Science: Poles Apart

Ever since Admiral Robert Edwin Peary returned from his latest Arctic expedition in 1909, critics have disputed his claim to discovery of the North Pole. As late as 1929, long after Congress, the National Geographic Society and the encyclopedias had taken Peary’s word for it, British Polar Scholar J. Gordon Hayes wrote a quarrelsome book to disprove that Peary had reached the Pole. Last week another critic had his say.

In Manhattan, the Rev. Bernard R. (“The Glacier Priest”) Hubbard disclosed that the U.S. Air Force recently took a “fix” of the North Pole with loran (longrange navigation) beams aimed from Alaska to intersect at the 90th meridian. Father Hubbard, who is serving as an Arctic consultant to Colonel Bernt Balchen’s 10th Rescue Squadron, said that U.S. Air Force planes had circled the North Pole 300 times, taking photographs of the spot marked by the crossing electronic beams.

“Where the Pole should be,” he announced, “there is only a nightmare jigsaw puzzle of ice floes … I won’t say it’s impossible that Peary reached the actual Pole, but it’s extremely improbable.”