Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups (14 page)

The logical conclusion of this theory is that any planet in the universe that has the right conditions, for example water, can support primitive forms of life. It is now thought that there is not only water in the subterranean lakes on Mars, but also on Jupiter's moons, Callisto and Europa. Although it seems unlikely that there are alien beings on Mars – descendants of a vanished civilization who want to take over the planet Earth – a new possibility has been raised, that the universe is teeming with life forms that we have never encountered and as yet, have no knowledge of. And that, perhaps, is an even more fascinating possibility.

From the earliest times, theories about life under the Earth have abounded. In Ancient Greece, an underworld peopled by the dead was envisaged, which was known as Hades, while Christian mythology conceived of a fiery subterranean place where the damned were sent to endure eternal torture. We know it as Hell. Different versions of these beliefs feature in many ancient religions the world over. But in modern times, there have also been many eminent thinkers and scientists, as well as fiction writers, who have picked up the idea. They describe a "hollow" Earth, often peopled by a prehistoric race, that is reached by a network of subterranean tunnels. Today, few believe that the Earth really is hollow, or that human beings live at the centre of it, but the idea of a different world underground, where some forms of life exist, still excites the imagination. Recent developments in science have shown that such a notion is not merely the stuff of science fiction.

H
ALLEY'S INNER SPHERES
In 1692, the renowned English astronomer, Edmund Halley, came up with the idea that the Earth was hollow. As the man responsible for plotting the path of the comet named after him, Halley's opinion was taken seriously. He was an eminent man of science, after all. According to his theory, the reason that the Earth's magnetic field sometimes showed inexplicable variations was because there were other magnetic fields around it, causing opposing gravitational pulls. Halley came up with a new model of the Earth, in which four inner spheres were stacked inside each other. He also advanced the idea that each of these was lit by a luminous gas. The aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, was evidence of this gas, he claimed. This is how the gas looked when it was escaping at the North Pole, where he believed the Earth's crust had thinned. Halley also believed that the spheres could well be inhabited, although he did not specify by what exact forms of life.

Next, a Swiss mathematician named Leonhard Euler proposed that instead of several spheres there was only one, which was at the centre of the Earth. This, he thought, was lit by an inner sun that allowed an advanced civilization to prosper there. Today there is some dispute as to whether Euler actually claimed this to be the case, or whether he was merely raising the possibility as a "thought experiment". Whatever the case, his ideas inspired several other thinkers. One of these was another mathematician, a Scotsman called Sir John Leslie, who went on to claim that there were two suns, Proserpine and Pluto, that lit the subterranean realms at the Earth's core.

U
NITED STATES
E
XPEDITION
During the nineteenth century, the idea of a "hollow Earth" became popular among would-be explorers, several of whom suggested making expeditions to find this lost world. In 1818, John Cleves Symmes, a businessman, began to raise money to support an expedition to the "hole" at the North Pole where he believed that the inner spheres of the Earth could be entered. He died before the expedition could take place but, in 1838, a newspaperman called Jeremiah Reynolds took up the challenge, agitating for the United States government to send out a force, which they did in that year. The Wilkes Expedition, as it was called, did not find the alleged hole, but over a period of years they brought back a great deal of useful information about the continent that came to be called Antarctica.

The next proponent of the hollow Earth theory was William Reed, whose book,
Phantom of the Poles
, was written in 1906. Seven years later, Marshall Gardner wrote
A Journey to the Earth's Interior
, and also made a working model of the Earth's core as he envisaged it. When an extinct species of woolly mammoth was found frozen in the ice in Siberia, Gardner advanced the idea that it had strayed out of the inner zone by passing through the hole at the Earth's pole. According to him, all manner of extinct animals wandered about this subterranean world and here was the evidence for it.

Since that time, new generations of writers have come up with the idea of life in this "hollow Earth": from prehistoric animals to a race of enlightened human beings. It has also been claimed that entrance can be gained to this subterranean civilization through holes in the Earth – in Antarctica, Tibet, Peru and the United States. Not only this, but some believe that UFOs and other extraterrestrial phenomena emanate from this underworld.

T
HE CULT OF
K
ORESH
One of the most notorious "hollow Earth" theorists was Cyrus Read Teed, who took the theory one step further by claiming that the Earth was a completely hollow sphere, with a great human civilization living inside it. He founded a cult in Florida and declared himself to be Koresh, a Messiah, before he died in 1908. Outlandish as his ideas sounded, some aspects of physics and mathematics could be employed to support them and a few scientists continued to investigate his ideas after his death.

By the end of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, claims about the existence of a highly developed, ancient civilization under the Earth's crust continued to abound. Not surprisingly, the idea of a master race proved especially popular among Nazi sympathizers. There was even a theory that Adolf Hitler had escaped to join them – via Antarctica in spacecraft – after his defeat in the Second World War and was still alive many years later.

J
OURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE
E
ARTH?
Ironically, one of the most persuasive versions of the "hollow Earth" theory came not from a scientist but from an adventure writer: Jules Verne. In his famous book
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
, published in 1864, Verne described a network of tunnels that led from the Earth's surface to underground caves where prehistoric beings live in an underground sea. For many years, scientists thought that such an idea was ridiculous and that nothing could live that far underground, away from the sun. However, recent research has shown that, in fact, there are underground passages leading far into the Earth and that more forms of life flourish there than was previously thought possible. For example, rock-eating bacteria and various kinds of insects such as millipedes and scorpions have been found in places over a mile below ground. No prehistoric creatures such as plesiosaurs have been sighted as yet and there has definitely been no sign of a master race of highly evolved human beings. However, after discovering these simple forms of life deep under the Earth's crust, who knows for certain what else awaits us as science progresses and we journey further into the centre of the Earth?

The standard account of Adolf Hitler's death is that on 30 April 1945 he committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, shooting himself in the head and possibly also taking a capsule of cyanide. With him was Eva Braun, the mistress he had married on the previous day. After their deaths, both bodies were taken into the garden outside by their few remaining friends, doused with petrol, burned and buried in shallow graves. The bodies were later identified by Soviet forces and a hasty autopsy was performed on the remains.

Today, there are those who continue to question this account. Why were the bodies disposed of in this way? Could it be, perhaps, that there were in fact no bodies, and that Hitler and Eva Braun had escaped from the bunker to carry on the Nazi campaign from a secret hide-out? If so, where did they go? Was it to the Bavarian Alps, to South America, or even to New Swabia in the Antarctic?

At the time, several important figures, including Joseph Stalin, believed that Hitler had escaped the bunker and was still alive and active somewhere in the world. As the years went by, the conspiracy theories became more bizarre as links were made with Nazi mythologies about the Aryan race. Some suggested that Hitler had disappeared into the hollow earth, or had travelled with aliens to the star Aldebaran, from where he continues to conduct a campaign to take over the planet Earth.

Far-fetched as some of these theories might be, it is not surprising that there has been a good deal of speculation about the issue. The fact that Hitler's body was so hastily disposed of by the Soviet authorities, and that a satisfactory autopsy was never performed, has meant that we will probably never know the exact circumstances of the death of one of the most notorious leaders in history.