It's beginning to be the case that I almost need a special "Antarctica" tab for this website, because it seems the strangeness of stories coming out of there just keeps coming. This week, so many people saw one version or another of this story that I know they were thinking what I am thinking: could this be the reason for the strangeness of the stories about the place lately?

Possibly. But before we get to all that, a brief memory refresher. Regular readers of my books and of this website know just how peculiar Antarctica really is, not so much because it's covered in ice, and is inaccessible, but rather because a very strange list of people are associated with it, and with those people, there are also strange stories. By now, we can probably recite the list of strange people associated with Antartica by heart:

(1) Rudolf Hess, (2) Hermann Goering, (3) Admiral Byrd, (4) King Juan Carlos, (5) Prince Harry (or was it William... they all look the same), (6) Secretary of State John Kerry, (7) the Patriarch of Moscow, Kiril III, (8) Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and, lest we forget, the elements of the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet are scheduled for a visit.

The stories have been almost as strange as the list. Admiral Byrd and Operation High Jump, as readers here know, returned from an expedition to the continent that was supposed to have lasted months, after only a few weeks. Along the way back home, Byrd reportedly gave an interview to a reporter for El Mercurio of Santiago de Chile, in which he warned that the United States would have to prepare to defend itself against "enemy fighters" (leaving the enemy unspecified) that could fly from pole to pole with tremendous speed. And of course, there are the stories of secret Nazi flying saucer bases under the ice (a story I've never bought, incidentally), a couple of Adolf Hitler survived in Antarctica stories. President Clinton contributed his own bizarre story by holding a press conference during his administration about a meteor from Mars that was allegedly found in Antarctica, which meteor also evidently contained microbial sized fossilized life.

As if it couldn't possibly get any stranger, there were also those stories several years ago that the Russians had "found something" near their installations at the vast under-ice lake Vostok; there were emergency evacuations at that time of people becoming suddenly sick (which of course fueled the rumor mill); perhaps the weirdest of all the stories was that the Saudis found something during an excavation around the Grand Mosque at Mecca, something which so terrified them that they turned it over to the Russians, who promptly (so the story goes) took it to Antarctica where Patriarch Kiril "performed ancient rituals" over it. Well, needless to say, I don't buy that story either (the part about the Saudis finding "something" and then turning it over to the Orthodox Christian "infidels" just isn't washing with me), but I mention it for the sake of completeness.

Then Buzz Aldrin decided, within mere days of Secretary John Kerry's visit, to visit the southern continent, and before boarding the flight in South Africa that would take him there, he tweeted he was getting ready to "go to the launchpad," a statement that I pointed out at the time could be taken as "astronautese" for boarding the airplane, or that it might mean that Antarctica was the "launchpad." Then, while in Antarctica, Aldrin gets sick, and has to be evacuated. A variant on the story also had him tweeting that what had been discovered was some "absolute evil."

Oh, and let's not forget, Lockheed Martin of Black Projects Fame also has a presence in Antarctica. Buzz Aldrin, John Kerry, Kiril III, Herman Goering, Rudolf Hess, and Lockheed Martin.

That's quite a line-up. The stuff of a bad Hollyweird B movie.

Well, now we might finally have a glimpse of what all the ruckus has been about:

Mysterious shapes and patterns discovered in Arctic and Antarctic sea floor

Of course, there is the usual blather that all this represents nothing strange or bizarre at all: all those polygons and so on are merely what happens when minerals and ice freeze. No argument from me. But of course, this doesn't really explain why Mssrs Kerry Kiril and Aldrin would be so keen to visit beautiful scenic Antarctica. I suspect, however, in the case of the second image, that the freezing-polygon explanation falls "a little short," for I don't know about you, but something sure looks artificial to me. And - what the heck - I'm willing to crawl out to the extreme end of the twig of speculation on this one, and say that my first thought, when I saw this picture, was that it looked like an electrical coil or installation of some sort. We're given no idea of the scale of what we're looking at, but it looks like "input, coil, output" to me.

In short, it looks like a "something", and that certainly would account for Kerry, Aldrin, Kiril, and Lockheed-Martin and the Russian Baltic Sea fleet. The real question is, did Hess and Goering have similar information, and if so, how did they come by it?

See you on the flip side...