openings into the Earth’s interior. This refinement notwithstanding, Reed reiterated the beliefs of earlier theorists: ‘The earth is hollow. The Poles, so long sought, are phantoms. There are openings at the northern and southern extremities. In the interior are vast continents, oceans, mountains and rivers. Vegetable and animal life are evident in the New World, and it is probably peopled by races unknown to dwellers on the Earth’s surface.’ (21)
In 1913, William Gardner published his book A Journey to the Earth’s Interior or, Have the Poles Really Been Discovered? The book contained the now-famous illustration of the Earth with half of its northern hemisphere cut away to reveal the continents and oceans within. According to Gardner, the central sun was 600 miles in diameter, and its surface was 2,900 miles from the inner surface of the Earth. The polar openings were 1,400 miles wide, and the planetary shell was 800 miles thick. Like Reed and others before him, Gardner believed that conditions within the Earth were extremely pleasant, akin to some semi-tropical paradise. Like Symmes, he attempted to gather sufficient funds for an expedition, without success. At the end of A Journey to the Earth’s Interior, Gardner wrote of his hope that one day, with the aid of airships, the openings would be proved to exist. (22) Of course, the advent of routine manned flight proved his theory wrong, although, as we shall see later in this chapter, the words of one famous explorer who flew over the poles have been twisted by hollow Earth believers to imply things he never intended.
While not proposing that the Earth is hollow, the World Ice Theory (Welteislehre, or WEL) of Hans Horbiger (1860–1931) amply demonstrates how outrageously inaccurate cosmological models can be used for political and propaganda purposes. Such was the case with Horbiger’s Glazial-Kosmogonie, which the Viennese mining engineer wrote in collaboration with an amateur astronomer and which Martin Gardner calls ‘one of the great classics in the history of crackpot science’. (23) Although ridiculed by astronomers in Germany — and by just about everyone else in the rest of the world — the World Ice Theory was to gain a fanatical following in Nazi Germany, where it was seen as a brilliant refutation of the orthodox materialistic science personified by the Jewish scientist Albert Einstein. Indeed, according to the rocket scientist Willy Ley (whom we have already met in Chapter Three and will meet again in the next chapter), supporters of this theory acted very much like a miniature political party, issuing leaflets, posters and circulars, and publishing a monthly journal, The Key to World Events. (24) Pauwels and Bergier offer a revealing snapshot of their behaviour:
[Horbiger] seemed to have considerable funds at his disposal, and operated like a party leader. He launched a campaign, with an information service, recruiting offices, membership subscriptions, and engaged propagandists and volunteers from among the Hitler Youth. The walls were covered with posters, the newspapers filled with announcements, tracts were distributed and meetings organized. When astronomers met in conference their meetings were interrupted by partisans shouting: ‘Down with the orthodox scientists!’ Professors were molested in the streets; the directors of scientific institutes were bombarded with leaflets: ‘When we have won, you and your like will be begging in the gutter.’ Businessmen and heads of firms before engaging an employee made him or her sign a declaration saying: ‘I swear that I believe in the theory of eternal ice.’ (25)
Horbiger was deeply fascinated by the origin and behaviour of moons, believing that they held the key to the way in which the Universe functions. For example, our present moon, Luna, is not the only satellite that the Earth has had: there have been at least six others, all of which crashed into the Earth, causing massive geological upheavals, so Horbiger believed. According to Horbiger, too, space is not a vacuum but is filled with hydrogen, which has the effect of slowing down celestial bodies in their courses, causing them to spiral in gradually towards their parent body. This, he maintained, is the ultimate fate of the Solar System, with all of the planets falling into the Sun. As they head inexorably towards their parent star, smaller planets occasionally are captured by larger worlds, becoming temporary satellites.
The Austrian engineer’s theories were taken up and developed after his death by a British mythologist named Hans Schindler Bellamy, who wrote a book entitled Moons, Myths and Man based on the World Ice Theory. (26) Martin Gardner provides us with an admirably condensed summary of his odd beliefs. Bellamy concentrated his research on the period in which the pre-Lunar moon orbited Earth: since humanity was present at this time, it was able to preserve a record of the moon’s cataclysmic collision with the Earth in the form of myths and legends. Bellamy refers to this satellite as the ‘tertiary moon’. As it spiralled closer and closer to the Earth, its gravitational field pulled the world’s oceans into a ‘girdle tide’, a gigantic, raised belt of water rising up from the equator. Humanity was forced by the resulting planet-wide glaciation to live in mountainous regions on either side of the girdle tide. As the tertiary moon drew closer, its orbital velocity increased until it was circling the Earth six times every day, its scarred and pitted surface apparently giving rise to the legends of dragons and other flying monsters.
When the moon reached a certain distance from the Earth, the planet’s stronger gravitational field tore the satellite apart The result was planet-wide rains and hail storms (all moons having thick coatings of ice on their surfaces), followed by bombardments of gigantic rocks and boulders as the moon finally disintegrated. With the moon gone, the girdle-tide of water collapsed, resulting in the Biblical Deluge.
Eventually, the Earth recovered from its titanic bruising, and this period of tranquillity gave rise to the legends of a Golden Age and earthly Paradise. However, with the arrival of the present moon, Luna, about 13,500 years ago, chaos reigned once again, with earthquakes, axial shifts and glaciation disfiguring the face of the planet. According to Bellamy, the Atlantean civilisation was destroyed in this cataclysm. He also believed that the Book of Revelation is actually a historical account of the destruction of the tertiary moon, and Genesis a description of the Earth’s recovery following the collision.
For his own part, Horbiger claimed that Luna is covered with a coating of ice 140 miles thick, and that ice also covers Mercury, Venus and Mars. In fact, the famous ‘canals’ on Mars (now known to be an optical illusion) are, in Horbiger’s warped cosmology, cracks on the surface of a 250-mile-deep frozen sea on the Martian surface. The Universe, Horbiger maintained, was packed with gigantic blocks of ice, the action of which accounted for the majority of astronomical events. The Milky Way, for instance, was actually a ring of enormous blocks of ice, not hundreds of millions of stars as the doctored photographs of orthodox astronomy implied. Like moons, the blocks of ice also encounter resistance from the hydrogen with which space is filled, and also spiral into the Sun, causing sunspots when they hit.
Of course, the fact that a theory was idiotic was no barrier to its success in the Third Reich, and the World Ice Theory was eagerly embraced and disseminated by the Propaganda Ministry Willy Ley records some of the statements made by representatives of the cult of WEL in its literature:
Our Nordic ancestors grew strong in ice and snow; belief in the World Ice is consequently the natural heritage of Nordic Man.
Just as it needed a child of Austrian culture — Hitler! — to put the Jewish politicians in their place, so it needed an Austrian to cleanse the world of Jewish science.
The Fuhrer, by his very life, has proved how much a so-called ‘amateur’ can be superior to self-styled professionals; it needed another ‘amateur’ to give us complete understanding of the universe. (27)
Gardner, writing in the 1950s, ends his discussion of Horbiger with the amusing comment (from our present perspective) that ‘the Cosmic Ice Theory will find disciples until the first spaceship lands on the cratered surface of an iceless moon’. (28) He was certainly correct, and Horbiger was certainly incorrect. However, it is difficult to resist the temptation to note the recent discovery of large ice deposits at the lunar poles, and the theory that they are the result of cometary impacts — comets being, of course, gigantic lumps of ice …
The island of Rugen in the Baltic was the site of one of the most bizarre and misguided strategies of the Second World War. In April 1942, an expedition under the leadership of the infra-red ray specialist Dr Heinz Fisher and equipped with state-of-the-art radar sets landed on Rugen and began to make a series of observations. Fisher ordered the radar sets to be pointed at an angle of 45° into the sky, a position they maintained for several days. The reason for this peculiar experiment was to prove that the Earth is not a sphere floating in space but is actually a bubble set in an infinity of rock. With the radar pointed upwards at a 45° angle, it was hoped that the beams would be reflected back from objects at some distance along the internal surface of the bubble. It was also hoped that the radar would provide Fisher’s team with an image of the British Fleet at Scapa Flow. (29)
According to Professor Gerard S. Kuiper of the Mount Palomar Observatory, who wrote several articles on the Hollow Earth Theory: ‘High officials in the German Admiralty and Air Force believed in the theory of a hollow Earth.
