FYI: Hollow Earth Map

So, it seems Jules Verne got another thing right - the Hollow Earth does exist and here at last is a map to prove it! With my recent re-viewing of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I began to wonder about other Verne prophecies and considered writing about the idea of the Hollow Earth (as suggested in Journey to the Centre of the Earth - and no I don't have a copy of the old 1959 Pat Boone movie).

In 1818, John Symmes, Jr. suggested that the Earth consisted of a hollow shell about 1300 km thick, with openings at both poles with 4 inner shells. Symmes proposed making an expedition to the North Pole hole and US president at the time, John Quincy Adams, indicated he would approve of this but he left office before this could occur. The new President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, halted the attempt - possibly due to his beliefs in a flat earth. 

In the 20th century, the Nazi Thule Society reported much about Tibetan myths of openings into the Earth. There is a theory that Hitler ordered a research journey for such an opening in Antarctica, based on a speech of Admiral Dönitz in front of a German submarine in 1944, when he claimed "The German submarine fleet is proud of having built an invisible fortification for the Führer, anywhere in the world." During the Nuremberg Trials, Dönitz spoke of "an invisible fortification, in midst of the eternal ice." So folks, keep your eyes open when travelling - you never know when you'll come across an opening.

Burn brightly, Pete

Neverland 2

Neverland

"I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. 


There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads on the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. 


It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate-pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine threepence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still."

                                                                                                 – Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie)