Strangest fact
A 'secret diary' says Admiral Byrd flew into a hidden world inside the Earth on February 19, 1947. Records place him in Antarctica then, not at the North Pole.
Why it is odd: The famous diary clashes with Byrd's own documented location, while his real 1926 diary shows erased navigation numbers.
Richard E. Byrd (1888 to 1957) was a U.S. Navy officer and one of the most famous explorers of his time. On May 9, 1926, he and pilot Floyd Bennett took off from Spitsbergen, an Arctic island north of Norway, and came back saying they had flown over the North Pole. Byrd received the Medal of Honor. In November 1929 he took part in the first flight over the South Pole, and he led several expeditions to Antarctica.
The North Pole claim has since fallen apart. In 1996, Ohio State University's archivist found the diary Byrd kept on the 1926 flight among his papers. Some of the sextant readings in it, the sun measurements used to work out position, had been erased but could still be read, and they differ from the numbers in Byrd's official report. In a 2000 paper in the journal Polar Record, the researcher Dennis Rawlins concluded that Byrd and Bennett made a heroic attempt but never reached the Pole. Most polar historians now credit the airship Norge, which crossed the Pole three days later, as the first verified flight over it.
The stranger story is about a second diary. Hollow earth believers say the Earth is a shell with openings at the poles leading to an inner world. In the 1950s and 1960s, hollow earth writers began quoting Byrd as saying I'd like to see that land beyond the Pole
and calling that area the Great Unknown.
Raymond Bernard's book The Hollow Earth, first published in the 1960s, built a whole theory on such lines. Later, a typed text called the 'missing secret diary' of Admiral Byrd began to circulate, from at least the 1970s. It says that on February 19, 1947, Byrd flew past the North Pole into a warm, green land and met people from an advanced civilization living inside the Earth.
The records do not fit the diary. In early 1947 Byrd was the officer in charge of Operation Highjump, the U.S. Navy's huge Antarctic expedition, with 13 ships and about 4,700 men. Ohio State's chronology of his life says the expedition left for Antarctica in 1946 and that he returned from Antarctica in April 1947. That puts him at the bottom of the world during the week the diary says he was flying over the top of it. No original of the diary has ever been produced, and the 'land beyond the Pole' line, when it can be traced, is about Antarctica, not a hole in the Arctic.