The Hollow Earth Enigma by Alec MacLellan

Author:Alec MacLellan [Alec Maclellan]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780285642263
Publisher: Souvenir Press (Perseus)
Published: 2013-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

What, in fact, did Byrd see on that May day? The open water was certainly a surprise, but had he also glimpsed something beyond the pole never seen before but hinted at from ancient times? Whatever the facts of the matter, on his return to the United States he became a national hero, was made a Rear Admiral and awarded a US Congregational Medal of Honour. But some authorities felt the climax of the flight may have been an illusion, as Richard Montague explains in Oceans, Poles and Airmen (1981): ‘In the early Seventies, grave doubts were cast upon these records and, indeed, upon Byrd’s claim to have reached the pole at all.’

The first hint of a conspiracy over what the aviator had seen? Byrd, for his part, was never in any doubt about the curious phenomena he had witnessed and they were never far from his thoughts on later polar expeditions.

In the autumn of 1928, after a ‘warm-up’ flight in June 1927 across the Atlantic from west to east, Byrd announced that he was planning to go to the other end of the earth and fly over the unknown regions of the Antarctic. His fame and publicity skill enabled him to obtain financial backing from wealthy Americans like Ford and Rockefeller, and a flood of donations poured in from the public, amounting to over $400,000. Backed by these funds, he led a large and well-equipped expedition to set up a base on the face of the Ross Ice Shelf. He named it, with a patriotic flourish, ‘Little America’. Once more, the unexpected awaited Byrd when he took to the air on 29 November, 1929, as he recorded in his 1931 publication Little America: Aerial Exploration in the Antarctic and the Flight to the South Pole:

It is a confusing place, this imaginary point, the South Pole. All time meridians converge there. A person unfortunate enough to be living in the vicinity would have difficult in telling just what time to keep. Directions, as we reckon them, likewise mean nothing to this unfortunate creature. For unless he was travelling either north or south, it would be impossible for him to walk in a straight line and still retain the same direction. His direction would change noticeably every few minutes; and to keep his original direction he would be forced to follow a spiral course.

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