Tag: hollow earth theory

Hollow Earth: A Journey Through 3 Centuries of Conspiracy Theory

In early summer 2007, a Utah river guide named Steve Currey planned to head an expedition the likes of which we don’t often see nowadays.

In the 21st century, our planet (or at least it’s surface) feels trodden, long since mapped, and thereby stripped of its greatest mysteries.

Surely, we would already know if there were a gaping hole at the North Pole that leads to a lush inner world. Yet Currey, a champion of the centuries-old “hollow earth” theory, chartered a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker on the premise that we don’t know.

Championing the Hollow Earth Theory

Between June 26 and July 19, Steve Currey intended to sail the North Pole from Murmansk to the precise coordinates at which he expected to find the entrance to interior Earth.

For $20,000 apiece, 100 passengers were invited to join “this historic voyage.” However, a year before his scheduled departure, Currey died suddenly of brain cancer, and the trip was canceled.

In the years since, an engineer named Brooks Agnew has taken up the mantle (pun intended) of offbeat Arctic exploration. The North Pole Inner Earth Expedition is ostensibly still afoot, though logistical details are scarce.

In a 2022 interview, the new leader framed his quest as a dispassionate, empirical endeavor. “What’s the truth? It’s difficult to tell,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons we want to do this expedition. Let’s prove or disprove the biggest myth in human history.”

Ancient Hollow Earth Beliefs

Agnew is right about one thing: the mythological ubiquity of subterranean realms. Hades to the Greeks, Duat to the Egyptians, Hell to the Christians, and so on.

Of course, any mainstream geologist will tell you that science has already disproven these ancient yarns — it’s not at all “difficult to tell.” With perhaps a passing nod to folkloric whimsy, they will explain that the Earth consists of a thin crust, a rocky but flowing mantle that drives tectonic activity, an outer core of molten liquid and an inner core of solid iron and nickel.

That’s the expert consensus, grounded in seismic data from earthquake monitoring and other lines of firm evidence. But there was a time when brilliant thinkers, lacking the advanced instruments of modern researchers, found a hollow Earth not just possible but plausible.

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Why the Soviets Sponsored a Doomed Expedition to a Hollow Earth Kingdom

IN DECEMBER OF 1923, TWO unlikely travelers arrived in Darjeeling, India intent on finding what could not possibly exist: Shambhala, a kingdom located inside a hollow earth. Along them trailed Soviet spies, Western occultists and Mongolian rebels, all serving their own agendas. Even with so many eyes on them, their expedition still managed to disappear from the face of the earth for months; when they finally emerged, they had a fascinating story to tell and even more secrets to hide.

The travelers were Nicholas and Helena Roerich, two Russian expatriates traveling under a U.S, flag, which they had hoisted upon a Mongolian spear. As they informed the local authorities in Darjeeling, they were leading a scientific-archaeological expedition aimed at cataloguing the art and culture of Central Asia for the first time. Their eccentric behavior quickly raised some eyebrows: Nicholas Roerich, a famed painter and archaeologist, walked around Darjeeling in the robes of a Dalai Lama, held conspiratorial meetings with Tibetan lamas and introduced himself as an American, even though his accent betrayed his Russian heritage.

Still, the couple’s reputation as paragons of the Western art world as well as their American sponsors persuaded the authorities to let them pass through the city, and into the forbidden Tibetan plateau. However, nobody was aware of the couple’s true destination: the city of Shambhala, a place not to be found in any map.

Shambhala is a fabled city-kingdom of the Himalayas, believed by Buddhists, Hindus and local shamans to exist simultaneously on the physical and the spiritual plane. For millennia, the legend of the underground kingdom played an important role in every Tibetan tradition and eventually, rumors of its existence reached the West.

It so happened that Helena Roerich, a writer and philosopher, had translated in Russian The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky’s influential esoteric work which first presented Shambhala as a shortcut to enlightenment. The Roerichs came to believe deeply in the Shambhala myth and at some point, while living in New York, Helena received telepathic instructions from “Master Morya”, an otherworldly entity, encouraging the couple to leave the U.S. and seek the city for themselves.

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