extraordinary%20encounters

and Sister of Jupiter. On this occasion he was
finally permitted to board a landed ship for a
few minutes. In due course, Rowe would fly,
more than once, into space onboard spacecraft,
sometimes with the Lady of Pluto, more
often with the Sister of Jupiter. “Some there
are who believe UFO’s are the greatest mystery
of our century,” Rowe wrote. “I only
hope I have made it clear that there is no mystery
connected with them.”
See Also: Adamski, George; Aura Rhanes; Bethurum,
Truman; Contactees
Further Reading
Rowe, Kelvin, 1958. A Call at Dawn: A Message from
Our Brothers of the Planets Pluto and Jupiter. El
Monte, CA: Understanding Publishing Company.
Land beyond the Pole
According to F. Amadeo Giannini, author of
Worlds beyond the Poles (1959), Admiral
Richard E. Byrd discovered a marvelous new
land when he flew 1,700 miles beyond the
North Pole during an expedition in 1947. He
saw ice-free lakes, mountains, and forests. He
even caught a glimpse of an enormous animal
walking through the underbrush. In 1956, on
a second expedition to the Arctic, he witnessed
similar sights. Giannini claimed that
the U.S. government had sworn Byrd to silence
after he first hinted of his discoveries in
his 1947 interviews with the New York Times.
Giannini, characterized as the “archetypal
crank” by one critic (Kafton-Minkel, 1989),
believed that Byrd’s alleged experience verified
his—Giannini’s—belief that the Earth is not
round but more or less spindle-shaped; at
each spindle point the surface, instead of ending,
curves back overhead. The universe consists
not of space but of vast land, “physical
continuity” he called it. What appear to humans
as stars, planets, galaxies, and other phenomena
in the distant cosmos are only “globular
and isolated areas of a continuous and
unbroken outer sky surface.” His original inspiration,
he wrote, was a mystical vision he
experienced while strolling through a New
England forest one day in 1926.
Land beyond the Pole 151
Published as a vanity-press (that is, at the
author’s expense) book, Worlds beyond the
Poles would have passed quickly into oblivion
if not for the fact that Ray Palmer, editor of
Flying Saucers and promoter of the Shaver
Mystery, read the book after receiving a review
copy. Always looking for an issue to stir up his
readers, Palmer wrote of Byrd’s supposed secret
flight to argue that the Earth is hollow
with giant holes at the poles. Anyone entering
the holes will encounter a hidden world harboring
an intelligent civilization that builds
and flies superaircraft that are called UFOs.
Palmer got the Byrd story from Giannini but
did not mention him, claiming that he had
gotten his information from “years of research”
(Palmer, 1959). A number of readers
pointed out that the New York Times stories
about Byrd’s expedition did not quote him as
saying anything about forests or a giant beast;
even worse, in 1947 and 1956, Byrd was at
the South, not the North, Pole. Palmer was
forced to acknowledge that his sole source was
Giannini. Unapologetic, he went on to speculate
that perhaps Byrd had made a secret flight
to the Arctic in 1947; either that, or “a deliberate
effort was being made to build an edifice
which could be toppled IF AND WHEN THE
TRUTH CAME OUT ABOUT THE SOUTH
POLE!” (Palmer, 1960). And if neither of
these were true, the question of which pole
Byrd had flown over was moot since Byrd had
encountered a lush, green landscape where
none should have existed and that, in the end,
was all that mattered—notwithstanding the
nonexistence of any documentation that Byrd
had made any such claim in the first place.
Giannini soon weighed in to attack Palmer’s
hollow earth interpretation and to argue for a
secret Arctic expedition by Byrd in 1947,
which was followed by a suppression of his
discoveries.
In the 1970s, a Missouri-based organization
called the International Society for a
Complete Earth, headed by retired marine
corps officer Tawani Shoush, who was also a
Modoc Indian, issued what it claimed was a
secret diary that Byrd kept during his 1947