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After a decade of effort, Russian researchers in Antarctica have successfully drilled through more than two miles of solid ice to reach a massive lake that has been sealed off from light and air for millions of years.

If Lake Vostok, a freshwater body roughly the size of Lake Ontario that has been locked beneath the ice for between聽15 million and 34 million years,聽is found to harbor living organisms, the discovery would fuel hopes of discovering聽life on other worlds, such as Jupiter's moon, Europa, or Saturn's moon, Enceladus,聽both of which are thought to have liquid oceans below their icy crusts.聽

The first announcement of the team's success was聽reported Monday in RIA Novosti. The Russian state-owned news agency quoted an unnamed "scientific source," who said,聽鈥淵esterday, our scientists stopped drilling at the depth of 3,768 meters and reached the surface of the sub-glacial lake.鈥澛�

A few paragraphs later, the story takes an unexpected turn:

While some might find it odd that the very first official announcement of a major scientific breakthrough contains references to esoteric Nazi conspiracy theories, there is a kernel of truth in there 鈥� albeit a tiny one. In December 1938, a German expedition set off for Antarctica with the aim of establishing a whaling station and possibly a naval base. The expedition arrived in early 1939 and set about planting Nazi flags on land that had recently been claimed by Norway. The expedition named this region "Neuschwabenland,"听and apparently left without building any permanent structures.

That's all we really know about Nazis in Antarctica.聽The area that the German expedition claimed is on Antarctica's coast, hundreds of miles from the landlocked Lake Vostok. That a U-boat reached the South Pole seems doubtful, as the crew would have had to have gotten out and pushed their vessel overland. Of course it could be that the submariners had reached the聽magnetic South Pole, which is constantly shifting due to changes in the Earth's magnetic field. The magnetic South Pole is currently off the coast of Antarctica, south of Australia, but in 1939s it would have been several miles inland.

The rumor that a U-boat secretly ferried Hitler and his wife out of Germany is an old one. A Time Magazine story from聽Monday, July 23, 1945, relays the story of U-530, which surrendered to authorities in聽Mar del Plata, Argentina, some two months after Germany's surrender. The story notes that an Argentine reporter cited a police report describing a submarine surfacing off Argentina's coast and dropping off two passengers, "a聽high-ranking officer and a civilian." The Time reporter speculated that the couple聽聽"might have been Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, in man's dress."

There's no evidence that U-530 ever visited Antarctica, although neither the skipper nor his crew never explained exactly what they had been doing for the previous two months. 聽

Submarine U-977 also surrendered聽in聽Mar del Plata on August 17, 1945, after famously spending 66 days submerged as it travelled from the North Atlantic to Argentina. The voyage of U-977 has fueled a several conspiracy聽theories聽involving Hitler and Nazi gold, but no real evidence.聽

In any case, it's highly unlikely that Nazi scientists would have even thought to attempt to preserve the F眉hrer's DNA. The聽DNA molecule was first discovered in 1869, but it wasn't until 1952 that scientist confirmed that it plays a role in heredity. The first successful clone from an adult mammal didn't come until 1996, when Scottish scientists successfully cloned a sheep.聽