studying thousands of glyphs that had been found there, that he said resembled those of the Egyptians and Mayans, but that were entirely unknown to us. He also alleged that these glyphs resemble those that have been found on the moon and on Mars by members of the United States Secret Space Program. him. So yeah, we're in the deep end of the pool here. Don't fight it. For now, just let it wash over you. According to Spartan 1, he was sent to the Beardmore Glacier region where the scientist was working,

and at this location there was a massive black octagon-shaped structure that protruded 18 feet above the ice made of black basalt. On the front of this structure was a black door, 23 feet high and 18 feet thick, which opened easily with a gentle push from just one finger. On this door was carved a star map and an esoteric symbol known as the Black Sun that, interestingly, was favored by the Nazis. When Spartan 1 stepped inside, he found himself in a huge nine-acre room, with ramps leading down to other equally massive spaces below, and the structure continued down one to two miles deep into the ice. The story goes on from there, and it only gets progressively more wild. But how seriously should we take any of this? Is Linda Moulton-how credit

Like everything in uphology, the answer to that question is complicated. And before we dive into that, I should admit my own bias here. I love Linda Moulton Howe, and I think she's a badass. She's one of the OGs of UFO investigative journalism. And in a field where even today men greatly outnumber women, she's been doing her thing for more than four decades. She's a trailblazer in every sense of the word. And if you've ever seen her holding court on her YouTube channel while stroking her long-haired

cats in front of towering stacks of books, just know that that is everything that I hope to someday be. What a queen. However, despite my deep and abiding love for LMH, I can't deny that she's a complicated figure, and it's worth our time to take a minute to talk about why this is the case. And to do so, we need to go back to the very beginning of Linda Moultenhow's career. Born in Boise, Idaho in 1942, Linda Moulton Howe set herself apart from her peers early on. She was a beauty queen competing as Miss Idaho in the Miss America pageant in 1963, and she accepted an intellectual pursuits as well. She received her BA in English literature from the University of Colorado in 1965, after which she was awarded the Stanley Babere Scholarship for her

Master's degree work at Stanford University, from which she graduated with a Masters in Communication in 1968. By 1978, Howe became the director of special projects at KMGIA. TV in Denver, Colorado, where her career really began to take off. Her work at the time was primarily focused on environmental issues, and she made several documentaries on the subject over the next two years, including poison in the wind, which compared smog pollution in Los Angeles and Denver, fire in the water about hydrogen as an alternative energy source to fossil fuels, and a radioactive water about uranium contamination of public drinking water in a Denver suburb. By 1980, how is focused had shifted and she produced a strange harvest, a documentary which explored the phenomenon

of cattle mutilation. In it, she suggested that the unusual wounds found on cattle are the work of extraterrestrial beings who harvest body parts required for their survival or research. She also leveled a bold accusation against the U.S. government that they both knew about this phenomenon and were complicit in it. The documentary garnered a lot of media attention, and by March of 1983, Linda Moulton Howe was in New York City, in the offices of HBO, signing a contract to produce a one-hour film called UFOs, the ET Factor. As a seasoned journalist and documentarian, this was the big break that she had been waiting for her entire career. That night, after signing the contract, she met up with an attorney named Peter Gersten for dinner.

Gerston was the attorney who represented Citizens Against UFO Secrecy and was responsible for the first Freedom of Information Act request filed, asking for all UFO-related documents in the possession of U.S. intelligence agencies. At dinner, Girsten showed Howe documents that have been shared with him by a man named Richard C. Doty, who worked at Curtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These documents were about a UFO landing, an alien contact event that occurred at Ellsworth Air Force Base. Girston said that Doty was willing to share more information about the incident with Howe, including the names of the specific witnesses that were there. But she needed to fly out to Curtland Air Force Base for a meeting to receive them.

You have to imagine that that was one of the best nights of Lyndon Moulin Howe's life, right? She was 41 years old, in the prime of her career, and after years of paying her dues, she takes a chance on a crazy story that no other credible journalist will touch, and it pays off. She starts getting more recognition, her star begins to rise. And then she gets a deal with HBO. And on the night that she signs the contract, she suddenly gets this invitation to glimpse behind the curtain, to enter the inner sanctum of UFO secrecy, and perhaps finally find the truth, not just for herself, but for all mankind. And if government insiders like Richard C. Doty are willing to go on the record, she'd be breaking the story of the millennia, that our government was in direct contact with extraterrestrial beings. A few short weeks later, on April 9, 1983, Linda Moulton Howe is met by Doty at Curtland Air Force Base.

He takes her into an office that he says belongs to his boss, a colonel, and closes the door. Howe thinks that she is there to learn the names of the Ellsworth Landing Witnesses. But instead, Doty says to her that her documentary on cattle mutilation has broadsided the U.S. government and that they'd never thought a serious journalist would take this subject seriously and actually investigate it. At this point, Linda Moultenhow is reeling. Doty asks her to move from her chair to another chair across the room, and he hands her a folder full of documents. He tells her that the higher-ups want her to see what's inside the folder, and that she's not allowed to take them with her or to take notes.

Howe opens the folder, and the very first document on the top, is a briefing for the president of the United States on unidentified aerial craft. Whoa. So she starts reading, doing her best to commit every word to memory. The first few pages are all historical context, things that Howe was already familiar with given her investigations, like the early UFO crashes and other UFO sightings and incidents. But here was what appeared to be confirmation by the U.S. government that these things had actually occurred. But on the third page was something entirely different. And on it, Linda Moulton Howe read the words that she said changed her life forever. The document read, quote,

these biological extraterrestrial entities manipulated DNA in already evolving primates to create Homo sapien. And on the final page, there was mention of a secret project called Project Garnet, something that jumped out at Howe because Garnet is her birthstone.

A description of Project Garnet concluded, all questions and mysteries about the evolution of Homo sapiens on this planet have been answered, and this investigation is closed. Linda Moultenhow was thunderstruck by what she read. She flies back to Colorado, and when she gets home, she calls HBO. She tells them everything that has just happened to her and suggests a new direction for a documentary. They tell her that she should come back to New York City

so that they could have another meeting. Two weeks later, she's back in the HBO offices, and they basically tell her that they aren't moving forward with any version of the documentary at all, unless she can get the president, vice president, secretary of defense, or the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff to go on the record corroborating her claims. Now, to me, what this sounds like is that HBO got spooked. They brought on this respected investigative journalist who could add an air of legitimacy to a documentary on UFOs. And then a couple of weeks after signing a contract, she's calling them talking about meeting with shadowy government officials and that humans are genetically engineered hominids created by biological extraterrestrial entities who are in contact

with our government. And of course, she has nothing to prove any of this. I'm sure when that happened, everyone involved at HBO felt like they had made a huge and potentially very embarrassing mistake in taking on this project. And I'm sure that they couldn't hit the abort button fast enough. And I'm betting the giving how an impossible hurdle to jump in order to move forward with the project, was their way of wiggling out of following through on a contract they'd already signed. But that didn't stop Linda Moulton Howe. She was so close. And now she not only had a contact on the inside, but she had enough of the big picture to know what she was looking for. So for the next two years, she worked tirelessly, self-funding all of her work, trying to put together more of the

story and the evidence to corroborate it. However, her contract with HBO ran out in 1985 in the documentary was never made. Those of you who are already familiar with Richard Doty already know how this story goes, but for those of you who don't. Richard Doty was a special agent for the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations, specializing in counterintelligence. He later admitted to feeding disinformation to Linda Moulton Howe and to others in the UFO community in order to discredit them in their work. Among these others was Paul Benowitz, a businessman and physicist who had recorded strange lights in the sky from his home across from Curtland Air Force Base. While virtually anyone who had contact with Doty had their reputations and careers irreparably

tarnished, if not utterly destroyed, the Benowitz case was particularly tragic. As a result of what he was told and shown by Doty, Benowitz's mental health began to deteriorate rapidly. In 1988, his sons took over his business and his family committed him to a mental institution. We don't have time to go down that particular rabbit hole today, because it's one that is exceedingly dark and seemingly bottomless. But I'll do an episode on government disinformation campaigns in the UFO community at some point in the future. And in the meantime, if you're interested in learning more about what happened, I highly recommend a documentary called The Mirage Men. I'll link to that in the episode brief. However, it's exactly this kind of intentional and targeted

disinformation on the subject of UFOs that can make it very difficult to establish the credibility of anyone who's been caught up in it. In the case of Linda Moulton Howellon, She says that what she saw in the file folder at Curtland Air Force Base made it impossible for her to pursue anything else. And she spent the rest of her career investigating the government's involvement with UFOs, ETs, and the origins of the human species. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply.

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Terms apply. But wait, does she not realize that Doty fed her misinformation, or does she not believe that he did, or is it just hedging to avoid the embarrassment of having been misled? Once again, there are no easy answers here. First, let's take a minute to talk about counterintelligence and how it works. Counterintelligence is an activity aimed at protecting an agency's intelligence program from an opposition's intelligence service. So basically, just like we're trying to get intelligence on what our adversaries are doing, they're trying to get intelligence on what we are doing.

So we run counterintelligence to try to protect the secrets that we don't want them to have. This usually involves things like leaking disinformation, secretly infiltrating groups and communities, trying to turn agents on the other side into double agents and just generally other sneaky spy shit. But many countries, including the United States, don't just run counterintelligence on foreign threats, but on domestic ones as well. As in, they spy on, lie to, and manipulate their own citizens. to protect state secrets. And the fallout from these efforts can be absolutely devastating to the people who are targeted. Most of these counterintelligence efforts are meant to undermine people's

credibility, to alienate them from those they would otherwise influence, to manipulate them into doing things that they wouldn't otherwise do, to destroy their reputations, and even to make them question reality and their own sanity. As a result of these actions, the lives, careers, and families of innocent, ordinary people have been utterly destroyed. For those who have been in the UFO community for a long time, and those who are scholars of the history of modern euphology, the specter of government meddling and misinformation is always there in the background. They are rightfully on guard against it and can be very suspicious of anyone in the community who has any kind of an intelligence background. This is actually the main source of the considerable division in the

community over Luis Elizondo, the former director of ATIP. Despite being the driving force, and the face behind the current push for disclosure that has thus far resulted in the public admission that the UFO phenomenon is real, the acknowledgement of videos and actual incidents involving the military, legislation being passed to improve transparency and reporting around UAPs, and the first hearings in Congress on UFOs in 50 years. There are those that still don't trust Elizondo due to his counterintelligence background. And while I don't necessarily agree with them, I can totally see where you're coming from, and I actually think it makes a lot of sense to be skeptical.

For his part, when confronted with questions about his background and counterintelligence, Lou's response has been to emphatically deny that the United States runs counterintelligence on its own citizens. He admits that it's been done in the past and that it has done massive damage to members of the UFO community. However, he claims that the government has learned its lesson and that we don't do that sort of thing anymore. And listen, I truly have nothing but respect for Lou Elizondo, but I simply don't. don't believe that, and I don't believe that he believes it either. I'd argue that we have really nothing but evidence that that is not the case. But even if that weren't true, any thinking person

would still have questions. That's why we call it breaking trust. Once it's broken, it's broken. And even if you manage to rebuild it and glue the pieces back together over time, you'll always see the cracks. Which is exactly what makes it so difficult to make any kind of a judgment with regards to the truth of anything that has been touched by the corrosive influence of Richard Doty. Doty admits to intentionally feeding disinformation to people in the UFO community. He admits to going to elaborate lengths to make his targets believe this disinformation was real by doing things like staging fake UFO crashes. He admits to turning certain members of the community, including author of the first major book on Roswell, Bill Moore, into an asset who both

intentionally lied to and informed on other members of the community. And he admits all of this completely unself-consciously and with an unnerving lack of remorse. He talks about how he became friends with Benowitz and tells the story that at one point, he went to Benowitz as a friend and told him that all this crazy UFO stuff was destroying him and that he needed to let it go. Benowitz refused, and Doty continued to terrorize him, despite his rapidly deteriorating physical and mental health. Any normal human being finds the story to be chilling, and even repugnant. But Doty seemingly feels no regret and takes zero accountability for the very

real harm that his actions inflicted upon someone that he, to this day, I saw him do it on Twitter today, calls a friend. As he tells it, he was just doing what he was told. And what he was told to do was to lie and to discredit and to muddy the waters so completely as to utterly compromise his targets. To do that, he says that some of what he fed his targets was true. This is a common counterintelligence tactic. And according to Doty, one of the smartest ways to do this is to make it so that some of the most unbelievable details included in the disinformation are the ones that are actually true. Do you see how complicated this gets? What are we to make of the fact that Doty admits to all of this?

What parts should we believe? All of it? None of it? And it's all made more complicated by. the fact that Doty continues to involve himself in the UFO community. He attends conferences and participates in television shows and documentaries where he openly talks about his disinformation campaigns within the community. Weirder still, he now also claims that he's seen proof that the United States has contact with ETs and that we're in possession of non-human technology and more.

So he's now profiting off the very community in which he reached so much havoc. Havoc that had real and lasting consequences in real people's lives. The whole thing isn't just ethically fucked, but it creates even more questions. Is he still lying? Is this just the next phase of the deception? Or is what he says now true? Does he even know what's true? There's a scene near the end of Mirage Men that I found particularly compelling,

where Richard Doty is describing how he was read into the government's involvement with UFOs and extraterrestrial beings. He says that he was shown documents and photographs about these secretive government programs and even saw a video of an alien talking in front of a camera. And as he's talking and saying all these fantastical things, you can't help but notice the similarities between the alleged reading in in the meeting that he had with Linda Moulton Howe at Curtland Air Force Base.

Let's assume that this has actually happened, which was someone like Doty you can never assume. But let's say it's true. How do we know that what Doty was told was even the truth? Could the US be running counterintelligence on its own? counterintelligence people? If you're going to embed a counterintelligence agent within a community that you're hoping to surveil, wouldn't it make sense for that person to be also misinformed? That seems like a pretty smart failsafe. So how could anyone hope to find the truth in any of this?

As Linda Moultenhow poignantly said in Mirage Men, it's a fractured hall of mirrors with a quick sand floor. So let's get back to our original question that brought us down this tangential rabbit hole. Is Linda Moulton Howe credible? In her defense, the fact that she was targeted by Doty suggests that she was getting close to something. It seems likely that the timing of this first contact with her coinciding with her signing the contract with HBO was not coincidental. So whether she actually had, as Doty said to her, blindsided the government with her documentary on cattle mutilation, or whether they were just trying to dissuade mainstream media outlets from reporting on any of this seriously, something that she did ruffled some feathers.

However, 40 years later, her credibility continues to be called into question, largely because she continues to present information that she got from Doty as fact, without any sort of caveat about the provenance of this information. It's very strange, because she admits to talking to Doty. She admits to getting this information from him. She admits that he was a counterintelligence agent. But there's this weird sort of cognitive dissonance. that seems to prevent her from truly accepting the full impact of what all that means.

In January of 2022, Linda Moulton Howe was interviewed by Kurt Jai Mungle on theories of everything, and there was this very strange exchange that happened near the end. She first is asked about her relationship with Richard Doty, and she goes on to tell basically the whole story that I just told you about the deal with HBO, her meeting with Doty, and the deal falling apart. But in telling this story, she doesn't really seem to factor in, or even to really acknowledge the fact that Doty is a known counterintelligence agent who has famously and publicly admitted to lying to her.

And then this happens, listen. Do you feel that you were misinformed by Doty? Anybody who is an Air Force office of special investigations agent, that is their job. Counterintelligence is what they do. So yes or no? Brad is giving me a signal of my mic battery. is going to die. Okay, okay. Weird, right? And shortly thereafter, Kurt asks her another question from a listener about whether or not she's ever had to redact a story, at which point she stormed out of the

interview. As always, I'll have that all linked up in the episode brief so that you can check it out for yourself. I have a lot of empathy for Linda Moulton Howe. She's clearly intelligent, hardworking, and driven. And like I said, she's a trailblazer in many respects and a seemingly fearless one. And I also think it's important to recognize the human element in all of this. She wasn't just intentionally lied to and misled. She was personally and professionally torpedoed by what Doty did to her. At the height of her career, a career that she had built out of her own sweat, passion, and talent, she had the biggest opportunity that she had ever had taken from her and had her name dragged through the mud.

She was ruined in the sphere of mainstream journalism. and although she's made quite the career in the UFO space, her name will always have an asterisk next to it. I think it's hard to judge unless you've walked a mile in those shoes. But even I have a hard time understanding her stance on Doty and her seeming refusal to grapple with the reality and the impact of what's happened, at least publicly. So how should we approach her work now? What do we make of stories of alien bases in Antarctica and a secret space program in cooperation with extra-traum? and ancient civilizations on Mars and all the rest of it. I'll simply say this.

Howe's work is undoubtedly significant, but the truth of it still lies somewhere in that fractured hall of mirrors. And finally, we come to our final theory as to what the Germans may have found in Antarctica in 1938. And despite the deeply weird path that we've taken to get here, this theory is perhaps the most bizarre of all. The Entrance to Hollow Earth. And there's a lot more to this story than you might think. And at the center of this incredible tale is one man,

a famed explorer and real American hero, Admiral Richard E. Bird. And that's where we'll pick up next time. I'll see you then.