Over the course of a long career as editor and writer, Ray Palmer mastered the art of huckstering mystification. He energetically hawked outlandish claims, often having to do with hollow-earth lore. In 1959, when Palmer was editing the small-circulation magazine Flying Saucers out of Amherst, Wisconsin, he received two review copies of a vanity-press book titled Worlds beyond the Poles, by an obscure theorist/crank named F. Amadeo Giannini.
Giannini championed the unique notion that the earth is more or less splindleshaped. The universe is not a vast near-emptiness, he argued, but an immense landscape of “physical continuity;” what we think are galaxies, stars, and planets are in truth “globular and isolated areas of a continuous and unbroken outer sky surface.” All of this came together, he wrote in what one assumes to have been an unintentional effort to make already dubious notions even less believable, in a vision he experienced while strolling through a New England forest one day in 1926. Even Giannini acknowledged that his concept of the earth’s and the universe’s shape cannot be visualized except “psychically.”
Author and book would have faded even deeper into the obscurity from which they emerged if Palmer hadn’t found something in the volume to get his more excitable readers wound up. Giannini had a new wrinkle on the myth of polar openings into the inner Earth. It turned out that no less than the celebrated aviator and polar explorer Adm. Richard E. Byrd (1888–1957) had entered such an opening while on an expedition to the North Pole in early 1947. (He also thought the same had happened on a South Pole expedition in January 1956.)
In the December 1959 issue Palmer took this story but failed to credit Giannini (or hold him responsible) for it, asserting that he learned this extraordinary secret after “years of research.” In his “research,” Palmer wrote with what passed for a straight face, he had uncovered contemporary reports from the New York Times in which Byrd mentioned seeing ice-free lakes, lush, green forests, mountains, and a giant, unknown animal, apparently a prehistoric mammoth, in a land 1,700 miles (2,735 kilometers) beyond the North Pole. These unexpected sights alerted him to the presence of an undiscovered land beneath the frozen polar region. (In 1956, similarly, Byrd allegedly flew 2,300 miles [3,700 kilometers] beyond the South Pole.) Palmer asserted that all of this is “well-authenticated. … At both poles exist unknown and vast land areas, not in the least uninhabitable, extending for distances which can only be called tremendous, because they encompass an area bigger than any known continental area!”
A 1912 illustration by Marshall Gardner shows an interior sun and oceans (Mary Evans Picture Library).
Not all readers chose to be wowed. A number wrote Palmer to point out the small consideration that in February and March 1947 Byrd was at the South, not the North, Pole. Moreover, as they determined easily, the Times had reported nothing about forests and mysterious beasts at the pole. Palmer was forced to concede that rather than having researched them on his own, he had taken these claims directly from Giannini. After that brief bow to the merely factual, however, he was off on a new and even more exotic tangent. Palmer suggests in his editorial in the February 1960 issue of Flying Saucers:
Now, as to the HOW of our “serious error.” Some time ago, we made a remark that there was a systematic effort being made to render the whole flying saucer story ridiculous. We promised to make this a particular point of attack, in the future, and name names, present facts. That time hasn’t come yet. We can only say that we haven’t changed our mind about this effort, and now, with the publication of the December issue … and our claims in it, we are more certain than ever. In short, what we want to say is that our statement that Byrd made a North Pole flight in 1947 to 1,700 miles [2,735 kilometers] BEYOND it, was a fishing expedition, for which we hope our readers will pardon us.
Not only has it not weakened our theory, it has strengthened it immeasurably, and also strengthened the theory that a systematic effort is being made to render flying saucers a subject of ridicule. In short, there were two alternatives—either Byrd made a SECRET flight over the North Pole in 1947, which NEVER hit the newspapers, or a deliberate effort was being made to build an edifice which could be toppled IF AND WHEN THE TRUTH CAME OUT ABOUT THE SOUTH POLE! There was only one way for this editor to discover if he had, somehow, missed the BIG story, the actual fact of a 1947 Byrd Polar flight as described, and by publication, he could ferret out the missed story. The whole thing was what you might term a “calculated risk.”
Palmer continues in this vein of bafflegab for pages more in virtually unparaphrasable rhetoric. He does reject Giannini’s cosmology as unworthy of serious consideration, then turns the subject to supposed mysteries of the polar regions, which leaves open the question of whether another world waits to be discovered within the earth. As usual Palmer was simply playing with his readers, and soon he abandoned these for other diversions.
Palmer’s nudge-and-wink twaddle would have left little mark outside the yellowing pages of old, modestly circulated Flying Saucers issues if not for the fact—and it is just about the only fact of the whole business —that in the 1970s a retired Marine Corps officer Tawani Shoush, also a member of the Modoc tribe, had not produced a remarkable document. Shoush, a Missouri man, headed something called the International Society for a Complete Earth. Because the organization sported a swastika logo and insisted the inner-earthers are “Nordic,” outsiders perhaps could not be blamed for drawing unflattering conclusions about the group’s political allegiances, but Shoush insisted he and his associates did not advocate Nazism (though not everybody would believe them). They did, however, hope to sail a dirigible into the North Pole hole, where they would meet the good folks who call the interior home. “The hollow Earth is better than our own world,” Shoush told Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene in 1978, “and we can only speculate that we will feel like coming back.” The expedition never happened—just as well, given the potentially fatal consequences to which serious misreadings of geography can lead the confused—and the organization hasn’t been heard from in years.
It did, however, make a lasting contribution to fringe literature with a monograph it sold. The monograph purported to be the secret diary of Admiral Byrd from his supposed 1947 North Pole expedition. Nothing about this is remotely believable, almost needless to say, starting with absurdly overwrought prose (replete not only with exclamation points, which sophisticated writers employ minimally, but multiple ones) bearing no resemblance to the erudite language the real Byrd used in his real writing. The prose reads exactly like ineptly executed pulp fiction, which of course is precisely what it is.
A cover feature illustration from a 1970 issue of Flying Saucers declares that a NASA photo clearly shows a gaping hole at the North Pole (Mary Evans Picture Library).
In any event, the bogus diary chronicles a flight starting in the morning of February 19, 1947. At 10:00 AM, four hours later, faux-Byrd notes: “We are crossing over the small mountain range and still proceeding northward as best as can be ascertained. Beyond the mountain range is what appears to be a valley with a small river or stream running through the center portion. There should be no green valley below! Something is definitely wrong and abnormal here! We should be over Ice and Snow! To the portside are great forests growing on the mountain slopes. Our navigation Instruments are still spinning, the gyroscope is oscillating back and forth!”
The plane descends to a thousand feet (300 meters). Byrd and radioman lose sight of the sun, and they see a mammoth and, soon after, green, rolling hills. Then, at 10:30, Byrd lets flies with the exclamation points: