Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, myths, strange facts or just plain weird, weird goings-on.

This week: Myths

The paranormal world covers an awful lot of topics. One of these is the Hollow Earth Theory. It propagates that the Earth has a hollow and inhabitable/inhabited centre. As the story goes, the Earth's innards are lit and warmed by an inner sun of sorts, and have a civilisation thriving within them.

There are those that believe the Earth is hollow, and contains advanced civilisations all its own. Generally speaking, it is most popularly believed that the entrances to Earth's belly are large gaping holes at the north and south poles. Other believers have stated the entrances are located elsewhere.

One of the more interesting (and far-fetched) ideas is that an ancient and advanced civilisation lives underneath Mount Shasta in the US state of California. There have been reported encounters with beings from underground (Often called Lemurians) by people spending time on the mountain grounds. One Edgar Lucian Larkin claimed to see one of their villages with the use of a telescope. This has long been held as some of the only proof of the Lemurian's existence.

The Lemurians are said to have communicated telepathically with a few select people from our top world. One such communication resulted in a book: A Dweller On Two Planets by a sickly 17-year-old boy named Frederick Spencer Oliver. To be fair, the book's author is toted as being Phylos the Thibetan, who lives under Shasta, and sent the text mentally to Oliver. The book is still available today, and is quite revered in some circles.

Some claim these communications continue today – through other people, as Oliver first 'dictated' his book in 1884 and has long since died. In fact, at least one of these new Mt. Shasta telepaths will allow you to communicate with the ancient inhabitants below Shasta through a her. For $65. Don't sweat it though, as the ancients apparently take Visa and Mastercard.

There's another philosophy regarding the hollow Earth, and this one states that we are on the inside of our fine planet – it's called the Concave Earth Theory. Some Nazis believed this to a degree – they called it hohlweltlehre. The greater scientific community has it that the Earth is a sphere with us wrapped around the outside of it. The concave theory is that since we're lining the inside of a giant globe, by looking up through the atmosphere we're actually looking toward the opposite side of the world – not space, but ocean or land.

Remember when we said the Nazis believed this? Well that's because a story goes that Hitler once sent a force out to spy on the British naval fleet. The troops, lead by Dr. Heinz Fischer went to an island called Rugen in the Baltic Sea. They took along some very powerful telescopic cameras to get the job done. When they arrived, they didn't aim them toward the British Isles, they pointed them towards the sky. The Germans fully expected to find the Atlantic ocean above them, with the British fleet making aquatic headway while held in place by centrifugal force instead of gravity. Of course the Germans were greeted with mountains of disappointment in this particular endeavor, and went on to not re-invent science at all.

Obviously, space travel and airplane flight have all but crushed any theory of a concave Earth. It's also brought the regular hollow Earth theory to a bit of a halt, as man has flown directly over both poles on numerous occasions, and nobody's ever seen a gaping 1400-mile hollow Earth entrance (as once believed) on either side.  

All in all, the Earth being hollow with an interior sun is a pretty silly idea – but it makes a pretty good read.

Read more:

Hollow Earth – Wikipedia

[story by Shawn Lindseth]