Date: ca. 1600–Present
Location: The Earth
The Conspirators: World governments
The Victims: The world population
You’d think that the idea of the Earth as a globe of rock with humanity living on its outside surface would seem to be an absolute given. Not for conspiracy theorists! In fact, there have been a number of groups throughout the centuries who claim that this accepted model of the Earth is absolutely false. These theorists believe in a hollow Earth and have claimed that the authorities—the mysterious and unnamed “powers that be”—are lying to the public in order to control us and prevent us from knowing the true geometry of the world.
There have been a number of divergent theories in the hollow Earth canon. In its most basic version, the universe consists of an infinite expanse of solid rock, and the surface of Earth consists of the concave surface of an empty bubble inside that rock. It is exactly the same surface area with the same surface features as the standard model of Earth, just turned inside out. Another variation, which is the more popular one that still survives today, has us living on the Earth’s outer surface as in reality, but an alien civilization lives in the hollow, inner surface, and the aliens come and go through various openings in the Earth’s poles in flying saucers. And, in yet another variation, the Earth is made up of concentric spheres with various civilizations living on each level, nested inside one another like gigantic Russian nesting dolls.
The Earth is a globe and we live on its outer surface.
Claims of a hollow Earth have been as varied in their types of alternate geography as they have in their motivations, which, through the centuries, have sometimes been religious and sometimes political. Today, we know that Earth is a convex sphere because we can see it from space. Yet that does not stop modern authors from continuing to promote that it is hollow and filled with aliens who exit and enter Earth’s surface through openings at the poles.
While this theory may be the most popular of those that survive today, it is not new. In the early 1800s, a former Army officer turned Hollow Earth promoter named John Symmes almost had the government persuaded to sponsor him on an expedition to find that north polar opening, in the hopes that the inner-world people could be persuaded to ally with the United States. The plan only died when President Andrew Jackson was elected and killed it, recognizing it as ridiculous.
The evidence that theorists cite as proof of this model has included the fact that birds migrate seasonally, and where else would they be headed but to those polar openings; and the fact that world maps have changed over the centuries, which is consistent with their belief in government suppression of the true geography of the world.
Even the model of nested concentric spheres has enjoyed serious scientific support at various times. In 1692 Astronomer Edmond Halley, after whom the famous comet is named, presented a paper to the Royal Society—Britain’s leading scientific academy—suggesting that the Earth might consist of various concentric spheres, all held in place by gravity. Assuming the concentric spheres were free to rotate within each other, this would explain phenomena such as the way the magnetic poles move around. Additionally, luminous gases leaking out through the north polar hole (for Halley’s model also had such holes) could explain the aurora.
But in 1870, it was Cyrus Teed, an American alchemist and pagan religious leader, who turned the world inside out, so to speak. His model said that the universe is an infinite expanse of solid rock with an Earth-sized bubble of air in the center, and all the world’s oceans, continents, and people are on the inner surface of that vast bubble. His book The Cellular Cosmogony, or the Earth a Concave Sphere described the universe as being inside out, with the world as we see it on the inside surface of a sphere, and all the heavens contained within. Teed established a church called the Koreshan Unity focused on this concept.
This concave sphere model of the Earth favored by Teed was famously put to the test by Ulysses Grant Morrow, a member of Teed’s Koreshan Unity. Morrow had conducted many ocean-level optical studies to learn whether the surface of the ocean appeared convex or concave and had grown familiar with the optical distortions that sometimes make distant ships either visible above the horizon or invisible below it. Using this idea as a base, he contrived a proof that the Earth’s surface curved upward that would not depend on sightings that he regarded as fallible and subject to optical illusions. Morrow reasoned that if he constructed an absolutely straight line four miles long and suspended it over the ocean, and that if it was absolutely level at one end, the far end would dip down toward the water, if the world was indeed concave and hollow.
In 1897, Morrow began his experiment at a stretch of straight beach near Naples, Florida. Because it wasn’t practical to build a 4-mile-long object, he designed a set of four rigid H-shaped frames that he dubbed “rectilinears.” They were built by the Pullman railroad car company, the most reliable builder he could find. Each was 12 feet long and 4 feet wide, made of mahogany and brass, and diagonally braced with steel bars to be absolutely rigid.
The first rectilinear was positioned just above sea level on rigidly anchored standards. It was leveled with four different types of level to be absolutely certain it was true. The next rectilinear was brought up beside it and bolted to it, and when it was secure, it too was fastened to a rigid standard. They continued down the beach this way, leap-frogging the last rectilinear and repositioning it at the front of the line. Caissons (watertight chambers) were placed in the water all along the way so the tides could be accurately measured and accounted for. Each measurement was checked and initialed by several people. Morrow went to great lengths to ensure that everything was absolutely correct.
In the true model of the Earth, with a convex surface, Morrow’s line should have been about 2 percent higher off the ground at the far end, as the curvature of the Earth would slope down away from a perfectly straight line. However, in Morrow’s model that curvature was exactly reversed, so his mathematics predicted the line would be about 2 percent closer to the water’s surface. It took months of painstaking work, but when they reached the end of the line, the last rectilinear was exactly 2 percent lower than the first had been. His results? The concave sphere model was proven! Earth is indeed hollow, and we live on its concave inner surface.
Let’s start by taking a look at Morrow’s “proof” of a hollow, inside-out Earth. With apologies to the engineers at Pullman, the rectilinears were built with an obvious geometric flaw. Although they were properly braced corner to corner, the point in the center where the diagonals crossed one another should have been fixed, with both diagonals fastened to the crossbar. Instead, the diagonals are free floating where they intersect the crossbar. This lack of attachment allowed the H-shaped frame to flex like an isosceles trapezoid. It is a testament to Pullman’s exceptional build quality that this freedom to flex escaped unnoticed. For Morrow to have gotten the result he did, his line could have sagged no more than 4 percent over the full 4 miles, which adds to the impressiveness of the achievement. Had the rectilinears been braced across the top and bottom, and/or had the diagonals been fixed at the center of the frame, Morrow would have certainly got even less of an error.
Morrow could scarcely have predicted that in the future spacecraft would be able to see the convex blue sphere of the Earth in all its glory, but it is to his credit that, as wrong as he was, he made every effort to be as rigorous as possible in his science-based exploration of truth.
By gravitational studies, we know that the Earth is a solid ball and does not contain the vast cavities assumed by the other various Hollow Earth theories, and with our detailed air and ground surveys and imaging we know there are no great polar holes through which migrating birds, alien flying saucers, or anything else come and go.