THE AUSTRAL-SUMMER ANOMALY
Early February Near the Ross Ice Shelf
It was high noon on a late summer day in Antarctica, minus 20 degrees Celsius, partly cloudy, winds at 20 kph. The twin engine Dernier, a ski equipped spotter plane, was carrying an extra passenger, Phil O’Neal of the National Geographic, as it tracked the path of the special New Zealand-American team. The hastily assembled group had traveled ten hours across the Ross Ice Shelf on snow machines to reach a spot 296 kilometers from base. Gasoline and supplies had been airdropped a half-click in front of them. From Dernier’s windows, the bright orange containers were scattered below like candy against the monochrome icescape.
A vast steam plume was gouting from a fresh crater in the ice ahead where a very large object had crashed into the Ross Ice Shelf close to the 80th parallel near the border of the Australian and New Zealand claim areas.
As the Dernier banked to the right, O’Neal reached for his camera. The steam plume towered against the chilly blue of the Antarctic sky. Thirty six hours earlier, satellite imagery had captured a huge impact reminiscent of the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia.
This was the spot.
After O’Neal had acquired his first four minutes of high quality images, the Dernier began banking away from the crater, preparing for another pass. Both O’Neal and the pilot were looking out when a sudden white flash engulfed the entire scene below. The searing pulse of light destroyed O’Neal’s retinas, fried the plane’s electronics and blinded the pilot as well. The brilliant flash and telltale mushroom cloud were captured from space at a very low angle by the nearest imaging satellite. Those images would be classified. The next morning a follow up team was sent from McMurdo by helicopter. They found the ice crater, still steaming, the wrecked Dernier and the remains of the ground team not far from the edge. The rescue team conducted a brief inspection and took several radiation readings, all negative. After a flurry of international calls, the incident was officially written off by the US, Australia and New Zealand as two “anomalous meteor impacts”. The suspicious nature of the post-impact explosion was ignored by mutual agreement.
The Antarctic winter soon arrived and a cloak of media silence followed. Public attention was soon diverted by the usual scandals, and the unsatisfactory official explanation stood. The pilot and the members of the New Zealand-American team were quietly written off as dead…as was the National Geographic photographer, Phillip O’Neal.