Hollow Earth Theory: What’s All That About?
William Reed 1906
In his book entitled Phantom of the Poles, Reed made a new theory of humanity’s origin. He tried to explain some of the odd phenomena experienced by polar explorers and came up with his own version of the hollow earth theory.
Reed attempted to explain why compasses didn’t behave themselves, he tried to explain the aurora and why nights are longer in the Polar winter, all through the lens of the hollow earth theory. Reed’s pet theory did away with the internal shells and internal sun.
William Fairfield Warren
Warren, in his book Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, made some bold new claims. He posited that humanity developed in a continent at the North Pole called Hyperborea, before migrating down towards the equator, rather than the other way round which is the established way of thinking.
His theory was popular with Hollow Earth thinkers who started to wager that Mongolians and Inuits initially developed inside the earth and migrated out at some point in ancient history.
George Papashvily 1941
Papashvily was a Georgian born artist and engineer. Released in 1941, his book Anything Can Happen made some wonderfully wild claims. He claimed to have found a cavern filled with human skeletons with skulls “as big as bushel baskets”. The caves led directly to the centre of the earth.
According to Papashvily one man entered and never returned.
As time drifted by more and more books and personalities put their names and reputations behind hollow earth ideas. Some spoke of robots underground and of course, in the 60’s, UFOs started appearing in the tales: aliens living below the surface of the earth, or at least parking their ships down there.
Others still spoke of ancient tunnels dug by our ancestors where primitive humans lived and could be heard shrieking in the quietness every once in a while.
Opposing Hollow Earth Theories
Convex Hollow Earth – humans live on the outside of a hollow planet
Concave Hollow Earth – humans live on the inside of a ball and as we stare up into the blackness of space we are actually staring down into the pitch dark centre of the earth.
Cyrus Teed, a New York doctor, claimed that with the help of his team and a “rectilineator” he had measured the Florida coastline and with his measurements could prove beyond doubt that the earth was concave.
Various 20th Century German writers promoted hollow earth thinking and some rumours have it that Hitler was himself a believer, although there’s no documentary proof. It wouldn’t be a massive surprise though, not with Hitler’s heavy use of the occult and his general all-round madness.
Martin Gardner 1992
We’ve now reached the 90’s and things have slowed down a touch for hollow earth theories, but certainly not vanished. Gardner released a book called On The Wild Side. In this manuscript he discusses hollow earth theories by Abdelkader.
Abdelkader thought that light in our hollow planet travels in a circular route which slows as it reaches the centre of our concave earth. Gardner said that “most mathematicians believe that an inside-out universe, with properly adjusted physical laws, is empirically irrefutable”.
Gardner himself however refutes the theory on the basis of Occam’s Razor. Sensible chap. Just because something could be true doesn’t make it more likely…
