By now, regular readers here are well aware of the high strangeness surrounding our planet's southern continent, Antarctica. Much of that high strangeness surrounds the very weird list of people associated with the place. Since the last time I posted this list, there have been some "revisions", some of which have been brought to my attention by our friend and colleague, Daniel Liszt a.k.a. the Dark Journalist, and some of which I mentioned in my last book, Hess and the Penguins. So, here's the very strange list of people connected to Antarctica, as far as I know it and can recall (and many thanks to all of you who've helped expand and document this list: (1) Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, creator of the Luftwaffe and the Gestapo, sponsor of the 1938-39 German Antarctic expedition (as pointed out in some of my books, beginning with Reich of the Black Sun); (2) Deputy Fuehrer (Stellvertreter) Rudolf Hess (as pointed out in Hess and the Penguins); (3) US Navy Rear Admiral Richard Byrd, leader of the 1946-1947 US "High Jump" expedition (Hess and the Penguins); (4) U.S. Navy Admiral-of-the-Fleet Chester Nimitz (Hess and the Penguins); (5) U.S. Secretary of the Navy John Forrestal (Hess and the Penguins); (5) Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin; (6) Kiril III, Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow; (7) U.S. Secretary of State John Kerrey; (8) the late King Juan Carlos of Spain; (8) the recently-married Prince Harry of Antarctica...

...Well, the list goes on and on, but you get the idea. Oh, did I mention, that Admiral Byrd's nephew was one of the owners of the Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was murdered there? Well, if not, here's the reference (courtesy of Daniel Liszt a.k.a. the Dark Journalist, who first made me aware of that strange connection):

When we began to look a little closer at D. Harold Byrd (nephew of the famous Admiral Byrd), there was one major detail that jumped out at us. It wasn't the fact that he was a saunch right-winger and a personal friend of Lyndon Johnson. Nor was it the fact that he founded the Civil Air Patrol. (An organization to which Lee Harvey Oswald once belonged). What intrigued us was the fact that D. Harold Byrd, Dallas millionaire and oil tycoon, was the owner of the Texas School Book Depository Building. (Glen Sample and Mark Collom, The Men on the Sixth Floor [Garden Grove, CA: Sample Graphics, 2011], p. 178.)

This above-cited source also goes on to show D Harold Byrd's close association with the Texas oilmen that many researchers believe were involved in some manner in the JFK assassination, Murchison and Hunt. (See the same source, pp. 178-180.)

Now, if Russian Orthodox Patriarchs of Moscow, Nazis, US admirals, Secretaries of State, moon astronauts, British and Spanish royals aren't enough to convince you that something very strange and serious is going on in connection with the polar continent(oh, did I mention that you can add US defense contractor and well-known black projects company Lockheed-Martin to the list?), then perhaps this newest addition to the list will convince you (and a big thank you to all of you who spotted this story):

Turkey set to create own Antarctic research station next year — president

'Time of the Dawn of Turkey': Erdogan Announces Construction of Antarctic Base

Really? Ottomaniac Erdogan wants a Turkish scientific base in Antarctica, while he has significant problems at home? What's even weirder is the way that the Sultan decided to announce the project, in a tweet on Twitter. Even weirder than this "Trumpism" is the actual wording of the Sublime Porte's announcement:

"In 2019, we will create a research station in Antarctica. Through this station, we will join the victorious group of 30 countries who already have a presence there. This is a time of global vision. It is the time of the dawn of Turkey!"(Emphasis added)

The rhetoric here - "the victorious group of 30 countries" - is reminiscent of the Rococo language of the Porte, and could thus be written down to the politics-as-usual sort of thing that politicians like to indulge in, in this case minus the "bey effendis" that characterized the Porte of yesteryear.

But I have to indulge in my trademark High Octane SpeculationTM here: what if it isn't? What if Mr. Erdogan means what he says when referring to a "victorious group of 30 countries who already have a presence there"? Viewed that way, I cannot but help recall the words attributed to Rear Admiral Byrd by the El Mercurio de Santiago when the Admiral terminated the High Jump expedition months ahead of schedule, and warned that the USA would have to prepare to defend itself against "enemy" aircraft capable of flying from pole to pole. Byrd returned to the USA, and we can only presume that he then briefed his superiors - Fleet Admiral Nimitz and Secretary Forrestal - about the expedition. He then wrote a very lengthy article about the expedition for National Geographic magazine, did a television appearance on the old Longines CBS talk show, and then more or less laid low. As readers of my book Hess and the Penguins will recall, his son was invited to Washington on an anniversary of that National Geographic article, but on the way, disappeared, only to be found dead in a Baltimore warehouse. The Baltimore police treated it as a homicide and assigned a detective to the case, but nothing more, to my knowledge, was ever done about the case. Within the alternative research community, the hypothesis has been advanced that Admiral Byrd and the High Jump expedition ran afoul of post-war surviving Nazis and their advanced high tech in Antarctica, was whipped into submission, and beat a hasty retreat, a view to which I do not subscribe. Other versions have it that he encountered aliens and UFOS, or found the entrance into the "hollow earth"(also stories to which, needless to say, I most emphatically do not subscribe), and so on. None of these stories has much, if any, evidence to back them up. But something happened down there that caught the attention of Herman Goering and Richard Byrd, and it probably wasn't just whale oil, lubricants, resources, or rich fishing fields.

So along comes Mr. Erdogan in the Sublime Porte, and announces that Turkey intends to join the "victorious group of 30 countries who already have a presence down there." Victory implies a conflict of some sort, and conflict of some sort implies someone with whom one is in conflict, an enemy, an opposition. So taking Mr. Erdogan's strange remark in a more literal and less rhetorical sense, one has to wonder, how long was this conflict? Against whom was it waged? Was the presence of Secretary of State Kerry, King Juan Carlos, Prince Harry and so on related to this possible conflict? Does the presence of Apollo Moon astronaut Buzz Aldrin - and for that matter, Kiril III - in this list indicate some off-planet opposition? Or does the presence of Goering and Hess- or again, Kiril III - in this impossibly strange list indicate that - indeed - there may be some kernel of truth to all those Nazi "last battalion" legends that have so persistently continued against the end of the war?

I don't know, but the bottom line is, Mr. Erdogan's comment is capable of more than one interpretation, and in the context of all the other high strangeness associated with Antarctica, my money is actually on the second interpretation.

See you on the flip side...