Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 23

Over the course of a long career as editor and writer, Ray Palmer mastered the art of huckstering mystification. He energetically hawked outlandish claims, often having to do with hollow-earth lore. In 1959, when Palmer was editing the small-circulation magazine Flying Saucers out of Amherst, Wisconsin, he received two review copies of a vanity-press book titled Worlds beyond the Poles, by an obscure theorist/crank named F. Amadeo Giannini.

Giannini championed the unique notion that the earth is more or less splindleshaped. The universe is not a vast near-emptiness, he argued, but an immense landscape of “physical continuity;” what we think are galaxies, stars, and planets are in truth “globular and isolated areas of a continuous and unbroken outer sky surface.” All of this came together, he wrote in what one assumes to have been an unintentional effort to make already dubious notions even less believable, in a vision he experienced while strolling through a New England forest one day in 1926. Even Giannini acknowledged that his concept of the earth’s and the universe’s shape cannot be visualized except “psychically.”

Author and book would have faded even deeper into the obscurity from which they emerged if Palmer hadn’t found something in the volume to get his more excitable readers wound up. Giannini had a new wrinkle on the myth of polar openings into the inner Earth. It turned out that no less than the celebrated aviator and polar explorer Adm. Richard E. Byrd (1888–1957) had entered such an opening while on an expedition to the North Pole in early 1947. (He also thought the same had happened on a South Pole expedition in January 1956.)

In the December 1959 issue Palmer took this story but failed to credit Giannini (or hold him responsible) for it, asserting that he learned this extraordinary secret after “years of research.” In his “research,” Palmer wrote with what passed for a straight face, he had uncovered contemporary reports from the New York Times in which Byrd mentioned seeing ice-free lakes, lush, green forests, mountains, and a giant, unknown animal, apparently a prehistoric mammoth, in a land 1,700 miles (2,735 kilometers) beyond the North Pole. These unexpected sights alerted him to the presence of an undiscovered land beneath the frozen polar region. (In 1956, similarly, Byrd allegedly flew 2,300 miles [3,700 kilometers] beyond the South Pole.) Palmer asserted that all of this is “well-authenticated. … At both poles exist unknown and vast land areas, not in the least uninhabitable, extending for distances which can only be called tremendous, because they encompass an area bigger than any known continental area!”

A 1912 illustration by Marshall Gardner shows an interior sun and oceans (Mary Evans Picture Library).

Not all readers chose to be wowed. A number wrote Palmer to point out the small consideration that in February and March 1947 Byrd was at the South, not the North, Pole. Moreover, as they determined easily, the Times had reported nothing about forests and mysterious beasts at the pole. Palmer was forced to concede that rather than having researched them on his own, he had taken these claims directly from Giannini. After that brief bow to the merely factual, however, he was off on a new and even more exotic tangent. Palmer suggests in his editorial in the February 1960 issue of Flying Saucers:

Now, as to the HOW of our “serious error.” Some time ago, we made a remark that there was a systematic effort being made to render the whole flying saucer story ridiculous. We promised to make this a particular point of attack, in the future, and name names, present facts. That time hasn’t come yet. We can only say that we haven’t changed our mind about this effort, and now, with the publication of the December issue … and our claims in it, we are more certain than ever. In short, what we want to say is that our statement that Byrd made a North Pole flight in 1947 to 1,700 miles [2,735 kilometers] BEYOND it, was a fishing expedition, for which we hope our readers will pardon us.

Not only has it not weakened our theory, it has strengthened it immeasurably, and also strengthened the theory that a systematic effort is being made to render flying saucers a subject of ridicule. In short, there were two alternatives—either Byrd made a SECRET flight over the North Pole in 1947, which NEVER hit the newspapers, or a deliberate effort was being made to build an edifice which could be toppled IF AND WHEN THE TRUTH CAME OUT ABOUT THE SOUTH POLE! There was only one way for this editor to discover if he had, somehow, missed the BIG story, the actual fact of a 1947 Byrd Polar flight as described, and by publication, he could ferret out the missed story. The whole thing was what you might term a “calculated risk.”

Palmer continues in this vein of bafflegab for pages more in virtually unparaphrasable rhetoric. He does reject Giannini’s cosmology as unworthy of serious consideration, then turns the subject to supposed mysteries of the polar regions, which leaves open the question of whether another world waits to be discovered within the earth. As usual Palmer was simply playing with his readers, and soon he abandoned these for other diversions.