The Mysterious ‘Staircase’ Pattern Spotted in Antarctica May Not Be What It Seems
Dubbed “The Land of Pure Silence” by National Geographic, Antarctica swaddles with a mysterious, eerie aura around it. Throughout the year, its bosom remains shrouded in the hum of silence, interjected only by the crackling ice, barking seals, squawking penguins, rumbling glaciers, and howling katabatic winds that look like swirls of “snow snakes” slapping the canopies of tents and roofs of houses. Its thick cloak of ice is infamous for hiding bizarre structures underneath, from mysterious subglacial lakes to a creepy ice ship.
In 2017, the white continent became the subject of another conspiracy when a person spotted a mysterious “staircase” pattern debossed into the Antarctic icescape, in a Google Earth image. They shared this discovery on Godlike Productions, a conspiracy forum where people discuss things like UFOs and secret societies. The hair-raising image sparked a fleet of jumpy discussions.
“This one has me a little baffled,” the forum user from the United States wrote in the post. They described that the discovery happened when they were onboard their work van and having conspiracy discussions with their colleagues. “I was bored so I pulled out Google Earth for a while, just exploring when I came across something that looked like a giant staircase. Does anyone have an idea what it is? Just a glitch with satellite cameras? Or something more,” the person asked the internet. They also shared the Imgur link to the digital artifact showing the mysterious staircase.
Viewed hundreds of times, the uncanny image prompted other forum users to share their guesses on what this pattern could be. One user likened it to “Jacob’s Ladder,” referring to the mythical ladder mentioned in the Bible that leads a human from the Earth to heaven. “[It] is some type of lens anomaly,” guessed another user. Another one said the staircase resembled a “Pattern on the surface made from wind…like washboard patterns on a dirt road (made by bouncing tires).”
Others cooked up even more outlandish and queerer scenarios. They associated the uncanny pattern with things like “snow dunes,” “pyramid rings,” “strictly high-tech demonic activity,” “underground slave city built by Nazis,” “steps of a Mayan pyramid,” “stairway to heaven,” “burning steppes,” “alien encounter,” “compression waves,” and even “fallen angels and Nephilim.” Nephilims, mentioned in the Bible, are referred to as unusually giant creatures who mated with human women and wreaked havoc on Earth.
Intrigued by the entire discussion, conspiracy theory hunter, Tyler Glockner, posted his interpretation of the “staircase” image on his Youtube channel SecureTeam10 (@SecureTeam10). “These stairs definitely look like they have simply become partially unearthed from the ice and that they really do look as if they are poking out and that the rest of them perfectly blend in with the surrounding snow which indicates that whatever this structure is it is actually there. So that leaves the question could this be some sort of natural formation,” he pondered in the video.
Concluding his explanation, he said that he didn’t believe that the pattern in the picture was “actually ‘stairs.’” They were rather “way too perfectly constructed to be natural ‘wind dunes,’ which oddly enough look nothing like the surrounding wind-shaped landscape, and only appear in one single spot on the entire 100-mile area, nowhere else. Must be one of those magical lone rectangular wind dunes.”