Ep 40 Hollow Earth

In this episode I discuss the Hollow Earth Theory, it's origins and the truth.

Transcript

Ep 40 Hollow Earth

Hello and welcome back to the UFO and Aliens Podcast. I’m your host Rick Black. Before we begin, I have to say something about moon landing.  I’m sure you’ve heard that we have gone to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. I remember being a little kid and men were walking on the moon and all the kids in my neighborhood had these giant plastic models of the Saturn 5 rocket and all it’s stages.  It was a big deal.  And then NASA went in a different direction and started focusing on the Space Shuttle program and we forgot all about the moon. It’s like we won the race and just stopped. I think Wernher Von Braun visualized colonies on the moon.  Well, that didn’t happen. And then there were people who were questioning whether NASA faked the moon landing and they got a following. Well, now we’re back. And it’s interesting that it was a private company that did it.  With the help of NASA of course. Intuitive Machines is the name of the company and Odysseus is the name of the unmanned lunar lander. They landed on the south pole of the moon where they expect to find water in the form of ice.  The lander operated for about a week and then their solar batteries are going to petered out because of the cold. So, it was a short mission, but that was expected.  It actually lasted a little longer than they anticipated. This landing is setting the stage for a return of men to the moon.  That should be exciting to watch. 

So on to today’s topic, hollow earth.  I know it doesn’t have anything to do with UFO’s or Aliens, but I thought it was interesting and it’s my podcast and I’ll talk about what I want.  You had your chance to put in your two cents.  I’m still open to suggestions by the way. 

I remember, I could be mis-remembering, but I remember being taught that during the middle ages and up until the time of Columbus people thought the earth was flat.  I do remember a Bugs Bunny cartoon that depicted Columbus arguing that the Earth was round like his head and then getting wacked on the head  with a mallet and the king saying the earth was flat like his head.  

Well, anyway, that wasn’t true. Scholars going all the way back to the Greeks knew that the earth was a sphere and some of them even figured out the earth’s circumference. The flat Earth myth was perpetuated by Protestants to argue against Catholic teachings. So, it was a religious thing.  People made up the flat earth theory. The remarkable thing is that people believed them. I don’t know how many or for how long, but people believed them.  People can be fooled into believing just about anything. If you tell them with enough confidence you can convince them of anything.  Walk into a hospital or college or office building and walk like you know where you’re going and most people with think that you belong there and won’t question you.  You’ve just fooled people into believing that you’re a doctor or professor or whatever. And without even having to say anything. Confidence is power.

There is a more recent flat earth theory that was thought up by a couple of American philosophy professors as an exercise to argue against. But of course, a large group of people actually believed them and we have a modern flat earth theory.  There are groups out there that believe that the earth is a flat coin shaped planet with waterfalls or ice walls around it. Australia doesn’t exist and anyone from Australia is a hologram. 

How people can believe that is amazing. But it makes what I’m about to talk about understandable. The hollow earth theory. Edmond Halley is the one who suggested that maybe the Earth is entirely hollow or contains a substantial interior space in the 17th century. But his theory was disproven by Charles Hutton in 1774. But it didn’t matter because people heard it and ran with it. But it wasn’t taken seriously by most scientists and it was considered part of popular pseudoscience and no longer a scientifically viable hypothesis.

The concept of a hollow Earth still comes up in folklore and as a premise for subterranean fiction. Hollow Earth also occurs in conspiracy theories like the underground kingdom of Agartha and the Cryptoterrestrial hypothesis and is often said to be inhabited by mythological figures or political leaders.

In ancient times, the concept of a subterranean land inside the Earth appeared in mythology, folklore and legends. The idea of subterranean realms seemed arguable, and became intertwined with the concept of “places” of origin or afterlife, such as the Greek underworld, the Nordic Svartakfaheimr, the Christian Hell, and the Jewish Sheol. The idea of a subterranean realm is also mentioned in the Tibetan Buddhist belief.  According to one story from Tibetan Buddhist tradition, there is an ancient city called Shamballa which is located inside the Earth.

According to the Ancient Greeks, there were caverns under the surface which were entrances leading to the underworld. In Mesopotamian religion there is a story of a man who, after traveling through the darkness of a tunnel in the mountain of "Mashu", entered a subterranean garden. 

In Celtic mythology there is a legend of a cave called "Cruachan", also known as "Ireland's gate to Hell", a mythical and ancient cave from which strange creatures would emerge and be seen on the surface of the Earth. There are also stories of medieval knights and saints who went on pilgrimages to a cave located in Station Island, County Donegal in Ireland, where they made journeys inside the Earth into a place of purgatory. There is a Chapel and bell tower there and the cave has been closed since October 25th, 1632. In County Down, Northern Ireland there is a myth which says tunnels lead to the land of the subterranean Tuatha Dé Danann, a group of people who are believed to have introduced Druidism to Ireland, and then went back underground. 

Natives of the Trobriand Islands believe that their ancestors had come from a subterranean land through a cavern hole called "Obukula". Mexican folklore also tells of a cave in a mountain five miles south of Ojinaga, and that Mexico is possessed by devilish creatures who came from inside the Earth. 

In the middle ages, an ancient German myth held that some mountains located between Eisenach and Gotha hold a portal to the inner Earth. A Russian legend says the Samoyeds, an ancient Siberian tribe, traveled to a cavern city to live inside the Earth. The Italian writer Dante describes a hollow earth in his well-known 14th-century work Inferno, in which the fall of Lucifer from heaven caused an enormous funnel to appear in previously solid and spherical earth, as well as an enormous mountain opposite it, "Purgatory".

In Native American mythology, it is said that the ancestors of the Mandan people in ancient times emerged from a subterranean land through a cave on the north side of the Missouri River. There is also a tale about a tunnel in the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona near Cedar Creek which is said to lead inside the Earth to a land inhabited by a mysterious tribe. It is also the belief of the tribes of the Iroquois that their ancient ancestors emerged from a subterranean world inside the Earth. The elders of the Hopi people believe that a Sipapu entrance in the Grand Canyon exists which leads to the underworld. 

Brazilian Indians, who live alongside the Parima River in Brazil, claim that their forefathers emerged in ancient times from an underground land, and that many of their ancestors still remained inside the Earth. Ancestors of the Inca supposedly came from caves which are located east of Cuzco, Peru. 

16th to 18th centuries

Edmond Halley's hypothesis

The notion was proposed by Athanasius Kircher's non-fiction Mundus Subterraneus (1665), which speculated that there is an "intricate system of cavities and a channel of water connecting the poles".

Edmond Halley in 1692 conjectured that the Earth might consist of a hollow shell about 800 km (500 mi) thick, two inner concentric shells and an innermost core. Atmospheres separate these shells, and each shell has its own magnetic poles. The spheres rotate at different speeds. Halley proposed this scheme in order to explain anomalous compass readings. He envisaged the atmosphere inside as luminous (and possibly inhabited) and speculated that escaping gas caused the Aurora Borealis. 

Le Clerc Milfort in 1781 led a journey with hundreds of Muscogee Peoples to a series of caverns near the Red River above the junction of the Mississippi River. According to Milfort the original Muscogee Peoples' ancestors are believed to have emerged out to the surface of the Earth in ancient times from the caverns. Milfort also claimed the caverns they saw "could easily contain 15,000 – 20,000 families".

It is often claimed that mathematician Leonhard Euler proposed a single-shell hollow Earth with a small sun (1,000 kilometres across) at the center, providing light and warmth for an inner-Earth civilization, but that is not true. Instead, he did a thought experiment of an object dropped into a hole drilled through the center, unrelated to a hollow Earth. 

19th century

In 1818, John Cleves Symmes, Jr. suggested that the Earth consisted of a hollow shell about 1,300 km (810 mi) thick, with openings about 2,300 km (1,400 mi) across at both poles with 4 inner shells each open at the poles. Symmes became the most famous of the early Hollow Earth proponents, and Hamilton, Ohio even has a monument to him and his ideas. He proposed making an expedition to the North Pole hole, thanks to efforts of one of his followers, James McBride.

Jeremiah Reynolds also delivered lectures on the "Hollow Earth" and argued for an expedition. Reynolds went on an expedition to Antarctica himself but missed joining the Great U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842, even though that venture was a result of his agitation.

Though Symmes himself never wrote a book on the subject, several authors published works discussing his ideas. McBride wrote Symmes' Theory of Concentric Spheres in 1826. It appears that Reynolds has an article that appeared as a separate booklet in 1827: Remarks of Symmes' Theory Which Appeared in the American Quarterly Review. In 1868, professor W.F. Lyons published The Hollow Globe which put forth a Symmes-like Hollow Earth hypothesis, but failed to mention Symmes himself. Symmes's son Americus then published The Symmes' Theory of Concentric Spheres in 1878 to set the record straight.

Sir John Leslie proposed a hollow Earth in his 1829 Elements of Natural Philosophy (pp. 449–53).

In 1864, in Journey to the Center of the Earth Jules Verne describes an expedition into the Earth's interior via the fictional Icelandic volcano Scartaris. The protagonists do not actually reach the centre, but nevertheless discover a subterranean ocean inhabited by creatures believed extinct. They escape through another volcano on the Italian island of Stromboli.

William Fairfield Warren, in his book Paradise Found – The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole (1885), presented his belief that humanity originated on a continent in the Arctic called Hyperborea. This influenced some early Hollow Earth proponents. According to Marshall Gardner, both the Eskimo and Mongolian peoples had come from the interior of the Earth through an entrance at the North Pole. 

20th century

NEQUA or The Problem of the Ages, first serialized in a newspaper printed in Topeka, Kansas in 1900 and considered an early feminist utopian novel, mentions John Cleves Symmes' theory to explain its setting in a hollow Earth.

An early 20th-century proponent of hollow Earth, William Reed, wrote Phantom of the Poles in 1906. He supported the idea of a hollow Earth, but without interior shells or the inner sun.

The spiritualist writer Walburga, Lady Paget in her book Colloquies with an unseen friend (1907) was an early writer to mention the hollow Earth hypothesis. She claimed that cities exist beneath a desert, which is where the people of Atlantis moved. She said an entrance to the subterranean kingdom will be discovered in the 21st century.

Marshall Gardner wrote A Journey to the Earth's Interior in 1913 and published an expanded edition in 1920. He placed an interior sun in the Earth and built a working model of the Hollow Earth which he patented (U.S. patent 1,096,102). Gardner made no mention of Reed, but did criticize Symmes for his ideas. Around the same time, Vladimir Obruchev wrote a novel titled Plutonia, in which the Hollow Earth possessed an inner Sun and was inhabited by prehistoric species. The interior was connected with the surface by an opening in the Arctic.

The explorer Ferdynand Ossendowski wrote a book in 1922 titled Beasts, Men and Gods. Ossendowski said he was told about a subterranean kingdom that exists inside the Earth. It was known to Buddhists as Agharti. 

George Papashvily in his Anything Can Happen (1940) claimed the discovery in the Caucasus mountains of a cavern containing human skeletons "with heads as big as bushel baskets" and an ancient tunnel leading to the center of the Earth. One man entered the tunnel and never returned. 

Novelist Lobsang Rampa in his book The Cave of the Ancients said an underground chamber system exists beneath the Himalayas of Tibet, filled with ancient machinery, records and treasure. Michael Grumley, a cryptozoologist, has linked Bigfoot and other hominid cryptids to ancient tunnel systems underground.

According to the ancient astronaut writer Peter Kolosimo a robot was seen entering a tunnel below a monastery in Mongolia. Kolosimo also claimed a light was seen from underground in Azerbaijan. Kolosimo and other ancient astronaut writers such as Robert Charroux linked these activities to UFOs.

A book by "Dr. Raymond Bernard" which appeared in 1964, The Hollow Earth, exemplifies the idea of UFOs coming from inside the Earth, and adds the idea that the Ring Nebula proves the existence of hollow worlds, as well as speculation on the fate of Atlantis and the origin of flying saucers. 

The science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories promoted one such idea from 1945 to 1949 as "The Shaver Mystery". The magazine's editor, Ray Palmer, ran a series of stories by Richard Sharpe Shaver, claiming that a superior pre-historic race had built a honeycomb of caves in the Earth, and that their degenerate descendants, known as "Dero", still live there, using the fantastic machines abandoned by the ancient races to torment those of us living on the surface. As one characteristic of this torment, Shaver described "voices" that purportedly came from no explainable source. Thousands of readers wrote to affirm that they, too, had heard the fiendish voices from inside the Earth. The writer David Hatcher Childress authored Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth (1998) in which he reprinted the stories of Palmer and defended the Hollow Earth idea based on alleged tunnel systems beneath South America and Central Asia. 

Hollow Earth proponents have claimed a number of different locations for the entrances which lead inside the Earth. Other than the North and South poles, entrances in locations which have been cited include: Paris in France (probably because of the catacombs which could be an episode all by itself), Staffordshire in England, Montreal in Canada, Hangchow in China, and the Amazon rainforest. 

Variations

In "A Culture of Conspiracy", Political scientist Michael Barkun draws a distinction between the terms hollow earth and inner earth, to differentiate materials that conceive the majority of the interior of the planet to be hollow, from those that view it as solid but honeycombed with interconnected spaces. 

Concave Hollow Earths

An example of a concave hollow Earth. Humans live on the interior, with the universe in the center.

Instead of saying that humans live on the exterior surface of a hollow planet, sometimes called a "convex" Hollow Earth hypothesis, it is hypothesized humans live on the interior surface. This has been called the "concave" Hollow Earth hypothesis or skycentrism.

Cyrus Teed, a doctor from upstate New York, proposed such a concave Hollow Earth in 1869, calling his scheme "Cellular Cosmogony". Teed founded a group called the Koreshan Unity based on this notion, which he called Koreshanity. The main colony survives as a preserved Florida state historic site, at Estero, Florida, but all of Teed's followers have now died. Teed's followers claimed to have experimentally verified the concavity of the Earth's curvature, through surveys of the Florida coastline making use of "rectilineator" equipment.

Several 20th-century German writers, including Peter Bender, Johannes Lang, Karl Neupert, and Fritz Braut, published works advocating the Hollow Earth hypothesis, or Hohlweltlehre. It has even been reported, although apparently without historical documentation, that Adolf Hitler was influenced by concave Hollow Earth ideas and sent an expedition in an unsuccessful attempt to spy on the British fleet by pointing infrared cameras up at the sky. 

Opposing views.

In 1735 a couple of French scientists went to this volcano in Ecuador to conduct a vertical deflection experiment at two different altitudes to see how local mass anomalies affected gravitational pull.  They ended up falsifying the Hollow Earth Theory. In 1772, The French did the experiment again and got even better results to disprove hollow earth.

The picture of the structure of the Earth that has been arrived at through the study of seismic waves is quite different from a fully hollow Earth. The time it takes for seismic waves to travel through and around the Earth directly contradicts a fully hollow sphere. The evidence indicates the Earth is mostly filled with solid rock (mantle and crust), liquid nickel-iron alloy (outer core), and solid nickel-iron (inner core). 

Another set of scientific arguments against a Hollow Earth or any hollow planet comes from gravity. Massive objects tend to clump together gravitationally, creating non-hollow spherical objects such as stars and planets. The solid spheroid is the best way to minimize the gravitational potential energy of a rotating physical object; having hollowness is unfavorable in the energetic sense. In addition, ordinary matter is not strong enough to support a hollow shape of planetary size against the force of gravity; a planet-sized hollow shell with the known, observed thickness of the Earth's crust would not be able to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium with its own mass and would collapse.

Based upon the size of the Earth and the force of gravity on its surface, the average density of the planet Earth is 5.515 gram per cubic centimeter and typical densities of surface rocks are only half that (about 2.75 g/cm3). If any significant portion of the Earth were hollow, the average density would be much lower than that of surface rocks. The only way for Earth to have the force of gravity that it does is for much more dense material to make up a large part of the interior. Nickel-iron alloy under the conditions expected in a non-hollow Earth would have densities ranging from about 10 to 13 g/cm3, which brings the average density of Earth to its observed value.

Direct observation

Drilling holes does not provide direct evidence against the hypothesis. The deepest hole drilled to date is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, with a true vertical drill-depth of more than 7.5 miles. They stopped because it got too hot. They didn’t even get close  the distance to the center of the Earth is nearly 4,000 miles.

Question.  If they disproved the hollow Earth Theory back in the 1700’s, why did people continue to run with the idea and write books and articles and even create a cult about it.  The continued reading works by science fiction writers and interpreting those as real fact without any evidence whatsoever. Was it their intent to mislead? Did they actually believe what they were writing about?

What do you think? You can believe what you want.

Remember, Believe none of what you hear and half of what you read. 

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Do you have a UFO story that you’d like to share? Is there a UFO story that you’d like for me to look into? Just send me an e-mail at ufoandalienpodcast@gmail.com  I’m Rick Black and I’ll talk to you next time.