Popular Purveyor of the Paranormal, Brad Steiger, Takes a Look at One of the Most Persistent Legends of Esoterica by Brad Steiger
A hundred years before William Reed wrote The Phantom of the Poles ("scientific evidence proving that the earth is hollow") and Marshall B. Gardner privately published his A Journey to the Earth's Interior and when Jules Verne, who would later write A Journey to the Center of the Earth, was only nine years old, Edgar Allan Poe published his longest tale, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," which told of a fantastic land located in Earth's center, reached by a hole at the pole. So convincingly did Poe weave the pseudoscientific beginning of his narrative that Horace Greeley soberly endorsed the Pym adventure as a true account, without finishing the tale and encountering its later sections of obvious fantasy.
In 1823, Captain John Cleve Symmes, a dour, humorless, retired war hero, petitioned the U. S. Congress for funds to conduct an expedition to explore the hollow earth. Captain Symmes and his small band of followers felt somewhat anointed for the task because the great American clergyman Cotton Mather had defended the theory of a hollow earth in his book The Christian Philosopher. Mather, in turn, had developed his hypothesis from a little-known essay penned by English astronomer Edmund Halley in 1692.
Quaint notions from an unsophisticated and romantic past, smiles the modern reader. Lest he remain secure in such an appraisal, he should be informed that one of the greatest military-scientific aggregations of this century was also prepared to explore and to exploit the alleged world within our planet.
THE THIRD REICH
In April, 1942, Nazi Germany sent out an expedition composed of its most visionary scientists to seek a military vantage point in the "Hollow Earth." Although the safari of leading scientists left at a time when the Third Reich was putting maximum effort in their drive against the Allies, Goering, Himmler, and Hitler enthusiastically endorsed the project.
The Fuehrer had long been convinced that Earth was concave and that man lived on the inside of the globe. According to theory advanced by the Nazi scientists, if the Third Reich were to position their most astute radar experts in the proper geometric area, they would be able to determine the position of the British Fleet and the Allied bomber squadrons, because the concave curvature of the globe would enable infrared rays to accomplish long-distance monitoring.
When the Nazi exponents of the Hollow Earth hypothesis sent the expedition to the island of Rugen, they had complete confidence in their pseudo-scientific vision. Those nearest the Fuehrer shared his belief that such a coup as discovering the entrance to the Inner World would convince the Masters who lived there that the Nazis were truly deserving of mixing their blood in the hybridization of a master race.
An important element in the Nazi mythos was the belief that representatives of a powerful, underground secret race emerged from time to time to walk among Homo sapiens. Hitler's frenzied desire to breed a select race of Nordic types was inspired by his obsessive hope that it should be the Germanic peoples who would be chosen above all other humans to interbreed with the subterranean supermen in the mutation of a new race of heroes, demigods, and god men.
LEGENDS OF THE OLD ONES
There are persistent legends in nearly every culture that tell of the Old Ones, an ancient race who populated the earth millions of years ago. The Old Ones, an immensely intelligent and scientifically advanced race, have chosen to structure their own environment under the surface of the planet and manufacture all their necessities.
The Old Ones are hominid, extremely long-lived, and pre-date Homo sapiens by more than a million years. The Old Ones generally remain aloof from the surface peoples, but from time to time, they have been known to offer constructive criticism; and it has been said, they often kidnap human children to tutor and rear as their own. There is scarcely a culture known to man that does not have at least one segment of their folklore built around troll-like creatures that live underground and do their best to steal the children of surface folk.
In virtually all the legends, the Old Ones have gone underground to escape natural catastrophes or the hidden death that exists in the life-giving rays of our sun. At this point a persistently propagated theory of Atlantis crosses the path of the Old Ones, the mysterious Teachers from the Caves, which declares that those Atlanteans who survived the great cataclysm learned to perpetuate themselves in underground caverns.
An alternate theory has it that the Cave Masters are surviving colonies of spacemen, who after walking the earth in god-like mien, grew disgusted with Homo sapiens and retreated to underearth bases from which they might watch over the primitive species' intellectual and cultural development. The Buddhists have even incorporated Agharta, a subterranean empire, into their theology and fervently believe in its existence and in the reality of underworld supermen, who periodically surface to oversee the progress of the human race.
Among the American indians, the Navajo legends teach that the forerunners of man came from beneath the earth. The ancient ones were possessed of supernatural powers and were driven from their caverns by a great flood (yet another echo of the traditional Atlantis myth). Once on the surface, they passed along great knowledge to humans before they once again sought secret sanctuary.
The Pueblo Indians' mythology places their gods' place of origin as being an inner world connected to the surface people by a hole in the north. Mesewa, according to the Pueblos, was succeeded as leader of the gods by his brother, Oyoyewa, which some researchers have pointed out is quite similar to the Hebrew Yahweh.
THE HOLLOW EARTH
Dr. Raymond Bernard's The Hollow Earth, originally published by Fieldcrest Publishing Company of New York, has become the classic work in the rather amorphous field of "proving" the existence of an Inner Earth. In his introduction to the book, Dr. Bernard promises to prove that ". . . the earth is hollow and not a solid sphere . . . and that its hollow interior communicates with the surface by two polar openings...."Dr. Bernard's magnum opus discloses that Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd flew beyond rather than over the North Pole and that his later expedition to the South Pole passed 2,300 miles beyond it. According to Dr. Bernard, the North and South Poles have never been reached, because they do not exist. In his view, the nation whose explorers first find the entrance to the hollow interior of the earth will become the greatest nation in the world.
There is no doubt, the reader learns, that ". . . the mysterious flying saucers come from an advanced civilization in the hollow interior of the earth . . . that, in event of nuclear world war, the hollow interior of the earth will . . . provide an ideal refuge for the evacuation of survivors of the catastrophe...."