Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio (38 page)
Authors: David Standish
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BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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That the Shaver Mystery elicited such a response seems remarkable now. In 1947, Palmer added a twist that really put it over the top: flying saucers. On June 25, a short news item had gone out on the AP wires:
PENDLETON, Ore., June 25 (AP)—Nine bright saucer-like objects flying at “incredible speed” at 10,000 feet altitude were reported here today by Kenneth Arnold, a Boise, Idaho, pilot who said he could not hazard a guess as to what they were.Arnold, a United States Forest Service employee engaged in searching for a missing plane, said he sighted the mysterious objects yesterday at 3 P.M. They were flying between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, in Washington state, he said, and appeared to weave in and out of formation. Arnold said he clocked and estimated their speed at 1,200 miles an hour.
The story got it slightly wrong. Arnold hadn’t actually said the objects were saucer-shaped. Rather, he’d said they “flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across the water”—and that they “were not circular.” But apparently the reporter misunderstood—and flying saucers were born.
It should be said that Arnold was a four-square regular guy. He’d been an Eagle Scout, was a high school All-State football player in North Dakota in 1932 and 1933, and since the early 40s had been a pilot, flying from place to place in the Northwest selling fire control equipment, occasionally moonlighting as a relief federal U.S. marshal and flying federal prisoners to various penitentiaries. He’d also been a field representative for the Red Cross for many years. He was no kook—he’d just seen these strange flying objects.
Ray Palmer jumped on Arnold’s story like a dog on a bone. Early in July he contacted Arnold to do an article about his sighting for
Amazing Stories
and hired him to investigate another one reported three weeks after his.
Amazing Stories
and hired him to investigate another one reported three weeks after his.
Soon flying saucers became a major component of the Shaver Mystery—since Shaver had earlier talked about spacecraft built by the Elder Ones. In the new formulation, there were still a few Elders left in their subterranean kingdom, along with some of their spaceships, and they sometimes used these flying saucers to check out the upper world.
Yes, the
true
origin of flying saucers lay in the hollow earth!
true
origin of flying saucers lay in the hollow earth!
In the late 1940s and early 1950s sightings multiplied, and a certain flying saucer mania swept the United States, spreading far beyond the community of true-believer sci-fi fans and others susceptible to embracing fringe phenomena. Back then
Life
was one of the highest-circulation magazines, and a good indicator of everyday American interests. Its April 7, 1952 issue featured a fetching picture of Marilyn Monroe on the cover, with the cover line “Marilyn Monroe The Talk of Hollywood.” The only other cover line was “There Is A Case For Interplanetary Saucers”—and this not in some screwy oddball publication but in what was arguably the most mainstream general interest magazine in the country. In a lengthy examination complete with photos of supposed saucers, after marshaling considerable evidence pro and con, the article has this portentious ending:
Life
was one of the highest-circulation magazines, and a good indicator of everyday American interests. Its April 7, 1952 issue featured a fetching picture of Marilyn Monroe on the cover, with the cover line “Marilyn Monroe The Talk of Hollywood.” The only other cover line was “There Is A Case For Interplanetary Saucers”—and this not in some screwy oddball publication but in what was arguably the most mainstream general interest magazine in the country. In a lengthy examination complete with photos of supposed saucers, after marshaling considerable evidence pro and con, the article has this portentious ending:
…the real depths of the saucer mystery bemuse penetration, as the night sky swallows up a flashlight beam…. Why do the things make no sound? How to explain their eerie luminosity? What power urges them at such terrible speeds through the sky? Who, or what, is aboard? Where do they come from? Why are they here? What are the intentions of the beings who control them? Before these awesome questions, science—and mankind—can yet only halt in wonder. Answers may come in a generation—or tomorrow. Somewhere in the dark skies there may be those who know.
Palmer played this story in his magazine for all it was worth, and in 1952 he and Kenneth Arnold collaborated on a book,
The Coming of the Saucers.
Palmer is often credited—perhaps blamed is a better word—for creating the flying saucer hysteria that swept the country back then. Certainly, and almost single-handedly, using Shaver and then Arnold, he established the premises and vocabulary that have formed the basis of so-called UFOlogy ever since, essentially defining the mind-set exemplified by
The X-Files.
Without Palmer, we wouldn’t have had Scully and Mulder.
The Coming of the Saucers.
Palmer is often credited—perhaps blamed is a better word—for creating the flying saucer hysteria that swept the country back then. Certainly, and almost single-handedly, using Shaver and then Arnold, he established the premises and vocabulary that have formed the basis of so-called UFOlogy ever since, essentially defining the mind-set exemplified by
The X-Files.
Without Palmer, we wouldn’t have had Scully and Mulder.
The whole Shaver Mystery idea, especially with the addition of flying saucers, is yet another example of how ideas of the hollow earth—and thoughts of what might lie within—mutated with the times. The advent of the atomic age, signaled by the dropping of the atomic bomb in August 1945, brought with it previously undreamed-of possibilities, including previously undreamed-of terrors. The Shaver Mystery can be considered an incarnation of these new fears in a contemporary sci-fi costume. In Burroughs, evil took the form of soulless flying reptiles and thuggish Stone Age villains—but with the Shaver Mystery, the horror is more cosmic and more incomprehensible, like the atomic bomb itself. And unlike previous forays into the hollow earth, which were often scary but charming and ultimately life-affirming, here the suggestion is that things are deeply, irrevocably
wrong
in ways that cannot be understood or rectified. The Elder Ones—who can be read as God—have all but abandoned us, leaving behind wreckage and vicious mutants. Only evil remains.
wrong
in ways that cannot be understood or rectified. The Elder Ones—who can be read as God—have all but abandoned us, leaving behind wreckage and vicious mutants. Only evil remains.
Speaking of evil, according to some sources, another hollow earth believer in the 1940s was Adolph Hitler. It’s not mentioned in
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
but during the 1930s, Hitler supposedly heard some lectures on Koreshanity—yes, Cyrus Teed’s hollow earth religion—and became a convert. This has only the slimmest substantiation, if it can even be called that. Along with other more virulent ideas he held, Hitler is said to have entertained Teed’s notion that our earth is concave, and we’re all living on the inside. In 1941 he supposedly had a go at putting the idea to some military use, sending a small expedition to the Baltic island of Hogan, armed with powerful telescopes, which they aimed in the general direction of England. The reasoning? If the earth curved upward, then properly aligned telescopes could spy on the movements of the British fleet. Probably none of this is true—it comes from current hollow earth websites on the Internet—but it’s somehow pleasing to think of Hitler being dumb or desperate enough to try it.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
but during the 1930s, Hitler supposedly heard some lectures on Koreshanity—yes, Cyrus Teed’s hollow earth religion—and became a convert. This has only the slimmest substantiation, if it can even be called that. Along with other more virulent ideas he held, Hitler is said to have entertained Teed’s notion that our earth is concave, and we’re all living on the inside. In 1941 he supposedly had a go at putting the idea to some military use, sending a small expedition to the Baltic island of Hogan, armed with powerful telescopes, which they aimed in the general direction of England. The reasoning? If the earth curved upward, then properly aligned telescopes could spy on the movements of the British fleet. Probably none of this is true—it comes from current hollow earth websites on the Internet—but it’s somehow pleasing to think of Hitler being dumb or desperate enough to try it.
A variant supposition holds that “Hitler and his chief advisers escaped the last days of the Third Reich by going through the opening at the South Pole.” As one website recounts it,
According to the hollow earth Research Society in Ontario, Canada, they are still there. After the war, the organization claims, the Allies discovered that more than 2,000 scientists from Germany and Italy had vanished, along with almost a million people, to the land beyond the South Pole. This story gets more complicated with Nazi-designed UFOs, Nazi collaboration with the people who live in the center of the Earth, and the explanation for “Aryan-looking” UFO pilots.
66
So Hitler may be down there yet, basking under an antiaging machine left behind by the Elder Ones, plotting his next move.
In 1947, Admiral Richard E. Byrd became another unlikely player in what was turning into the unintentional comedy of the hollow earth.
If anything, you’d think his explorations of both poles would have provided discouraging facts for the hollow earthers. In 1926, he’d been the first to fly over the North Pole and had repeated the feat in 1929 with the first flyover of the South Pole. He’d established the famous base, Little America, during the 1928–1930 Antarctic expedition, and had led a second expedition there from 1933–1935, a third in 1939–1940 (during which four exploratory flights were made), and then a fourth from 1946 to 1947, during which Byrd explored and mapped nearly a million square miles of territory and made his second flight over the South Pole, as well as another over the North Pole that same year. He went back to Antarctica yet again in 1956, and flew over the South Pole once more.
And in all this time, Byrd
never
mentioned seeing a single polar opening.
never
mentioned seeing a single polar opening.
Did this stop the hollow earthers from adopting him as their poster child? Not on your life. They leaped on a few casual remarks he’d made and performed a maniacally close reading that would make Talmudic scholars shake their heads in wonder. In February 1947 Byrd stated, “I’d like to see that
land beyond the Pole
[italics courtesy of hollow earthers]. That area beyond the Pole is the center of the
Great Unknown.
” The significance read into this by the hollow earthers, and a few other equally ambiguous remarks by Byrd, is positively daffy.
land beyond the Pole
[italics courtesy of hollow earthers]. That area beyond the Pole is the center of the
Great Unknown.
” The significance read into this by the hollow earthers, and a few other equally ambiguous remarks by Byrd, is positively daffy.
The most “definitive” (or at least exhaustive) recent elucidation of hollow earth theory came in a 1963 book titled
The Hollow Earth
by Dr. Raymond Bernard. His real name was Walter Siegmeister, and he wrote his master’s thesis on Rudolph Steiner, anthroposophist founder of the Waldorf Schools. Bernard was also a higher-up in the Rosicrucian Society. Biographical information about him is fuzzy at best. He appears to have had a lifelong dedication to esoteric ideas of every sort. Born in New York City, as a biochemistry student in Germany he became interested in the therapeutic possibilities of lecithin. On returning to the United States he began manufacturing a patent medicine containing it and writing articles for health magazines promoting its benefits—until the FDA charged him with fraud and forced him to shut down the operation. Around this time he changed his name to Bernard and moved to Lorida, Florida, continuing to write tirelessly about his “fruitarian” (eating mainly fruits) and “breatharian” (breathing air for food) interests. A former sometime secretary, Guy C. Harwood, recalled: “He would type all day and, sometimes half the night on these manuscripts. [He would] eat baked sweet potatoes and a lot of kelp …”
67
Typical output from this time is a booklet called
The New Race,
“Devoted to the Creation of a Superior Race through Scientific Vegetarianism, Regeneration, Colonization and Eugenics.” Sometime in the 1940s he got word the government was after him, and split for parts south, Mexico then Central and South America. It was around this time that his interest shifted to the hollow earth, subterranean caverns, and related “philosophical” subjects.
The Hollow Earth
by Dr. Raymond Bernard. His real name was Walter Siegmeister, and he wrote his master’s thesis on Rudolph Steiner, anthroposophist founder of the Waldorf Schools. Bernard was also a higher-up in the Rosicrucian Society. Biographical information about him is fuzzy at best. He appears to have had a lifelong dedication to esoteric ideas of every sort. Born in New York City, as a biochemistry student in Germany he became interested in the therapeutic possibilities of lecithin. On returning to the United States he began manufacturing a patent medicine containing it and writing articles for health magazines promoting its benefits—until the FDA charged him with fraud and forced him to shut down the operation. Around this time he changed his name to Bernard and moved to Lorida, Florida, continuing to write tirelessly about his “fruitarian” (eating mainly fruits) and “breatharian” (breathing air for food) interests. A former sometime secretary, Guy C. Harwood, recalled: “He would type all day and, sometimes half the night on these manuscripts. [He would] eat baked sweet potatoes and a lot of kelp …”
67
Typical output from this time is a booklet called
The New Race,
“Devoted to the Creation of a Superior Race through Scientific Vegetarianism, Regeneration, Colonization and Eugenics.” Sometime in the 1940s he got word the government was after him, and split for parts south, Mexico then Central and South America. It was around this time that his interest shifted to the hollow earth, subterranean caverns, and related “philosophical” subjects.
The Hollow Earth
was first published in 1963 in a down-home edition printed as an offset copy of the original typescript, and republished the next year in a regular hardback edition. It has since been through at least four more editions with three different publishers. The book’s subtitle pretty much says it:
was first published in 1963 in a down-home edition printed as an offset copy of the original typescript, and republished the next year in a regular hardback edition. It has since been through at least four more editions with three different publishers. The book’s subtitle pretty much says it:
The Greatest Geographical Discovery in History
Made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd in the Mysterious Land Beyond the Poles—The True Origin of the Flying Saucers
Truly wonderful in its way, deeply earnest, the book is a distillate of virtually every crackpot theory about the hollow earth that had been accumulating for a hundred years or more—presenting it all dead seriously. If there’s a single “bible” for current Hollow Earthers, this is it. In the best syllogistic fashion, an early section is headed “WHAT THIS BOOK SEEKS TO PROVE.” Which is, that the earth is hollow, with two polar openings; that Byrd “was the first to enter the polar openings”; that the Poles have never really been reached “because they do not exist”; that the hollow interior “has a land area greater than that of the earth’s surface”; that the “hollow interior, which has a warmer climate than on the surface,” is “the home of plant, animal and human life”; and “that the mysterious flying saucers come from an advanced civilization in the hollow interior of the earth.”
Most telling in this list is the final point: “That, in event of a nuclear world war, the hollow interior of the earth will permit the continuance of human life after radioactive fallout exterminates all life on the Earth’s surface; and will provide an ideal refuge for the evacuation of survivors of the catastrophe, so that the human race may not be completely destroyed, but may continue.”
A little farther on, the same idea is given a more optimistic turn. Like Symmes nearly 150 years before, Bernard proposes an expedition—but the reasons have changed from finding an unexploited frontier to the expression of atomic-age cold-war collywobbles. He says we need to do it to “establish contact with the advanced civilization that exists there, whose flying saucers are evidence of their superiority over us in scientific development. Perhaps this elder wiser race may save us from our doom, preventing a future nuclear war and enabling us to establish a New Age on earth, an age of permanent peace, with all nuclear weapons outlawed and destroyed by a world government representing all the peoples on earth.”
At least his heart is in the right place—if not his science. The hollow earth is still viewed as a handy nearby utopia, only now it contains a beneficent advanced race that will save us from ourselves and nuclear holocaust—the implication being that we’re too dumb to do it on our own, and that there is no God around to help out. So we have to make do with the next best thing—wise alien elders living underground.
In the 1950s the hollow earth began appearing in movies. It was a natural for low-budget science fiction melodramas. In 1951
Unknown World
was released featuring Victor Kilian (best known as Grampa Larkin on the 1970s soap opera send-up,
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman).
Kilian plays celebrated geologist Jeremiah Morley, founder of the Society to Save Civilization. He’s worried sick that mankind is about to destroy itself in nuclear holocaust. In an echo of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “iron mole,” he builds a powerful device called the Cyclotram to dig to the center of the earth in hopes of finding a safe refuge. Sixteen hundred miles down, as critic Jeff Berkwits describes it, “they finally discover their subterranean Shangri-La, a colossal cavern with a huge sea, a phosphorescent ceiling and clouds created by volcanic vapors. But just as everyone begins to feel comfortable, the team’s physician realizes that their newfound home holds a dark and potentially deadly secret.”
68
Seems like heaven, but then they learn something in the atmosphere down there renders people sterile—and what good is a refuge that will only save one generation? So it’s back up to the surface. Berkwits notes, “In 1951, the newly developed H-bomb, combined with the increasingly pervasive influence of Communism, had made the Earth a tremendously scary place. So it’s not terribly surprising that, with the ever-present threat of atomic annihilation, [the] film essentially sought to envision the ultimate bomb shelter.”
Unknown World
was released featuring Victor Kilian (best known as Grampa Larkin on the 1970s soap opera send-up,
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman).
Kilian plays celebrated geologist Jeremiah Morley, founder of the Society to Save Civilization. He’s worried sick that mankind is about to destroy itself in nuclear holocaust. In an echo of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “iron mole,” he builds a powerful device called the Cyclotram to dig to the center of the earth in hopes of finding a safe refuge. Sixteen hundred miles down, as critic Jeff Berkwits describes it, “they finally discover their subterranean Shangri-La, a colossal cavern with a huge sea, a phosphorescent ceiling and clouds created by volcanic vapors. But just as everyone begins to feel comfortable, the team’s physician realizes that their newfound home holds a dark and potentially deadly secret.”
68
Seems like heaven, but then they learn something in the atmosphere down there renders people sterile—and what good is a refuge that will only save one generation? So it’s back up to the surface. Berkwits notes, “In 1951, the newly developed H-bomb, combined with the increasingly pervasive influence of Communism, had made the Earth a tremendously scary place. So it’s not terribly surprising that, with the ever-present threat of atomic annihilation, [the] film essentially sought to envision the ultimate bomb shelter.”
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