Shortly before his death in 1957, Byrd referred to ‘that enchanted continent in the sky, land of everlasting mystery’. (37)
For believers in the hollow Earth, these statements were a godsend: apparently corroborative testimony from a highly respected explorer. The interpretation was straightforward: the Earth really does have a vast opening at each Pole, leading to the hollow interior, and it was into these openings that Byrd had flown. The ‘vast new land’ was actually the lip of the South Polar opening, the curvature of which was so gradual that Byrd did not realise he was well on his way into the inner Earth. The ‘enchanted continent in the sky’ was none other than the fabulous Rainbow City, home of the hidden super-civilisation that operated the UFOs. (38)
As the more responsible commentators on this subject state (often with noticeable relish), there is absolutely no evidence that the Earth is a hollow globe, and the statements attributed to Rear Admiral Byrd do not refer to journeys (witting or unwitting) into the Polar openings. As W.A. Harbinson and Joscelyn Godwin state, the ‘great unknown’ and the ‘land beyond the Pole’ are merely descriptions of those parts of Antarctica that had yet to be explored; the ‘enchanted continent in the sky’ was ‘no more than a description of a phenomenon common in Antarctic conditions: the mirage-like reflection of the land below’. (39)
Harbinson continues with his sweeping away of the nonsense that has developed around Byrd’s exploratory flights:
[W]hat, precisely, did Rear Admiral Byrd say? In extracts from his journal, published in the National Geographic magazine of October 1947, he wrote: ‘As I write this, we are circling the South Pole … The Pole is approximately 2500 feet [760 metres] below us. On the other side of the Pole we are looking into that vast unknown area we have struggled so hard to reach.’
Did Byrd claim to have flown 1,700 miles (2,750 kilometres) beyond the North Pole in February 1947? No. Describing his flight beyond the South Pole on 16 February 1947 he wrote: ‘We flew to approximately latitude 88°30’ south, an estimated 100 miles [160 kilometres]. Then we made approximately a right-angle turn eastward until we reached the 45th east meridian, when we turned again, this time on the way back to Little America.’
Did Byrd report seeing on his journey, not ice and snow, but land areas consisting of mountains, forests, green vegetation, lakes and rivers: and, in the undergrowth, a strange animal that resembled a mammoth? No. According to his journal: ‘Altogether we had surveyed nearly 10,000 square miles [25,900 square kilometres] of “the country beyond the Pole”. As was to be expected, although it is somewhat disappointing to report, there was no observable feature of any significance beyond the Pole. There was only the rolling white desert from horizon to horizon.’ (40)
It is a fundamental feature of ‘paranormal’ debate that believers will always find a way around sceptics’ arguments, and also, of course, that sceptics will always find a way to rubbish the evidence provided by believers. The Hollow Earth theory is no exception, and Rear Admiral Byrd’s voyages of Polar discovery continue to be presented as incontrovertible proof of the existence of the Polar openings and the fabulous lands and creatures within, in spite of the fact that those voyages, epoch-making as they were, revealed little more than ice. As we shall now see, Byrd’s flights served as the inspiration for ever more elaborate variations on the basic Hollow Earth theme.
The first writer to appropriate Rear Admiral Byrd’s polar experiences (real or otherwise) in support of his own cosmological theories was Amadeo Giannini, who had had a kind of extrasensory revelation about the structure of the Earth and the surrounding Universe while walking through a forest in New England in October 1926. Like Symmes before him, Giannini spent many years attempting to gain both official recognition for his theory from orthodox scientists and astronomers and adequate funds to mount an expedition to the Polar regions to prove it. Again like Symmes, he was frustrated in both endeavours.
In 1959 he produced a book entitled Worlds Beyond the Poles that was published by the New York vanity publisher Vantage Press at a cost to Giannini of $3,000 and that set out, in confusing and badly written prose, his argument concerning what he called the ‘Physical Continuity of the Universe’. The theory was bizarre even by the standards of the Hollow Earth thinking that had spawned Bender’s Hohlweltlehre. According to Giannini, our belief that the Earth is a sphere floating in space is the result of an optical illusion: the Earth is actually physically connected to the rest of the Universe at the Poles.
In Giannini’s view, Byrd, in flying beyond the Poles, had managed to reach the lands connecting this world to the next. Indeed, according to David Hatcher Childress, Giannini was the first to quote the great explorer’s words about the ‘land beyond the pole’ and the ‘great unknown’. Giannini stated: ‘It must be conceded that the land beyond to which Admiral Byrd referred had to be land beyond and out of bounds of theoretic Earth extent. If it had been considered part of the mathematized Earth it would not have been referred to as the “center of the great unknown.” (41) As we have already noted, it is a considerable leap of logic to take a poetic description of an unexplored land and claim that it connotes a hollow or infinitely extensive planet.
Anxious that his revolutionary theory should reach as wide an audience as possible, Giannini sent a copy of Worlds Beyond the Poles to the man most likely to give it a sympathetic reading: Raymond Palmer. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1910, Palmer would become something of a Renaissance man in the fields of the bizarre and unusual, writing science fiction stories, editing pulp magazines and founding Fate, the world’s longest-running journal of the paranormal.
It has to be said that life did not deal him the best of hands: at the age of seven he was run over by a truck and his back was broken; two years later, a failed spinal operation left him with a hunchback, and this, combined with a growth-hormone deficiency, resulted in an adult height of just four feet. Understandably enough, this led him to become something of a loner, with a voracious appetite for reading, particularly the fantastic romances that were becoming increasingly popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Palmer was also a great fan of Hugo Gernsback’s pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stones, the first of its kind. (The term ‘pulp’ comes from the low-grade paper on which these popular magazines were printed.) Palmer organised the first-ever science fiction fan club, the Science Correspondence Club, and founded the first SF fanzine, The Comet, in 1930. Over the next few years, he wrote a number of stories for the pulps before becoming editor of Amazing Stories in 1938. At that time, the magazine was in serious difficulties, but Palmer turned it around with an emphasis on romantic, suspenseful and picaresque adventures. Under his editorship, the magazine’s circulation rose by several tens of thousands. (42)
The principal reason for the improvement in the fortunes of Amazing Stories was Palmer’s knack of spotting what his reading public wanted and giving it to them, in spite of criticism from many of the ‘hard’ SF fans who later deserted him for John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction, which published the technology-orientated fiction of people like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and A.E. van Vogt. However, the success or failure of magazines depends very much on their performance at the news-stands, and by that criterion Amazing was doing just fine. Palmer noticed that his readers seemed fascinated by the idea of lost civilisations — not to mention the paintings of nubile young women in skintight costumes that frequently graced the magazine’s covers. This sexual imagery, combined with cosmic mysticism, seemed to Palmer a potentially lucrative mixture, and it did not escape his notice that Amazing always seemed to jump in circulation whenever it featured a story about Atlantis or Lemuria. This led Palmer to wonder how best he might capitalise on this curious interest among his readers. In late 1943, he found the answer in the form of a strange letter from a man named Richard Shaver.
Born in Berwick, Pennsylvania in 1907, Richard Sharpe Shaver was very fond of playing pranks on people, which earned him a somewhat dubious reputation. As a child, he had had two imaginary companions, one good, the other evil, who became more real to him than the living people around him. (43) After graduating from high school he worked for a meat packer and then a tree surgeon before moving to Detroit and enrolling in the Wicker School of Art. In 1930, Shaver joined a communist group called the John Reed Club (named after the American correspondent who had reported on the Russian Revolution). (44) Like just about everyone else, Shaver fell on hard times with the arrival of the Depression, but managed to eke out a living as a part-time art instructor at the Wicker Art School, supplementing his meagre income by going to a park and selling sketches of passers-by for 25 cents each.
In 1933, Shaver married a fellow art student named Sophie Gurivinch who had come originally from Kiev in the Ukraine. They had a daughter the same year, and Shaver took a job as a welder in Highland Park, Michigan. He continued in this job for about a year until he suffered heat stroke, lost the power of speech and was admitted to the Ypsilanti State Hospital for two weeks. In February 1934, Shaver’s brother Tate, to whom he had been very
