Fig. 3.1
One of the most colourful controversies in the field of UFOs is that of where they actually come from. There was a time when Outer Space was all the rage. But, thanks largely to the late Brinsley Le Poer Trench, the idea seems to have gained ground that they are not from space at all but from the cavernous interior of our own hollow Earth.
Lord Clancarty (Mr Brinsley Le Poer Trench before succeeding to the title) may be the most famous champion of this view, but he is by no means the originator of it. It is a theory with a long and eccentric history.
That the Earth is hollow is an old idea dating back to the early nineteenth century, and the ideas of John Cleves Symmes, who proposed that the Earth consisted of an outer shell, about 800 miles thick, with four concentric inner shells, all of the shells being open at the poles. Later, in 1906, William Reed published a book Phantom of the Poles in which he argued that a hollow Earth, without inner shells, this time, but still with holes at the poles, would neatly explain the formation of icebergs and the true nature of the aurora borealis, as well as various other natural phenomena. A few years later, in 1913, Marshall B. Gardner promoted similar ideas in his book A Journey to the Earth’s Interior, but went further than Reed by giving the interior of the hollow Earth a central miniature sun to illuminate it! Both Reed and Gardner felt that the interior might be inhabited, though of course neither of these early authors mentioned UFOs for the simple reason that prior to about 1947, they hadn’t really been invented! (The first UFO sighting was reported by Kenneth Arnold in June 1947, and publicised in his book The Coming of the Saucers five years later.)
The problem with UFOs from Outer Space was that since it seemed extremely unlikely that they originated from within the solar system, therefore they must have come from a planetary system orbiting another star. And that immediately introduced rather unbelievable stints of interstellar travel into the proceedings.
It was probably Gardner’s intriguing concept of ‘the people of the interior’, coupled with the need to avoid these lengthy space journeys, that prompted a group of Brazilian Theosophists to link the hollow Earth with UFOs.
Sometime in the 1950s, then, a theosophist called Huguenin got around to writing what was probably the first hollow earth UFO book. It was called From the Subterranean World to the Sky and it was this book that converted one Dr Raymond Bernard (apparently the pen-name of one Walter Seigmeister), probably the most extraordinary character that this strange belief has attracted to date.
By 1963 Dr Bernard had himself put pen to paper in the form of his own book The Hollow Earth. We summarise its major conclusions under six headings:
That, in a nutshell, is the enthralling saga unfolded by the mysterious Dr Bernard.
The obvious question is, if there are holes at the poles and people on the inside, why don’t we know more about them? What about those famous flights over the poles by Admiral Byrd? Indeed, what about those commercial flights that now take routes directly over the poles?
There are answers to all these questions, never fear!
For a start, how do most people ‘know’ the Earth to be a globe rather than a pancake? The answer is that they don’t. They merely believe what they are told in schools and that is the unquestioned end of the matter. The holes at the poles sound absurd, to be sure, but that is certainly not a disproof of their existence.
So why don’t the Aghartans actually contact us instead of carrying on this cloak-and-dagger UFO business?
There are two possible answers here. Firstly, they don’t want to know us. We surface dwellers are a warlike lot, with our nuclear weapons and such like. The Aghartans don’t want to mix with us hostiles, but they do want to keep an eye on us lest we blow ourselves – and them – to kingdom come. You have to admit that the hollow earthers have something of a point here. Even more so when you consider that UFOs began to appear in ever increasing numbers about 1947 – a mere two years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is a veil of Aghartan secrecy, therefore, and in fact some UFO buffs claim that the Aghartans actively encourage surface dwellers to believe that UFOs come from Outer Space to distract us from their real purpose and place of origin.
The other explanation of why the Aghartans don’t seem to want direct contact with us is linked to the problem of how on earth – in earth, rather – we today could fail to ‘know’ such incredible facts about our own planet as its hollow interior and its holes at the poles.
Government secrecy is the key. The top brass know all about the hollow earth and its super-civilised inhabitants, but are keeping quiet about it. Contact might have already been made. It is just that we run-of-the-mill citizens, fit only for paying exorbitant taxes, are not deemed worthy of being in on the secret.
This is not as unreasonable as it sounds – the secret, not the taxes. The nation that first persuades the Aghartans that it really is worth getting pally with it may well reap untold economic and political benefits, and thus end up as Top Nation. That being the case, whilst negotiations are in progress, the less said the better.
So what about Admiral Byrd and those trans-polar flights of today?
Dr Bernard claims that Byrd did fly over the poles, and that he did see at least a part of the lands of the interior, but that, being in the employ of the US Navy at the time, he was naturally sworn to secrecy. However, if one looks at Byrd’s accounts of his flights, and one reads between the lines a bit, it soon becomes apparent – Dr Bernard says it does, at any rate – that Byrd let slip a few things. Why, for instance, did he say that, “That area beyond the Pole is the Centre of the Great Unknown”? (In recent years a secret diary of Admiral Byrd’s is supposed to have been found, in which his 1947 flight to the inner Earth is graphically described, and in which he tells of being ordered by Top Security Forces to keep quiet about it. Some people suspect that the diary is a fake, though.…)
As to trans-polar flights, well, they are not really trans-polar at all. Word has it that commercial airlines never get within 1500 miles of the hypothetical ‘poles’, either because the flights are ultimately controlled by the Official Secrets Act, or because any magnetic compass, or gyro-compass, on the rim of a polar hole behaves as it would if a pole really existed. In other words, when you get near the rim, if you trust in your compass, you will believe yourself to be at the pole, or, perhaps more to the point, up it.
For this same reason the exploits of Scott of the Antarctic need something of a revised interpretation, as do the so-called sub-polar exploits of the submarine Nautilus.
But let’s go back to Dr Bernard’s speculations concerning the life-style of the subterranean descendants of Atlantis. Why, for a start, did they go underground? Why, indeed, was Atlantis destroyed?
Dr Bernard is quite positive that Atlantis was destroyed in an antediluvian nuclear war and that the Atlanteans went underground to escape the fall-out. This would also account for their need to keep an eye on our nuclear activities – a case of once bitten, twice shy.
As to the Atlantean way of life, we quote Dr Bernard:
There is no old age in Agharta and no death. It is a society in which everyone is young looking, even if many centuries or even thousands of years of age. This seems incredible to surface dwellers exposed to the baneful effects of solar radiation and the autointoxication of food poisoning on a wrong diet. The symptoms of old age are not the natural result of the passage of time nor an assumed ageing process, but to adverse biological conditions and habits. Senility is a disease; and since Aghartans are free from disease, they do not grow old.
The sexes live apart in Agharta and marriage does not exist. Each is free and independent and one sex does not depend on the other for its economic support. Reproduction is by parthenogenesis; and the virgin-born children are all female. (In this matriarchal civilisation the female is considered the normal, perfect and superior sex.) Children are raised collectively by special teachers and not by private families. They are supported by the community. So are their mothers.
The superior scientific culture of the subterranean people, of which their flying saucers are an evident example, is the result of superior brain development and more energetic brains. This is due to the fact that their vital energies flow up to their brain, rather than dissipated through the sexual channel as among so-called ‘civilised’ surface races. In fact, sex indulgence is completely out of their lives, because of their fruit diet, their endocrines are in a state of perfect balance and harmonious functioning, as in little children, and are not stimulated to abnormal activity by metabolic toxins, as produced by such foods as meat, fowl, fish and eggs and by such aphrodisiacs as salt, pepper, coffee, tobacco and alcohol. By keeping their blood-stream pure and free from toxins, the subterranean people are able to live in complete continence, conserving all vital energies and converting them into superior brain power.
We have quoted this at some length to show that the hollow earth is not Dr Bernard’s only off-beat belief by any means. He firmly believes in virgin birth and has written a book proclaiming it as the method of reproduction by which a Super-Race will evolve. He has also written a book in which he claimed that Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton both owed their genius to life-long celibacy. The sex act, according to Dr Bernard, is no more than a senseless debilitating indulgence. He has also written a book on the herbal elixirs of life, another on the serpent power at the base of the spine, and a third which seeks to show that Jesus wasn’t Jesus at all.
Unfortunately, we have to stick with the hollow earth, so let us leave Dr Bernard and come back to his latter day followers. Two of these are Warren Smith, author of This Hollow Earth (1972), and our own Lord Clancarty, mentioned earlier, and author of Secret of the Ages (1974).
Mr Smith feels that sea serpents are really creatures from the interior, as are dinosaurs and Abominable Snowmen. He also quotes an account of “a strange animal with sixteen feet and one eye, like the legendary Cyclops of ancient times”, but we rather feel that someone is being not altogether serious here.
Again, Mr Smith speculates that the infamous Lost Ten Tribes of Israel were not lost at all, but that they ended up inside the hollow earth. So, too, apparently, did Hitler at the end of the last war. Mr Smith quotes a hollow earther called Gunther Rosenberg to the effect that “a fleet of Nazi submarines took Hitler and his henchmen to a Nazi base set up under the ice cap at the south pole.”
Mr Smith, as does Lord Clancarty, produces evidence that nature favours hollow structures rather than solid ones. There are nebulae with holes in them. Human bones and the stems of plants are both hollow. The Van Allen belts are hollow in the sense of being moulded about the Earth so as to leave ‘holes’ at the poles. And what about the so-called polar caps of Mars? Are they really the thin ice caps that astronomers claim or are they polar entrances instead?
Mr Smith and Lord Clancarty both point out that there is even biblical authority for a hollow earth. Well, sort of, anyway. Here is Job 26.7–8:
He stretcheth out the north over the empty place and hangeth
the earth upon nothing.
He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds; and the cloud is not
rent under them.
The “empty place” of the north could be the north polar opening, and one of the reasons why these polar openings have remained unknown for so long is that it is always very cloudy in and around them. If you add to this “the angel of the bottomless pit” in Revelation 9.11 – an obvious reference to the King of Agharta – then the whole business becomes as clear as a foggy day at the north pole.
Talking of which, we come to Lord Clancarty’s ultimate piece of evidence for the holes at the poles – the ESSA 7 photographs.
Lord Clancarty claims that most satellite pictures of the polar regions don’t show the holes because they are obscured behind dense layers of cloud most of the time. Most of the time, but thankfully not all. On 23rd November 1968 a series of photographs taken from the satellite ESSA 7 caught a unique glimpse through the polar clouds of the north and revealed – A HOLE! We reproduce this remarkable photograph here as Fig. 3.1.
Fig. 3.1
Well, it certainly looked like a hole, though, perhaps predictably, the scientists were quick to step in with a denial of such an outrageous idea.
The ESSA 7 photograph, they said, was really a mosaic of photographs of sections of the Earth’s surface, each section being photographed when under direct illumination from the Sun. That is, each section was photographed at a different stage of the Earth’s rotation on its axis.
Now, in November, when these photographs were taken, the north pole was tilted away from the Sun. Consequently, those regions in the immediate vicinity of the north pole were never illuminated at any time during the Earth’s rotation, and so they came out blank when the photographic sections were developed.
When the sections were put together, of course, the dark bits of each one fitted together to make a ‘hole’ – but not, alas, the one the hollow earthers were looking for.
We are of the view that if there aren’t really any polar holes at all, then there jolly well ought to be, if only for the reason that the hollow earthers have devised such marvellous stories of what goes on in the interior.
Apparently it is not all correct diet, celibacy and virgin births down there, and life is not one endless round of Atlantean sweetness and light.
Atlantis, remember, probably destroyed itself in a nuclear war. Lord Clancarty has a rather involved theory about just what went on, but basically most of the Atlanteans, or, shall we say, the cream of what was left of them, escaped into space in their UFOs (which is where, incidentally, they came from in the first place!) The rest, as we saw earlier, went underground, and it appears that that is where the Atlantean riff-raff ended up. Certainly there were some unsavoury characters amongst them.
One of these, a mad scientist called Satanaku, had an uncontrollable urge to create monstrous reptilian creatures by way of biological experimentation. Hence the legends of Satan and his subterranean Hell, into which, incidentally, Lord Clancarty assures us, both Dante and Christ really did descend.
But if you want the real hot gossip of what goes on down under then even Satanaku pales into insignificance when compared to the deros, a malicious subterranean race of malformed sub-human midgets who, by telepathy, vision rays and remote control devices, delight in plaguing the human race with disasters and misfortunes. All our troubles are stage-managed by the deros. By suitably directing mysterious beams of energy they cause train crashes, earthquakes and wars. By telepathic means they induce mental anguish, trauma, dreams, nightmares and even death.
The deros are the evil mutant descendants of the slave classes of Atlantis. Quite naturally, therefore, they have a chip on their collective malformed shoulder. For 12,000 years they have lived in their underground tunnels, turning the abandoned machinery of the Old Atlantean civilisation to their own spiteful ends. They are therefore very dangerous – like a little child with a machine-gun. We quote from Warren Smith:
A train is speeding across the surface of the world. In the dark recesses of his cavern, a dero focuses a tractor beam on a railroad switch. The track is opened; the train is derailed. The dero can instantly change highway traffic signals, sabotage industrial machinery, and ruin complex devices. Have you ever had a machine or object that refused to work, then performed marvellously when the repairman arrived? A dero may have been amusing himself.
Unlike the sexless Atlanteans described by Dr Bernard, the deros are sex-mad. In fact, they even have a machine to cater for it. It is called a Stim Machine, and Mr Smith knows all about what happens to the very naughtiest deros who just don’t know when to stop:
Unfortunately, many of these stim machines have been captured by roving bands of deros. These complex mechanisms are used to create varied degrees of sexual intensity. The deros, who are totally degenerate, may spend their entire lives in a stim ray sex orgy. This debauchery can be heightened to such a degree, and prolonged for so many years, that the dero is deformed. They are transformed into even more frightening, more monstrous creatures. Perhaps a stim machine is addictive.
Mind you, when a dero gets fed up with his stim machine, no lady surface dweller is safe. The May 1967 issue of Hollow Earth Bulletin carried the lurid tale of a French woman who pressed the wrong button in a lift and ended being kidnapped by a dero in the basement:
His face was of a pale, whitish colour. His short, twisted body was covered with thick, bristly hair. His eyes were piggish, insensitive to any emotion, and gleaming with evil lust. The creature was fat, almost bloated. There were terrible scars and running sores over most of his body. He had no neck, so his head was placed squarely atop his muscular shoulders.
We are not told whether or not he spoke French.
Now, our readers can be forgiven for wondering if all this is really to be taken seriously, or if we are only the victims of a giant leg-pull.
The dero stories do have a suspicious origin, to be sure. They first featured in a science-fiction magazine called Amazing Stories in 1945, but the man who wrote about them, Richard Shaver, claimed them as fact rather than fiction. How firmly his tongue was lodged in his cheek when he said this, we have been unable to discover, but such is the appeal of these underground adventures that many people certainly do believe them. Some people even seriously claim to have had their own encounters of the unpleasant kind with these creatures.
Certainly in the history of hollow earthism, with or without flying saucers, fact and fiction have walked hand in hand, and it has not always been clear where the dividing line lies.
The most famous fictional exploit in this vein, of course, was Jules Verne’s Journey to the centre of the Earth (1864). An early foretaste of Mr Shaver’s deros came in the underground dwellers, or Morlocks, of H.G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine (1895), and the fore-runners of Dr Bernard’s sophisticated Atlanteans feature in Bulwer Lytton’s novel The Coming Race (1871). Finally, there is Willis George Emerson’s novel The Smoky God (1908).
This last one is an oddity. Like Mr Shaver’s stories, it reads like a novel but its author, with a twinkle in his eye, hinted that the contents might just be true after all.
Basically Mr Emerson posed as the recipient of the death-bed confession of an old Norwegian sailor called Olaf Jansen. Jansen’s story was that in 1829, whilst on a fishing trip with his father, a mighty storm blew up that drove them over the polar rim and down into the interior. Here they were rescued by some 12 feet tall giants – fortunately friendly – and taken to the subterranean city of Jehu where, in the course of a year or so, they managed to pick up the local language. This was very similar to Sanskrit, as it turned out. Having mastered the language, they were in a position to learn all manner of extraordinary things, such as the location of “the navel of the earth” and the fact that on the inside of the Earth the land to sea ratio is exactly the reverse of that on the outside. That is, three-quarters land to one-quarter sea.
All in all it was an entertaining tale of adventure whose title, The Smoky God, was taken from the name given to the interior sun by the local inhabitants. But Mr Emerson didn’t know what he was letting himself in for when he wrote:
A hundred times I have asked myself whether it is possible that the world’s geography is incomplete, and that the startling narrative of Olaf Jansen is predicated upon demonstrable facts. The reader may be able to answer these queries to his own satisfaction, however far the chronicler of this narrative may be from having reached a conviction.
Mr Emerson just could not have known that within seventy years of the publication of his novel some people would be taking it all seriously. And that includes a penguin nine feet tall which waddles across the plot on page 146!
The notion of the Hollow Earth lingers on, and in 2008 plans were afoot to organise a voyage to the interior via the web-site http://www.ourhollowearth.com. It was advertised that a contribution of about $20,000 would secure a cabin on board a Russian nuclear ice-breaker which was to be chartered for the expedition. If this seems like a lot of money, well, prospective participants were tempted with the prospect that once they got to the interior world they would have the chance to meet up with the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and to take a monorail ride to the Garden of Eden, which, by the way, is located on the interior directly below America! (Incidentally, that monorail ride to the Garden of Eden is based on material in part III of The Smoky God which is, remember, a novel!…) Whether the expedition ever actually took place, and with what results if it did, alike remain unclear. Though the web-site is still there at the time of writing (January 2013), the section of it devoted to the proposed voyage to the interior has quietly disappeared.
As we have seen, the idea of a hollow Earth goes back a long way – at least to the early part of the nineteenth century. The idea of a hollow Moon is much more modern. According to a writer named Don Wilson, who has written two books about it – Our Mysterious Spaceship Moon (1975) and Secrets of Our Spaceship Moon (1979) – it is due to two Russians, Mikhail Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, writing in about 1970. Even more surprisingly, it is claimed that the Moon is not a natural world at all, but a vast spaceship with a metal hull concealed beneath its outer surface. In this case it must have been inhabited in the past, and Mr Wilson himself inclines to the view that it is still inhabited now. He is supported by George H. Leonard, the title of whose book, Someone Else is on Our Moon (1976), speaks for itself.
Quite where and when the idea of a hollow – and inhabited – Moon first appeared is not clear, but it is a fact that in 1926 Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan stories, wrote an adventure novel called The Moon Maid in which he pictured the Moon as a hollow sphere with a solid crust some two hundred and fifty miles in thickness, and which was inhabited by some rather strange creatures, which included flying toads and quadrupedal humanoids! The idea may also have been sparked off by an article written in 1959, at the start of the space age, by another Russian, Iosif Shklovskii. Unlike Vasin and Shcherbakov, Shklovskii was an eminent astronomer, and all students of astrophysics will know about his pioneer work in connection with the Crab Nebula – a mass of gas which we know to be the result of a supernova explosion, seen by the Chinese and others in the year 1054. Today we know a good deal about it, but most of what we have found out is based on Shklovskii’s brilliant work in the early 1950s.
Iosif Shklovskii, then, is not a man whose opinions can be cast lightly aside. This is why his paper about the two dwarf satellites of Mars caused such a stir when it first appeared. Phobos and Deimos, the Martian satellites, are quite unlike our Moon. Neither is as much as 20 miles in diameter, and from Earth they look like tiny points of light, visible only with the aid of telescopes of considerable size. Phobos, the inner and rather larger of the two, moves round Mars at a distance of less than 4000 miles above the surface, and completes one circuit in 7½ hours. The interesting point here is that the Martian day amounts to 24½ hours, rather longer than ours. Therefore, to an observer on the planet, Phobos would rise in the west, scud across the sky in a mere 4½ hours, and set in the east.
There is no other natural satellite which has a period of revolution less than its primary’s ‘day’, and it was also suggested that that Phobos was slowly spiralling downwards, so that in a few tens of thousands of years it would crash-land on Mars. In his original paper, Shklovskii suggested that this spiralling-down was due to the braking effect of the Martian atmosphere. Since the atmosphere at that height would be very tenuous, it followed that Phobos must have negligible mass; in other words it must be hollow, and came into the category of a spaceship built by the local inhabitants (either past or present) for reasons of their own. Presumably the same would apply to the other satellite, Deimos.
Shklovskii’s announcement caused quite a stir, and it seems that the USSR Academy of Sciences was not particularly pleased about it. Subsequently, it was found that the spiralling-down effect is not genuine – or at least, not to the extent that was supposed – and pictures taken in the 1970s by the Mariner and Viking space-craft showed that both Phobos and Deimos are irregular, crater-scarred chunks of material, as natural-looking as they could possibly be. They may well be ex-asteroids, which came from the belt of midget planets orbiting the Sun between the paths of Mars and Jupiter. In any case, in 1979 Shklovskii wrote an article in the British Yearbook of Astronomy in which he said that his original paper was “just a joke”. He went on to say that in his view there was unlikely to be much intelligent life anywhere in the universe except on the Earth: perhaps none at all.
This was a complete reversal of the opinions he had expressed earlier in a book he had co-authored with Carl Sagan, which had been entitled Intelligent Life in the Universe. Whether his Martian-moon suggestion really was a joke, or whether the space-probe findings caused a rapid change of heart, is a question to which only Dr Shklovskii knew the answer. But joke or not, his paper was widely circulated, and could well have led others on to the idea that if Phobos and Deimos were hollow, our own Moon might be the same.
Mind you, there are differences. The Moon is planet-sized. Its diameter is 2160 miles, and it has 1/81 the mass of the Earth. It seems disturbingly large to be an artificial satellite, and there are actually grounds for believing that the Earth–Moon system is a double planet.
Nobody is certain about the origin of the Moon. The old idea that it used to be part of the Earth, and was hurled away in ancient times, has been so maltreated by the mathematicians that most astronomers have relegated it to the scientific scrap-heap. The Moon may have been an independent body which was captured by the Earth’s pull of gravity, though this would involve some very special circumstances. It may have been formed from debris circling the youthful Earth. Or it may have been produced in the same way as the Earth itself, at the same time and in the same region of space, by condensing out of a ‘solar nebula’, a cloud of material associated with the Sun in its early stage. At any rate, analyses of the samples brought back by the Apollo astronauts and the unmanned Russian Lunas show that the Moon and the Earth are about equally old; they date back between 4½ and 5 thousand million years.
It is true that the Moon is less dense than the Earth, but there is nothing surprising in this, because the Earth is denser than any other planet in the Solar System. The Moon’s mass is known very accurately, and there is no chance of it being hollow – at least, not according to the majority view. The possibility of deep sub-crustal caverns is another matter, and is not out of the question; but we have these on Earth too. The lunar surface is pitted with craters, some of which exceed 150 miles in diameter. According to one school of thought, they are volcanic in origin. Other astronomers prefer to regard them as the scars left by the impacts of meteorites. No doubt both processes have operated to some extent.
(Of course, other theories have been proposed, ranging from coral atolls to the results of a nuclear war. One writer, who rejoiced in the name of Weisberger, even claimed that there are no craters at all, and what we are seeing is storms and cyclones in dense lunar atmosphere. Unfortunately, we now know that the Moon is to all intents and purposes airless.)
Sir William Herschel, arguably the greatest of all astronomical observers, regarded the habitability of the Moon as “an absolute certainty”, and never changed his mind up to his death at an advanced age in 1822. Subsequently a German astronomer, Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, announced the discovery of a lunar city with “dark gigantic ramparts”, though observers both before and afterwards could see nothing more than low, haphazard ridges of the type to be found almost everywhere on the Moon. Gruithuisen also paid attention to the so-called Straight Wall, an 80 miles long fault in the surface which can be seen with a small telescope near the edge of one of the so-called seas (the Mare Nubium). Gruithuisen regarded this as due to engineering works.
The Moon spins on its axis in exactly the same time that it takes to complete one orbit of the Earth: 27.3 days, so that it keeps the same face turned towards us all the time. Again there is no mystery in this. Tidal friction over the ages has been responsible, and all the other principal planetary satellites do the same thing with respect to their primaries. In the 1870s a Danish astronomer, Andreas Hansen, suggested that all the lunar air and water had been drawn round to the hidden side, which could be inhabited; and in his famous book of 1954 George Adamski even said that during one of his trips in a flying saucer he had been right round the Moon and had seen little furry animals running about among the mountains and craters. However, in 1959 the Russians sent out their unmanned probe Luna 3, which obtained the first pictures of the hitherto-unknown regions; furry animals were conspicuous only by their absence. Today, thanks to the various probes, we have very detailed maps of the entire lunar surface. The “other side” contains mountains, valleys and craters, but it is just as stark and sterile as the hemisphere we have always known.
So much for the facts. Now let us see what Messrs Vasin, Shcherbakov, Wilson et al. make of them.
First, there are the craters, which are shallow for their size. Their diameters, as we have seen, may exceed 150 miles, but their walls rise to only a few thousand feet above their sunken floors, some of which contain central peaks. It is suggested, therefore, that there is something very strong and tough below the outer surface, which is where the metallic shell idea comes in. Yet the depths of both volcanic and impact craters on the Earth are about the same proportion – and it does not seem that anyone (not even Lord Clancarty) has suggested that the Earth, too, is a metal-hulled spaceship.
Next, there is the question of the make-up of the great plains which are still known as seas even though it has long been known that there is no water in them (in fact, all the current evidence indicates that there has never been a drop of water on the entire Moon.) The consensus of opinion is that they are lava. Certainly this is what is indicated by analysis of the specimens brought home. What seems to have happened is that at a much earlier stage in the Moon’s history, several thousands of millions of years ago, there was tremendous volcanic activity; magma poured out of the interior, and filled the great basins which already existed.
Vasin and Shcherbakov, however, have another interpretation. They believe that the “spaceship Moon” had been fitted out for a long voyage across the galaxy, and, of course, had to be made extremely tough. Therefore, some 2½ miles below the outer surface there is an armour-plated shell. Inevitably the Moon is sometimes hit by meteorites, which – as we have seen – produce the craters; they cannot penetrate the inner shell, but merely dent it. Yet there are occasions when the shell is damaged. After a particularly heavy meteoritic bombardment, the inhabitants found it necessary to open vents and undertake extensive repair operations. This involved sending out vast amounts of “artificial lava”, producing the comparatively level seas – which are, therefore, nothing more nor less than areas from which the protective coating was torn away from the armour-plating. The Straight Wall, near the edge of the Mare Nubium, was formed as a result of one of the armour plates bending under the impact of these “celestial torpedoes”, so that one of its straight, regular edges has been raised!
What about the interior itself? Below the armour-plating, between it and the core of the Moon (referred to by Wilson, perhaps significantly, as the kernel of the nut), there is the main living section, where a suitable atmosphere was provided. To quote the Russian sages: “The Moon is evidently a very ancient spaceship, the interior of which was filled with fuel for the engines, materials, and appliances for repair work, navigational instruments, observational equipment and all manner of machinery.” They also compare the Moon to a cosmical Noah’s Ark. There is, though, one important difference between Vasin and Shcherbakov on the one hand, and Don Wilson and George Leonard on the other. The Russians believe that the Moon’s inhabitants are extinct, so that we are seeing a dead vehicle. The Westerners, on the contrary, are confident that it is inhabited at the present time, and that many of the current Flying Saucers come from inside the Moon.
Don Wilson gives various reasons for this. As proof of an artificial origin, he points out that from Earth, the Sun and the Moon appear virtually the same size, which can hardly be coincidence (this equality is the reason why we can sometimes see total solar eclipses.) The Moon is not a perfect sphere; it has a “huge Earth-turned bulge”, inexplicable on natural grounds. The sea surfaces are loaded with iron, indicating their artificial construction. There is a remnant magnetic field which is sufficient to affect Earth compasses at suitable times. Strange glows and moving lights are seen by Earth-based telescopic observers. There are various features, such as the formation Linné on the Mare Serenitatis, which are clearly non-natural. And finally, NASA has effectively covered-up the fact that there are pieces of machinery and miscellaneous gear scattered all around the lunar surface; they have also concealed the even more startling fact that the Apollo astronauts have had many encounters with lunar-based Flying Saucers. They quote a Soviet scientist, Lev Mohilyn, who reveals that two cosmonauts, Ilya and Evgeny, went to the Moon in 1968, before the Apollo mission had achieved their aim, but Evgeny was killed by a “mechanical monster”, leaving Ilya to return home in a state of considerable mental agitation. There have been other signs of habitation. A Japanese gentleman, Dr Kenzahuro Toyoda, has seen the letters PYAX JWA displayed on the surface; Robert Charroux, a French writer, has described voices heard by the astronauts, notably the meaningful sentence MARA RABBI ALLARDI DINI ENDEAVOUR ESA COUNS ALIM (the lunar module of Apollo 15 was named Endeavour, of course, in honour of Captain James Cook’s ship of so long ago.)
This is all very well, but it is just possible that these authors are jumping to conclusions. Admittedly it is sheer luck that the Moon and the Sun appear equal in size as seen from the Earth, but there are other satellites in the solar system which can produce total solar eclipses as seen from their primaries. From Jupiter, for instance, the Sun has an apparent diameter of a mere 6 minutes of arc, and there are five satellites which would appear larger than that to an observer on the planet. The Earth-turned bulge is very slight in relation to the Moon’s actual diameter, and is easily explained by tidal deformation. The sea surfaces are not particularly iron-rich; and there is no remaining general magnetic field, so that the Moon has no effect upon our compasses – and in fact, if you take a magnetic compass with you to the Moon, it doesn’t work. Linné has been photographed in great detail from orbiting probes, and is a perfectly normal small crater – very probably due to meteoritic impact.
The great NASA cover-up is, of course, a now conventional ploy – in 1982 a gentleman by the name of William L. Brian even devoted an entire book to it – Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the US Space Program – in which he managed to conclude that Russia and America were really on the same side in the Space Race! Every eccentric believes that the forces of Orthodoxy are ganging up to hide the truth. Unfortunately, the allegedly “hidden recordings” turn out to be non-existent; authorities quoted, such as Dr Lev Mohilyn, cannot be found anywhere in scientific records – or, for that matter, anywhere else. And no astronomer, save the elusive Dr Toyoda, seems to have observed the phrase PYAX JWA displayed upon the Moon. It would be interesting to know what the words mean in Lunarian – “Earthmen, go home,” perhaps, or “UFO diversion ahead – delays expected”?
It is true that certain minor glows and other phenomena have been seen by telescopic observers, but they do not move around, and there seems no doubt that they are due to minor emissions of gas from below the outer crust. They can hardly indicate the presence of UFO bases!
Coming now to the “artefacts” which have been described on the lunar surface (we need do no more than mention in passing the dinosaur skeleton which has been reported by various investigators!), there are extensive descriptions in George Leonard’s book Someone Else is on Our Moon. Various photographs are reproduced, showing details such as bridges, T-scoops, super-rigs, cosmic domes, pipes, nozzles, gas sprays, rope ladders, control wheels, platforms, T-bars, and (in the Mare Tranquilitatis) what is called a right-angled pipe. At least two races from different planets inhabit the Moon (perhaps three), and as one contingent moves out another moves in. Space-vehicles range from metallic disks to fuzzy globes which seem to be non-material, so that they can change shape at will and often swoop down to see just what we on Earth are doing.
Much stress is placed upon a NASA scientist, Dr Sam Wittcomb, who backs up everything that Mr Leonard says, and confirms the great policy of covering up. However, “Sam Wittcomb” is an assumed name (as is stated quite clearly in the book), so just who he is we will never know!
Looking for Mr Leonard’s super-rigs, platforms, control wheels and right-angled pipes is considerably more difficult than looking for the legendary needle in the equally legendary haystack. And to sum up the whole concept of the spaceship Moon, with its hollowed-out interior, its Flying Saucer bases and its nutty kernel, one can only say, with regret: MARA RABBI ALLARDI DINI ENDEAVOUR ESA COUNS ALIM!
The idea of a hollow-moon ‘spaceship’ still persists today on the Internet (see, for example, http://users.belgacom.net/gc674645/grave/moon.htm). Thus one N. Huntley PhD, in his article entitled Our Enigmatic Moon (see the web-site http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2006/01jan/moon.html.), assures us that the Moon is in the wrong orbit for its size, and that it “rings like a bell” when struck by meteorites! The latter idea is apparently derived from the Moongate book mentioned earlier (see http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/tierra_hueca/esp_tierra_hueca_21.htm and click on “Hollow Moon”). Dr Huntley also assures us that several television viewers who watched the 1968 lunar landings saw one of the astronauts pick up what appeared to be a glass bottle, and blurt out “My God, I don’t believe it, look at this …” just before the screens went blank! Both of the authors of the present book must have blinked at the wrong moment back in 1968, because, unfortunately, neither of them remembers this at all! More worrying still is Dr Huntley’s revelation that “renowned astronomer Patrick Moore” has discovered over one hundred dome-like buildings on the Moon! Unfortunately, PM himself cannot remember this.…