would be saved by extraterrestrials who would take them to Mars. (67)
While in Brazil, Siegmeister came across an odd book entitled From the Subterranean World to the Sky by one O. C. Huguenin who seems to have held a high position in the Brazilian Theosophical Society. In common with Shaver, Huguenin claimed that the UFOs were the handiwork of an ancient civilisation (Huguenin claimed they were the Atlanteans) that had built them 12,000 years ago, just before the destruction of their continent. Some Atlanteans escaped the cataclysm by taking their craft through the Polar openings and re-establishing their fabulous civilisation in the inner Earth. The reason UFOs were being seen by so many surface dwellers was that the Atlanteans were concerned at humanity’s use of nuclear energy (concerns that were also attributed to the so-called ‘Space Brothers’ by the American contactees of the 1950s — see Chapter Eight).
At this time, two Theosophist friends of Huguenin, Commander Paulo Strauss and Professor Henrique de Souza, were also actively promoting in Brazil the idea of the hollow Earth: Strauss by lecturing widely about a UFO base called Agharta, and de Souza by claiming that he was in contact with the Atlanteans. (68) Siegmeister also claimed to have met an Atlantean woman (who looked like an eighteen-year-old, but who was actually 70) at the Theosophical Society Headquarters in Sao Lourenco. At one of these meetings, de Souza told Siegmeister that Brazil contained a number of tunnels leading down to the inner Earth (Childress notes that one of the tunnels was supposed to be in the Roncador Mountains of the Matto Grosso, the region in which the famous explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett disappeared in 1925). (69) According to de Souza, Fawcett was still alive and well in an Atlantean city, although he was prevented from leaving in case the surface dwellers forced him to reveal its whereabouts. Although he claimed to have made many trips into the Roncador Mountains, Siegmeister never found any of the tunnel entrances.
When some friends in America sent him a copy of Ray Palmer’s journal Flying Saucers, containing articles about Rear Admiral Byrd’s flights and the Hollow Earth Theory, Siegmeister went into creative overdrive, writing Agharta, The Subterranean World and Flying Saucers from the Earth’s Interior. At this time, 1960, Siegmeister received a letter from one Ottmar Kaub, who was a member of an organisation called UFO World Research based in St Louis, Missouri. Kaub was writing on behalf of the organisation’s leader, Dr George Marlo, who claimed to have visited the inner Earth on board a UFO, and who wished to live at Siegmeister’s Brazilian colony. Dr Marlo claimed to know two beings called Sol-Mar and Zola, who lived in a city called Masars II, underneath South Africa. Sol-Mar and Zola described the inner Earth as a paradise with a perfect climate, giant fruits, beautiful birds with 30-foot wingspans, and where the people grew to over 12 feet tall. (70)
For the next few years, Marlo tantalised Siegmeister with promises of a meeting with Sol-Mar and Zola — meetings that were always unavoidably postponed for various reasons. Eventually, Siegmeister realised that Marlo was lying about his contacts with the Inner Earthers and decided to continue his researches alone.
In 1964, he managed to find a New York publisher for his last book, The Hollow Earth, which was largely a rewrite of Flying Saucers from the Earth’s Interior and also borrowed heavily from Reed, Gardner and Giannini. The book sold well, but unfortunately Siegmeister did not live to enjoy its success: he died of pneumonia in 1965. Although The Hollow Earth contains a great deal of material from earlier writers, it is distinguished by its lengthy treatment of the idea that the governments of the world are well aware of the ‘fact’ that UFOs are spacecraft, and that they come from the inner Earth (it was one of the first books to pay serious attention to this idea). In addition, Siegmeister was one of the first writers to suggest that the US and Soviet Governments were secret allies in the face of the potential threat posed by the Inner Earth civilisation, a claim that has become an integral part of modern conspiracy theory. (71)
Siegmeister’s greatest legacy, however, must be the identification of Brazil as the most significant location in the mythology of the hollow Earth. Not only is that country a hot spot for UFO activity and encounters with apparent ‘aliens’, it also contains possibly more subterranean tunnel networks and entrances to the inner Earth than any other country. Before moving on, we may cast a glance at some of the reports that have recently been coming out of Brazil concerning some rather unusual discoveries. For instance, the Brazilian organisation Sociedade de Estudos Extraterrestres (SOCEX) has spent the last few years investigating claims that an elaborate tunnel network exists in the mountains of Santa Catarina and Parana States, particularly around the town of Joinville about 190 miles south-west of Sao Paulo (which, oddly enough, was Siegmeister’s base of operations in Brazil). (72)
In another SOCEX report, two men entered a tunnel near the city of Ponta Grossa, 250 miles south-west of Sao Paulo, in which they discovered a staircase leading further underground. Descending the staircase, the men found themselves in a small underground city, where they remained for five days with its 50 inhabitants. Many people have reported UFOs in the area, and some say they have heard singing, the voices apparently coming from underground. (73)
While these stories may be taken with a large grain of salt (their protagonists are invariably referred to by pseudonyms or just initials), the claim that Brazil, and indeed the rest of South America, is an important centre of UFO activity and of the belief in powerful subterranean civilisations is of considerable significance to the present study. In South America we find the nexus of the ideas we shall be discussing in the last two chapters of this book: firstly, that by the end of the Second World War the Nazis had begun to develop aircraft and weapons systems radically in advance of anything in use elsewhere at the time; and secondly, that Nazism as a potent political force did not cease to exist with the defeat of the Third Reich but continues in one or more secret locations, still exerting a powerful influence on world events.
As with most aspects of what may broadly be termed ‘the paranormal’, the concepts of Nazi occultism and genuine Nazi occult power (the former a verifiable historical fact, the latter an unsafe extrapolation based on rumour and hearsay) have merged into one another to such a degree that a clear line of dichotomy between the two has become virtually impossible to define. This will become especially apparent as we conclude this chapter on the hollow Earth and subterranean civilisations with a look at the tunnel system that is said to exist beneath South America. While legends of tunnels beneath South America have existed ever since the Spanish conquest of the continent, referring to the mysterious places where the Incas were said to have hidden most of their gold, there is some evidence for their actual existence. Some modern explorers even claim to have visited them.
Chief among these is David Hatcher Childress, who has written many books on the more unorthodox aspects of archaeology and who offers an account of one such adventure he undertook in his fascinating and informative study of the Shaver Mystery and the Hollow Earth Theory, Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth. Childress describes how he followed a lead provided in a letter sent to him by one of his South American readers, named Marli, who described an opening leading to a tunnel system near the small mountain town of Sao Tome das Lettres, north of Sao Paulo.
Childress travelled to the town with Marli, and in a local restaurant they listened, together with about twenty others, to the owner as he told a strange story of a man-made tunnel extending far into the earth. Marli translated the restaurant owner’s Portugese:
‘The Brazilian army went into the tunnel one time to find out where it ends. After travelling for four days through the tunnel the team of Army explorers eventually came to a large room deep underground. This room had four openings to four tunnels, each going in a different direction. They had arrived in the room by one of the tunnels.
‘They stayed in the room for some time, using it as their base, and attempted to explore each of the other three tunnels, but after following each for some time, turned back to the large room. Eventually they returned to the surface, here at Sao Tome das Lettres.
‘… [T]here is a man here in town who claims to know the tunnel and claims that he has been many weeks inside the tunnel. This man claims that the tunnel goes all the way to Peru, to Machu Picchu in the Andes. This man claims that he went completely under South America, across Brazil and to Machu Picchu.’ (74)
The restaurant owner went on to tell how he himself had encountered a strange man near the tunnel entrance one morning. The man was dressed in traditional Andean Indian clothes, and was extremely tall, approximately seven feet. As soon as he saw the restaurant owner, the man walked away without saying anything.
Childress goes on to report that the following morning he, Marli and a fellow explorer named Carl Hart went to the tunnel entrance with the intention of exploring as far as they could. He continues:
I was amazed at this ancient feat of engineering. We were descending down into the earth in a wide,
