ATLAS

DivergenceOMEGA-24-8-5Sheet 5 of 5 of the dossier Operation Highjump

No saucer in the record

The press vocabulary, Byrd's actual words, the geography and the Navy's purpose all contradict the battle story.

Summary

This divergence sheet sets the battle stories against the contemporary record. The vocabulary alone is a first problem: the expression "flying saucer" was coined by the press after Kenneth Arnold's sighting near Mount Rainier on 24 June 1947, four months after Highjump's ships were back, so there were no saucers in anyone's account of the expedition. The quote that seems to prove otherwise, Byrd's talk of "flying objects", is a free English rendering of his March 1947 warning that planes could attack the United States across the poles. The geography does not help the thesis either. Highjump worked from the Ross Ice Shelf, on the opposite side of the continent from the area surveyed by the German ship Schwabenland in 1938, and eleven journalists travelled with the fleet without reporting Germans or saucers. The Polar Record study of 2007 concludes that the operation trained the Navy for an Arctic war with the Soviet Union, and that the German base is a myth. Its deadliest accident was a crash in an "ice blink", a weather effect that hides the ground from pilots. Contemporary reading therefore points to an ordinary, large and dangerous polar expedition. The saucer battle is a story built afterwards, and the varied purposes later given to Highjump, from Nazi hunting to the ice wall, show how freely it has been reinterpreted.

Verified facts

  1. Verified fact

    The term "flying saucer" was born in June 1947: after Kenneth Arnold reported "nine silver-colored objects" near Mount Rainier on 24 June, headline writers coined "Flying Saucers", four months after Highjump ended.

  2. Verified fact

    Highjump was based on the Ross Ice Shelf, on the opposite side of the continent from the German 1938 survey, and eleven journalists were embedded with the ships.

  3. Verified fact

    No saucer appears in the record: the expedition's deadliest accident was the crash of a flying boat in an "ice blink", a weather effect, and one writer notes that no Nazi flying saucers were reported.

Official version

  1. Official version

    A history article states that Highjump "did not lose any planes to flying saucer attacks" and "had nothing to do with the Germans".

  2. Official version

    Byrd's own words in El Mercurio concern a possible attack by planes crossing the poles, not saucers; the "flying objects" wording is a later mistranslation, according to fact-checkers.

  3. Official version

    A 2007 Polar Record study found that Highjump was designed to train the U.S. Navy for a possible war with the Soviet Union in the Arctic, not to attack an alleged German base.

    • Hitler's Antarctic base: the myth and the reality, Polar Record, Cambridge University Press (C. Summerhayes, P. Beeching), January 2007
      Operation Highjump was designed to train the US Navy for a possible war with the Soviet Union in the Arctic, and not to attack an alleged German base in Antarctica
  4. Official version

    A fact-check of a 2024 video found no evidence that Highjump was sent to investigate an "ice wall", showing the expedition is still being given new, contradictory purposes.