Hollow Earth Expedition Earth Drill
Fat Dragon Games is proud to present our first official Hollow Earth Expedition model set, the Earth Drill. This model measures 11″ long and features fully rendered surface detailing, realistic tread and drill assemblies with all art in full color and 300dpi for maximum detail. This is a must have for any serious Hollow Earth Expedition fan (how else are you going to get to the Hollow Earth?)
The role playing game Hollow Earth Expedition features a fictionalized Thule Society's attempts at infiltrating the Hollow Earth. The source-book, Secrets of the Surface World, further expands the efforts of Nazis to discover and use occult relics.
Explore one of the world’s greatest and most dangerous secrets: the Hollow Earth, a savage land filled with dinosaurs, lost civilizations, and ferocious savages! Players take on the roles of two-fisted adventurers, eager academics and intrepid journalists investigating the mysteries of the Hollow Earth. Meanwhile, on the surface, world powers and secret societies vie for control of what may be the most important discovery in all of human history.
Set in the tense and tumultuous 1930s, the action-filled Hollow Earth Expedition is inspired by the literary works of genre giants Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The subterranean action is powered by Ubiquity, an innovative roleplaying system that emphasizes storytelling and cinematic action.
Hollow Earth
Edmund Halley (1656-1742) is best known for having
calculated the orbit of a comet that passes by Earth every 76 years. The comet
known as Halley's made its first appearance under that name in 1682. During the
next decade, Halley turned his attention away from the celestial in favor of
the subterranean. He claimed that the Earth was hollow and populated by humans
and beasts.
Halley's Hollow Earth idea was developed further during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and sometimes backed by sound scientific
reasoning. None of the claims of Hollow Earth proponents have been substantiated,
however. Those still holding to the belief in the twenty-first century are part
of a long history of people who believe human life exists beneath the surface
of the Earth.
Halley's theory was based on the fact that the earth's
magnetic field varies over time. Halley suggested that there were several magnetic
fields, one of which emanated from a sphere within the earth. Halley eventually
developed the idea that there were four con- centric hollow spheres within the
earth. He believed the inner earth was populated with life and had a luminous
atmosphere. The aurora borealis, he concluded, was actually an emanation of
radiant gases from within the earth that escaped through thin layers of crust
at the poles.
During the eighteenth century, Halley's Hollow Earth theory
was adapted by two other famed mathematicians, Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), a Swiss, and John Leslie (1766- 1832), a
Scotsman.
Euler abandoned Halley's concentric spheres idea. He postulated that
a glowing core some six hundred miles wide warmed and illuminated the inner
earth, where an advanced population thrived. Leslie, on the other hand,
believed there were two concentric spheres within the earth each with their own
sun, which he named Pluto and Proserpine after the Greek god of the under-
world and his mate.
Perhaps the most enthusiastic proponent of the Hollow Earth
idea was John Cleves Symmes, who was born in 1780 in New Jersey. He was named
after an uncle who fought in the American Revolutionary War. Symmes fought in
the War of 1812, after which he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and established a
trading post. He immersed himself in read- ing books in the natural sciences.
By 1818 he was publicizing his version of the Hollow Earth, which had
concentric spheres and received light and warmth from the sun through large
holes in the planet open at each of the poles.
Symmes proved relentless in publicizing his views: he was a
prolific lecturer and writer of letters and articles; wrote fictional accounts
of the Hollow Earth, including Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery (1820), which he
published under the pseudonym Adam Seaborn; and advocated expeditions to the
poles. His Hollow Earth illuminated by openings at the poles became the most
popularly known version, and one that would be tested as humans began
struggling to reach the poles.
Symmes was able to impress two influential men who would
take his cause further. James McBride, a wealthy Ohio man, wrote articles
supporting the concentric spheres version of the Hollow Earth. He lobbied a U.
S. senator from Kentucky to support a bill fund- ing a proposed expedition to explore
trade routes in the southern hemisphere (where McBride hoped the expedition
would continue on to the open pole). The senator he had lobbied, Richard M.
Johnson (1790-1850), later became vice president of the United States under
Martin Van Buren (1782-1862). In 1828, President John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)
indicated that he would approve funding for the expedition. However, when Adams
left office in 1829, his successor, Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), stifled a bill
funding the proposed expedition.
Symmes died in 1829, but his cause was continued by Jeremiah
Reynolds, an Ohio newspaper editor. After the failure to get government funding
for the expedition in 1829, Reynolds joined a crew sailing to the south seas to
hunts seals, but seven years later in 1836, he helped renew efforts for funding
of a Southern Hemisphere expedition. Reynolds spoke before Congress,
emphasizing the national glory that would accompany scientific discoveries and
expanded foreign relations, but he became so impatient with the methodical
planning and a series of delays that he was fired from the crew.
What became known as the Wilkes expedition, named after its
commander, Charles Wilkes (1798-1877), launched in 1838. When the expedition
was completed in 1842, they had effectively mapped a landmass where Symmes had
envisioned a large hole in the earth. The world's seventh continent, Antarctica,
was officially recognized for the first time.
The open poles theory promoted by Symmes had been
effectively undermined, but the belief in the Hollow Earth would only grow more
popular. In 1846, the remains of a woolly mammoth, a creature long extinct,
were discovered perfectly preserved in ice in Siberia. So suddenly had it been
frozen, that the mammoth had not yet digested pine cones it had recently eaten.
It was theorized that the animal had been caught by a climate change, but many
questioned that such a change could have happened so quickly and thoroughly.
Some people believed the animal had wandered out from the Hollow Earth through
a hole at the North Pole.
As late as 1913, even after the North Pole had been reached,
Marshall Gardner published A Journey to the Earth's Interior, or Have the Poles
Really Been Discovered? which claimed that many creatures thought to be extinct
were still thriving within the earth. Gardner theorized that the interior earth
was warmed by materials still spinning since earth's creation. Based on the law
of centrifugal force, Gardner argued that earth was originally a spinning mass
of matter. An outer layer of matter had hardened and continued to revolve
around a central axis, while an inner layer also hardened and was warmed by
heat continually generated by the earth's spinning.
That same year, William Reed published The Phantom of the
Poles (1906), in which he promoted the idea that a ship can pass from outer
Earth to inner Earth. The effect of gravity pulls a ship against the interior
in the same manner as it works on the exterior. He claimed that some sailors
had already passed into inner Earth without knowing it. Gravity had pulled them
to the interior side, where a 600 mile-long sun continued to keep them warm, as
the outer sun had done.
In between the woolly mammoth find and those publications of
1913, fascination in the Hollow Earth was exhibited by scientists and science
fiction writers. Jules Verne (1828- 1905) published Journey to the Center of
the Earth (1864), in which characters enter the Earth's interior through the
chimney of an inactive volcano in Iceland. In 1873, The Coming Race, a novel by
the occultist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1831-1891), was set in the Earth's
interior, where an advanced civilization of giants thrived. In this story, the
giants had built a paradise and discovered a form of energy so powerful that
they outlawed its use as a potential weapon. The paradise is threatened,
nevertheless; not by weapons, but by a lack of conflict that has resulted in
general boredom.
One of the more interesting variations on the Hollow Earth
theory during the late nineteenth century was expounded by Cyrus Read Teed (1830-1908).
In The Cellular Cosmogony, or The Earth, A Concave Sphere, Teed claimed a
civilization inhabited the concave inner surface of Earth. Dense atmosphere
pre- vents viewing across the surface. The Moon, according to Teed, reflects
the larger, uninhabitable surface of Earth.
Teed made a religion of his discoveries and changed his name
to Koresh, the Hebrew equivalent of his given name, Cyrus. As the messiah of
Koreshanity, he formed a church, started a magazine, The Flaming Cross, which
continued to be published regularly into the 1940s, and founded a community on
a 300-acre tract in Florida in 1894. He lived there with about 250 followers
until 1908. Upon his death, his followers waited for him to rise again, as he
had prophesied. After four days, health officials appeared on the scene and
ordered his burial.
Hollow Earth theories continued to be promoted by
enthusiasts even as explorers reached the North and South Poles during the
first decade of the twentieth century. The open poles theory was further
undermined when aviator Richard E. Byrd (1888-1957) became the first to fly
over the North Pole (1926) and the South Pole (1929) and reported nothing but
unending whiteness. In 1959, a U. S. submarine journeyed beneath the polar ice
cap and actually surfaced at the North Pole, based on precise calculations.
Since then, year-round research stations have been built on several sites at
both poles. No large holes have been found.
Hollow Earth enthusiasts continue to believe. Teed's Concave
Earth theory, for example, was tested during World War II (1939-1945) by a Nazi
scientist. He aimed a camera at a 45-degree angle into the sky from an island
in the Baltic Sea, hoping to catch an image of a British fleet on the other side
of the concave Earth. The experiment was unsuccessful.
Delving Deeper
Beckley, Timothy Green, ed. The Smoky God and Other Inner Earth Mysteries. New
Brunwick, N. J.: Inner Light Publications, 1993. Bernard, Raymond. The Hollow
Earth. Mokelumne Hill, Calif.: Health Research, 1963. Gordon, Stuart. The
Encyclopedia of Myths and Leg- ends. London: Headline Books, 1993. Michell,
John. Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1984.
