Unproven allegation or interpretation; being indexed is not proof.
Summary
The thesis claims that Operation Highjump, the large U.S. Navy expedition to Antarctica of 1946-1947, was really a military campaign against hidden enemies and was driven off by flying saucers. Versions differ. In one, Admiral Richard E. Byrd's fleet attacked a secret Nazi base and met advanced disc-shaped craft; in another, the saucers came from a hollow Earth entered through polar openings, and Byrd was forced to retreat. The story assembles older pieces: the hollow Earth of Edmond Halley and John Cleves Symmes Jr., the Shaver Mystery of Ray Palmer's magazine, Raymond W. Bernard's saucer books of 1960 and 1964, Nazi-UFO writing of the 1970s, a "secret diary" first hinted at in 1959, and a March 1947 interview in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, in which Byrd warned that the United States could be attacked by planes flying over the poles. Supporters read that warning, in a free English rendering, as an admission about "flying objects". What is established: Highjump ran from 26 August 1946 to late February 1947 with 4,700 men, 13 ships and 33 aircraft. It built Little America IV, took more than 70,000 photographs and ended because winter was closing in. Its deadliest accident was a weather-related flying-boat crash. The words "flying saucer" appeared only in June 1947, and neither historians nor the Byrd papers at Ohio State find any trace of a battle or of the diary's flight.
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