Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 24

Palmer’s nudge-and-wink twaddle would have left little mark outside the yellowing pages of old, modestly circulated Flying Saucers issues if not for the fact—and it is just about the only fact of the whole business —that in the 1970s a retired Marine Corps officer Tawani Shoush, also a member of the Modoc tribe, had not produced a remarkable document. Shoush, a Missouri man, headed something called the International Society for a Complete Earth. Because the organization sported a swastika logo and insisted the inner-earthers are “Nordic,” outsiders perhaps could not be blamed for drawing unflattering conclusions about the group’s political allegiances, but Shoush insisted he and his associates did not advocate Nazism (though not everybody would believe them). They did, however, hope to sail a dirigible into the North Pole hole, where they would meet the good folks who call the interior home. “The hollow Earth is better than our own world,” Shoush told Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene in 1978, “and we can only speculate that we will feel like coming back.” The expedition never happened—just as well, given the potentially fatal consequences to which serious misreadings of geography can lead the confused—and the organization hasn’t been heard from in years.

It did, however, make a lasting contribution to fringe literature with a monograph it sold. The monograph purported to be the secret diary of Admiral Byrd from his supposed 1947 North Pole expedition. Nothing about this is remotely believable, almost needless to say, starting with absurdly overwrought prose (replete not only with exclamation points, which sophisticated writers employ minimally, but multiple ones) bearing no resemblance to the erudite language the real Byrd used in his real writing. The prose reads exactly like ineptly executed pulp fiction, which of course is precisely what it is.

A cover feature illustration from a 1970 issue of Flying Saucers declares that a NASA photo clearly shows a gaping hole at the North Pole (Mary Evans Picture Library).

In any event, the bogus diary chronicles a flight starting in the morning of February 19, 1947. At 10:00 AM, four hours later, faux-Byrd notes: “We are crossing over the small mountain range and still proceeding northward as best as can be ascertained. Beyond the mountain range is what appears to be a valley with a small river or stream running through the center portion. There should be no green valley below! Something is definitely wrong and abnormal here! We should be over Ice and Snow! To the portside are great forests growing on the mountain slopes. Our navigation Instruments are still spinning, the gyroscope is oscillating back and forth!”

The plane descends to a thousand feet (300 meters). Byrd and radioman lose sight of the sun, and they see a mammoth and, soon after, green, rolling hills. Then, at 10:30, Byrd lets flies with the exclamation points:

Ahead we spot what seems to be a city!!!! This is impossible! Aircraft seems light and oddly buoyant. The controls refuse to respond!! My GOD!!! Off our port and starboard wings are a strange type of aircraft. They are closing rapidly alongside! They are disc-shaped and have a radiant quality to them. They are close enough now to see the markings on them. It is a type of Swastika!!! This is fantastic. Where are we! [sic] What has happened. [sic] I tug at the controls again. They will not respond!!!! We are caught in an invisible vice grip of some type!

Minutes later, a voice speaks through the radio. In a slight Scandinavian or German accent it welcomes the admiral to “our domain,” then promises to land his plane “in exactly seven minutes.” The aircraft is no longer under the crew’s control. Within the promised period it descends and lands gently.

I am making a hasty last entry in the flight log. Several men are approaching on foot toward our aircraft. They are tall with blond hair. In the distance is a large shimmering city pulsating with rainbow hues of color [an allusion to another staple of hollow-earth literature, Rainbow City; see below]. I do not know what is going to happen now, but I see no signs of weapons on those approaching. I hear now a voice ordering me by name to open the cargo door. I comply.

It is surely pointless to observe that if all of this had happened in real life, Byrd would have been far too preoccupied to be scrawling in his diary (and, of course, taking extra time to dot his sentences with all those exclamation points) even as events were unfolding. The rest of the story, however, is reconstructed “from memory,” faux-Byrd writes.

The two explorers step aboard a platform without wheels and speed toward a glowing crystal city. There they are taken to a big building “out of a Buck Rogers setting!!” After consuming a warm, tasty beverage unlike any with which they are familiar, Byrd sees two men approach. They separate him from his companion and lead him a short distance to an elevator which descends to another floor. They walk down a long hallway until they reach a great doorway. As it opens, one of the men says, “Have no fear, Admiral, you are to have an audience with the Master.”

As his eyes adjust to the “beautiful coloration” of a room too “wondrous to describe,” he hears the voice of the Master, an elderly, handsome man seated at a long table. Byrd sits and listens, his remarkable memory recalling every word that the Master intones:

We have let you enter here because you are of noble character and wellknown on the Surface World, Admiral. … You are in the domain of the Arianni [better known as Aryans], the Inner World of the Earth. We shall not long delay your mission, and you will be safely escorted back to the surface and for a distance beyond. But now, Admiral, I shall tell you why you have been summoned here. Our interest rightly begins just after your race exploded the first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. It was at that alarming time we sent our flying machines, the “Flugelrads,” to your surface world to investigate what your race had done. That is, of course, past history now, my dear Admiral, but I must continue on. You see, we have never interfered before in your race’s wars and barbarity, but now we must, for you have learned to tamper with a certain power that is not for man, namely that of atomic energy. Our emissaries have already delivered messages to the powers of your world, and yet they do not heed. Now you have been chosen to be witness here that our world does exist. You see, our Culture and Science is many thousands of years beyond your race, Admiral….

Your race has reached the point of no return, for there are those among you who would destroy your very world rather than relinquish their power as they know it. In 1945 and afterward, we tried to contact your race, but our efforts were met with hostility, our Flugelrads [flying saucers] were fired upon. Yes, even pursued with malice and animosity by your fighter planes. So, now, I say to you, my son, there is a great storm gathering in your world, a black fury that will not spend itself for many years. There will be no answer in your arms, there will be no safety in your science. It may rage on until every flower of your culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in vast chaos. Your recent war was only a prelude of what is to yet to come for your race. We here see it more clearly with each hour….

We see at a great distance a new world stirring from the ruins of your race, seeking its lost and legendary treasures, and they will be here, my son, safe in our keeping. When that time arrives, we shall come forward again to help revive your culture and your race. Perhaps, by then, you will have learned the futility of war and its strife, and after that time, certain of your culture and science will be returned for your race to begin anew. You, my son, are to return to the Surface World with this message.

The forger of the diary has taken the message Space Brothers preached to flyingsaucer contactees and put it into the mouth of an inner-earther. This is yet one more of multiple indications that the diary was composed in the 1970s.

The diary ends with a coda dated December 30, 1956, with the observation that “I have faithfully kept this matter secret as directed all these years. It has been completely against my values of moral right. … This secret will not die with me. … I HAVE SEEN THAT LAND BEYOND THE POLE, THAT CENTER OF THE GREAT UNKNOWN.”

As laughable as all this may seem, the faux-Byrd diary is firmly ensconced in hollow-earth literature.¹ At least one writer has speculated that “Admiral Byrd’s weird flight” was the secret inspiration for the International Geophysical Year, proposed in 1947 though not declared till a decade later. Not all hollow-earth advocates, however, have been fooled.

For example, Dennis G. Crenshaw, editor of The Hollow Earth Insider, has remarked that the Master’s words are unsettlingly like those uttered by the Dalai Lama of Shangri-La in the 1937 film Lost Horizon. Crenshaw does not hide his suspicion that Tawani Shoush and his associates forged the document. Unfortunately, not content to let well enough alone, Crenshaw himself sails off into fantasyland, charging—on no visible evidence—that Giannini’s family “owned the Bank of Italy and the Bank of America.” Moreover, the “Illuminati and … a New World Order … John D. Rocherfeller [sic] and his pals” financed Byrd’s polar expeditions in the service of a vast cover-up. The “One Worlders’ plan” is to “cloud the water” by having “one of their own, an admitted [sic] member of an international banking family, toss in a controversy—such as this phony trip by Admiral Byrd—to make hollow earthers appear … ridiculous.”

Travelers stumble upon a hidden Shangri-La in Lost Horizon, a 1933 novel by James Hilton that was adapted to film in 1937 and again in 1973 (Ronald Grant Archive / Mary Evans).

One suspects, however, that they can manage that on their own.