The hollow earth theory

Lost Civilizations (@lostcivilizations)

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lostworlds

· 6 Aug 2023

The expression hollow Earth theory refers to various theories, formulated by different thinkers in different historical periods, according to which the planet Earth is hollow inside. According to some of these theories, under the earth's surface there are other concentric surfaces, which could in turn be inhabited or habitable. According to others, there would be at the poles the entrance to a real world under the earth's surface.

For many proponents, these worlds would be inhabited by people or aliens or Atlanteans.

This theory was formulated by some in pseudo-scientific terms starting from the seventeenth century, when appropriate scientific studies of the planet had not yet been carried out, and in the following centuries it was popularized by fantastic novels which exploited it in narrative books.

The theory began as an extreme pseudo-scientific theory and then became the subject of bizarre fantasy stories, due to the fact that new scientific discoveries, supported by incontrovertible evidence, showed more and more that there was no validity in Hollow Earth theories.

Although widely debunked by modern science (geology, geophysics and astrophysics) and therefore relegated to pseudoscience for gullible people, even today the theory of the hollow Earth finds a certain number of supporters among various proponents of conspiracy theories or science fiction.

More precisely, the Inner Earth theory is a real gold mine used to extract money from the gullible, even if it aims at the most extreme gullible ones, those raised on fairy tales who totally ignore the existence of hundreds of years of scientific studies concerning terrestrial geology, geophysics and astrophysics.

Brief summary of Hollow Earth Theories

Here are brief list of the various versions of the Hollow Earth Theory. I know they are absurd but still they are interesting for the imaginative verve:

We live on the crust, but inside there is another world, which we do not know, in which lies the mysterious kingdom of Agarttha, seat of the King of the World.
We believe we inhabit the outer crust, but in fact we inhabit the interior (that is, we believe we inhabit a convex surface but in fact we inhabit a concave surface).
One of the first Hollow Earth theories had been proposed in 1692 by Edmund Halley, who had suggested that the earth was composed of four spheres, each embedded in the other, like so many nesting dolls, and that the interior of the planet was inhabited and illuminated from a kind of light atmosphere. Later, Euler had replaced the theory of multiple spheres with that of a single concave and empty sphere, which contained a sun that warmed and illuminated an advanced civilization.
The theory had been revived at the beginning of the 19^th century by Captain J. Cleves Symmes of Ohio, who had written to various scientific societies: "To all the world: I declare that the earth is empty and habitable inside, that it contains a certain number of solid spheres, concentric, i.e. placed one inside the other, and which is open at the two poles for an extension of twelve or sixteen degrees". According to Symmes, at the North Pole and the South Pole, there were two openings that led into the globe. The idea had been picked up by a newspaper publisher, Jeremiah Reynolds.
At the end of the nineteenth century, a certain Cyrus Reed Teed returned to the theory, specifying that what we believe to be the sky is a mass of gas, which fills the interior of the globe, with areas of bright light (the sun and the moon and the stars would not have been celestial globes but visual effects).
In 1873 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, political writer and esotericist, published a book, The Coming Race, in which he claimed that within the earth there was a race of supermen who had survived mythological cataclysms.
At the beginning of the 20^th century, William Reed argued that the Poles had never actually been discovered, simply because they don't exist: in their place there would be a huge hole with the transition to the Inner Continent. The sea waters would have poured in running along the surface.
Later, Marshall Gardner claimed the existence of a sun inside the Earth.
The ideas of Reed and Gardner were resumed in 1969 in the book The Hollow Earth, in the name of a self-styled Dr. Raymond Bernard, who also added some ideas inspired by science fiction, claiming that UFOs would come from the Inner Continent, and that the nebulae ring would prove the existence of hollow worlds. An article by Martin Gardner revealed that the pseudonym "Bernard" was used by Walter Siegmeister, but only with Walter Kafton-Minkel's book Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarfs, the dead, lost races & UFOs from inside the Earth in 1989 the story of Bernard/Siegmeister emerged.

Basically, according to this version, inside our planet there is an immense cavity, on whose concave walls a civilization similar to ours has developed, illuminated by an internal sun. Incredible but true, Bernard has found numerous followers, still united today in an association called the Hollow Earth Society.

In recent times planes and satellites have photographed the pole; the members of the "Hollow Earth Society" did not fail to notice (interpreting photographs in their own way) the presence of the famous passage. According to Richard Shaver, current spokesman of the theory, evil entities, the "Deron", who mentally take possession of humans, dwell within the Earth.

However, years earlier, from 1945 to 1949, the pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories successfully revived the idea of a hollow earth: the editor Ray Palmer published a series of stories by Richard Sharpe Shaver in which the idea was presented as realistic story of a prehistoric master race (such as the Atlanteans) that would have survived in the hollows of the Earth. The descendants of this race, known as the Dero would live in caves using fantastical machines (such as UFOs) abandoned by ancient races to torment those living on the surface. Following Shaver's claims, supported only by hypothetical "rumors," thousands wrote to the paper claiming they heard "hellish voices" coming from underground.

Supporters of the Inner Earth Theory have repeatedly relaunched some phantom and unverifiable diaries of old expeditions, where the most absurd stories are written about journeys in the Inner Earth, perhaps entering from the pole ...

Some debunking of the theory

Actually it doesn't make sense to debunk such an absurd theory that goes against thousands of proven scientific discoveries, but it's actually very interesting to see some debunking of this theory, as you can read below:

Thousands of satellite photos show the non-existence of cavities leading to the Hollow Earth, including the many photos of the polar areas.
Modern geology has shown that the Earth is a solid mass, and subsoil investigations carried out by all kinds of machinery indicate the non-existence of Hollow Earth. All cores, even those carried out at the poles, show the non-existence of the Hollow Earth. For example, the core known as SG-3 reached 12.3 km deep, part of the Kola Superdeep Borehole project, and materially testifies to the existence of the solid structure of the Earth.
A being inside a hollow Earth would not receive a gravitational pull towards the surface: The theory of gravitation predicts that a person inside the sphere would be virtually weightless. This fact was first demonstrated by Newton, whose Spherical Shell Theorem predicts that the gravitational force is zero everywhere within a spherically symmetrical solid shell, regardless of the thickness of the shell.
A weak gravitational force would derive from the imperfect sphericity of the Earth, and from the tidal force, due to the Moon. The centrifugal force would also contribute to the formation of a gravity, which, however, would ultimately be equal to only one three-hundredth of normal gravity at the equator.
As anyone who has studied physics knows, Gauss's theorem (formulated in the 19^th century) applied to the force of gravity (discovered by Newton in the 18^th century) shows that inside a hollow sphere the force of gravity is ZERO.
The theory is also fallacious due to the fact that a predominantly hollow earth would have a much lower mass than the experimentally observed one. However with the imagination you can make all the hypotheses you want, such as the one formulated in a book by Giacomo Casanova, Icosaméron (1788) and which is a story of 5 volumes, 1800 pages, of a brother and sister who fall within the Earth by discovering the underground utopia of the Mégamicri, a race of multicolored and hermaphroditic dwarfs.
One of the most comical hoaxes is a NASA satellite photo of the north pole taken in 1967 by the ESSA 3 satellite, which apparently shows a giant hole over the north pole area and which is purported to be proof of the existence of an entrance to a world underground. In reality, the photo is nothing more than a mosaic of many photos taken by the satellite, which by bringing them together shows all the areas of the pole photographed while they were illuminated by the light of the Sun, while a "black hole" appears in the center which is nothing more than the portion of the Arctic Circle never illuminated during the days of the winter months. At the poles nights and days last for months.
Obviously hundreds of satellite photographs of the poles have been taken, many planes have flown over the poles, many scientific expeditions have sieved them far and wide, many corings have been carried out in the polar ice, scientific surveys have been made which have even allowed us to understand what the ground is like under the polar ice: all this has never shown the presence of any entrance or cavity that would lead to underground worlds.
As icing on the cake, phantom evidence on the Hollow Earth, especially those relating to entries at the poles, are present only in the books of those who speculate on the history of the Hollow Earth, but are not found in the scientific world. It is at least obvious that these are tests invented to support one's bizarre theories and to sell one's books by catching at least the most gullible ones.

As crazy as it sounds, many people have made a lot of money on the Hollow Earth hoax, mostly by selling books about it or even setting up improbable Hollow Earth companies. And, even more absurd, today there are still people who believe that the Hollow Earth theory is true ...