They Would Be Gods - 9 - A Hollow Earth?

THEY WOULD BE GODS: OUR PAST RECONSIDERED, OUR FUTURE FOREWARNED

PART I: ALIENS

by Anthony Forwood (2011)

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9: A Hollow Earth?

There has been some speculation and theorizing in the past that our planet might actually be a hollow sphere, with an inner environment much like the outer one, comprised of oceans and landmasses, mountains and rivers, flora and fauna, and an internal source of light. Although it might sound unbelievable, there is absolutely no concrete evidence to prove otherwise. Our knowledge of celestial mechanics and the formation of planets and stars is extremely limited, and is dependent on so many theoretical assumptions that have yet to find anything in the way of physical evidence to confirm that the Earth must be a solid body. It’s only because of our familiarity with the idea that planets are all solid bodies that stands in the way of there being such a possibility, and this is a purely mental barrier, and not a physical one. It may very well be that the Earth and certain other celestial bodies are actually hollow. We just don’t know for certain one way or the other, and the universe seems to always find a way to surprise us in its increasing complexity as we continue to explore it further and further.

A more acceptable explanation for a subterranean civilization, of course, is that the Earth’s crust and upper mantle is riddled with caverns that are in some places of immense proportions, and which often form natural city-sized areas of interconnected chambers, as we discussed in the last section. I won’t attempt to provide an in-depth scientific argument for the possibility of a hollow Earth, since that’s beyond the scope of this book, but I’ll give some consideration to certain evidence that suggests this possibility, due to the relevance of this subject to the theme of this book.

The possibility that the Earth is hollow has actually been taken quite seriously since our earliest history, and there are many ancient legends and myths from different cultures around the world that describe this inner world and its inhabitants. Although these stories might be considered purely fictitious, they deserve some consideration nonetheless, for they may contain a seed of truth. These stories often involve creatures that have since come to be familiarized in children’s tales as fairies, elves, goblins, dwarfs, trolls, ogres, giants, dragons, and other strange creatures. These children’s tales, however, often stem from very ancient sources, and have been passed down for centuries, often taking on certain distortions, but nonetheless retaining certain deeper truths that have continued up to modern times. If we consider the reports of strange creatures that are seen in modern times and often attributed to the UFO enigma (but not always), such as the common ‘gray’ aliens, insectoid creatures, reptilians, chupacabras, sasquatches, the Mothman creature, etc., it becomes much more plausible that those ancient tales may have been reflecting more accurate truth than fantastic imagination. These creatures may not all come from outer space, as modern suspicions so easily gravitate to, but may be from somewhere much closer to home, living in the darker and less explored regions of our planet.

Over the last few centuries, certain scientists and investigators have published works that argue for the existence of a hollow Earth, some rather speculative, but some more scientifically supported with reasonable hypotheses given about how a hollow planet might actually be physically possible. The famous astronomer, Sir Edmund Halley, after whom Halley’s comet was named, published a paper in 1692 in which he theorized that the Earth might be hollow, comprising four concentric spheres. He also explained the Aurora Borealis in terms of a hollow Earth, suggesting that it was luminous material escaping through Earth’s thinner polar crust. Less than a century after Halley published his paper, the mathematician Leonhard Euler proposed another hollow Earth theory, but conceived it as a single hollow sphere with a central sun. Sir John Leslie proposed a very similar theory to Euler’s at about the same time.

Not long after this, in 1818, a retired US Army officer, Captain John Cleves Symmes, proposed his own theory that the Earth was hollow, and petitioned US Congress at least nine times requesting the government to finance him on an expedition to investigate a vast opening into the hollows of the Earth that he believed existed at the North Pole. Being well-read and having an interest in science, he was probably influenced in his ideas by Halley, proposing a similar theory of concentric spheres, but suggesting that they each had vast openings at the poles. He was definitely influenced by a poem by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, entitled The Botanical Garden, in which it is supposed to have been hinted that there was a great secret to be discovered at the poles. As we’ll see, the influence of Erasmus Darwin, who was a Freemason, is to come up again in later pages of this book.

The idea of a hollow Earth was also used in a poem called The Messiah by Friedrich Klopstock, a German Romantic of the mid-eighteenth century, which may have been an influence on Symmes, and perhaps even influenced the mythology created by Hitler and his Nazi Party for the German people two hundred years later. In 1871, a man named William F Lyon published a four hundred page book called The Hollow Globe, which was based on the spirit communications received by a medium named Dr. M. L. Sherman (reminiscent of the hidden Masters). It offered a fanciful explanation of the cosmos that depicted the planets as hollow spheres with polar openings, and claimed that the Earth’s interior was populated by spiritual beings. Then, in 1886, a man named Frederick Culmer Sr. published a booklet called The Inner World: A New Theory, which offered still another explanation of the cosmos that depicted the Earth as a hollow sphere with openings at the poles.

In 1906, a man named William Reed published a book called The Phantom of the Poles, in which he presented a number of anomalies about the polar regions that showed evidence that there was a polar opening into the Earth. His book was soon followed by that of a man named Marshall B. Gardner in 1913, titled A Journey to the Earth’s Interior. Gardner offered further arguments regarding certain anomalies found in the northern polar region, and claimed that supposedly extinct animals such as the wooly mammoth still exist inside our hollow planet. Gardner was successful enough with his book to publish an expanded second edition in 1920, in which he set out to show that (in all likelihood) neither Robert Peary nor Dr. Frederick Cook had ever actually reached the North Pole as they both claimed while fighting between themselves as to who was the first to reach it and deserved the recognition. Since both of these men were so keen on seeking recognition, and since both leave us questioning whether either of them actually reached the pole, due to their lack of real proof, we should remain doubtful as to their claims.

Still more recently, the idea of a hollow Earth became a familiar one with the Theosophical Society and its founder, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Through her two books, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), she presents a body of mystical dogma based on the teachings of a group she calls the ‘Hidden Masters’. Blavatsky wrote that certain perfected humans were given possession of secret teachings and became the first in a succession of Hidden Masters, watching over and guiding humanity from the shadows on a course that only they know. These Masters, according to Blavatsky, reside in a secret underground location in the Himalayas, where there exists a vast library of knowledge which she says contains all the written works that humanity has ever created or will ever create. Furthermore, Blavatsky also spoke of vast subterranean tunnel systems and catacombs, both in the Himalayas and in South America, the latter which she claimed were built by the Atlanteans. Echoing Erasmus Darwin and giving support to certain previous writers of the hollow Earth theory that I’ve already mentioned, Blavatsky suggested that what might be found at the North Pole would change the course of history.

In 1964, a book was put out by a Dr. Raymond Bernard (real name Walter Siegmeister) entitled The Hollow Earth. Bernard’s book was based on the works of William Reed and Marshall B. Gardner, as well as another writer named F. Amadeo Giannini, who wrote a book entitled World’s Beyond the Poles in 1959, and articles written by Ray Palmer, editor of Flying Saucer magazine. Bernard’s book seems to be the last serious attempt to suggest that the Earth might be hollow, but his book isn’t significant for just this reason. It may turn out that the hollow Earth hypothesis that he proposes in his book is wrong, but the book nevertheless appears to contain a large number of vital clues that may be relevant to the bigger picture, and are supported by other pieces of evidence that have since come into play in this giant puzzle. As David Hatcher Childress implies in his introduction to the 2009 reprint of The Hollow Earth, Bernard may have been an unwitting disinformation agent, and perhaps he’s been a successful one. His book only helped to encourage innumerable conspiracy theories that have caused a great deal of confusion regarding certain possible truths, and this is exactly what an effective disinformation campaign would be expected to achieve.

As Bernard and earlier writers have pointed out, explorers of the North Pole, on reaching the most northerly climes, have very often reported coming across unexplainable dust storms, vegetative matter on icebergs, a consistent rise in temperature beyond eighty degrees north latitude, warm winds coming from the north, iceless waters where they should be frozen over, increasing signs of animal life rather than less, the unexplainable appearance of logs and driftwood, and snow blanketed in colored pollen. It has often been noted as well that certain animal species in the northern climes are seen to migrate north rather than south during the winter season. Reports of these sorts of anomalies come from the explorers Hayes, Greely, Nansen, Sverdrup, Beechey, Franklin, Kane, and McClure. All of this suggests that there may be a major entrance to the Earth’s interior at the North Pole.

Bernard promoted the idea that the Earth was hollow, and he also believed that the US government has known of this since at least 1946 and has been covering up the fact all these years. In order to understand all of this more fully, it’s necessary to take into consideration the years being discussed, and certain relevant events that reportedly took place around that time. The following discussion is based primarily on Bernard’s book.

It’s been verified to some extent by reliable documentation that there have actually been several government expeditions undertaken to explore the possibility of a hollow Earth. After World War II, the US military sent two separate expeditions to the South Pole. These expeditions (Operation High Jump and Operation Deep Freeze) were both headed by Admiral Richard E. Byrd of the US Navy, who Bernard claims had discovered an entrance to the inner Earth during the first of these expeditions. Although Bernard seems to be in error and claimed that the North Pole was explored in the first expedition, both expeditions were apparently to the South Pole.

Byrd launched the first expedition on August 26^th, 1946 (Operation High Jump), taking with him 4,700 men and a military armada of thirteen ships that included submarines and an aircraft carrier. The stated purpose of this expedition was to survey the Antarctic continent. Something had occurred on this expedition to force it to be aborted six months earlier than planned, but apparently not before having taken film footage of ice-free mountains and lakes in Antarctica’s interior. This footage was later shown in newsreels and in a documentary about the expedition that went by the same name. The March 5^th, 1947 edition of the El Mercurio newspaper of Santiago, Chile, quoted Admiral Byrd after the expedition, saying that “Adm. Byrd declared today that it was imperative for the United States to initiate immediate defense measures against hostile regions.” It further quoted him as saying that he “didn’t want to frighten anyone unduly” but that it was “a bitter reality that in case of a new war the continental United States would be attacked by flying objects that could fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds.” This was a very unusual statement to be made by someone who had just returned from the isolated and uninhabited South Pole, where he had supposedly only gone to survey the region. Added to this is one other rather mysterious statement made right after this first expedition, in which he said, “I’d like to see that land beyond the pole, that area beyond the pole is the center of the great unknown.” That he was just waxing poetic is possible, but it seems a rather strange thing to say nonetheless, given the logical understanding that, as Bernard pointed out, to go beyond the pole is to travel north again, towards the inhabited world we know, which certainly wouldn’t be considered the ‘great unknown’. However, it does make sense if he was actually talking about entering an inner realm. Soon after this statement, Byrd was hospitalized and ordered not to make any more statements to the press. All of this seems highly unusual if we’re to believe that this expedition was just a simple surveying mission.

In March of 1955, Byrd was put in charge of another expedition to the South Pole (Operation Deep Freeze), this time under the pretext of establishing a satellite base there. This time he took with him 1,393 officers and men, five ships, fourteen planes, and all the equipment necessary for the mission. A statement made by Byrd to newspaper reporters just prior to this expedition was a little unusual as well, considering the stated purpose of the mission: “This is the most important expedition in the history of the world.” It seems a little farfetched to think that setting up a base on an otherwise uninhabited continent could be seen by anyone as more important than any other expedition ever taken in human history. It certainly doesn’t surpass Columbus’ expedition to the New World, which was probably the single most significant expedition in our history up to the time of Byrd’s statement. So why would Byrd feel that this expedition was more important?

Other statements by Byrd further suggested that something more was to be found at the South Pole than what we might normally expect. One statement, made just after his second expedition, seems rather interesting: “On January 13^th, members of the United States expedition accomplished a flight of 2,700 miles from the base at McMurdo Sound, which is 400 miles west of the South Pole, and penetrated a land extent of 2,300 miles beyond the Pole.” Two months later, he is quoted as saying, “The present expedition has opened up a vast new territory.” It may be that, in these two statements, he was simply saying that he had navigated 2,300 miles past the South Pole and established the fact that there was a vast continent there. But we already knew that. So why would he think that he had opened up a vast new territory? Antarctica is the bleakest, coldest, least inhabitable, and most isolated location on the entire planet, and establishing a small base or two there doesn’t constitute opening it up. So, what was he referring to? Had he gotten his wish, and seen the land beyond the pole – the great unknown?

He had filmed regions that were devoid of ice and snow, so could he have been implying that he had discovered a land as much as 2,700 miles in extent that was temperate and habitable? But even if this was the case, how does this justify calling it the most important expedition in the history of the world? Interestingly, Admiral Byrd’s expeditions have remained classified, and the government seized his diaries immediately after his death in 1957, so we’ll probably never know the whole truth, but there certainly seems to be more to these expeditions than merely surveying the land and establishing a few small bases. And what about his statement after his first expedition, warning about hostile regions and flying objects that could fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds? There certainly seems to be something to all of this that’s significant to the subject of this book, but how does it lead to the possibility that the Earth is hollow?

Bernard based many of his ideas for his own book on the works of Gardner, Giannini, as well as on an article or two by Ray Palmer in Flying Saucer magazine, and it was through the latter two that he came to mistakenly believe that the first Byrd expedition was to the North Pole, so he may not be completely accurate in his facts, but we shouldn’t dismiss him too quickly.

Bernard interprets Byrd’s statement about having traveled 2,300 miles beyond the Pole to mean that he traveled that far into the inner Earth through a large natural opening. Whether or not this is the case, his book deserves some consideration, because it introduces certain intuitions that have arisen in the minds of others as well, and where there are such similarities of mind, there is often some truth.

According to the unusual statements made by Byrd, he might very well have flown some ways into the Earth’s interior as Bernard and others have speculated, but due to eventual shortages in fuel, had to turn back. He seems to have been able to at least go far enough to substantiate that there was an entrance into the hollows of the Earth that could be navigated by plane, and that what lay beyond the entrance was a habitable inner-earth environment that was apparently illuminated by an unknown source of light, with mountainous lands that promised to be filled with all sorts of flora and fauna. The immense entrance to this inner world would be hidden from anyone flying overhead due to the almost constant cloud cover in the area, making it unnoticeable even as you entered it because it was so large and the inward-curving surface of the Earth was so gradual that you wouldn’t notice any changes until you were some ways beyond the entrance. Any plane that attempted to cross over the opening would instead travel into the entrance, following the inward curve over the rim of the opening. This explanation is at least plausible, and the idea that the Earth is hollow and has a large opening at each pole may actually have some scientific validity.

But what other evidence do we have that the Earth might be hollow? The fact is that we have very little, but we have even less that would prove otherwise. The hypothesis for a hollow Earth is based on the supposition that as the planet was forming, the centrifugal force of its spin caused much of its substance to be forced outward, forming a shell while leaving the core almost entirely hollow. The mass of the Earth at the polar latitudes, being under much less centrifugal force, would cause a thinner shell towards the pole, and there would remain an opening of a certain magnitude at each pole. The majority of the substances making up the Earth would be along the equatorial regions, causing the shell to be thicker and denser there, while progressively becoming thinner and less dense nearer to the poles. In support of this, we can see from images of Earth taken from space that our planet bulges perpendicular to its spin, while the poles appear to be flattened. Also, it should be noted that almost all earthquake and volcanic activity occurs within a certain distance of the equator, where a thicker shell would be more active, being under greater pressures than towards the poles.

We must realize that the Earth, being approximately eight thousand miles in diameter, could easily accommodate a shell thickness of at least a thousand or so miles at the equators, which would be thick enough to accommodate the amount of volcanism that appears to take place on our planet while still leaving about a six thousand mile diameter hollow interior, and the openings at the poles might be as much as a few thousand miles in diameter.

We’re taught that the Earth is a solid body with a molten core, and that this core is molten due to the heat created by the intense gravitational pressures at the center of the Earth. The Earth’s crust is supposed to be quite thin, and as you go deeper, the temperature rises, until you reach a point where it’s so hot that rocks become molten. Going even deeper, you reach an extremely dense core consisting of the heaviest metals. Within the composition of our planet are also radioactive substances, which also give off heat. All of this is logical enough, but this structural description is still based almost completely on theory, and other possibilities may be shown to be more valid if they’re just given fair and equal consideration. A hollow Earth, with a structure as described here, might still cause the pressures necessary for the volcanic activity that we see. In fact, if the Earth were as hot in its interior as scientists theorize, then this heat would require a continuous means of escape that the occasional volcanic eruptions that do occur on its surface can’t possibly account for. The amount of radiated heat given off by the Earth should be greater than that of the distant Sun shining on it, but it’s the warmth of the Sun that we immediately feel after coming out of a deep cave, and not the other way around. Of course, if the Earth is hollow then it would still have some internal heat caused by the pressures of gravity and centrifugal force, and this would be enough to cause the amount of volcanic activity that we do see. In regards to what we understand about plate tectonics and continental drift, it is based almost entirely on theoretical science, and although we do experience tectonic shifting, we have no proof that it occurs for the reasons that we think.

It might seem that Arctic explorers would have discovered any existing polar opening into the Earth long ago, and that even if they hadn’t, then our conventional planes, traveling on flight paths that took them over the North Pole, would have. However, this isn’t necessarily so. First of all, the gradual curve of the Earth’s surface into the inner realms would appear completely unnoticeable to anyone situated anywhere on that curve, and even when viewed from a plane flying high above the surface, the combination of constant snow and cloud cover would make it very difficult to distinguish anything unusual. Second, up until the very recent past when we began to put satellites into space, we were entirely reliant on using the Earth’s magnetic properties to navigate by plane or ship. If Earth’s magnetic pole is situated somewhere within a polar opening in the Arctic, then no matter where a person might be situated along the rim of this opening, their compass would react exactly as they would do at true magnetic North, spinning wildly or pointing straight up or down. Whenever this occurs, navigators have just assumed that they were at ninety degrees latitude. Because of the fact that compasses become erratic near the North Pole, air and sea routes have been established that avoid going directly through it, but instead veer around it.

If a person were to begin to enter into the Earth at the North Pole, our Sun would appear to set, no matter where on the horizon it was situated. This would seem a little unusual, but if the inner Earth had its own source of light, as has been proposed by some, then as a person continued inwards this light would eventually replace our sun’s light, and nothing untoward might be noticed until a person was well within the inner realms.

The Aurora Borealis, commonly believed to be an optical effect of the Earth’s electromagnetic field, may actually be caused by an inner source of light streaming out of the Earth’s interior. A radiating orb that’s suspended in the center of Earth’s inner cavity could cause an inner light, or it might be an effect of luminescent gases within the Earth’s hollow center, as Halley proposed.

That the formation of the Earth resulted in it being hollow with a central sun in its interior is a reasonable proposition, and can be argued just as easily as can many other claims of science that we accept as accurate without actually being sure that they are. For instance, our scientists have come to accept the belief that there is such a thing as ‘dark matter’, and that it forms a type of shell or barrier around galaxies that keep its stars from breaking away even though they reach escape velocities at the outer extremities. Dark matter is a very recent ‘discovery’ in cosmology, used to explain discrepancies in calculations of the universe’s total material composition. Since dark matter is itself such a newly recognized factor, we can’t expect to have figured out every other possible factor in the formation of the universe, or our own planet. What we’ve come to believe about the formation of our planet was worked out before such things as dark matter were even considered, and it’s only because its existence doesn’t seem to have an effect on the formation of our planet that we don’t consider that it might have. I’m not arguing here that dark matter may have had anything to do with our planet being hollow, or that it doesn’t really exist, but only wish to point it out as an example that there are possibilities that go beyond mere assumptions or even theories, and it’s only through investigation, rather than immediate doubting, that we’ll ever know the truth of this or anything else.

Is there any evidence that other celestial bodies might be hollow? Our moon has been suggested to be hollow, based on the fact that its calculated mass is far too low to account for its size. This possibility was only strengthened when the astronauts who went there during the Apollo missions remarked on the fact that it rang like a hollow bell when the lunar module hit it on its descent.

Apart from this, there is evidence that other planets in the solar system are hollow and have openings at their poles. The famous astronomer, Lowell, witnessed two points of light streaming from Mars’ polar cap on June 7^th, 1894. An astronomer named Green observed similar lights previously in 1846. The English astronomer W. E. Denning wrote in Nature magazine in 1886 that over the previous few months the polar cap of Mars had been extremely bright in contrast to the rest of the planet. In 1892, the English astronomer J. Norman Lockyer observed that the Martian polar caps were sometimes so bright that the light seemed to project beyond the surface of the planet. Similar lights have been witnessed coming from the polar regions of Venus. In 1878, the French astronomer Trouvelet observed a mass of luminous lights at Venus’ pole. Mercury has also been observed to give off an extremely bright light while its dark side was facing Earth, and was written about by the famous astronomer Richard Proctor.

It should be noted that by the time we began putting satellites into space, the Byrd expeditions had already taken place, and since future satellite technology could result in the unwanted discovery of an opening to the inner Earth at one or both poles, great care may have been taken to assure that this technology was under the control of those who came into the knowledge of Byrd’s possible discovery. In support of this, we see that the Americans quickly took a leading position in all things space, and have only ever increased their control there since the inception of the space industry. This would allow those in control to assure that no satellite images of Earth will ever reveal anything untoward, and that all modern navigation systems automatically ‘correct’ any apparent discrepancies, effectively hiding the truth. If the air space above the magnetic pole happens to be declared off-limits by the US government for whatever reason, then this would add further weight to the possibility that there is indeed an opening there.

Has anyone ever wondered why an attack on the USA by Russian missiles coming from the north over the pole, or vise versa, has never been taken seriously enough to merit placing a heavy line of defenses in the northern latitudes? The northern borders have always been left wide open, even throughout the height of the Cold War when a fear of just such an attack was supposedly high in the minds of American national defense officials. It’s very likely that the US government knew that such a direct trajectory would pose an impossibility, especially at the time of the Cold War when auto-navigation systems were still in their infancy. Any missile would be caught in the distortion of the Earth’s gravity at the point of reaching the polar opening, and would end up going into the Earth’s interior.

The North Pole is situated in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, and so the area where there is a possible opening into the Earth is thought to be just an expanse of ice-covered water, and the area has cloud-cover for much of the year. This makes it very hard to detect that such an entrance might exist, even when viewed from space.

The South Pole offers even greater cover from detection of any secrets that it might hold. If you look at Antarctica’s position on a three-dimensional globe, you’ll see that it’s extremely isolated in comparison to any other place on Earth. Looking straight down at the North Pole from a point in space, almost all of the Earth’s land masses can be seen, while if you look straight down on the South Pole, very little land mass is visible except for the Antarctic continent itself, which is comparable in size to Australia. Considering that most of the world’s population are living in the northern hemisphere, and that even the North Pole seems far away and isolated, the South Pole can be seen to be that much more so.

Unlike any of the other continents, Antarctica is surrounded on all sides by ocean, with the closest neighboring landmass being the southern tip of the South American continent, which reaches towards the Antarctic Peninsula where it juts from the continental mainland of Antarctica, with the Drake Passage running between them. The waters surrounding Antarctica are very treacherous and difficult to navigate. Weather conditions at the southern perimeters of the planet are equally harsh, with high winds, extremely cold temperatures, and heavy snowfalls. Like its polar opposite, it’s covered by cloud virtually year round. Because of its isolation and the extreme conditions of the area, very little exploration of the continent has ever been undertaken.

Certain evidence has come out over the years that suggests the Byrd expeditions might have been secret US military operations in search of a secret Nazi stronghold in the Antarctic where there were German-manufactured flying discs and other secret technologies. We’ll consider this aspect next, since this may be significant, whether or not the Earth is hollow.