All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Sept. 15, 2020 - Skeptoid
17:36
Skeptoid #745: Australia Doesn't Exist, and Other Geographic Conspiracy Theories

The belief that Australia doesn't exist may not be as unique as you think. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Ancient Geographic Hoaxes 00:09:08
The crazy conspiracy theories people come up with can really blow your mind.
Finland doesn't exist.
Australia doesn't exist.
But did you know geographic conspiracies like these go back centuries, even before the dawn of the internet?
But why would people make up false continents, false islands, and erase other places from maps when they clearly exist in reality?
Turns out there are sometimes good reasons.
Geographic Conspiracies is coming up next on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and replace them with more Skeptoid.
The Extended Premium Show available now.
Come to Skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Australia Doesn't Exist and other geographic conspiracy theories.
A few years ago, we covered a conspiracy theory that claimed the country of Finland doesn't exist, and all the world's governments cooperatively conspired to fool all the world's citizens into believing in it as a ploy to get extra fish to feed struggling post-war Japan.
Well, regardless of how plausible you may have felt that one was or wasn't, we have another one for you today.
A similar claim made about Australia.
Complete with an equally believable motive.
In 2006, an anonymous post on the Flat Earth Society Forum first raised the idea of Australia being fake.
It said, in part, Most of you have probably been brought up believing in the imaginary land called Australia.
Well, the fact is that Australia doesn't really exist.
Everything you have ever heard about it was made up, and any pictures of it you have seen were faked by the government.
I am sure you have even talked to people on the internet who claim to be from Australia.
They are really secret government agents.
The idea languished in internet obscurity for a long time until a Swedish Facebook user named Shelly Florid revived it based on some random thread on Reddit.
And this time, she added a motivation.
Australia is not real.
It's a hoax made for us to believe that Britain moved over their criminals to someplace.
In reality, all these criminals were loaded off the ships into the waters, drowning before they could see land ever again.
It's a cover-up for one of the greatest mass murders in history, made by one of the most prominent empires.
Australia is not real.
It's a code word for the cold-blooded murder of more than 100,000 people, and it is not okay.
We will not accept this.
Stand up for the ones who died.
Let it be known that Australia does not exist.
The post was quickly shared over 20,000 times before Florida deleted it, telling BuzzFeed News at the time that she was buried in ridicule from angry Australians, including, quote, 100 or so death threats.
She probably wishes she'd kept a bit more distance from flat earther forums, but regardless, let us expend an appropriate amount of effort presenting the evidence that Australia is in fact real.
Now that we're done with that, it's worth noting that Finland and Australia aren't the only places in the world that are both denied by some to exist and that can be easily visited by anyone at any time.
In a nondescript part of Germany, you may or may not find a city called Bielefeld.
Like the Australian story, the Bielefeldt doesn't exist conspiracy theory also has a well-known point of origin.
In 1993, some students at the University of Kiel in Germany were having a party in a dormitory and someone happened to mention that they were from Bielefeldt, a small city somewhat known for being uninteresting.
Achim Helt, today a computer scientist, recalls that one of his friends jokingly scoffed at the innocent statement and said that nobody would actually be from there.
Later, Helt and some of the same friends were in a car on the way to Essen and saw that the motorway exits to Bielefeldt were closed.
It was the perfect Deus ex Machina punchline to their wise crack from the other night.
It was satirical proof of the joke that Bielefeldt is just a government-invented myth.
So Helt went to Usenet, an online thing that was eventually replaced by the internet for all you kids out there, and posted about his discovery that they, always written in all caps whenever used in reference to Bielefeldt, have created this false city and even gone so far as to generate fake daily sports news about its football team and produce automobile license plates with BI on them.
As Helt figured that as jokes go, this one probably wasn't worth spending more than about two and a half minutes on, he didn't bother to fabricate any particular reason for the deception by them.
But defying expectations, the joke stuck.
And even today, it's the running gag about Bielefeld.
It's worth mentioning that although this joke about Bielefeldt is based on it being boring and nondescript, it's actually quite a beautiful city with a lot of history and a thriving arts scene, very impressive for a city its size, and well worth taking that highway exit.
But geographic hoaxes are hardly new.
Ever since the first few centuries of the common era when ships first began venturing into intercontinental waters, knowledge of the world was fuzzy.
Cartographers struggled to organize and present geographic information that was incomplete and often contradictory.
All of these early maps were wrong to some degree, some more than others, yet most were made with the very best of intentions.
But not all of them.
Combine the fact that the claimed existence of certain places could be beneficial to certain parties with the limited ability for others to verify some faraway place on a map, and we should not be surprised to find that there was a whole closeted industry of fake geographical information.
In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact.
Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking.
And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media.
It's an easy ask.
Just send a quick message to your station's programming director.
By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction.
Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address.
You can even use the telephone.
I know that might sound crazy.
It's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication.
I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option.
The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless.
When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction.
And that's how we shape a better future.
In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless.
Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding together.
Get them to air the Skeptoid files from Skeptoid Media, available on the PRX Exchange, and they'll know what that is.
To illustrate, let's take two examples.
Phantom Islands Explained 00:05:33
An Italian cartographer who promoted a non-existent island in an effort to prove that Venetians had beaten Columbus to the New World, and another island whose claimed existence was used to establish mineral and economic rights.
The first of these concerns the island of Friesland, a substantial island nation dotted with cities, ports, surrounding isles, and even its own monarchy.
Friesland first appeared in maps of the North Atlantic beginning in 1558 and was included on multiple subsequent important maps for at least a century until such time as that part of the world became sufficiently thoroughly explored that Friesland's existence was finally debunked.
There has been speculation that Frieslant was an honest mistake stemming from misidentification of the southern part of Greenland, but a study into the 1558 map's author puts that speculation to rest.
The map was by Niccolo Zeno, a prominent Venetian who came from a family of modest explorers.
Frustration had been growing in Venice that the discoveries of their own ships were being eclipsed by those of other nations, and in Zeno in particular because his own family was losing much of its former luster.
The map was found in his book De la Scoprimento, On Discovery, which pretended to be an historical account of his family's voyages, but was in fact more like pulp fiction.
Zeno cast his father in the role of an explorer who first landed on Friesland and had dealings with its prince, who, upon learning that they came from Italy, were overjoyed that visitors from the world's most famous nation would come to his humble island.
Zeno the Elder was knighted, of course, the prince citing his great industriousness and genius as a Venetian.
The Zeno family's exploits on the island nation of Friesland established the credibility of everything else in the book, which also included Zeno's brother Antonio beating Columbus to the New World.
But as discussed earlier, in those days it simply wasn't practical or possible to challenge or verify such stories.
So Friesland continued to appear on maps and was even claimed by England, sight unseen.
And to this day, a core of Italian purists accepts the Zeno family as the true discoverers of the New World.
Our second example is Isla Bermeja, an 80-square-kilometer island paradise said to be off the northern coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.
It sits on the Compecha Bank, site of some of Mexico's largest oil reserves.
Until quite recently, Bermeja was used to extend Mexico's 200-mile economic claim to natural resources, even though the Mexican Navy tried to find it in 1997 and reported that it wasn't there.
Conspiracy theories appeared immediately, some saying the CIA had destroyed the island with explosives in order to shrink Mexico's oil claim.
Others saying it had probably become submerged due to global warming.
Isla Bermeja has appeared on old maps of the Gulf of Mexico since at least 1539.
Its first known appearance was in a list of islands published in Madrid by the eminent cartographer and astronomer Alonso de Santa Cruz, though there doesn't seem to be any record of what his source might have been.
In March of 2008, the National Autonomous University of Mexico conducted documentary research, basically looking at all the old maps, to determine exactly where Bermeja was supposed to be and came up with 22 degrees, 33 minutes north, 91 degrees, 22 minutes west.
They then spent a week actually searching 223 square kilometers of the Gulf of Mexico with depth-sounding equipment and flying around in a plane.
Today, this is easy enough to replicate from your desk.
Just pull up a bathymetric map on Google Earth, and it's plain to see that there is no island anywhere near there and never was.
The ocean floor is smooth throughout the vicinity.
It didn't sink because of global warming, and it wasn't blown up by the CIA.
However, some 30 kilometers to the southwest of those coordinates is a reef complex called Cayo Arenas, which includes a few coral keys and one little island large enough to have vegetation, and it even has a couple of unused structures on it.
Clearly, this is leaps and bounds from being the 80 square kilometer island that Bermeja was said to be, but it's a perfectly reasonable source for the erroneous phantom on the ancient maps.
So although we have no ulterior motive for how Bermeja first came to be, we certainly have a strong economic motive for modern persistence of belief in it.
And so, let us bow our heads in remembrance of those who perished under the guise of being shipped to Australia.
The overworked Swedish lackeys paid to claim they're from a place called Finland.
The members of Bielefeldt's fake football team, threatened with death if they ever reveal their own non-existence.
Support Skeptoid Today 00:02:50
The good prince of Friesland, so generous with his knighthoods, and the 17th century pirates who landed on Isla Bermeja to bury their fabulous treasures but suddenly found themselves with only water underfoot.
Whenever you hear a tale, backed only by Reddit threads and a forum post from the Flat Earth Society, you have very good cause to be skeptical.
A great big skeptoid shout out to premium supporters Maricopa Jeff, Denny Lindhorse, Noah, a skeptic in Savannah, Georgia, and Sergeant Burney, the skeptical cop.
Sustainability is a popular theme in science, and the support from these premium members is what pays the bills of our non-profit.
Please join them by becoming a member for just $5 a month at skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
But first, as long as you've got your podcast app open right now, please take a second and give Skeptoid a rating.
It really does help with the discovery algorithms that suggest Skeptoid to new listeners.
And we all know how much they need it.
And remember, we always do our best to publish any corrections.
So if you find an error in any Skeptoid episode, come to skeptoid.com slash corrections to report it.
And I'll include it in an upcoming corrections episode.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the teacher's toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection