Years ago, with certain chemical assistance, some friends told me about one of the early polar explorers (I can’t remember which) had entries in his journals of meeting people who lived far underground, in a previously undiscovered civilization. I never bothered to look it up. It sounded, well, nuts. Later, I heard that one of the explorers went mad on the journey.
The Firesign Theater’s Everything You Know Is Wrong packed together several bushels of such wacko theories into one story. Sure enough, there were the underground people.
Where does all this crazy shit come from? Did a polar explorer really have anything like that in a journal?
In The Hollow Earth by Professor Raymond Bernard, AB, MA, PhD, he relates evidence by various researchers that indicate that the Earth is indeed hollow, and inhabited by an advanced civilization. I don’t recall anything in it about the researchers going mad, but it’s been quite a few years since I read it.
Two other researchers, David Innes and Abner Perry, recounted a civilization, although the one they found was rather primitive.
The first to postulate this was John Clives Symmes, who put forth the idea in 1818. Symmes became wildly popular as a lecturer and nearly convinced Congress to fund an expedition to check it out. He influenced Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Jules Verne was familiar with Symmes theory when he wrote A Journey to the Center of the Earth.
There were books purporting to be actual accounts that confirmed Symmes theories, such as Symzonia; Voyage of Discovery (1820). Symmes never wrote a book on his theory (a student of his did), though he did put out quite a few pamphlets on the subject.
Hmmm. Well, I guess it’s not that unusual for folks’ musings in the wee hours of a long party to confuse fiction with little known facts. Thanks for all your insights, my friends.
I believe that Congress thought enough of Symmes’s theory to ask some polar explorers to look out for that sort of thing. But that’s not crazy, even Jefferson asked Lewis & Clark to look out for prehistoric giant mammals.
Well of course it’s true, but Congress didn’t want to incite a panic so they downplayed it. In the meantime, the party in power developed a plan to flood Middle Earth. It was bitterly opposed by the other side but they didn’t control Congress. No amount of fillibustering could stop it, and they looked very foolish when the plan successfully wiped out all below-ground civilizations.
The unfortunate thing was that now they can’t reverse the melting of the polar ice caps and it has left a large hole in the ozone layer. To this day, certain parties refuse to acknowledge the existence of the phenomena.
That’s not really crazy, though; it wasn’t unreasonable to speculate that there might be some fantastic undiscovered creatures in the vast unexplored swathes of what was then “the west”- and there were! Bison, the American grizzly, etc.
Thanks for all your insights, my friends.
