If you've been following the strangeness in Antarctica, you can add some more strangeness, and this ranges from a completely unsubstantiated rumor, which we'll get to in a moment, to something that is a little more than... well, creepy, which will be the subject of our trademark High Octane Speculation de jour.

So let's look at the unsubstantiated rumor. When Ms. K.F. sent this to me, I looked at the subject header, and said out loud to my empty office, "You've got to be kidding!" I clicked on the link and found this:

Now, I have no idea where this story is coming from, and in the limited time I've had to do various searches for it, I've not been able to find exactly where - if anywhere - this is coming from. So, I'm filing this in the "Unsubstantiated But Definitely Interesting Rumor" file. Normally I wouldn't even mention something like this, other than for the fact that of all the strange, and on occasion weird, people on the "People Associated with Antarctica List," Newt Gingrich would certainly fit right in there with Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering, Richard Byrd, King Juan Carlos, Prince Harry, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Secretary of State John Kerry, and the Patriarch of Moscow, Kiril III. (Our only advice to Mr. Gingrich is that if he really is intending to go look at penguins and study climate change, that he take Nancy Pelosi and John McCain with him, and leave them there.) But seriously, even if this is unsubstantiated rumor, consider only what this very bizarre list adds up to:

1) The Reichsleiter of the Nazi Party until 1941 (Hess);

2) The founder and head of the Luftwaffe and founder of the Gestapo (Goering);

3) An American admiral and arctic explorer;

4) The King of Spain;

5) A British Prince;

6) The chief diplomat of the USA in the final months of the Obama administration;

7) A Christian hierarch and head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Add Mr. Gingrich and one has "Former Speaker of the American House of Representatives" and former candidate for President.

(And this is all supposed to be about climate change? Sorry, I'm not getting the connection between Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess and climate change, thank you very much.)

Boil that list down and you have representatives of (1) militaries (2) intelligence agencies (3) royalty (4) politics (5) International diplomacy (6) space programs and (7) religion. Hmmm...

Turning from the "Unsubstantiated But Definitely Interesting Rumor" file to something much more substantial (and shared by many here), we discover that scientists in Great Britain want to go there to.... well, read it for yourself:

FROZEN IN TIME British scientists to lead hunt for fragments of ‘dead planets’ hidden in Antarctica

After I picked my jaw up off the floor after having read this, my first thought was, "Gee, isn't it interesting what people will do once they vote to BREXIT and get out from underneath Mad Madame Merkel's thumb and are free to do their own thing?" Why, the first thing they want to do is go to Antarctica to look for "the remains of these ancient proto-planets (which) will allow us to understand conditions in the early years of our Solar System." Now, these are all perfectly respectable British scientists, and there is of course a perfectly respectable British and typically scientific "low key" explanation for all this:

Mathematician Dr Geoffrey Evatt will lead the expedition, which will set off in 2020. He believes Antarctica could be hiding vast numbers of “missing iron meteorites”. He said: “We now have the opportunity to commence on a truly exciting scientific adventure. If successful, our expeditions will help scientists to decode the origins of the Solar System and cement the UK as a leader in meteoritics and planetary science.”

Wot!?!? You mean the United Kingdom is not a leader in meteoritics?!?

Now the reader probably detected a heavy note of sarcasm in my remarks (unless of course, they're a recent product of the American educational system, where the word "sarcasm" will remain a deep, profound, and Inscrutable Mystery). And that brings me to my high octane speculation de jour, for it sounds an awfully lot like what these British scientists might be looking for is confirmation of the late 18th-early 19th century astronomical theory that the asteroid belt is the remains of an exploded planet that blew up aeons ago, a theory which was revived by the late US Naval astronomer Dr. Tom Van Flandern. Now the interesting thing about Dr. Van Flandern, if you've read his book(Dark Matter, Missing Planets, and New Comets), or if you've read my summary of it in my book (The Cosmic War: Interplanetary Warfare, Modern Physics, and Ancient Texts), is that he proposed a number of models as to why that missing planet suddenly blew up. One of his proposals was that a sort of natural fission reactor in the core of the planet -and yes there are such things as natural fission reactors, or at least, scientists think there could be - suddenly went critical, and kablooey, the planet blew up. But in reading Dr. Van Flandern's book, you can tell that he isn't very taken with that idea. After all, that would require a very BIG natural fission reactor, and that's problematic for a whole host of reasons we don't have time to get into here. Then he proposed another natural model: suppose, he said, there was a great accumulation of anti-matter somehow in the core of the planet, that was contained, but that the containment broke down, the anti-matter came into contact with matter and, again, kablooey, it blew up. That too, you can tell he was not to thrilled with, because, as a scientist, he knew that the matter/anti-matter anisotropy phenomenon was hugely problematic, as was the idea that somehow, a natural containment was fashioned to contain enough anti-matter to cause a planet to blow up, not to mention the idea that, once having proposed such a natural containment mechanism, it then somehow broke down. The natural explanations had too many ifs, and he wasn't considering too carefully that idea of collisions with other celestial bodies, because that too had its problematic elements.

So then Dr. Van Flandern came - somewhat reluctantly - to the idea that it was caused by some sort of "technological accident", say, perhaps (though he does not say this) that they built their large hadron collider just a little too big, and slammed one too many God particles into one too many anti-God particles. And then, finally, he comes right out and says what I suspect he may have been thinking all along, or at least entertaining the idea for the sake of "completeness" in hypotheses, namely, that the planet was blown up - in his words - by "deliberate action," in other words, in an act of war. And that, of course, implies a technology of weapons of mass destruction capable of doing so. And of course, if one is blowing up planets with such technologies in an act of war, then that implies that the planet itself may have been home to intelligent life, was a belligerent in that war, and at a similar pitch of technological and warmaking capability.

...and that implies that maybe, just maybe, by dint of some fluke of chance, or by dint of that very high pitch of technological development itself, that some sliver or slivers of that technology might have survived, to be recognizeable and recoverable in meteorites...

See you on the flip side...