Digging below the surface

Unlike nonfiction authors who go right to mainstream topics for their fodder, David Standish has more fun at the edges. “I’ve always been a juvenile delinquent as a writer, drawn to topics that have been marginalized or seriously overlooked,” says Standish, a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. “Any topic despised by the intellectual establishment appealed to me.”

That tack is on full display in Hollow Earth, which was published in 2006, and will appear in paperback on July 1 (Perseus Books/DaCapo Press, $16.95). Hollow Earth follows the history of the various theories that another world resides below the Earth’s crust—unexpected stuff, considering the author’s résumé.

Standish moved to Chicago from Bloomington, Indiana, to work as a junior editor at Playboy magazine. At the mag, Standish interviewed everyone from Janis Joplin to Jimmy Buffett. But he moved on from pop culture with his recent book after he fell in love with hollow-Earth theories.

Standish notes that every culture (even the cavemen) had some notion of an underworld, somewhere in the center of the Earth. German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, for instance, penned Mundus Subterraneus in 1665, a compendium of theories that fancied underworld giants, dragons and demons. 

Hollow Earthers had strong Chicago connections: Cyrus Teed, Standish’s favorite theorist, believed we live inside the Earth, not on it, and he conducted experiments to prove the Earth was concave, not convex. “Teed was considered a crackpot—but a charismatic one,” Standish says. Teed came to Chicago in the 1880s to speak at a religious convention, ending up staying, and started a metaphysical school here called the World College of Life. He preached that God comes in the form of a beautiful woman, which drew many female followers. Teed took their cash and was eventually pursued by irate husbands.

In the 1940s, Chicago editor Ray Palmer published a letter in his pulp magazine Amazing Stories, which claimed an ancient alphabet embedded in many English words was proof of an Atlantean legend. Writer Richard S. Shaver suggested a wiser race of man lived inside the hollow Earth, and his follow-up story detailing his experiences with the remnants of a subterranean race sold 120,000 magazines. “Palmer exploited Shaver’s vivid, paranoid, schizophrenic delusions for years to sell magazines, and Shaver cheerfully went along,” Standish says. “It is safe to say without Palmer and Shaver, we never would have gotten Scully and Mulder on The X- Files.”

Hollow-Earth theories aren’t limited to obscure quacks: During the collapse of the Third Reich, Hitler sent out an expedition to find an opening in the Earth where he could hide.

Standish’s work has stirred up interest in these obsolete theories—DreamWorks has even optioned it for an animated film. But true believers exist even today: When Standish sat in on George Noory’s Coast to Coast radio show to discuss the book, the first caller asked what he knew about the giant beavers living inside the Earth. Briefly stunned into silence, Standish took a deep breath and said, “Not much, why don’t you tell me about them?”

Hollow Earth surfaces in paperback on July 1.