For more than 40 years, Linda Molton How has chased the stories most reporters won’t touch.
And she’s done it with a reporter’s habits.
One of her documentaries earned her a regional Emmy.
She has sat across from hundreds of soldiers, scientists, and officials, and taken down what they told her.
In a field where people get laughed out of the room, she built her name on sources, records, and patients.
But there’s one story she has never told from beginning to end.
She’s been following it since 1998, and it has never been published in full.
Her sources warned her it could finish her career, or worse, if it ever came out.
The story is about Antarctica, the emptiest continent on Earth, a place run under an international treaty where military logistics, science, and the interests of powerful governments overlap in ways the public almost never gets to see.
Over the years, she’s gathered accounts from people who went down there, scientists, Navy crews, and contractors.
People who signed non-disclosure agreements and were told never to talk about what they’d seen.
And as they got older and closer to the end, some of them decided that what they knew was too important to take to the grave.
Now Howal is 84 and she’s made up her mind.
She’s pulled the testimony together.
She’s checked what could be checked.
She’s written down what was meant to stay hidden.
[clears throat] And she’s ready to say what several of her sources have told her lies under the Antarctic ice.
Ancient structures, machines that shouldn’t exist, signs of a civilization older than recorded history, and the part that troubles her most, what they describe as a cover up shared by several governments for more than 70 years.
This is her story.
It’s nearly 30 years of work built on witnesses who wanted the truth out before they died.
And it’s a story she believes could change what we know about human history, about this planet’s past, and about what’s really going on at the bottom of the world.
One of those witnesses put it to her plainly.
Before I die, I must tell the truth.
The men who saw this with me are already dying, and if I don’t say it now, it dies with us.
So, here’s what how has finally exposed about Antarctica and what her witnesses saw there.
My name is Ambrose Wild.
And before we go back to the beginning, here’s one of those witnesses on the record.
He was a retired Navy flight engineer who flew Hercules transport planes out of McMmero station and he told how that his crew once cut across a restricted patch of ice a few miles past the South Pole to save time on a medical flight.
Afterward, a man in plain green fatigues who wasn’t part of their squadron walked up and told them, “What you saw you did not see.”
That’s the kind of story Howal has been collecting for decades.
And to see why so many people trusted her with stories like that, you have to see who she is.
Howal’s career didn’t start with ice or lights in the sky.
It started with dead cows and with an Air Force sergeant who would teach her a lesson her critics have never let her forget.
We’ll get to him.
She was born Linda Anne Molton on the 20th of January 1,942 in Boise, Idaho.
In 1963, she was crowned Miss Idaho and went on to Miss America.
She graduated cumloud in English literature from the University of Colorado in 1965, then took a masters in communication at Stanford in 1968.
She worked in television through the 1970s, much of it on environmental stories.
And by 1978, she was running special projects at KMGH in Denver.
Then in 1979, she started looking into cattle mutilations.
Ranchers across the West were finding animals dead with organs removed, wounds that looked surgical, and no sign of a predator.
The film she made about them in 1980, A Strange Harvest, picked up that regional Emmy, and it went further than local TV usually goes.
It suggested the wounds were the work of something not from here, and that the government knew more than it was saying.
From there, her beat widened.
She wrote books, starting with An Alien Harvest in 1989.
She helped create the TV series Sightings in 1991 and became a regular voice on the radio show Coast to Coast AM for close to 30 years.
And she built Earth Files, her own news site and weekly broadcast where she interviewed ranchers, sheriffs, vets, and more and more people from the military.
Critics called her a conspiracy theorist.
Her answer was her method.
She recorded the testimony, checked service records where she could, followed the paperwork, and let the witnesses talk.
And over the years, one place kept turning up in those interviews over and over.
It started with a phone call in 1998 from a different Navy veteran.
He’d been a flight engineer on Operation Deep Freeze, the mission that keeps America’s Antarctic station supplied.
He was retired now in his 60s and carrying something he’d been ordered never to talk about.
It had happened back in 1982.
His crew was flying a routine supply run from McMmero out to a remote research camp when an equipment failure forced them down early.
While they worked on the repairs, someone noticed a shape on a ridge in the distance that didn’t belong.
The lines were too straight and too regular to be ice.
He said they got near enough to make out the upper part of something enormous, half buried, all hard angles, made of a material that wasn’t ice and wasn’t rock.
They never got a closer look.
The crew was ordered straight back to Mcmeuro where intelligence officers questioned them and told them their flight logs were now classified.
They signed more non-disclosure agreements.
He kept quiet for 16 years until he knew he was dying.
And then he called how planes like his were real.
For most of that era, the Navy’s Antarctic flights were run by a squadron called VXE6, nicknamed the Puckered Penguins, flying Hercules transports on skis, until it was shut down in March 1999.
Howal spent hours with him.
She says his service record checked out and his story came with coordinates, dates, and the names of the rest of the crew.
She believed him, but a single witness, however convincing, is still a single witness.
So she filed the interview away.
And then one by one, more of them started to call.
Over the next 20 years, how took testimony from more than a dozen people who’d spent time on the ice.
They didn’t all see the same thing, but the pieces fit together in a way that’s hard to shrug off.
A geoysicist who’d worked on ice penetrating radar surveys told her his scans picked up hollows deep beneath the surface that were too big, too deep, and too regular for any natural cave.
When he flagged them, he said his results were locked away, and his team got moved to other work.
A CB, one of the Navy’s construction battalion, described a classified dig miles from any official research station.
They were drilling, but nobody was after ice cores.
Down in that hole, he saw metal structures that looked manufactured.
Then there was a scientist from Espiranza Base, Argentina’s station at Hope Bay on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Espiranza is a strange place in its own right.
It’s the only civilian settlement on the Antarctic mainland with families and school teachers who winter there.
And in 1978, a baby named Alio Palmer was born there.
The first person ever born in Antarctica.
According to the scientist, teams there sometimes pulled objects out of the ice that were older than 12,000 years, and soldiers took them away before they could ever appear in a scientific paper.
A pilot who’d flown all over the continent described a zone where flights were off limits, closed to civilian research planes with military flights needing special clearance.
When he pushed, the answer was that it was a sensitive area for research and he should drop it.
And then there’s the man from the start of this video, the one witness whose account we can actually lay out in detail.
His name has only ever been given as Brian.
He joined the Navy in 1977 and retired in 1997 as a petty officer first class.
And he showed how his discharge papers and an Antarctic service medal dated 1,984.
He first emailed her in January 2015 and she interviewed him on the record in 2017.
He said his crew watched silver discs moving over the transantarctic mountains more than once.
He said that near the pole they flew over a hole in the ice at least 300 feet across with tracks in the snow that seemed to run from the South Pole station toward it.
He said the man in the green fatigues never threatened them and that he himself was never asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
And he said that at a camp near Marie Birdland about a dozen scientists went missing for 2 weeks.
When his crew was sent to pick them up, they wouldn’t talk and they looked scared.
Each of these people came to How on their own, and each, she says, had credentials she could check.
None of them saw the whole picture, but laid side by side, their stories made one.
Something old and built was under the ice, and more than one government seemed to know about it.
What came next changed the size of the whole investigation.
In 2016, a new source got in touch.
The one how ranks above every other person she’s ever interviewed.
He was a former NORAD officer and he said that early in the 2000s he’d been part of a secret operation in Antarctica.
She has protected his identity more closely than anyone else’s.
And what he told her partly from what he’d been briefed and partly from what he’d seen tied all the earlier accounts together.
According to him, several artificial structures sit roughly 2 mi down beneath the ice that covers West Antarctica.
And they aren’t recent.
He said they were built before the last ice age when Antarctica wasn’t buried in ice at least 12,000 years ago.
Hold on to that date.
The ice itself has something to say about it, and we’ll get there.
He said the structures were first picked up in the 1940s by seismic surveys during Operation High Jump.
That part of the story at least is real history.
High jump began in August etc and ran until late February etihundufure task force 68 with Admiral Richard Bird as officer in charge brought 4,700 men 13 ships and 33 aircraft to Antarctica.
A fleetcale trial of what it takes to operate in the far south.
On the 30th of December, 1,946, a sea plane called George, one crashed in a blizzard.
Three men died and the six survivors were rescued 13 days later.
Officially, it was about mapping and testing equipment in the cold.
But one of its listed objectives, extending potential United States sovereignty, was publicly denied before the expedition was even over.
Then on the 5th of March 1,947, Bird gave an interview to the Chilean newspaper El Mccurio.
He warned that the United States should prepare for the possibility of attack by planes flying over one or both poles.
The NORAD officer claimed that ever since a handful of countries, chiefly America and Russia and lately China too, have been running secret recovery operations at sites around Antarctica, separate from the public science done under the Antarctic Treaty.
He described what sounded like a city, a sprawling complex with buildings and infrastructure reached in some places through ice caves and in others by drilling dressed up as research.
And the part that unsettled how most was his claim that some of the technology down there still works.
Not all of it is understood, he said, but devices have been brought out and are now in secret labs in America and other countries.
Why keep it secret?
He gave her three reasons.
There are the politics of any nation claiming a find like that on Antarctic ground.
It would tear up the timeline of human history.
And above all, there’s the technology itself, which he described as beyond anything we can build today.
Howal was shaken, but she’s a journalist, so she asked for proof.
He gave her coordinates for several sites, internal papers so heavily blacked out you could barely read them, though they still showed classified projects at the places he’d named, and a list of other people who’d been involved, people she could try to reach.
For the next few years, she worked those leads without making noise.
Some of the people on the list wouldn’t talk to her at all.
Others confirmed pieces of the story, but wouldn’t add anything.
And a few, with not much time left, decided to tell her everything.
The pattern held.
Different witnesses described different corners of the same thing.
Ancient structures under the ice, recovery work kept secret by more than one government, and technology that doesn’t fit anything we know about the past.
One of the strongest of those later accounts came from a contractor who’d worked on a drilling job in 2003.
He said he was lowered down a shaft cut through the ice to reach what his crew had been told was a geological anomaly.
More than a mile down, the shaft opened into a space that wasn’t natural.
Its walls were smooth and looked almost like metal.
There were markings on them that nobody on the team could read.
And there was a doorway, an actual entrance leading somewhere deeper.
His team didn’t have the clearance to go further.
He watched scientists and military people in special suits getting ready to go in and then he was sent back up.
He was paid a large bonus and made to sign an agreement that threatened criminal charges if he ever talked.
Years later, when cancer was killing him, he reached out to how.
He told her, “People deserve to know that something had been found down there, something that overturns what we think we know about our own history.”
Now, a mile of drilling through Antarctic ice sounds like science fiction.
It isn’t.
There’s one place where we know for certain that a drill went that deep and kept going.
At Vostto Station, deep in East Antarctica, a joint Russian, French, and American team pulled up an ice core 3,000, 623 m long, more than 2 mi, and stopped about 100 m short of what lay underneath.
Under Vostto, there’s a lake about 250 kilometers long with its surface roughly 4,000 mters below the top of the ice.
The Russian scientist Andre Capitza used old seismic soundings to show the water was there in a paper in Nature in 1996.
And on the 6th of February 2012, the Russian drill finally touched it.
Scientists think that water has been sealed off for about 15 million years.
I mean, think about that for a second.
A whole lake in the dark under 2 and 1/2 miles of ice, and we’ve only just knocked on the door.
So, there really are hidden worlds under that ice.
Whether anyone built anything in them is another question, and the age of the ice itself, which we’ll come to, makes it a stranger one.
Another of how’s witnesses was a satellite imagery analyst.
He said some parts of Antarctica looked blurred or painted over in the public images, and when he raised it, he was told those areas fell under special access rules, but he’d seen sharper versions before release with straight edges and right angles that didn’t look like geology.
Pictures alone couldn’t prove anything was built.
Put next to the radar data he’d seen, though, he was convinced there was architecture under that ice.
By 2020, how had more than 15 testimonies she trusted with coordinates, dates, names, and organizations she could check.
She could publish everything and take what came or keep protecting her sources and keep digging.
She kept digging, sharing pieces of the story in interviews and at conferences while holding back her most sensitive sources.
Believers took it as proof.
Skeptics called it a conspiracy theory.
Mainstream news ignored it completely.
Then her sources started to die.
The flight engineer from that first phone call died in 2019.
The NORAD officer died too and others were sick and how by then past 80 herself understood that if she didn’t get the whole thing on the record, the testimony would be buried with the people who gave it.
Though the story goes, she began pulling everything into one place, what she calls her complete Antarctic report with every testimony, every piece of evidence.
She’d been able to check the coordinates of the suspect sites and the operations and people she could confirm.
She knew it could cost her career, bring legal trouble, and put living sources at risk.
In early 2024, excerpts reportedly went up on Earth Files.
They included coordinates where witnesses said they’d seen exposed structures or where drills had broken into cavities.
One sat in Victoria land at 74° and 35 minutes south by 164° and 32 minutes east.
Another was out in West Antarctica at 82° and 53 minutes south by 135° and 17 minutes west.
And here’s a detail that cuts both ways.
One of the best known satellite maps of Antarctica, the LANCAT image mosaic, was stitched together from more than 1,000 LANCSAT scenes for the International Polar Year of 2007 and 2008.
But it has a hole in it.
From 82° south all the way to the pole, there’s no LANCSAT coverage because of the satellites orbit.
That second site at nearly 83° south falls inside that hole.
So, the analyst was right that some of Antarctica looks worse in public imagery than the rest.
The question is whether that’s orbital mechanics or something else.
Pay attention to how the authorities responded because how thinks it says more than any document.
Nobody denied it.
Nobody confirmed it.
Nobody sued her.
And nobody charged her with anything.
And how reads that silence as meaningful.
If she were making this up, she argues someone would have said so or taken her to court.
To answer her, they’d have to admit what she’s describing or explain why so many people with real credentials would all be lying.
And she believes they don’t want to do either.
There is an official answer on paper, though, and it’s worth hearing.
The Antarctic Treaty was signed in Washington on the 1st of December, 1,959 by 12 governments.
Article one says Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only and it bans any measures of a military nature from bases and fortifications to weapons testing.
And under article 7, observers from the treaty nations get complete freedom of access at any time to any or all areas of Antarctica, including from the air.
So on paper, any treaty country can go and look anywhere on that ice whenever it wants.
How’s sources describe something very different happening underneath it and some people have started looking.
Amateur analysts have been going over her coordinates on satellite images.
A few say they found odd formations while others see nothing that settles anything.
Some scientists asked to see old radar surveys of the ice at her sites and most of those requests were turned down on national security grounds or because the research was private for data that ought to be about rock and ice.
Some people found that strange.
A former worker at an Antarctic research station went public to back her up.
He said anyone who’d spent long stretches on the continent knew there were places you didn’t go and questions you didn’t ask.
And that classified military work went on regularly, separate from the science.
There’s a real case on the record of what happens out there when someone strays.
On the 8th of May, 1,965, a radio researcher named Carl Dish left a lab about a mile and a quarter from the main buildings at Bird Station and apparently missed the hand line that would have guided him back.
30 mph winds wiped out his footprints at around 44 below.
They searched for four more days and he was never found.
No conspiracy is needed to explain that one, but it shows how fast the ice swallows people.
Meanwhile, Howal kept publishing.
New accounts described symbols on the structures, geometric patterns that match no known writing, and electronics failing near certain dig sites.
And most controversial of all, some claimed that pieces of what was recovered have been taken apart and copied in America.
A material scientist said he’d spent a short stint on a secret project testing samples dug out in Antarctica.
The material was metallic, but it matched no alloy.
He knew it resisted corrosion.
It was unusually strong for its weight, and it looked like it had been made by methods we don’t have.
When he asked where it came from, he was told to stick to what it was made of.
He finished the contract, got paid, and signed the papers, convinced that something extraordinary had come out of that ice.
A woman who handled logistics in the government’s Antarctic science program described shipping lists that matched no research project she knew of, heavy excavation gear, specialist drills, and sealed containers moving with military escorts.
When she asked, she was told those were defense department jobs outside her ay’s control.
That’s how how sums it up.
Separate witnesses who don’t know each other.
Each describing a piece of the same thing.
Buried structures, impossible technology, secret operations, and governments working together to keep it quiet.
In her view, a pattern like that deserves a serious investigation.
If any of this is true, the consequences are enormous.
A city that old would mean someone was building thousands of years before Sumer, before the pyramids of Egypt, before every ancient culture we know.
If they had technology we still can’t make sense of, then human progress hasn’t been a straight line.
And we may not be the first advanced civilization this planet has seen.
If several governments have known for 70 years, you have to wonder what else they’re sitting on.
And the darkest question of all, if a civilization like that lived there, what happened to it?
And could it happen again?
This is where that number runs into the ice itself, Antarctica didn’t freeze over at the end of the last ice age.
According to research led by the University of Southampton, geocscientists Thomas Gernon and Thea Hincks published in the journal Science, the Antarctic ice sheet formed about 34 million years ago when mountains in the middle of the continent had risen high enough for snow to stay frozen all year.
Those mountains, the Gambertvs, are still there with peaks around 3,390 m.
And today they’re completely buried.
The ice on top of the continent is up to about 3 mi thick.
So 12,000 years ago, Antarctica wasn’t a green land waiting to be settled.
It had already been under ice for tens of millions of years.
That doesn’t make the witnesses go away.
It changes what they’re describing.
If there really is something built down there, it isn’t the work of people living on open ground back then.
Either it’s far far older than anything human or it was built under the ice or it’s something else entirely that only looks built.
And no amount of silence from any government settles which how doesn’t claim to have every answer.
She separates what witnesses told her, what she could check, and what’s still a guess.
And she isn’t asking anyone to take her word for it.
She wants a proper inquiry.
If even half of it holds up.
She says the world is very different from the one we were taught about.
She’s 84 now.
She ended her regular spots on Coast to Coast AM in 2019, but she hasn’t stopped.
In March of 2026, she turned up on a Spanish language podcast called Paranormal in an episode about anonymous military testimony describing octagonal structures in Antarctica.
In her view, everything she’s covered, the cattle, the sightings, the secrecy, points the same way.
And Antarctica is where the hard evidence lies.
She’s reportedly working on a full documentary and leaving copies of her files with several institutions.
So, the work outlasts her, and this is the moment to meet that Air Force sergeant.
In 1983, Richard Doty showed how documents that he said proved small gray aliens were real.
And he promised her film footage and even an interview with an alien.
The footage never turned up.
The FBI later called the majestic 12 papers that grew out of that world completely bogus.
30 years on in the 2013 documentary Mirage Men, Doty said of her, “We gave Linda some good information and some bad information.
She chose the bad information.”
Back in 2002, the investigator Joe Nickel called her a credulous journalist in Skeptical Inquirer.
And the writer Jason Kivvito reviewing an ancient aliens episode in which Howal interviewed Brian said the supposed entrance to an alien base was just a hole.
Her critics say that’s the whole problem.
There’s no physical evidence anyone outside can test.
Testimony from credible people still isn’t proof, and secret work in Antarctica could have perfectly ordinary explanations.
Her supporters say the accounts are too consistent to wave away, and the silence looks suspicious on its own.
And whatever you make of her, after more than four decades, the ridicule, and the doty years, she’s still putting her name on it.
The truth about Antarctica is still contested.
What nobody can take away is that how spent nearly 30 years recording people who say they saw something under the ice that doesn’t fit the history books.
Whether that’s real, a mistake, or something in between, only disclosure, or an outside check will settle it.
Most of those witnesses are gone now, but their accounts are on the record.
And the treaty those governments signed in 1959 already says any of them can fly over any part of Antarctica at any time.
And look, remember what one of them told her.
Before I die, I must tell the truth.
The witnesses told theirs.
Under 3 mi of ice that’s been there for 34 million years, the continent is still keeping its own.
A lake sealed in the dark for 15 million years.
A mountain range buried out of sight.
And two coordinates that someone someday will fly over and photograph.
When they do, we’ll find out whether How’s Witnesses saw a lost world or something stranger.
I’m Ambrose Wild.
And if you want more stories like this, the ones that start as a rumor and lead somewhere the history books haven’t caught up with, I’ve got more videos like this one on the
