Doorways

There's something about doors that is magical.

They're portals from one room to another or from the inside of a house to the outside -- and sometimes stand between imprisonment and freedom.  As such, they belong to neither realm.  They're boundaries, edges, passageways.

I'm not the only one who finds the "middle ground" doors occupy to be evocative.  How many stories have the word in the title?  A Wind in the Door, The Door in the Wall, The Doors of Perception, The Door into Summer, and The Door to December -- that's without even thinking hard.  Stories that feature doors as portals from one realm to another are even more commonplace; I've done it myself (in Sephirot and The Accidental Magician).

Maybe you've even seen the following meme that was going around on social media a while back:

My immediate answer was that if I could bring along my puppy, then hell yes.  (I rather shamefacedly added that I should probably bring along my wife, too.)  I mean, chances are that rather like the Bear That Went Over The Mountain, where I'd end up after walking through is merely the other side of the doorway.  But hell, I've read books with way more interesting options.  If there was even a chance I'd find myself in Earthsea or Narnia or Prydain or the Dreamlands or Middle Earth, it'd be worth the risk of disappointment.

It's that sense of doorways as liminal spaces that probably explains the current hoopla over the discovery of what appears to be a giant oval doorway in the Dzungarian Alatau Mountains of Kazakhstan.  To be fair to the hooplites, it's pretty odd-looking:

Its dimensions (about 12 meters tall and wide) and shape immediately brought up comparisons to the Gates of Moria from The Lord of the Rings and the doorway into Jabba the Hutt's palace in Return of the Jedi.  Then the Ancient Aliens crowd got involved (because of course they did) with claims that it's the entryway to an alien base.

Maybe even one that's still occupied.  *cue scary music*

The likeliest explanation, of course, is much more prosaic; this is simply a weathering pattern in the rock face.  All you have to do is visit Arches National Park in Utah to see dozens of examples of rock formations eroded into arches (thus the name).  Geology, in fact, can do some really freakin' weird stuff.  The Giant's Causeway, a hexagonal basalt formation in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, is so peculiar-looking it seems like it couldn't be natural (until, of course, you understand the mechanism of how it formed).

That hasn't slowed down the speculation any.  It doesn't help that some early twentieth century Spiritualist writers speculated that Hyperborea, one of the mythical lands invented by the ancient Greeks, was located in the mountains of central Asia.  Gary Manners, who wrote the article linked above, concludes with the following equivocal passage:

Despite scientific explanations, the Kazakhstan doorway continues generating intense interest and debate online.  Social media users propose theories ranging from concealed alien bases to entrances to underground civilizations...  The formation's remarkable symmetry and positioning challenge even skeptical observers to consider alternative explanations beyond conventional geology.

Let's clear one thing up right away; these are not theories.  What the social media users are proposing are what we skeptics call WAGs (wild-ass guesses).  A theory is a well-tested model that explains a set of data -- i.e., a framework backed up by actual hard evidence.  All the social media users are doing is looking at a single photograph and saying, "Hey, that looks like..."  As such, these guesses are nearly worthless -- only valuable in bringing attention to an interesting site, and perhaps prompting some actual geologists to go over there and see what we've got.

So me, I'm waiting for the scientists to weigh in.  If they get to Kazakhstan, and have to say the Sindarin word for "friend" to get the doorway to open, or if they hear a gurgly voice behind it saying, "Bo shuda!  Huh huh huh huh huh," or if (best of all) they pry it open and find an underground alien base, then we can talk.

Until that time, I'm gonna Ockham's Razor the shit out of this and stick with "it's an odd-looking rock formation."

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A door in the ice

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:

So it's far from "a cyclopean maze" spreading for "boundless miles in every direction," and light years from anything that "only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause."  It is, in fact, a vaguely rectangular block of ice that probably slid down the slope and got hung up on a projection in the rock. 

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. 

Then someone had the audacity to point out the obvious.  "Wouldn't they make sure Google Earth DIDN'T photograph it if it was secret?"  Which has, all along, been one of my main objections to conspiracy theorists; they're asking you to believe that major world events are being engineered by a cabal of brilliant but devious malevolent supergeniuses, who are so intelligent they can do things like modify the weather and build secret bases on Mars and engineer spacecraft with faster-than-light capability and use 5G technology to manipulate our minds, but this same cabal is simultaneously so stupid that some neckbeard can figure out everything they're doing without ever leaving his mom's basement.

But that kind of argument is a non-starter with these people, so of course the guy who wondered why Google Earth would slip up and photograph the secret door if it was a secret door was immediately shouted down.

Anyhow, it's wryly amusing how little it takes to get the conspiracy theorists going.  If there really is some kind of bizarre structure on Antarctica, I'll wait for better evidence.  Boundless miles of eldritch, blasphemous, cyclopean architecture would do it for me.  Although don't ask me to be the one to go down there and investigate.  For one thing, I'm not fond of the cold.  For another, I'd rather not get eaten by a Shoggoth.  I'll stay here in my comfortable house and see what I can find out on Google Earth.

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