extraordinary%20encounters

122 Hollow earth
rior. Some beliefs have it that the spirits of the
unsaved dead live on in gloom or torment beneath
our feet. The most famous scientific
proponent of a hollow earth, Edmond Halley
(1656–1743), best remembered for the comet
named after him, argued that within the
earth’s sphere there were three other, smaller
ones, all harboring intelligent beings. Theories
about a hollow earth, while dismissed as physically
impossible by scientists, continue on the
fringes into modern times.
John Cleeves Symmes (1779–1829) became
a notorious figure in early American history
as a vigorous publicist for the notion first
proposed by Halley, of an earth whose interior
consisted of concentric spheres. According to
Symmes, the interior could be entered
through four-thousand-mile-wide holes at either
pole. Symmes hoped to lead an expedition
into the earth, and he lectured widely, all
the while lobbying for funding. In the face of
national ridicule, he argued that the people of
the interior amounted to a vast new market
for American goods. Symmes inspired Edgar
Allan Poe to write the classic proto-sciencefiction
novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym (1838). Symmes’s son Americus kept the
faith after his father had passed on. As late as
1878 he published a collection of the elder
Symmes’s writings and lectures.
The 1870s and 1880s saw a hollow - e a rt h
re v i val with the publication of still other books
championing the notion, including M. L .
Sh e r m a n’s The Ho l l ow Gl o b e (1871), a channeled
work, and Frederick Cu l m e r’s The In n e r
Wo rl d (1886). Helena Bl a vatsky incorporated
the hollow earth into her two popular and influential
occult texts Isis Un ve i l e d (1877) and
The Se c ret Doctrine (1888). Another import a n t
book, William Re e d’s The Phantom of the Po l e s ,
was published in 1906, the first of a small lib
r a ry of hollow - e a rth volumes to be issued
t h rough the twentieth century.
By the late nineteenth century, a re l i g i o n
based on the hollow earth was formed by Cy ru s
Teed (1839–1908), after a vision in which the
Mother of the Un i verse told him he would save
the world. He went on to lead a utopian com-
An illustration of the hollow earth from Phantoms of the
Poles by William Reed, 1906 (Fortean Picture Library)
munity in Fo rt Myers, Florida, devoted to “Kore
s h a n i t y.” Ko reshanity held that not only is the
e a rth hollow, humans live inside it, orbiting the
sun, which is at the center of the world. T h e
stars, planets, and moon are also within the
e a rt h’s shell. Marshall B. Ga rd n e r’s book A Jo u r -
ney to the Ea rt h’s In t e r i o r (1913) agreed with
Te e d’s views to the extent that Ga rdner was willing
to acknowledge an interior sun, though it
was not t h e sun, and another race, not humans,
get their heat and light from it. This other-race
l i ves in a pleasant, tropical climate.
Other fringe thinkers, notably H. Spencer
Lewis and Guy Warren Ballard, wrote that
Mount Shasta in northern California is an entrance
to the interior, where a colony of survivors
from the lost continent Lemuria live
on. Ballard claimed to have personally met
super beings under the mountain, including
golden-haired, angelic Venusians such as those
George Adamski and later flying-saucer contactees
would claim to know. Ballard, his wife
Edna, and their son Donald founded a popular
Theosophy-based (and fascist) movement
around these experiences and doctrines. Ballard
died in 1939, but his organization, the “I
AM” still exists.
In the 1940s the pages of the science-fiction
pulps Amazing Stories and Fantastic Ad -