Europe Doesn't Exist!

Last week I embarked on a journey to Finland. I had a housemate who used to always say that Europe didn't exist, but it was on all the maps. Next he's going to tell me that the sea monster isn't real either! Unshaken by his scepticism I set off on my European adventure.

Something was amiss from the first moment I stepped onto the plane, the flight was at 1am in the morning so I could see nothing outside. The destination was Hong Kong, so I just had to take the pilot's word for it. I knew we had to cross into the northern hemisphere, I would be flying across the equator and through the tropics. But something was amiss, the temperature display was getting colder and colder the closer to the equator we became. It would have appeared we were heading south!

I got to Hong Kong at what my watch said was 7am, it was 11C outside. Funny because the forecast for Hong Kong that day was meant to be 20C. I couldn't see much beyond the airport, there was a thick haze obscuring vision of more than a couple of hundred metres. It's like a pollution mask to conceal that we really weren't in Hong Kong, Asia's hub to Europe. We were in an island south west of Tasmania - a secret island uncharted in order to fool any tourist travelling onward to Europe.

My sceptic brain kicked back in, this of course is impossible. Why would there be an elaborate conspiracy to convince the world that a continent exists that does not? I put the question into the back of my mind and boarded the flight to Helsinki.

The in-flight entertainment unit built into the seat in front of me included a couple of options to track the aircraft. First I wondered why we were flying north over china instead of in a straight line to Helsinki. It's like they wanted to avoid a huge mountain range, but what mountain range rises more than 10km above sea level? The plane had a camera on the bottom of the aircraft so I was able to look down at the landscape, it all looked so familiar... I had seen images like this on Google Earth. I was again alarmed.

Now it could have been that I was genuinely looking at the ground, but the coincidence between what google earth sees and what I saw on the plane were just too coincidental not to be causal. The conspirators were clever about it though, instead of just taking the image straight, they applied a filter to the image so it would look like it's live. The cloud cover was a nice touch, I must admit. The temperature outside got colder and colder, it was at once stage -70C. I knew we must be in the Antarctic.

One other give away that we were in the Antarctic was the length of day. The flight had been 11 hours and the sun had been up for a couple of hours beforehand. In Finland the sun is only up a few hours a day, how could I have seen that much sunlight if I was in the northern hemisphere?

I landed in "Helsinki" in the late afternoon their time, it was -7C outside and the sun was low on the horizon. Curiously enough they didn't care much about screening me to allow me into the country, probably didn't want me asking too many questions. I've had more trouble getting out of a domestic airport than that, surely in this age of heightened terrorism a real place would be doing all it can to put in safeguards.

I know this all sounds crazy, but the motivation fits. Currently the EU is the backbone of the global market, it is helping stabilise the global system. It's the fictitious entity that caused the global meltdown. Many tourists flock to Europe each year so the entire conspiracy exists to feed the market back into itself. It's taking the money off citizens of the USA, Australia and Asia who are destroying the economy by spending that money elsewhere, and putting it back into the economy to fund the bailouts of the multimillionaires who destroyed it in the first place. It's how it's always been, it's how it always will be, and I've cracked the conspiracy. Europe doesn't exist, spread the word!

---

This is a tribute to an old housemate, because without him I wouldn't be where I am now - physically and sceptically. Thanks Mike, I owe you one.