Minutes later, a voice speaks through the radio. In a slight Scandinavian or German accent it welcomes the admiral to “our domain,” then promises to land his plane “in exactly seven minutes.” The aircraft is no longer under the crew’s control. Within the promised period it descends and lands gently.
I am making a hasty last entry in the flight log. Several men are approaching on foot toward our aircraft. They are tall with blond hair. In the distance is a large shimmering city pulsating with rainbow hues of color [an allusion to another staple of hollow-earth literature, Rainbow City; see below]. I do not know what is going to happen now, but I see no signs of weapons on those approaching. I hear now a voice ordering me by name to open the cargo door. I comply.
It is surely pointless to observe that if all of this had happened in real life, Byrd would have been far too preoccupied to be scrawling in his diary (and, of course, taking extra time to dot his sentences with all those exclamation points) even as events were unfolding. The rest of the story, however, is reconstructed “from memory,” faux-Byrd writes.
The two explorers step aboard a platform without wheels and speed toward a glowing crystal city. There they are taken to a big building “out of a Buck Rogers setting!!” After consuming a warm, tasty beverage unlike any with which they are familiar, Byrd sees two men approach. They separate him from his companion and lead him a short distance to an elevator which descends to another floor. They walk down a long hallway until they reach a great doorway. As it opens, one of the men says, “Have no fear, Admiral, you are to have an audience with the Master.”
As his eyes adjust to the “beautiful coloration” of a room too “wondrous to describe,” he hears the voice of the Master, an elderly, handsome man seated at a long table. Byrd sits and listens, his remarkable memory recalling every word that the Master intones:
We have let you enter here because you are of noble character and wellknown on the Surface World, Admiral. … You are in the domain of the Arianni [better known as Aryans], the Inner World of the Earth. We shall not long delay your mission, and you will be safely escorted back to the surface and for a distance beyond. But now, Admiral, I shall tell you why you have been summoned here. Our interest rightly begins just after your race exploded the first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. It was at that alarming time we sent our flying machines, the “Flugelrads,” to your surface world to investigate what your race had done. That is, of course, past history now, my dear Admiral, but I must continue on. You see, we have never interfered before in your race’s wars and barbarity, but now we must, for you have learned to tamper with a certain power that is not for man, namely that of atomic energy. Our emissaries have already delivered messages to the powers of your world, and yet they do not heed. Now you have been chosen to be witness here that our world does exist. You see, our Culture and Science is many thousands of years beyond your race, Admiral….
Your race has reached the point of no return, for there are those among you who would destroy your very world rather than relinquish their power as they know it. In 1945 and afterward, we tried to contact your race, but our efforts were met with hostility, our Flugelrads [flying saucers] were fired upon. Yes, even pursued with malice and animosity by your fighter planes. So, now, I say to you, my son, there is a great storm gathering in your world, a black fury that will not spend itself for many years. There will be no answer in your arms, there will be no safety in your science. It may rage on until every flower of your culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in vast chaos. Your recent war was only a prelude of what is to yet to come for your race. We here see it more clearly with each hour….
We see at a great distance a new world stirring from the ruins of your race, seeking its lost and legendary treasures, and they will be here, my son, safe in our keeping. When that time arrives, we shall come forward again to help revive your culture and your race. Perhaps, by then, you will have learned the futility of war and its strife, and after that time, certain of your culture and science will be returned for your race to begin anew. You, my son, are to return to the Surface World with this message.
The forger of the diary has taken the message Space Brothers preached to flyingsaucer contactees and put it into the mouth of an inner-earther. This is yet one more of multiple indications that the diary was composed in the 1970s.
The diary ends with a coda dated December 30, 1956, with the observation that “I have faithfully kept this matter secret as directed all these years. It has been completely against my values of moral right. … This secret will not die with me. … I HAVE SEEN THAT LAND BEYOND THE POLE, THAT CENTER OF THE GREAT UNKNOWN.”
As laughable as all this may seem, the faux-Byrd diary is firmly ensconced in hollow-earth literature.1 At least one writer has speculated that “Admiral Byrd’s weird flight” was the secret inspiration for the International Geophysical Year, proposed in 1947 though not declared till a decade later. Not all hollow-earth advocates, however, have been fooled.
For example, Dennis G. Crenshaw, editor of The Hollow Earth Insider, has remarked that the Master’s words are unsettlingly like those uttered by the Dalai Lama of Shangri-La in the 1937 film Lost Horizon. Crenshaw does not hide his suspicion that Tawani Shoush and his associates forged the document. Unfortunately, not content to let well enough alone, Crenshaw himself sails off into fantasyland, charging—on no visible evidence—that Giannini’s family “owned the Bank of Italy and the Bank of America.” Moreover, the “Illuminati and … a New World Order … John D. Rocherfeller [sic] and his pals” financed Byrd’s polar expeditions in the service of a vast cover-up. The “One Worlders’ plan” is to “cloud the water” by having “one of their own, an admitted [sic] member of an international banking family, toss in a controversy—such as this phony trip by Admiral Byrd—to make hollow earthers appear … ridiculous.”
Travelers stumble upon a hidden Shangri-La in Lost Horizon, a 1933 novel by James Hilton that was adapted to film in 1937 and again in 1973 (Ronald Grant Archive / Mary Evans).
One suspects, however, that they can manage that on their own.
The origins of Rainbow City go back millions of years, to a long-forgotten time when the human race conquered and colonized worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy and dozens of other galaxies. Eventually, however, the humans encountered their nemesis: a race called the Snake People. The ensuing conflict dragged on inconclusively for a thousand years until at last events turned decisively in the Snakes’ direction. The ancient humans were virtually destroyed, chased through space by vengeful Snakes until finally our ancestors found a few backwater worlds in which to hide and lick wounds. Among these planets was Mars, which sheltered the humans for a long time. Then the planet began to lose its oxygen, and the Great Ruler dispatched an exploratory fleet to the neighboring world, the third from the sun.
SILENT CITY
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, press accounts highlighted observations of what they called the “Silent City.” The Silent City was a mysterious presence supposedly encountered, usually in the summer, typically between June 21 and July 10, in the sky over the Muir Glacier 150 miles (241 kilometers) north of Juneau, Alaska. Dubious-looking photographs of it or something similar (allegedly seen along the Alaska-Yukon border) were printed and sold as postcards. The latter are widely judged to be fakes, but the sightings comprise something of a historical and meteorological enigma.