Wed. Jan 22nd, 2025 11:21:23 PM

BREAKING NEWS

I Was a Leader of an Antarctic Expedition. This is Why I’m Never Returning.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

In a shocking revelation, a former leader of an Antarctic expedition has come forward to share the harrowing tale of why he will never set foot on the continent again. Our team had the exclusive opportunity to sit down with the expedition leader, who wished to remain anonymous, to discuss the life-changing events that led to his departure from the frozen landscape.

"I thought I was prepared, but nothing could have prepared me for what we faced."

The expedition, which aimed to explore the remote and unforgiving terrain of Antarctica, was a journey of a lifetime for many involved. However, for our interviewee, it was a journey that took a devastating toll on his mental and physical well-being.

"The harsh conditions, the isolation, and the constant fear of the unknown took a massive toll on my mental health. I went from being a confident leader to feeling like I was losing my grip on reality."

As the expedition leader, our interviewee was responsible for making critical decisions that affected the lives of everyone involved. The weight of that responsibility, combined with the extreme conditions and lack of resources, left him feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.

"There were times when I felt like I was going to collapse under the pressure. I knew I had to keep going, but my body and mind were screaming at me to stop."

The final straw came when the expedition team faced a catastrophic event that threatened their very survival. Our interviewee described the incident as "a moment of pure chaos" and revealed that it was then that he realized he had to prioritize his own well-being.

"I knew I couldn’t keep going. I had to get out of there before it was too late. I didn’t want to lose myself, and I didn’t want to risk losing anyone else."

The expedition leader’s decision to leave Antarctica was met with mixed reactions from his team members. Some understood his reasons, while others felt betrayed and abandoned. Our interviewee acknowledged that it was a difficult decision, but he knows it was the right one for his own survival.

"I’ll never forget the lessons I learned on that expedition. I’ll never forget the feeling of being at the mercy of the elements and the weight of responsibility. But most of all, I’ll never forget the realization that sometimes, it’s okay to say no and prioritize your own well-being."

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Antarctic Expedition, Expedition Leader, Antarctica, Mental Health, Stress, Pressure, Survival, Catastrophic Event, Chaos, Self-Preservation, Exclusive Interview, Breaking News, Adventure, Exploration, Extreme Conditions, Isolation, Fear, Uncertainty, Leadership, Decision-Making, Prioritization, Well-being, Survival Story

I am a researcher and explorer working for a US government-funded geological institute. I won't tell you the name of the institute, but you know it's legit anyway, so I'll give you the old name: AIGS, the American Institute for Geographical Studies.

I was a bit of a celebrity in the lab for both good and bad reasons. Let's start with the good: I was the very definition of the phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" in human form. I was a big, muscular man with a very ferocious voice, but I was also competent and knowledgeable enough to help my colleagues with all their research.

What I'm about to tell you is why I'm famous for all the wrong reasons.

A year ago, we sent an expedition of 10 people to the US station in Antarctica to study the ecosystem. Mr Jackson, the director of the station at the time, told me a few days later that the expedition from our lab had arrived and was doing well, which was good news. For three days, we were able to communicate with the expedition using a radio. So once we had the information from the researchers, we could theorise and discuss with them how to write papers or reports to government officials that would benefit the United States.

Seven days after their arrival, we were tidying up the lab, knowing that they would be back in three days, and preparing to have a celebration party for them afterwards. That night we received some worrying news: the people at the Arctic base told us that some of our researchers, our very own, had not returned when they were supposed to, and that there were now only five of them.

It was very bad news that they were missing in Antarctica. Especially at night, a death sentence even if you were armed to the teeth, in the snow, in storms, in the freezing cold, and so they said that if they didn't come back by tomorrow, they would send an expedition to search for them.

Hoping they would come, we left the station and went home for the night.

The next day, when I arrived first at the institute, I immediately put in a call to the Antarctic base. And they told us that the researchers were still missing, and that they had now sent out a search party and were searching a 10-mile circle around the area where they were heading.

That was the last we heard from the US Antarctic Base.

For 2 days, we called the Antarctic base at all hours, but all we got back was silence. Only now did we realise that something serious had happened, but we couldn't just sit here and do nothing. Soon a search party was sent from our side, a search party of which I was the captain.

There were 9 of us in total, and we were given seven days to investigate the Antarctic. We were warned that if we didn't return to the States or hear from them after seven days, we would be declared missing. Meaning we had to return in 7 days, with that in mind, our ship landed on the shores of the arctic.

As soon as we arrived there, we had come to realise just how cold the place was despite being in the middle of the day. Average temperature of -50 degrees celsius. A single padding or a winter coat was not enough for it, luckily for us, we were prepared for this situation. We all wore a sweatshirt, a polo shirt, and padding, and all were given a hot pack that can be used to warm ourselves. All we needed to be careful of now was the danger of the antarctic.

Once the ship reached land, we grabbed as much gear as we could and headed for the Antarctic base where the missing expedition had gone, about five hours from where we had arrived.

We arrived at south pole at 11:00,

The plan was to follow the tips given to us by the base before the expedition disappeared, have lunch at a makeshift hut about two hours away from our arrival point, and arrive at the main base at about five o'clock.

In Antarctica, every minute can mean the difference between life and death, so we started moving right away.

This is where I felt the fear.

You have to walk for two hours, but you have to carry 50 kilograms of packs per person. Very gruelling conditions from the start. At first it was easy to walk in the first few minutes, we encouraged each other, cheered each other on and marched on. After half an hour, no one talks, even opening your mouth saps your energy, so it's very scary to march in silence for an hour.

As the leader of the expedition, I led the way, and the only relief was to hear the breathing of my companions behind me, and as soon as it got quiet, or if I couldn't hear them, I wanted to look behind me. But I couldn't look behind me, because if I stopped pacing, it would take a lot of time to get pacing again.

After an hour or so, 20 minutes of silence was starting to get punctuated by a grumpy exclamation from one of the researchers.

Is it the sound of death or pain? I didn't know, but I kept walking.

Another few minutes of silence passed, and then I broke the silence, right in front of me, I saw a forest. I don't know if it had a mind of its own, but the path was essentially one, pointing to our next destination.

"There should be a cabin over there."

The words were encouraging, and the men began to move quickly, and as we approached the forest, fortunately there was no danger of the wilderness, nor was there any sign of it.

We continued onward, and suddenly there was a downhill slope. As we descended into the woods, we found ourselves between a ravine, and between diverging paths. Walking slowly at the lowest point, we suddenly saw something in front of us, something that looked like it had fallen, but it wasn't, it was a rock, several rocks were embedded in the ground.

"Let's take a break over there," said one of the expedition members. But he changed his mind when we got near the rock.

There was blood on the rock. One rock was ominous enough, but all the rocks had blood on them. And not just a little, but a lot. The feeling of dread returns, what the hell is going on…?

Is it animal blood? I don't know, the blood is frozen, but not so frozen that it hasn't been there a long time, this blood is at least from yesterday. And most of all, the blood is on the rock, but only on the upper part of the rock, not anywhere else. If the expedition that went first, or the expedition from the unsignaled base, had hunted, killed an animal, and dismantled it on this rock, there would have been blood on the other side of the rock, no, it was only on the top of the rock. And the second thing that's curious is that this pattern, this pattern of blood on the top, is not just one rock, it's all of them. All the blood we saw was all on the 'top'.

Only now did I realise that something was ominous, that these were not animal blood, these were human tracks, and that the only people who would pass through here would be former expedition members, or researchers from the Antarctic station, believing that there must be a human body around here, I had the expedition scavenge around.

No body, no other bloodstains.

Suddenly feeling worse, we decided not to rest on this rock and headed for the hut. Luckily, when we got over the hill, we saw the hut and the door was open.

The hut was warm compared to the outside, but it was no place for a person to live without a jacket, so I sat down to eat and while the rest of the expedition took an hour's rest, I explored the hut.

The wooden cabin had windows everywhere, so even though there was no fire, the sunlight lit up the whole place. There was no toilet, and there were no survival items in the storeroom, except for harpoon and other hunting tools.

After a long hallway, I opened the door to the last room, which contained an unexpected item. Photographs were tacked up all over the place, apparently souvenirs of explorers who had stopped by,

and in the center of the room was a human corpse.

It was a shock, this man I knew, he was part of the expedition we sent, and he was the leader of the first expedition I sent encouragement to before they left.

My shock must have been felt by the rest of the expedition, because one by one, they entered the room where their dead comrade was.

The body was not stiff, however, it was cold even for a corpse, it was the temperature that may have caused his body to be as cold as you could imagine. Scavenging around the area, we started searching for things that might have given his final moments, and when it was his final moments. We started examining the clothes if there was some information, and came to a map (Which might have been useful for us) and a name tag from our institute.

By the looks of it, the cabin we entered was in the middle of the forest, and the arctic base we were heading to was located as much as the distance we have covered so far. Another 2 hours of walking was set there. Aside from that, nothing was wrong about the map, hasn’t it for the fact there was this written behind it:

“The devil has killed us.”

If I was ever going to feel fear in a single sentence in my life, it would be now. "The devil killed us." This isn't The Conjuring Part III. Given everything that has happened since we arrived in Antarctica,we knew what our next goal was. We had to find out why this creepy sentence was written. We needed to know what had happened, what had led to the death of our colleagues.

We decided to collect the body of our colleague in the hut when we returned later, to bury him in his hometown. We put our clothes back on and headed outside. The warmth that had been in the house for an hour vanished as soon as we stepped outside, and a sharp wind greeted us this time.

It felt like the whole of Antarctica was laughing at us, insulting us, mocking us.

Back on the road again. The forest began to darken with trees, and after a short walk from the hut, I could see the road was going uphill. Normally, the climb would have been nothing, but after everything that had happened in Antarctica, I was afraid to climb.

But I'm the leader of this expedition, and if I'm scared, this expedition is doomed to fail, and in Antarctica, failure is death. We must climb against all odds.

Twenty minutes later, it began to snow, flakes drifting with the wind, covering everything in white. A white-out situation. It was a very dangerous situation, because we could get lost, but this is Antarctica, it's Wilderness, and there are animals that do not have sight but have a great sense of smell, and if they are here, they will eat us.

It's scary, but we can't stop here. "Forward!" I said, and for ten, twenty, thirty minutes we walked in the white world. Heaven is represented in the media as a white world, but what we see in front of us doesn't remind me of heaven, this is hell.

Antarctica is hell.

After 40 minutes, the whiteout lifted, and when it did, I was relieved to see what was in front of me. There, right in front of us, was our final destination, the only problem was that we would have to walk for another two hours to cross a safe path to get there, and then go around the cliff. With the mindset of never giving up, we started walking.

Less than ten minutes later, a strong gust of wind knocked me and the others over, and just as I was about to stand up, dust off the snow, and continue walking, someone behind me called out to the captain, "Captain!" One of the men had fallen into a pit and barely survived, and I rushed over and pulled him up, before he fell to his death.

We couldn't let our guard down. Even if we have paradise in front of us, the slightest slip of the guard is our annihilation.

On the downhill we descended slowly, and when we reached a flat area, we took a 10 minute break and then we climbed. The path up was studded with trees.

As soon as we got up there, we realised that something very bad had happened.

No one was there.

No researchers, no one from our team, no bodies, no body parts, no blood. We look inside, there's the some of the first expedition’s bags, there's some researchers' notes,

but no one is there. It's as if they've evaporated into the air.

Scattering from the base, we searched as many places as we could, two or three times, but, no one, not a single body.

I immediately went to the telecommunications department and connected to our base in the U.S., and fortunately, we have communication.

"This is Alpha, we're on base."

One of the Institute's leaders greeted us.

"Lab, we're listening."

"There's no one here."

There was a murmur through the comms.

"No one here, what does that mean?"

"Our expedition is definitely not here, nor are the researchers who were supposed to be here, but their luggage and research notes are."

"I see."

It was frustrating, but what could they do, even we in Antarctica don't know what to do, and the people waiting for us in the U.S. can't do anything about it, they sent us here, and that's the least they could do.

I told my men to start searching the perimeters for any evidence. I stayed at the main base and started looking for clues, thinking that, like the Roanoke Colony mystery, the crew must have left something related to their destination. Then I saw the transmitter again and decided to contact the bases of the other countries in Antarctica.

I contacted the closest base to us, the Australian base (I say closest, but it's still about 100 kilometres away), and they responded, but said that they hadn't seen any of the staff from this base, and that they were just as puzzled as we were because they hadn't heard back from anyone from this base.

Next, I checked the call logs for calls made between the bases, and there were 27 in two days, all labeled as "missed calls." The most recent one, within the confines of "conversations," was a call from the UK base, which was answered by a call to the UK base, which was accepted after 20 seconds.

I asked the same question, if they knew the whereabouts of the staff at the US base, and they didn't know either.

Just as I was about to call the next base, one of the explorers came to me with a terrified look on his face.

"Captain, there's something here.

I immediately put the phone down and followed the frightened ranger, anxiety overwhelming me. He led me to where the other rangers were looking at something.

The bags from the first team were buried in the snow, and they weren't the only ones: expedition gear, weapons, and even research journals were buried in the snow.

The items I'd seen on the base weren't all that was on the base.

It was starting to get dark, so I righted the bag and decided to investigate outside tomorrow. Dinner was eaten in silence. I thought something would be solved when I got to the base, but instead, more mysteries were created. Where is our expedition, where are the researchers at the base, and why are their things scattered outdoors?

As we were eating dinner and thinking, one of the expedition members saw one of the researcher's notebooks.

"What is this?”

He showed us the paper, and we saw a drawing on the ground of a creature that looked like something out of Cthulhu mythology, but even more bizarre: a giant that looked like a cross between a yeti and a Davy Jones. It was a drawing, but the creature seemed to be staring at us.

It was too good to be just a hobbyist drawing. It looked more of an diagram of something, IA diagram of a living thing.

Just as we were trying to think, One of the expedition members shouted.

“Oi!”

He pointed his finger outward. We looked out and stoof in shock, there are people running outside, and they are wearing the same clothes as us, the expedition we sent first!

My team saw that they were being chased by something, so they armed themselves and headed outside. They asked me to explain the situation from above, so I stayed back at the base. I saw the men in red jammies heading down the hill toward him like that.

I looked through the window, and the man with the gun suddenly looked back and started firing, and at the same time, a red light began to shine from the bottom of the valley. He stopped firing, and the other members of the expedition began to run away, and I saw.

Seven red-furred yeti-like beings with luminous bodies were chasing them, or perhaps "charging" is a better word than "chasing"; they were not chasing like humans, but "charging" like tigers and bears chasing animals.

I saw the expedition member at the back fall.

Two of the seven pounced on him and began pummeling his body as he fell to the ground, the screams of the member could be heard up to this point, and then suddenly the screams grew louder… No, the screams of many began to be heard.

At the same time, other members of the expedition stopped in horror, and they too were seized by the beasts. I saw some of them struggling. The screams got louder and louder, and I couldn't tell which ones were ours.

As they writhed in agony, a pit was summoned from beneath them, and as soon as it was summoned, I saw people swimming in fire and brimstone.

As the pit grew larger, the screams of the damned echoed across the Antarctic. I gathered up my courage and decided to go outside and watch from the cliffside.

The spirits of the damned are writhing in agony, some of them feeling a fate worse than death across the bay. In the centre of the lava, a mighty, nay, towering being stands, and unlike the yetis, he is red to the flesh. Like those creatures you see in the media that are used to depict demons? It was something like that, except looking even more diabolical than anything I have imagined.

As the hole started to get closer, I thought of running, and just as my instinct told me to flee, I saw the yetis dragging my companion into the fiery pits. The yetis jumped in there like they felt no pain, while despite the screams of the fallen souls muffling my comrades, I could sense they were also in pain as well.

That is all I remember about that day, the next thing I do remember was that I was approached by the Australian Base Members, who found me unconscious in the middle of the snow. Surrounded by the items of the comrades.

I didn't know what to tell them, but I first excused myself by saying that I must have accidentally fallen down the hill while looking for the missing people, because honestly, who would believe me?

I headed back to base and sent a comm to the lab, telling them what happened right here, that I'd be back with proof of the supernatural, that they should look at the evidence and think about it before they thought I was crazy.

The Australian base member said they would confiscate the base since it was effectively abandoned, and of course, I, not being part of the lab, could not argue.

They escorted me to the harbor, and as I boarded the ship and left Antarctica, I swore never to return to this hellhole.

It's been four months since I made that vow, and even now I worry about those who study Antarctica, but I worry more about those who have gone there themselves, for they do not know.

that curiosity can lead them to hell.



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One thought on “I was a leader of an Antarctic expedition. This is why I am never returning.”
  1. I genuinely hope that you’re doing OK after experiencing something like this! You’ve been through an incredibly traumatizing event. The fact that you’ve shared this story is brave of you. I just wanted you to know there is nothing to be ashamed about your decision to leave Antarctica. Thanks for sharing your experiences with us.

    Please take care of yourself, and if you ever need to talk about what happened, know that there are people who will listen and support you. The safety of those who venture into such dangerous and unknown territories is always a concern. I hope that you find peace after what you’ve endured.

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