  In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript
in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the
documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a
sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an
extraordinary island. Johansen`s descriptions of his adventures upon the island
are fantastic, and are often considered the most enigmatic (and therefore the
highlight) of Thurston`s collection of documents.
  We contend that all of the credible phenomena which Johansen described may be
explained as being the observable consequences of a localized bubble of
spacetime curvature. Many of his most incomprehensible statements (involving
the geometry of the architecture, and variability of the location of the
horizon) can therefore be said to have a unified underlying cause.
  We propose a simplified example of such a geometry, and show using numerical
computation that Johansen`s descriptions were, for the most part, not simply
the ravings of a lunatic. Rather, they are the nontechnical observations of an
intelligent man who did not understand how to describe what he was seeing.
Conversely, it seems to us improbable that Johansen should have unwittingly
given such a precise description of the consequences of spacetime curvature, if
the details of this story were merely the dregs of some half remembered fever
dream.
  We calculate the type of matter which would be required to generate such
exotic spacetime curvature. Unfortunately, we determine that the required
matter is quite unphysical, and possess a nature which is entirely alien to all
of the experiences of human science. Indeed, any civilization with mastery over
such matter would be able to construct warp drives, cloaking devices, and other
exotic geometries required to conveniently travel through the cosmos.
