In H. P. Lovecraft's seminal horror short story "At the Mountains of Madness," some scientists are sent on an expedition to Antarctica to drill down through the ice and see what they can find out about the geology and paleontology of that largely-unexplored continent, and -- unsurprisingly, if you've ever read any Lovecraft -- they should have declined to participate. First they discover fossil evidence of advanced forms of life dating back to the Precambrian Era; then, carved stones showing that some of those creatures had culture and tool-making capabilities; and finally, in an icy cave, they come across the frozen remains of life forms unlike anything known from Earth's prehistory. Ultimately, they find that these life forms were intelligent -- far more intelligent than humans -- and in the interior of Antarctica, the scientific team discovers the remains of an ancient city:
Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause... This cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality... For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim we decided we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through which we had come. We had merely struck, at random, a limited part of something of incalculable extent.
So, of course, they decide to land their plane and investigate. And of course find out that not all the monsters are frozen. And of course a number of them end up getting eaten by Shoggoths. Which kind of sucked for them, but is also no more than you should expect if you're a character in a Lovecraft story.
The reason all this comes up is that the conspiracy theorists are currently having multiple orgasms over the discovery on Google Earth of what looks like a giant door in the ice in Antarctica, southeast of the Japanese-run Showa Station. This has sparked a huge amount of buzz, despite the fact that the image itself is... um... underwhelming, to put it mildly:
Once this explanation was presented to the conspiracy theorists, they all frowned, scratched their heads, laughed in an embarrassed sort of way, and said, "Oh, all right, then! What goobers we were!"
Ha! I made that up. If you know anything about conspiracy theorists, you surely know that the obvious, rational explanation just made them conspiracy even harder. Besides the "OMFG Lovecraft was rightI!!!!!" responses, here are a few of the reactions I saw, before my prefrontal cortex started whimpering for mercy and I had to stop reading:
- It's the door to Agartha. Agartha is a kingdom located on the inner surface of the Earth.
- I bet it's a clone reptile base.
- Bunker entrance? It's too regular to be natural. Could be an old Nazi base.
- Didn't someone found entrance on Mars same like this one? [sic]
- It's a secret doorway to another dimension.
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