The Conspiracy about the Lost Alien City in Antarctica Turns from "At the Mountains of Madness" to "The Thing"

​More than 80 years ago, H. P. Lovecraft invented a frozen city half buried beneath the snow and ice of Antarctica, the outpost of an alien civilization possessed of incredible technology, a sophisticated culture, and horrific servitors who somehow … survived. While At the Mountains of Madness was a work of fiction, a sort of horrific inversion of Hyperborea at the antipodes, a determined group of ufologists and fringe historians have been trying desperately to make it a reality. Maybe Charles Hapgood and Graham Hancock did too good a job imagining Antarctica as the home a lost Ice Age civilization. Or maybe Antarctica is just the only place left on Earth where an alien city could plausibly exist without someone noticing. 

Anyway, Michael E. Salla over at Exopolitics more of less credulously reported (or, rather, has “cautious optimism” about) claims made by—literally—a guy named “Pete” on YouTube in order to “confirm” the fantastical claims made by Corey Goode and David Wilcock earlier this year regarding the U.S. government’s alleged efforts to excavate an alien and/or Nephilim city in Antarctica, efforts witnessed by former Secretary of State John Kerry and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. “Pete” claims that a secret source has explained what is really going on at the site of the alien city. The “source” quoted by “Pete” is pretty much just reciting parts of At the Mountains of Madness:

I’m told to imagine the site as a massive city with as many buildings as a metropolis would contain, all devoid of life at least so far as we know. However, there are protocols in place if life is discovered in stasis or otherwise.

It’s basically a shorter, less wordy version of Lovecraft:

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism.

​Just as Madness helped inspire John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There?, which was the basis for The Thing from Another World and The Thing, and featured a hostile ancient alien entity creating medical problems in an Antarctic research station, so too did the originally Lovecraftian story of a city in Atlantis transform into a retread of The Thing:

​And, the participants have suddenly found themselves exposed to “something” for which their bodies literally have no immunity — something not extant in the rest of Earth’s biosphere for between 13,000 and several million years! After the initial reports of “four emergency extractions,” the number changed to five … and now twelve McMurdo personnel are supposedly in need of a dangerous, “emergency medical evacuation” well into the Antarctic winter season.

​Michael Salla of Exopolitics has more than a little reason to believe this warmed-over science fiction story, and that’s because he is planning a new book for next year about Antarctica and its supposed role in the so-called “secret space program” he has fantasized about for decades now.
 
I can’t really help but relate the claims to Lovecraft because so much of it seems to be copied from him, at least indirectly. There is, after all, no evidence whatsoever for a lost city in Antarctica, a story that is known only from the work of fantasists like Corey Goode and David Wilcock, who admit that science fiction is their inspiration, though they disingenuously claim that fiction is a secret disclosure of fact.