One of the most fascinating parts of any trip is learning something new. Recently, as I was getting ready to set out for a hike, I met an interesting local at the trail head that had a great story to tell.
We started talking about the trail itself, and then quickly we were talking about all sorts of other interesting facts about the surrounding area. I had know before arriving at the site that there was a lot of ancient Native American activity in the area, and I had hoped to set out to find some of the ruins. What my new friend had told me was a story about the local tribe’s creation story and how it tied in to a story about German U-boats years later.
Apparently, this tribe believed that the area that I was hiking in was where their people had originated from – a sort of Garden of Eden, so to speak. They, much like other tribes in the area, believe that their ancestors came out of the ground and started living in this place. When I was hearing this story, I’m sure that I seemed a little skeptical to my new friend, so he tried to add some credibility to the idea that people can move between the surface of the earth and some plane below the surface (commonly known as the Hollow Earth theory) by telling me a story about a United States Admiral who, after World War II had gone to Antarctica.
Admiral Byrd was an explorer who traveled to both the North and South poles. In his travels, it was said that the US Navy had sent him to the South Pole to hunt a group of German U-boats that had escaped after WWII. When he found them, he was unable to track them because they kept moving in and out of the surface of the earth, and they had set up some sort of colony below the Earth’s surface. After a couple of government conspiracy tie-ins and anecdotal second-hand accounts, he sure did have an interesting story put together.
Truth? Who knows. Definitely an interesting story, though.