The Hollow Earth: A Theory that for a time nearly governed a nation:

 

• The idea of a world or worlds beneath the surface of the earth is not new. It dates back to Sumerian times and is found in religion and mythology the world over.
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• • The idea that these subterranean worlds are inhabited is also ancient. The nature of the beings believed to dwell there varies but the idea that a world exists beneath the surface of the earth is very widespread. In ancient times they were generally regarded as the dwelling places of dwarves, fairies, goblins, Gods or Goddesses and other supernatural beings.
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    • They have also been seen as the location for various types of hell. 
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    • • In mediaeval times the story of the ‘Children of Woolpit’ captured the imagination of the age. They were a boy and girl who emerged in Suffolk in 1150 and had green skin and refused to eat normal food. 
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        • Many theories were suggested at the time but not until the 19^th century was the idea that the children had come from a hollow earth put forward.
        • The facts of the case are curious and perhaps the most significant is the description of them as having green skin. This can be caused by a variety of factors of which the type of anaemia known as chlorosis is highly probable; being in contact with copper which can produce that effect on the skin; and possibly hyper biliverdinemia, a condition that affects the bile. If their claim to have been living underground is true then exposure to copper might well be a possibility though chlorosis is perhaps the most likely. Another important fact is that the children spoke an unknown language which rules out the emerging English tongue, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and French all of which were well known. Because of the similarity of Latin to Italian, Spanish and Portuguese it is unlikely to be one of those languages. Dutch, German, Flemish or a Slavonic language would be the most probable as none would have been familiar to people in England at that time. The children also claimed to have come from an underground country that they called ‘St Martin’s Land’ which has led to a number of theories being put forward. They were however clearly like any other children except for their green colour and their ignorance of English. They were able to learn English and to eat the same food as other people and the girl even married and had children. Clearly, whatever their origin, they were not dwellers in an underground world.
        • • The concept of the ‘hollow earth’ as opposed to simply beings dwelling underground appears to have first been proposed in the 17^th century, originally by Athanasius Kircher. 
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            He wrote a book advocating the theory
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        It was further refined by the astronomer Edmund Halley (the man after whom Halley's comet is named)
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    • • His theory was based on some mathematical miscalculations by Newton but Halley, assuming that Newton’s figures were correct, suggested that perhaps they could be explained if the Earth was hollow. He did at least believe that we lived on the surface of this hollow world. 
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        • Halley’s theory caught the imagination of the American minister Cotton Mather who publicized it among his followers.
     
    
    
    
  • • Later the astronomer Sir John Leslie slightly refined the idea.
   
  
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  •  In his book ‘Elements of Natural Philosophy’ he argued for a modified form of the theory. 
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    Other advocates of the theory were the Italian adventurer Casanova
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    who wrote a novel using the idea.
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    The scientist Laplace
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    did not believe in the theory but his idea of polar hollows was seized upon by those who did.
  • • Then it fell out of favour and was taken up by fringe groups.
    • John Symmes publicized the idea widely but turned Halley’s theory on its head by asserting that we lived on the inside of a hollow earth.
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    • • In 1818 Symmes tried to recruit 100 people for an expedition in search of the hollow earth but without success.
      • He persuaded the US President John Quincy Adams
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      • • to fund an expedition but Congress was dubious and when Adams lost to Andrew Jackson in 1828 the proposed public funding was dropped.
        • Cyrus Teed further refined Symmes’ theory.
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          • He produced a magazine called The Flaming Sword. and founded a religious movement based on the idea of a hollow earth. 
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            • Another advocate of the hollow earth theory was William Reed.
             
            
            
            
         
        • He wrote a book called ‘The Phantom of the Poles’ published in 1906.
       
      
    • • Reed summarized his theory as follows: ‘The earth is hollow. The Poles, so long sought, are phantoms. There are openings at the northern and southern extremities. In the interior are vast continents, oceans, mountains and rivers. Vegetable and animal life are evident in this New World, and it is probably peopled by races unknown to dwellers on the Earth's surface.’
      • As a prisoner of war during the First World War Teed’s magazine was read by Peter Bender.
      • Bender became converted to the idea. While the concept of habitable layers beneath the Earth’s crust had been popular for centuries amongst occultists, Bender’s Hohlwelt-theorie argued that the Earth was a vault within an endless field of matter. The sun was somewhere in the middle of this vault, and the stars in the sky were the lights of cities from the other side.
      • “An infinite universe is a Jewish abstraction,” wrote Bender. “A finite, rounded universe is a thoroughly Aryan conception.”  Bender  persuaded Hermann Goering of its truth and many officers in the German navy.
      • Other German advocates of the idea were Johannes Lang
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      • and Karl Neupoert
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        Neuperts model of the Hollow Earth
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      • • Bender further developed Teed’s theory by claiming that the universe was extremely small and was entirely contained within the hollow earth. Humans lived within a hollow globe with the sun at its centre. However, points of light revolved around the sun, creating what Bender called ‘the phantom universe.’ Day and night were only illusions caused by the movement of the sun to the other side of the phantom universe. The hollow earth was the fixed centre of the cosmos and the sun, stars and planets revolve around it. All astronomical observations were simply our relative location to the sun and planets within the hollow earth.
        • Shortly after the National Socialist party came to power Bender convinced several Nazi leaders to fund an experiment to send a rocket from Magdeburg to New Zealand. Bender believed that if the rocket was fired directly into the sky it would be able to reach the other side of the world.  
        
        
        
        • Bender declared that the Copernican theory was false. We did not live on the outside of a globe rotating around the sun but we lived inside the earth which was the true centre of the universe and the sun was inside our globe. What humans believed to be the surface of the earth was actually the inner section of the world we know.

        ·         Bender claimed that the hollow bubble of the Earth was the same size as we believe our spherical Earth to be, with solar radiation keeping everything pressed to the concave surface. Beneath our feet is an infinite mass of rock; above our heads the atmosphere stretches to 45 miles, beyond which there is a hard vacuum. At the centre of this vacuum there are three objects: the Sun, the Moon and the Phantom Universe, which is a globe of blue gas containing the shining points of light astronomers mistake for stars.

        ·         The German navy were intensely interested in Bender’s theory and hoped it might help them to detect British ships. Bender and his fellow advocates suggested that aiming radar detection equipment at the sky would lead to light waves bouncing back from the exterior layer surrounding the centre which would pinpoint the positions of vessels.

        • For five years Bender and his supporters gained increasing support. Then in 1938 one of them, Johannes Lang, asked for permission to give a talk on the subject. [insert slide]Rosenberg not only refused permission but discovered that Lang had once published a horoscope of Hitler. This was illegal in Nazi Germany and led to the hollow earth advocates coming under suspicion.
        • In spite of this setback Goering’s powerful patronage allowed Bender to continue to promulgate his ideas and in April 1942, with the war at a critical turning point, he was able to mount an expedition in an attempt to ‘prove’ its ’truth.’ Precious radar equipment was used and set up on an island and in spite of repeated efforts to prove the theory the results were unsuccessful. Bender was thrown into a concentration camp and the theory was banned for the remaining three years of  the Third Reich

        • ·          Admiral Richard E Byrd led an expedition to Antarctica in 1947.

          

          ·         His motives and what he discovered there have been the subject of furious controversy. The most common conspiracy theory is that he discovered a secret Nazi base with advanced weapons and that the Antarctic Nazis drove him away. Another theory is that he discovered the ‘polar hollows’ and found an unknown civilization hidden beneath the Antarctic ice. 

          
          
          

          ·         There is no real evidence in support of either theory other than an alleged ‘secret diary’ published years later.

          • Raymond Bernard (Walter Siegmeister)  
          
          • was a health-food advocate and esoteric writer. He seems to be the first person to suggest that UFOs came from a hollow earth. Bernard believed that they were craft piloted by the denizens of the ‘inner earth’ He made much of Byrd’s Antarctic expedition and believed that the US Admiral came into contact with a hidden civilization beneath the ice of the Southern Continent.
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          • • Bernard also made much of the 1923 book by the explorer Ferdinand Ossendowski
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            • • in which he claimed to have discovered a partly underground civilization in the Gobi Desert and Tibet. His book, ‘Beasts, Men and Gods’ became a best seller and inspired a bewildering variety of people from the Nazis to the novelist James Hilton whose novel ‘Lost Horizon’ described an imaginary land in the region of Tibet that he called Shangri-La.
                
              • • All the original hollow earth theories were attempts by scientists to explain various scientific anomalies, principally electro-magnetic ones. That was the motivation and approach of Halley and Leslie.
                • Later the theory fell out of favour and became taken up by champions of fringe beliefs such as Symmes, Teed, Reed and Bender.
                • Possibly under the influence of Bernard, it continues to enjoy some support in certain sections of the UFO community. Of course there are many different possible theories about what UFOs are and to my knowledge there are at least 19, all which varying degrees of plausibility.
                • Brinsley le Poer Trench 
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                • • , having originally championed the extraterrestrial theory about the origin of UFOs, later became converted to the hollow earth explanation.
                   
                  
                • • Of course there are severe problems with all forms of the hollow earth theory. If we lived on the outside of a hollow earth with a sun at its interior it is difficult to see how humans or any other forms of life could survive. If we lived on the inside of a hollow earth the notion is even more incredible since it would turn the inside of the planet into a nuclear bonfire which would make any kind of existence impossible.
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                    • The notion was disproved twice, first by Pierre Bouguer 
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                    • • in 1740 and then conclusively refuted by Charles Hutton 
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                      • • in his Schiehallion experiment around 1774.
                        • The centre of the earth is a ball of molten iron at unbelievably hot temperature. It would be impossible for anything to live under those conditions.
                        • The final argument against the notion of a hollow earth is the effect of gravity. In a hollow earth any gravitational force would come from the crust and the result would be that gravity inside the hollow earth would be nullified. Any form of life that somehow survived the extreme temperatures would be unable to control its movement and would simply float endlessly in darkness and empty space. However romantic the theory has been for writers – Jules Verne in particular – it has no scientific veracity
                        • What is fascinating is that a theory that was long abandoned by mainstream science and has been conclusively disproved enjoyed the support of Goering and for 9 years was able to receive large sums of public money in attempts to prove its truth.
                        • Beneath the surface of a modern technological society Nazi Germany was riddled with a series of cranky and occult beliefs. The hollow earth is simply one of the more bizarre ones to hold sway in that strange period of human history.
                         
                       
                      

                
                

          
          

          
           
          

          
          

           
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