The hypothesis of a Hollow Earth has long been contradicted by overwhelming evidence as well as by the modern understanding of planet formation, and the scientific community now dismisses the notion as pseudoscience. It has recurred as a premise for fantastic adventure fiction. Hollow Earth is a belief that the planet Earth has a hollow interior and, possibly, a habitable inner surface. Edmund Halley (1656–1742) is best known for having calculated the orbit of a comet that passes by Earth every 76 years. The comet known as Halley’s made its first appearance under that name in 1682. During the next decade, Halley turned his attention away from the celestial in favor of the subterranean. He claimed that the Earth was hollow and populated by humans and beasts. Halley’s Hollow Earth idea was developed further during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and sometimes backed by sound scientific reasoning.
None of the claims of Hollow Earth proponents have been substantiated, however. Those still holding to the belief in the twenty-first century are part of a long history of people who believe human life exists beneath the surface of the Earth. Halley’s theory was based on the fact that the earth’s magnetic field varies over time. Halley suggested that there were several magnetic fields, one of which emanated from a sphere within the earth. Halley eventually developed the idea that there were four concentric hollow spheres within the earth. He believed the inner earth was populated with life and had a luminous atmosphere. The aurora borealis, he concluded, was actually an emanation of radiant gases from within the earth that escaped through thin layers of crust at the poles.
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| Hollow Earth Image Credit: Crystalinks |
During the eighteenth century, Halley’s Hollow Earth theory was adapted by two other famed mathematicians, Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), a Swiss, and John Leslie (1766– 1832), a Scotsman. Euler abandoned Halley’s concentric spheres idea. He postulated that a glowing core some six hundred miles wide warmed and illuminated the inner earth, where an advanced population thrived. Leslie, on the other hand, believed there were two concentric spheres within the earth each with their own sun, which he named Pluto and Proserpine after the Greek god of the underworld and his mate.
Perhaps the most enthusiastic proponent of the Hollow Earth idea was John Cleves Symmes, who was born in 1780 in New Jersey. He was named after an uncle who fought in the American Revolutionary War. Symmes fought in the War of 1812, after which he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and established a trading post. He immersed himself in reading books in the natural sciences. By 1818 he was publicizing his version of the Hollow Earth, which had concentric spheres and received light and warmth from the sun through large holes in the planet open at each of the poles. Symmes proved relentless in publicizing his views: he was a prolific lecturer and writer of letters and articles; wrote fictional accounts of the Hollow Earth, including Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery (1820), which he published under the pseudonym Adam Seaborn; and advocated expeditions to the poles. His Hollow Earth illuminated by openings at the poles became the most popularly known version, and one that would be tested as humans began struggling to reach the poles. Symmes was able to impress two influential men who would take his cause further.
James McBride, a wealthy Ohio man, wrote articles supporting the concentric spheres version of the Hollow Earth. He lobbied a U.S. senator from Kentucky to support a bill funding a proposed expedition to explore trade routes in the southern hemisphere (where McBride hoped the expedition would continue on to the open pole). The senator he had lobbied, Richard M. Johnson (1790–1850), later became vice president of the United States under Martin Van Buren (1782–1862).
In 1828, President John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) indicated that he would approve funding for the expedition. However, when Adams left office in 1829, his successor, Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), stifled a bill funding the proposed expedition. Symmes died in 1829, but his cause was continued by Jeremiah Reynolds, an Ohio newspaper editor. After the failure to get government funding for the expedition in 1829, Reynolds joined a crew sailing to the south seas to hunts seals, but seven years later in 1836, he helped renew efforts for funding of a Southern Hemisphere expedition. Reynolds spoke before Congress, emphasizing the national glory that would accompany scientific discoveries and expanded foreign relations, but he became so impatient with the methodical planning and a series of delays that he was fired from the crew. What became known as the Wilkes expedition, named after its commander, Charles Wilkes (1798–1877), launched in 1838. When the expedition was completed in 1842, they had effectively mapped a landmass where Symmes had envisioned a large hole in the earth. The world’s seventh continent, Antarctica, was officially recognized for the first time.
The open poles theory promoted by Symmes had been effectively undermined, but the belief in the Hollow Earth would only grow more popular. In 1846, the remains of a woolly mammoth, a creature long extinct, were discovered perfectly preserved in ice in Siberia. So suddenly had it been frozen, that the mammoth had not yet digested pine cones it had recently eaten. It was theorized that the animal had been caught by a climate change, but many questioned that such a change could have happened so quickly and thoroughly. Some people believed the animal had wandered out from the Hollow Earth through a hole at the North Pole. As late as 1913, even after the North Pole had been reached, Marshall Gardner published A Journey to the Earth’s Interior, or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered? which claimed that many creatures thought to be extinct were still thriving within the earth. Gardner theorized that the interior earth was warmed by materials still spinning since earth’s creation.
Based on the law of centrifugal force, Gardner argued that earth was originally a spinning mass of matter. An outer layer of matter had hardened and continued to revolve around a central axis, while an inner layer also hardened and was warmed by heat continually generated by the earth’s spinning. That same year, William Reed published The Phantom of the Poles (1906), in which he promoted the idea that a ship can pass from outer Earth to inner Earth. The effect of gravity pulls a ship against the interior in the same manner as it works on the exterior. He claimed that some sailors had already passed into inner Earth without knowing it. Gravity had pulled them to the interior side, where a 600 mile-long sun continued to keep them warm, as the outer sun had done. In between the woolly mammoth find and those publications of 1913, fascination in the Hollow Earth was exhibited by scientists and science fiction writers.
Jules Verne (1828– 1905) published Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), in which characters enter the Earth’s interior through the chimney of an inactive volcano in Iceland. In 1873, The Coming Race, a novel by the occultist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1831–1891), was set in the Earth’s interior, where an advanced civilization of giants thrived. In this story, the giants had built a paradise and discovered a form of energy so powerful that they outlawed its use as a potential weapon. The paradise is threatened, nevertheless; not by weapons, but by a lack of conflict that has resulted in general boredom. One of the more interesting variations on the Hollow Earth theory during the late nineteenth century was expounded by Cyrus Read Teed (1830–1908).
In The Cellular Cosmogony, or The Earth, A Concave Sphere, Teed claimed a civilization inhabited the concave inner surface of Earth. Dense atmosphere prevents viewing across the surface. The Moon, according to Teed, reflects the larger, uninhabitable surface of Earth. Teed made a religion of his discoveries and changed his name to Koresh, the Hebrew equivalent of his given name, Cyrus. As the messiah of Koreshanity, he formed a church, started a magazine, The Flaming Cross, which continued to be published regularly into the 1940s, and founded a community on a 300-acre tract in Florida in 1894. He lived there with about 250 followers until 1908. Upon his death, his followers waited for him to rise again, as he had prophesied. After four days, health officials appeared on the scene and ordered his burial.
Hollow Earth theories continued to be promoted by enthusiasts even as explorers reached the North and South Poles during the first decade of the twentieth century. The open poles theory was further undermined when aviator Richard E. Byrd (1888–1957) became the first to fly over the North Pole. In February 1947, about the time when Admiral Byrd made his great discovery of land beyond the North Pole, another remarkable discovery was made in the continent of Antarctica, the discovery of "Bunger's Oasis."
This discovery was made by Lt. Commander David Bunger who was at the controls of one of six large transport planes used by Admiral Byrd for the U. S. Navy's `Operation Highjump' (1946-1947). Bunger was flying inland from the Shackleton Ice Shelf near Queen Mary Coast of Wilkes Land. He and his crew were about four miles from the coastline where open water lies. The land Bunger discovered was ice-free. The lakes were of many different colors, ranging from rusty red, green to deep blue. Each of the lakes was more than three miles long. The water was warmer than the ocean, as Bunger found by landing his seaplane on one of the lakes. Each lake had a gently sloping beach. Around the four edges of the oasis, which was roughly square in shape, Bunger saw endless and eternal white snow and ice. Two sides of the oasis rose nearly a hundred feet high, and consisted of great ice walls. The other two sides had a more gradual and gentle slope.
The existence of such an oasis in the far Antarctic, a land of perpetual ice, would indicate warmer conditions there, which would exist if the oasis was in the south polar opening, leading to the warmer interior of the earth, as was the case with the warmer territory, with land and lakes, that Admiral Byrd discovered beyond the North Pole, which was probably within the north polar opening. Otherwise one cannot explain the existence of such an oasis of unfrozen territory in the midst of the continent of Antarctica with ice miles thick. The oasis could not result from volcanic activity below the Earth's surface, for, since the land area of the oasis covered three hundred square miles, it was too big to be affected by volcanic heat supply. Warm wind currents from the Earth's interior are a better explanation. Thus Byrd in the Arctic and Bunger in the Antarctic both made similar discoveries of warmer land areas beyond the Poles at about the same time, early in 1947. But they were not the only ones to make such a discovery.
Some time ago a newspaper in Toronto, Canada, "The Globe and Mail," published a photo of a green valley taken by an aviator in the Arctic region. Evidently the aviator took the picture from the air and did not attempt to land. It was a beautiful valley and contained rolling green hills. The aviator must have gone beyond the North Pole into the same warmer territory that Admiral Byrd visited, which lies inside the polar opening. This picture was published in 1960. An American writer on flying saucers, Michael X, was impressed by Byrd's discoveries, and came to the conclusion that flying saucers must come from an advanced civilization in the Earth's interior, whose outer fringes Byrd visited. He describes Byrd's trip as follows:
"There was a strange valley below them. For some strange reason the valley Byrd saw was not ice-covered, as it should have been. It was green and luxuriant. There were mountains with thick forests of trees on them, and there was lush grass and underbrush. Most amazingly, a huge animal was observed moving through the underbrush. In a land of ice, snow and almost perpetual `deep freeze,' this was a stupendous mystery."
When Admiral Byrd went into this unknown country, into `the center of the great unknown,' where was he? In the light of the theory of Marshall Gardner, he was at the very doorway that leads to the earth's interior and which lies beyond the Pole.
"Both Alaska and Canada have had much more of their share of sightings of flying saucers in recent months. Why? Is there some connection with the `land beyond the Pole' - that unknown territory inside the earth? "There must be a connection.
If the flying saucers enter and leave the earth's interior by way of the polar openings, it is natural that they would be seen by Alaskans and Canadians much more frequently than they would be by people in other parts of the world. Alaska is close to the North Pole and so is Canada."
The theory that flying saucers came from the Earth's interior and not from other planets originated in Brazil and only later was it taken up by American flying saucer experts. In 1957, while browsing in a Sao Paulo, Brazil, bookstore, the author came across a book that struck his attention, entitled, "From the Subterranean World to the Sky: Flying Saucers". The book was devoted to the thesis that flying saucers were not space ships from other planets but were of terrestrial origin and came from a subterranean race dwelling inside the earth. At first, the author could not accept this strange, unorthodox theory concerning the origin of the flying saucers, which seemed improbable and impossible, since it would require the existence of a cavity of tremendous size inside the earth in which they could fly, in view of their tremendous speed. In fact, this cavity would have to be so large that it would make the earth a hollow sphere.
At this time the author had not come across the remarkable books of two American scientists, William Reed and Marshall B. Gardner, proving, on basis of evidence from Arctic explorers, that the earth is hollow with openings at the Poles, with a diameter of 5,800 miles in its hollow interior, large enough for flying saucers to fly in. Huguenin's theory of the subterranean origin of the flying saucers, however, was not original.
The idea was first put forward by Professor Henruique Jose de Souza, president of the Brazilian Theosophical Society, which has its headquarters in Sao Lourenco in the State of Minas Gerais, where there is an immense temple in Greek style dedicated to "Agharta," the Buddhist name for the Subterranean World. Among the professor's students at Sao Lourenco were Mr. Huguenin and Commander Paulo Justino Strauss, officer of the Brazilian Navy and member of the Diretoria of the Brazilian Theosophical Society, From him they learned about the Subterranean World, and also the idea that flying saucers come from the Earth's interior. It was for this reason that Mr. Huguenin dedicated his book to Prof. de Souza and his wife, D. Helena Jefferson de Souza.
While Huguenin incorporated the idea of the subterranean origin of the flying saucers in a book, Commander Strauss presented it in a series of lectures which he held in Rio de Janeiro, in which he affirmed that the flying saucers are of terrestrial origin, but do not come from any known nation on the earth's surface. They originate, he believes, in the Subterranean World, the World of Agharta, whose capital city is known as Shamballah. One of the most puzzling facts of Arctic exploration is that while the area is oceanic, covered with water, which is variously frozen over or partially open, depending on the time of the year, many explorers remarked, however, paradoxically, that the open water exists in greater measure at the points nearest to the Pole, while further south there is more ice.
In fact, some explorers found it very hot going at times, and were forced to shed their Arctic clothing. There is even one record of an encounter with naked Eskimos. In fact, the origin of the Eskimo race is believed to be in the extreme north, from where they migrated southward to their present habitat. Their original more northern home was probably warmer than their present more southern one.
This is following conclusions confirmed by many Arctic explorers :
There is really no North or South Pole. Where they are supposed to exist there are really wide openings to the hollow interior of the Earth.
Flying saucers come from the hollow interior of the Earth through these polar openings.
The hollow interior of the earth, warmed by its central sun (the source of Aurora Borealis) has an ideal subtropical climate of about 76 degrees in temperature, neither too hot nor too cold.
Arctic explorers found the temperature to rise as they traveled far north; they found more open seas; they found animals traveling north in winter, seeking food and warmth, when they should have gone south; they found the compass needle to assume a vertical position instead of a horizontal one and to become extremely eccentric; they saw tropical birds and more animal life the further north they went; they saw butterflies, mosquitoes and other insects in the extreme north, when they were not found until one is as far south as Alaska and Canada; they found the snow discolored by colored pollen and black dust, which became worse the further north they went. The only explanation is that this dust came from active volcanoes in the polar opening.
There is a large population inhabiting the inner concave surface of the Earth's crust, composing a civilization far in advance of our own in its scientific achievements, which probably descended from the sunken continents of Lemuria and Atlantis. Flying saucers are only one of their many achievements. It would be to our advantage to contact these Elder Brothers of the human race, learn from them and receive their advice and aid.
The existence of a polar opening and land beyond the Poles is probably known to the U.S. Navy in whose employ Admiral Byrd made his two historic flights and which is probably a top international secret.
Hollow Earth enthusiasts continue to believe. Teed’s Concave Earth theory, for example, was tested during World War II (1939–1945) by a Nazi scientist. He aimed a camera at a 45-degree angle into the sky from an island in the Baltic Sea, hoping to catch an image of a British fleet on the other side of the concave Earth. The experiment was unsuccessful. In 1959, a U.S. submarine journeyed beneath the polar ice cap and actually surfaced at the North Pole, based on precise calculations. Since then, year-round research stations have been built on several sites at both poles. No large holes have been found.
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Icarus in Greek Mythology made wings out of wax and feathers; and he flew to high and the heat from the sun melted the wax holding the feathers together and Icarus fell down to his death. could Icarus have gotten too close to the center sun. It's not like that's what I believe, but it sounds like it could possibly be linked to this idea of a Hollow Earth.
ReplyDeleteWonder why there aren't any entrances into the hollow earth seen from Googl Earth? That would be cool!
ReplyDelete@Lavender Darwin - "Wonder why there aren't any entrances into the hollow earth seen from Googl Earth?" Because there aren't any- this is one of those theories that has more to do with pseudoscientific ideas like Vril energy and aliens than anything else.
ReplyDeletePlease don't put your website link in Comment section. This is for discussion article related only. Thank you :)