Raymond Bernard's 'The Hollow Earth' and the Byrd myth
Writing as Raymond W. Bernard, Walter Siegmeister published 'The Hollow Earth' (1964), claiming UFOs come from a civilisation inside the Earth reached through polar openings and tunnels, and that Admiral Richard Byrd had flown into one.
1964 CE · -27.60, -48.60 · status: hoax
The account
Siegmeister, a health-food promoter who founded utopian communes, moved to Brazil in the mid-1950s and believed tunnels there led to the inner world. He is credited with merging Hollow Earth ideas with UFO belief. A fake 'secret diary' of Byrd describing a land beyond the pole later circulated widely in New Age and internet culture.
The sceptical view
Byrd's polar flights were real but recorded nothing of the kind; Bernard misquoted his statements, and the 'diary' is a later fabrication. Satellite imagery shows no polar openings.
Connections in the atlas
- Koreshan Unity and the hollow earth
- 'The Smoky God': a voyage into the inner Earth
- 'The Smoky God': Olaf Jansen's inner world
- Neuschwabenland and the Nazi base myth
- Byrd's flight over the South Pole
- Agartha, the kingdom inside the Earth
- Byrd's 'land beyond the pole' quotes, claimed and documented
- Operation Highjump: myth and history
- Symmes's hollow-earth circular