UFOs from Outer Space, or from a Hollow Earth?

UFOs have once again been making headlines after the government released more videos and documents. There’s still no clear evidence of extraterrestrial life, but there’s enough to keep people wondering—as we have been for nearly the past 80 years since the term “flying saucer” was first coined in 1947. Among the stranger theories regarding their origin is the Hollow Earth theory, which suggests these beings aren’t visiting from light years away, but instead, from right inside our planet.

In his 1969 book, The Hollow Earth, Dr. Raymond Bernard expanded on earlier Hollow Earth theories, which boldly claimed there were holes at the North and South Poles. In 1906, William Reed published his reasoning in The Phantom of the Poles, and by June had  founded the “Reed Hollow Earth Exploring Club” (a lifetime membership cost an exorbitant $1,000). One explanation members offered was the presence of penguins—how else could the flightless birds have gotten there if they didn’t climb out of the hole? Within two years Reed’s club planned a $700,000 expedition to prove its theory.  

Blending fringe science, polar exploration lore, and UFO mythology, Bernard argued that strange lights and unidentified flying objects seen near the Arctic and Antarctic were actually craft entering and exiting the Earth through these polar passageways. To Bernard and others whom he supported, UFOs were not extraterrestrial visitors, but evidence of an advanced world operating beneath the surface of our own planet.

Bernard initially didn’t believe there was enough space within the Earth for flying saucers to zip around, until he read the works of other earlier theorists who claimed the planet’s interior had a spacious 5,800-mile diameter. These subterranean pilots were allegedly descendants from the highly advanced people of Atlantis, who found refuge inside the Earth after the continent was lost. They only reemerged after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, fearing nuclear weapons could destroy the planet and thus initiating waves of UFO sightings around the world.

These hollow Earth visitors also explained why the contactees of the 1950s always described their encounters with space people as looking very human. How could aliens develop just like us if they came from far away worlds, he wondered. “It seems much more probable that they came originally from the earth’s surface, gained access to the Subterranean World, and are employed as pilots by subterranean authorities, who sent them to us,” he wrote. “As for the ‘small men’ found in flying saucers, they are probably subterranean dwarfs employed by the master race that created them as pilots.”

They would have encouraged us surface dwellers to believe they came from outer space to prevent any invasions of their hollow world. If an ambitious and aggressive government decided to send in nuclear weapons to appropriate their territory, “the superior subterranean people would be forced to defend themselves by their ‘death rays,’ a force far more powerful than atomic energy, capable of bringing about complete atomic disintegration and the dematerialization and disappearance of their invaders and their weapons. Such a catastrophe they would rather prevent, since they are pacifists and detest warfare.”

Bernard’s conclusion, “confirmed by many Arctic explorers whom we cite,” claims the following:  

1. There is really no North or South Pole. Where they are supposed to exist there are really wide openings to the hollow interior of the Earth.
2. Flying saucers come from the hollow interior of the Earth through these polar openings.  
3. The hollow interior of the earth, warmed by its central sun (the source of Aurora Borealis) has an ideal subtropical climate of about 76 degrees in temperature, neither too hot nor too cold.
4. Arctic explorers found the temperature to rise as they traveled far north; they found more open seas; they found animals traveling north in winter, seeking food and warmth, when they should have gone south; they found the compass needle to assume a vertical position instead of a horizontal one and to become extremely eccentric; they saw tropical birds and more animal life the further north they went; they saw butterflies, mosquitoes and other insects in the extreme north, when they were not found until one is as far south as Alaska and Canada; they found the snow discolored by colored pollen and black dust, which became worse the further north they went. The only explanation is that this dust came from active volcanoes in the polar opening.
5. There is a large population inhabiting the inner concave surface of the Earth’s crust, composing a civilization far in advance of our own in its scientific achieve-ments, which probably descended from the sunken continents of Lemuria and Atlantis. Flying saucers are only one of their many achievements. It would be to our advantage to contact these Elder Brothers of the human race, learn from them and receive their advice and aid.
6. The existence of a polar opening and land beyond the Poles is probably known to the U.S. Navy in whose employ Admiral Byrd made his two historic flights and which is probably a top international secret.

So will the government soon disclose that the Earth is hollow and we’ve been secretly in touch with subterranean geniuses for decades? Probably not. But for now, you can see the latest files made public at war.gov/ufo.