[narrator]
Located on a southern peninsula of Ross Island,
this is the largest research station
on the continent.
It was opened by the U.S. government in 1956
and houses up to as many as 1,200 residents at a time.
In January of 2015,
a U.S. Navy flight engineer
who served with the Antarctic Development Squadron
at McMurdo for 14 years came forward
to investigative reporter Linda Moulton Howe
with bizarre accounts of his time in Antarctica.
[Howe]
I got an email
from a retired naval flight engineer.
He's asked me to call him only "Brian"
in the world public.
And this is what he told me.
From about 1983
to when he retired from the Navy in 1997,
he was in all kinds of what they call
Antarctic Squadron expedition missions
that included rescuing people
in and out of various places.
In all these trips,
nothing of a high strangeness had occurred,
and then, all of a sudden, it was one thing after another.
During a squadron mission
in the Transantarctic Mountains,
the whole crew saw a whole bunch
of silver darting objects,
and they are round,
and he says, "They're doing the strangest thing.
They're going like to this peak in a group,
to this peak in a group, to this peak in a group,
and then they'd all take off."
And not only did this happen once,
it happened over and over.
[narrator]
this was just one of many strange mysteries
on the continent that he witnessed
during his time there.
[Howe]
There's a medical emergency.
They are now under the gun, the clock is ticking,
and a decision was made.
They're going through the no-fly zone
because it's a medical emergency.
And what do they see?
In the ice,
like a huge entrance to a cave
but slanted going down,
and he said, "I think it was at least, Linda,
200 feet in diameter, a big hole in the ice."
And he said, "Our instruments are not operating,
we were losing electricity,
we had magnetic anomalies,
and we concluded there's something about this hole
that is now causing these problems."
They do their medical recovery,
and the next thing they know,
they're all being chewed out
by men in suits
that are not from McMurdo.
They appear to be from Washington, D.C.,
and as he said, "They told us
that we are never, ever to fly over that hole,
and we are never to discuss it again."
What is that about?
And does that have anything to do
with all these other pieces that keep emerging,
that there might be something archaeological
in Antarctica?
[narrator]
this was not the first time
a massive hole has been spotted in the ice
of Antarctica.
Famous polar explorer Admiral Richard Byrd
allegedly reported seeing a massive entrance
to an underground world
during his 1947 expedition
to the South Pole.
[man]
allegedly talking about a large opening
at the South Pole
that went deep inside the Earth ice-free
and was inhabited
by various sorts of aliens.
And when Byrd got back to the United States,
he was brought back to Washington
where he was questioned very heavily
about his statements.
And allegedly he was told to stop talking about this.
You have to wonder, is the South Pole
some kind of extraterrestrial entry zone,
some kind of portal that's so important
that it has to be controlled by the military?