A 'Hollow Earth' theory posits that the planet Earth has a hollow interior and, possibly, a habitable inner surface. At one time, adventure literature made this idea popular, and it was a feature of many fantasy and science fiction works as well as in some conspiracy theories.
However, the hypothesis of a Hollow Earth has long been contradicted by overwhelming evidence as well as by the modern understanding of planet formation, and the scientific community now dismisses the notion as
pseudoscience.
Hollow Earth claims
Conventional hollow Earths
Early history
In ancient times, the idea of subterranean realms seemed arguable, and became intertwined with the concept of "places" such as the
Greek Hades, the
Nordic svartalfheim, the
Jewish Sheol, and the
Christian Hell.
Leonhard Euler's purported hollow-Earth thought-experiment, featuring openings at the poles, with an internal star.
in 1692 (''Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society of London'') put forth the idea of Earth consisting of a hollow shell about 500 miles (800 km) thick, two inner concentric shells and an innermost core, about the diameters of the planets Venus, Mars, and Mercury. 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.
Some have claimed
Leonhard Euler also proposed a hollow-Earth idea, getting rid of multiple shells and postulating an interior sun 600 miles (1000 km) across to provide light to advanced inner-Earth civilization. The source of this claim seems to be de Camp and Ley's ''
Lands Beyond'', but the authors provide no references. However in his ''Letters to a German princess''
[1] Euler describes a
thought experiment involving a patently solid Earth.
De Camp and Ley also claim that
Sir John Leslie expanded on Euler's idea, suggesting two central suns named Pluto and Proserpine (this was unrelated to the dwarf planet
Pluto, which was discovered and named some time later). Leslie did propose a hollow Earth in his 1829 ''Elements of Natural Philosophy'' (pp. 449-453), but does not mention interior suns.
19th century
In 1818,
John Cleves Symmes, Jr. suggested that the Earth consisted of a hollow shell about 800 miles (1,300 km) thick, with openings about 1400 miles (2,300 km) across at both
poles with 4 inner shells each open at the poles. Symmes became the most famous of the early Hollow Earth proponents. He actually proposed making an expedition to the
North Pole hole, thanks to efforts of one of his followers,
James McBride, but the new President of the United States,
Andrew Jackson (in office 1829 - 1837), halted the attempt. Symmes died in 1829.
However, another follower,
Jeremiah Reynolds, also delivered lectures on the "Hollow Earth" and also argued for an expedition. Eventually he would drop talk about a hollow Earth after the death of Symmes. 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. He did not participate because he had offended too many in his call for such a trip.
Symmes himself never wrote a book of his ideas but others did. 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, a professor W.F. Lyons published ''The Hollow Globe'' which put forth a Symmes-like Hollow Earth theory, but didn't mention Symmes. Symmes's son Americus then published ''The Symmes' Theory of Concentric Spheres'' to set the record straight.
Recent history
An early twentieth-century proponent of a hollow Earth, William Reed, wrote ''
Phantom of the Poles'' in 1906. He propounded the idea of a hollow Earth, but without interior shells or inner suns.
Marshall Gardner wrote ''A Journey to the Earth's Interior'' in 1913 and an expanded edition in 1920. He placed an interior sun in the hollow Earth. He even built a working model of the hollow Earth and patented it (#1096102). Gardner made no mention of Reed, but did take Symmes to task for his ideas. In the same time
Vladimir Obruchev wrote a fiction novel ''Plutonia'', where the hollow Earth's interior possessed one inner (central) sun and inhabited by prehistoric species. The interior was connected with the surface by a hole in
Arctic.
Other writers have proposed that "
ascended masters" of esoteric wisdom inhabit subterranean caverns or a hollow Earth.
Antarctica, the North Pole,
Tibet,
Peru, and
Mount Shasta in
California,
USA, have all had their advocates as the locations of entrances to a subterranean realm referred to as
Agarttha, with some even advancing the theory that
UFOs have their homeland in these places.
A book allegedly by a Dr Raymond Bernard which appeared in 1969, ''The Hollow Earth'', exemplifies this idea. The book rehashes Reed and Gardner's ideas and ignores Symmes. Bernard also adds his own ideas: UFOs come from the interior, the Ring Nebula proves the existence of hollow worlds, etc. An article by
Martin Gardner revealed that Walter Siegmeister used the pseudonym `Bernard', but only with Walter Kafton-Minkel's ''Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarfs, the dead, lost races & UFOs from inside the Earth'' in 1989 did the full story of Bernard/Siegmeister emerge.
The pages of 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 supposedly claimed as factual, though presented in the context of fiction. Shaver claimed that a superior pre-historic race had built a honeycomb of caves in the Earth, and that their degenerate descendants, known as "Dero", live there still, 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.
Fantastic stories (supposedly believed as factual within fringe circles) have also circulated that
Adolf Hitler and some of his followers escaped to hollow lands within the Earth after
World War II via an entrance in Antarctica. (See also Hitler's supposed adherence to concave hollow-Earth ideas, below.)
In 2001 the
Australian father-and-son team Kevin and
Matthew Taylor self-published the book ''
The Land of No Horizon'' (
direct link National Library of Australia ISBN 0-646-41057-1). Among other things it proposes an
expanding and hollow Earth (as well as other planetary bodies) which eventually reached equilibrium. The book also looks at a range of topics including but not limited to
evolution, human
physiology,
impact craters and other
geology in light of such a hollow Earth.
Kevin and Matthew Taylor's view of a hollow planet envisages a hollow globe with a small (depending on planet size) central sun ignited by radiation from the inner surface. They use this view both to explain
Earth's magnetic field (replacing the
dynamo theory) and the origin and ignition of
stars.
Some writers have proposed building
megastructures that have some similarities to a hollow Earth -- see
Dyson sphere,
Globus Cassus.
Concave hollow Earths
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 outside surface of a hollow planet, sometimes called a "convex" hollow-Earth theory, some have claimed that our universe itself lies in the interior of a hollow world, calling this a "concave" hollow-Earth theory. The surface of the Earth, according to such a view, might resemble the interior shell of a
Dyson sphere. Generally, scientists have taken neither type of speculation seriously.
Cyrus Teed, an eccentric doctor from upstate New York, proposed such a concave hollow Earth in 1869, calling his scheme "
Cellular Cosmogony". Teed founded a
cult 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, 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 twentieth-century German writers, including Peter Bender, Johannes Lang, Karl Neupert, and Fritz Braun, published works advocating the hollow Earth theory, or ''Hohlweltlehre''. Stories have even been circulated, although apparently without historical documentation, that Hitler was influenced by concave hollow-Earth ideas and sent an expedition in an unsuccessful attempt to spy on the British fleet by aiming cameras up into the sky (Wagner, 1999).
The Egyptian mathematician
Mostafa Abdelkader authored several scholarly papers working out a detailed mapping of the concave Earth model. See M. Abdelkader, "A Geocosmos: Mapping Outer Space Into a Hollow Earth," 6 ''Speculations in Science & Technology'' 81-89 (1983). Abstracts of two of Abdelkader's papers also appeared in ''Notices of the American Mathematical Society,'' (Oct. 1981 and Feb. 1982).
In one chapter of his book ''On the Wild Side'' (1992), Martin Gardner discusses the hollow Earth model articulated by Abdelkader. According to Gardner, this theory posits that light rays travel in circular paths, and slow as they approach the center of the spherical star-filled cavern. No energy can reach the center of the cavern, which corresponds to no point a finite distance away from Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. A drill, Gardner says, would lengthen as it traveled away from the cavern and eventually pass through the "point at infinity" corresponding to the center of the Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. Supposedly no experiment can distinguish between the two cosmologies. Martin Gardner notes that "most mathematicians believe that an inside-out universe, with properly adjusted physical laws, is empirically irrefutable". Gardner rejects the concave hollow Earth theory on the basis of
Occam's Razor.
In a trivial sense, one can always define a
coordinate transformation such that the interior of the Earth becomes "exterior" and the exterior becomes "interior". (For example, in spherical coordinates, let radius ''r'' go to ''R''²/''r'' where ''R'' is the Earth's radius.) Such transformations would require corresponding changes to the forms of physical laws; the consensus suggests that such theories tend towards
sophistry.
Gravity and a Hollow Earth
Someone on the inside of a hollow Earth would not experience an outward pull and could not stand on the inner surface; rather, the theory of
gravity implies that a person on the inside would be nearly
weightless. This was first shown by
Newton, whose
shell theorem mathematically predicts a gravitational force of zero everywhere inside a spherically symmetric hollow shell of matter, regardless of the shell's thickness. A tiny gravitational force would arise from the fact that the Earth does not have a perfectly symmetrical spherical shape, and also from
tidal forces due to masses such as the Moon which do not form part of the spherical shell. The
centrifugal force from the Earth's rotation would also pull a person outwards, but even at the
equator this is only 1/300 of ordinary Earth gravity.
Also, if the Earth were largely hollow but made of the same materials, it would have much less mass than what is actually observed (from, e.g., the strength of gravity at the outer surface).
Hollow Earths in fiction
Literature
★ In
Ludvig Holberg's
1741 novel ''Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum'', Nicolai Klim falls through a cave while spelunking and spends several years living on both a smaller globe within and the inside of the outer shell.
★
Jacques Casanova's
1788 ''Icosaméron'' is a 5-volume, 1,800-page story of a brother and sister who fall into the Earth and discover the subterranean utopia of the Mégamicres, a race of multi-colored, hermaphroditic dwarves.
★ An early science-fiction work called ''Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery'' by a "Captain Adam Seaborn" appeared in print in
1823. It obviously reflected the ideas of
John Cleves Symmes, Jr. and some have claimed Symmes as the real author. One recent reprint of the work gives Symmes as the author. Some researchers say it deliberately satirized Symmes's ideas, and think they have identified the author as an early American author named
Nathaniel Ames who wrote other works, including one that might have served as the inspiration of ''Moby Dick'' (see Lang, Hans-Joachim and Benjamin Lease. "The Authorship of ''Symzonia'': The Case for Nathanial Ames" ''New England Quarterly'', June 1975, page 241-252).
★
Edgar Allan Poe used the idea in his
1838 novel ''
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket''. He also touches on it in ''
MS. Found in a Bottle'' and ''
The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall''.
★
Jules Verne, who did not often stray far from the bounds of scientific plausibility in his works, used the idea of a hollow Earth in his
1864 novel, ''
A Journey to the Center of the Earth''.
★
James De Mille's novel ''
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder'' (
1888) is a
Victorian satire of the inverted society within the hollow Earth.
★
William R. Bradshaw's science fiction novel ''
The Goddess of Atvatabar'' (
1892) is a utopian fantasy set within the hollow Earth.
★
Willis George Emerson's science-fiction novel ''
The Smoky God'' (
1908) recounts the adventures of one Olaf Jansen who traveled into the interior, found an advanced civilization, and then left it.
★
Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote adventure stories set in the inner world of
Pellucidar (including, at one point, a visit from his character
Tarzan). Although the inner surface of the Earth has an absolutely smaller area than the outer, Burroughs's Pellucidar has oceans on the outer surface corresponding to continents on the inner surface and vice-versa, and therefore the inner world actually has a greater total land area than the outer. It is inhabited by primitive humans and creatures extinct on the outer surface, including the ''Mahars'', pterodactyl-like creatures with
psychic powers. Pellucidar has a central miniature sun which never sets, so that its human inhabitants have never developed the notion of time.
★ The Russian geologist
Vladimir Obruchev uses the concept of the hollow Earth in his popular scientific novel ''Plutonia'' to take the reader through various geological epochs.
★ The
Cthulhu Mythos stories of
H. P. Lovecraft (''et al.'') feature as a common theme a subterranean
gateway or
labyrinth that serves as the home of various
Great Old Ones.
★
Nehwon, the setting of
Fritz Leiber's stories about
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, is a concave hollow world, a bubble in the universal sea. The story "
Trapped in the Sea of Stars" explains this setting.
★ Two models (concave and convex) of
Saraksh fictional planet were depicted in
Strugatsky's novel ''
Prisoners of Power'' (1971). Saraksh is believed by its inhabitants to be a hollow cave in an endless solid space.
★ A Hollow Earth featured in the children's "
Choose Your Own Adventure" novel ''The Underground Kingdom'' (
1983).
★ In
Richard A. Lupoff's novel ''
Circumpolar!'' (
1984), the Earth is donut-shaped, and Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, and various famous aviation pilots must fly through the middle of the planet in order to win an air race.
★
Umberto Eco's thriller ''
Foucault's Pendulum'' (
1988) features dubious characters who dream of an absolute power stemming from
telluric currents, which they believe to be possibly related to the hollow nature of the Earth, and supposedly known to the
Templars.
★
Rudy Rucker's novel ''
The Hollow Earth'' appeared in
1990, and features
Edgar Allan Poe and his ideas.
★ The novel ''
Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth'' by
Max McCoy (
1997) expands on the legend of an advanced civilization dwelling in the Earth's interior.
★
Eoin Colfer's ''
Artemis Fowl'' series of novels has a population of
fairies living inside the Earth, under the
mantle.
★ The short story "Black as the Pit, From Pole to Pole" by
Howard Waldrop and
Steven Utley continues the journey of
Frankenstein's creature through a hollow earth similar to Edmund Halley's model, blending the works of H. P. Lovecraft and
Edgar Allan Poe, the theories of John Cleves Symmes, Jr. and Melville's Moby Dick.
★
Weird NJ Issue #27
★ The sixth book in the ''
Chronicles of Narnia'' series, ''The Silver Chair'', features a group of near-humans living under the ground in Narnia.
★
The Third Eye by
Lobsang T. Rampa mentions contact with advanced beings living in the center of the earth.
★
Against the Day by
Thomas Pynchon makes extensive mention of the earth's interior as a place to be explored, positing inner-earth seas.
Other cultural references
★ In the ''
Tiny Toon Adventures'' episode "
Journey to the Center of Acme Acres", a series of
earthquakes shake up the city, causing
Plucky and
Hamton to fall into a crater in the ground. They fall for hours before finally reaching the center, which is hollow.
★ The
Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game's
Mystara campaign setting included a ''
Hollow World'' expansion.
★ The comics series ''Les Terres Creuses'' by Belgian comics writers Luc and
François Schuiten features several hollow-Earth settings.
★ The comic book series
BPRD by Mike Mignola, creator of
Hellboy, did a collection called "Hollow Earth", where the team journeys into great caverns inside the Earth inhabited by Hyperborean people and fantastic machines.
★ The '' cartoon series features a character, Professor Lucy Suzuki, who believes in the Hollow Earth Theory.
★ The video game
Terranigma for the
Super Nintendo Entertainment System features both a hollow Earth and a normal Earth.
★ The PC Adventure game "Torin's Passage" features a depiction of a hollow Earth (though technically the fictional planet is called "Strata") similar to the one described by Edmund Halley.
★ The band
Bal-Sagoth has, on their new album ''
The Chthonic Chronicles'', a song about the hollow Earth called "Invocations Beyond the Outer-World Night".
★ The 2004 Japanese horror movie
''Marebito'' (稀人), directed by
Takashi Shimizu, also references hollow Earth theory and the netherworld or subterranean realms.
★ In the 1970s, comic-book artist
Mike Grell produced the comic-book
''Warlord'', about a pilot who finds himself in
Skartaris, a
sword-and-sorcery world reached through an opening at the North Pole. First believed to be the hollow interior of the Earth, Skartaris was later revealed to be a parallel dimension.
★ The
Marvel Universe features several underground empires ruled by villains like the
Mole Man or Tyranus.
★ In , the Hollow Earth exists as an alternate reality, but virtually all ways of accessing without magic have ceased to exist in the modern age because people no longer believe the Earth could be hollow.
★ The video game
Final Fantasy IV for the
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Released as "Final Fantasy II" in the United States) features a subterranean world that is inhabited by dwarves.
★ The
webcomic,
Overcompensating also references hollow earth theories in this August 2006 strip.
★ The console Strategy/RPG series
Super Robot Wars features a Hollow Earth world named LaGais.
★ A
Dyson sphere is a hypothetical shell constructed around a star. The episode "Relics" features such a structure.
★ The planet
Naboo in
Star Wars has a "hollow core", but it is filled with
water.
★ In the episode "
For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky", there is a hollow, artificially created, planet-shaped spaceship whose inhabitants falsely believe that they are living on the surface of a planet.
★ One adventure of
Alan Moore's Pulp-style hero
Tom Strong involved a gateway into the Hollow Earth in the Arctic where Nazis had fled after World War Two only to be devoured by its inhabitants. Much of the story is spent discussing many of the varying Hollow Earth concepts mentioned above. (Tom Strong's Terrific Tales #1)
★ The
Spider Riders series of books and anime take place in the "Inner World" of Arachna.
★ The
CRPG Septerra Core takes place on an eponymous world with seven separate layers, similar to the theory of
Edmund Halley.
★ Abduction by '
Robin cook' a fiction that includes a concept of a third world under the sea called ‘Interterra’.
Hollow Moon
An allied theory regarded
The Moon as being hollow, with the interior having a breathable atmosphere - which allowed various SF writers to postulate Lunar life, including intelligent life, despite scientific observation that the Lunar surface is airless.
This sub-genre seems to have died out following the actual Moon landing in 1969.
References
1. [1] p. 178 at Google Books
See also
★
Agartha
★
Etidorhpa
★
Brinsley Le Poer Trench, 8th Earl of Clancarty
★
Cyrus Teed
★
Dyson sphere
★
Expanding earth theory
★
Flat Earth
★
John Cleves Symmes, Jr.
★
Nazi mysticism
★
Neal Adams
★
New Swabia
★
Subterranean fiction
★
Travel to the Earth's center
★
Unidentified flying object
★
Vril
★
Hollow moon
Bibliography
★ Seaborn, Captain Adam. ''Symzonia; Voyage of Discovery''. J. Seymour, 1820.
★ Kafton-Minkel, Walter. ''Subterranean Worlds''. Loompanics Unlimited, 1989.
★ Standish, David. ''Hollow Earth''. Da Capo Press, 2006.
External links
★
Outlandish theories: Kings of the (hollow) world Review of
Paul Collins' book ''Banvard's Folly'', which includes a chapter on Symmes.
★ ''
Griffin, Duane A.; ''Hollow and Habitable Within: Symmes's Theory of Earth's Internal Structure and Polar Geography'' - a scholarly article on Symmes's theory
★ ''
At the Earth's Core'', by Edgar Rice Burroughs
★
''The Cellular Cosmogony'', by Koresh: full text of Cyrus Teed's book about the inside-out Earth at www.sacred-texts.com
★
''The Phantom of the Poles'', by William Reed: full text at www.sacred-texts.com
★
Hollow Earths: page illustrating several hollow-Earth proposals with diagrams
★ Stephen Wagner,
Nazis and the Hollow Earth, ''Paranormal.About.com'' (
11 January 1999): (thinly sourced) discussion of rumors about the Nazis and hollow Earth ideas.
★
Koreshan State Historic Site, official web page.
★
Unofficial Koreshan State Historic Site, unofficial web page.
★
American Communal Utopias and The Koreshan Unity: A Bibliography Brief overview and great bibliography of works, if slightly dated.
★
Turning the Universe Inside-Out: Ulysses Grant Morrow's Naples Experiment Examination of the Naples Experiment, and why it failed, but also covers the major hollow Earth theories and Koreshan beliefs.
★ ''
The Smoky God'', by Willis George Emerson. Complete novel
★
Voyage to our Hollow Earth, Journey to the North Pole and Beyond - 24 day Trip,
June 26 2006 -
July 19 2006. Expedition aboard the nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker
Yamal
★
The Hollow Earth - from
The UnMuseum
★
Hollow Earth Insider, "a dedicated worldwide group of Insiders researching, not only the Hollow Earth/Subterranean Mysteries, but also reports on the UFO/Alien connection and other mysteries, the New World Order and other conspiracies"
★ ''
The Expanding Hollow Earth Theory'' - a book by proponents of a hollow-Earth theory.
★
The Hollow Earth Theory, "A band inspired by the theory"
★
List of Some Hollow Earth books in Print at amazon.com
★
Phoenix Science Foundation, organization supporting an expedition
العربية
中国
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिन्दी
Italiano
日本語
Português
Русский
Español
