The world has always had its secret places. As mankind spread out from its ancient home on the plains of Africa, there was always something wonderful — or fearful — over the next hill, the next mountain, or across the sea. By the nineteenth century, the outlines of all the continents were known, and the interiors were steadily being explored.
But as the Earth became more and more known, the desire for secret places did not lessen. Speculations about the supposed lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria became popular fads in the nineteenth century. Most of these efforts can be traced to the work of one eccentric American, Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901), whose seminal 1882 work Atlantis, the Antediluvian World set the standard for scholarship in the field.
Atlantis and Lemuria (a landmass first theorized by early Darwinists to explain the diffusion of species across the Pacific Ocean) were adopted by various occult groups as part of their gaudy cosmologies. Helena P. Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical movement, incorporated many of Donnelly’s theories into her occult vision of human history, and ever since Atlantis and/or Lemuria have been a major occult theme, from Guy Ballard’s I AM movement in the 1930s to J. Z. Knight’s Ramtha cult.
Even stranger were those who believed our planet was hollow, and that another race lived inside. In the 17th century, men of learning like Edmund Halley (of comet fame) and Cotton Mather considered the idea that our globe might be a hollow sphere. In the 19th century, an American naval officer named John Cleve Symmes stumped the country, agitating for an expedition to the Earth’s interior via a presumed hole in the earth’s crust at the North or South Pole. Symmes convinced many and even got his plan discussed in Congress in 1828, but tight budgets and lack of support from President Andrew Jackson prevented Symmes from obtaining support.
As geological knowledge progressed, theories of lost continents and the hollowness of the earth were relegated to fringe status. Just as occultists took Atlantis for their own, so did a small group of crank writers take the hollow earth theory as their raison d’etre. Men like Marshall B. Gardner and John Reed published classic crank books expounding their impossible concepts of terrestrial architecture. In Germany, a former fighter pilot named Bender inverted the hollow earth doctrine and came out with an even more outlandish theory: the earth is hollow, but we live on the inside! Bender’s predecessor in America was the arch-eccentric Cyrus Teed, better known by his assumed cult name Koresh. Teed’s followers were numerous enough to populate a small town (Estero, Florida), but the group did not long survive the death of Koresh in 1908.
Science fiction adopted Atlantis and the hollow earth as the settings for wild adventure stories, prominently featured in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and ’30s. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a popular series set in Pellucidar, the hollow interior of the world, but the most famous use of both Atlantis and the hollow earth was the Shaver Mystery.
Ray Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories SF magazine, often boasted he could turn any crackpot idea into a salable story. One day in 1944 a weird manuscript arrived at his office. It was purportedly non-fiction, and it described how a race of underground beings was responsible for all the mayhem and madness in the world. The author of this strange opus was Richard Shaver, a welder from Pennsylvania.
Shaver exhibited many of the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia (persecution by unknown forces, ill health caused by mysterious “rays,” hearing voices), but Ray Palmer saw gold in the other man’s delusions. He re-wrote Shaver’s manuscript into a “fiction-fact” story called “I Remember Lemuria!” and published it. Shaver’s paranoia, coupled with Palmer’s breathless exposition of the wonders of alien super-science, ignited the readership. Circulation soared, and the letters column of Amazing was swamped with notes from people claiming experiences just like Shavers.
Briefly put, the Shaver-Palmer story went like this: long ago, highly advanced Atlanteans and Lemurians had to leave the Earth because of an increase in dangerous solar radiation. They departed for the stars in their spaceships, leaving their splendid cities in the care of robots. Then a cataclysm struck, sending Atlantis and Lemuria into the interior of the earth.
The robots diverged into two opposing camps: the “teros” and “deros“. Teros retained their beneficent programming and tried to do good. The deros were evil degenerates who perverted the remaining Atlantean technology for their own selfish pleasure and the torment of the savage humans left on the surface. As of 1944, the deros were still at it.
Despite the sales success of the Shaver stories, the publisher of Amazing Stories was not at all happy to see the series spin out for four years. By 1948 Palmer was out (fired or quit, depending on who was asked). He went on to co-found FATE magazine, and later Flying Saucers From Other Worlds. Palmer adopted the hollow earth theory as his platform, and he used Flying Saucers as a forum to promote the idea. UFOs, said Palmer, were not from outer space but Inner Space.
Palmer never regained the success he enjoyed at Amazing with the Shaver Mystery, and he and his hollow earth notion remained on the fringe of UFOlogy. A few people have carried on the hollow earth theory as the source of UFOs, notably the late Brinsley le Poer Trench, Earl Clancarty, and writers Dr. Raymond Bernard and Harley Byrd. The most notorious hollow earth promoter of the past twenty years has been German-Canadian Ernst Zundel, better known these days as a virulent Holocaust revisionist. For years Zundel sold books about Nazi expeditions into the hollow earth, and at one time tried to organize a flight to (and through) the South Pole in a jetliner painted with swastikas. The plan didn’t come off, though connoisseurs of the weird might wish it had.
There is ample scientific evidence that the earth is not a hollow ball, and modern understanding of plate tectonics and continental drift have ruled out any lost continents in the Atlantic or Pacific. Mystics will still believe, of course, but the true source of UFOs lies elsewhere.