By Sean Casteel
Do heaven and hell actually exist as physical locations? Can one step outside of the boundaries of religious and cultural conditioning that for millennia have told us that the two places exist outside the physical realm as places to be found only in spiritual dimensions that are unreachable by the living?
Timothy Green Beckley and his stable of venerable writers and researchers invite you to consider the possibility that the territories we think of as the afterlife – the dichotomies of heaven and hell – are in fact physical places concealed throughout eternity in the bowels of the Earth.
This is the theme of Beckley’s latest group project, the book called “Our Hollow Earth: An Inner World Paradise, Or A Gateway To Hell?” Since the book provides excellent arguments to support either case, it is up to the reader to determine which authors’ testimonies are more credible.
Beckley’s introduction pulls no punches when he writes: “Frankly, the text books – the truth according to our ‘experts’ – are all wrong! If you think life exists only on the surface of the planet, you have been listening to the ‘party line’ way too long, for there are those who see the Earth as being multilayered, and that what goes on ‘above’ definitely goes on ‘below’ – and maybe more so to the extreme.”
THE NOTION OF HELL BENEATH US
“One case for an Inner Earth hell,” Beckley continues, “is found in the wickedly profound tales of one Richard S. Shaver, who claimed he knew about a race of underground beings he called the Dero. For eons, the Dero had been polluting humankind’s minds with murderous thoughts and were responsible for plagues, ‘natural’ disasters, wars and all manner of evil deeds. They inflicted these woes upon humankind through the use of ancient laser-like ‘stem rays’ shot forth from their cavernous dwellings, hidden out of sight below the very bottoms of our feet.”
According to Beckley, Shaver said there was a real hell and it was located not in some mythical place but down below, right beneath us, toward the center of the earth. Like it or not, fundamentalist “scholars” tell us quite clearly that hell is for real and located inside the earth, making reference to Ephesians 4:9, which says of Jesus: “Now in saying that He ascended, what does it mean but that He also descended into the LOWER PARTS OF THE EARTH?” The reports of some who have experienced a Near Death Experience say they were thrown into the fiery lakes of hell and that “this place seems to be UNDERGROUND or WITHIN THE EARTH in some way.”
Shaver’s belief in a literal, physical hell was the result of demonic voices in his head.
“From as far back as I can remember,” Shaver writes, “there were the voices. They weren’t there all the time, but they were there enough that they played an important role in my early childhood development. At first I thought that everyone heard the voices. I thought there was nothing strange about being awakened at night with the hideous screams of someone being torn limb from limb ringing in your ears. I thought it was normal to hear the maniacal laughing of an invisible someone who thought it was a fine joke to see an innocent soul run down by a speeding train. I thought everyone knew that the voices were with us all of the time, watching, waiting, and scheming for our bloody deaths. But I was wrong. It seemed that I was the only one who heard the voices. I learned quickly not to talk about them, lest I be thought a maniac.”
Shaver’s voices gradually faded from his life and became only a distant childhood memory. They returned, however, when he was an adult working at an auto plant in Detroit. He began to hear them through the noise of the machinery, conversing among themselves about gleefully tearing the skin off a woman as she screamed for mercy or causing cars and planes to crash.
He concluded he must be quite insane, quit his job, began to live a hobo life and took to alcohol to try to block the voices out. He found himself confined to a prison or mental hospital – he seems unclear on which – and came to believe the voices came from people living in caves beneath the institution where he was incarcerated, tormenting him and the other prisoners with strange technologies he compared to some kind of x-rays.
Shaver writes: “My problems, I realized, did not stem from some kind of mental impairment. I wasn’t crazy in the traditional sense, even though at times I felt like I was being driven mad by the hateful rays that were being beamed at me by the people below. No, I was sane in an insane world.
“I have often wondered,” he continues, “how many people who have been institutionalized because they were diagnosed as crazy were in fact victims, such as myself, of the damnable rays. Did they themselves think that they were insane because of the voices they heard in their heads and voluntarily committed themselves? Even today I still wonder if most forms of mental illness are not actually insidious attacks from the world below.”
Over time, perhaps as a method of coping with the voices, Shaver began to develop a myth or a narrative to explain them. He writes about the coming of the “Titans,” a humanoid race that migrated from their home planet and settled on Earth long before mankind was created. The Titans created the first civilization on the Earth, a social and scientific utopia that has never been equaled since.
But there came a time when the sun began to flare in dangerous ways and Earth was flooded with world-destroying radiation. The Titans had no choice but to flee, but some of them stubbornly refused to abandon their homes and instead moved underground or beneath the seas. They took their great machines and scientific knowledge with them, in hopes of someday finding a solution to the solar radiation and returning to live on the Earth’s surface.
But even deep within the Earth, the solar radiation continued to affect them. They tried moving deeper into the planet, but to no avail.
“Those who did not die immediately,” Shaver writes, “suffered genetic damage that was passed down from generation to generation. Eventually, this once mighty race was reduced to mutated horrors, retarded in intelligence and social structure. Worse still, these monstrosities still had access to the self-repairing machines of their ancestors. But instead of using them for their intended purposes, they used them to satisfy their sick, twisted desires. These are the demons of ancient myth and folklore.”
They are the masters of a very REAL Hell!
IS THE CENTER OF THE EARTH TEEMING WITH LIFE?
Of course, stories about various locales inside the Earth are nothing new. Unlike Shaver’s tales of the demonic Dero who inhabit a cavern world, the inhabitants of the actual Hollow Earth, located at the planet’s core, are also said to be peaceful in countenance, but wish to keep their existence a secret for fear that the surface “warmongers” will want to invade.
A few years ago, when Beckley reprinted the long out-of-print edition and expanded upon the original version of “The Smoky God And Other Inner Earth Mysteries,” he knew going in that there isn’t anything new under the sun – even the central sun said to light the interior of our planet!
The story of the Smoky God is dramatic and tells of a fantastic journey by father and son to a place inhabited by gentle giants. In contrast to the rather admittedly demented Richard Shaver, who made no effort to conceal his hearing voices inside his head, voices that drove him nearly insane (he is said to have been locked in an insane asylum for several years), most of the tales of a Hollow Earth are rather benign. As a further example, one need only examine the works of Tibetan mystic T. Lobsang Rampa, who called the paradise located in the Inner Earth “Agharta.” Beckley’s Global Communications publishing house has republished many of Rampa’s books in excellent new editions.
THE DARKNESS OF THE HUMAN ELEMENT
But the story of the Inner Earth does not always involve supernatural entities like demons or highly-evolved, benevolent, heavenly personages. There is also plenty of everyday human evil thrown into the mix. Take the story of Admiral Byrd, for instance, about whom many questions remain.
Admiral Richard E. Byrd is thought of as an iconic American hero. But what was he concealing from the public, and why did he swear to secrecy a handpicked group from among the crews that accompanied him on his polar expeditions?
In 1938, the Nazis asked Byrd to join their expedition to the North Pole, which the admiral quite naturally declined. The Nazis went there without him, seeking to make contact with a hidden race of supermen by finding a doorway into the Hollow Earth that was believed to exist in the icy northern wastelands. Did the Nazis succeed in making that contact? Did they get alien assistance in building their own disc-shaped aircraft?
Ace Fortean advocate Tim Cridland presents not only photographic proof of the existence of massive holes at the North and South Poles, which are usually covered with a thick cloud layer, thus disguising the entrances there, but also explores the close connection between a member of the Byrd family and the assassination of a beloved president.
The admiral’s cousin, David Harold Byrd, was an oil-rich financier from Texas who funded some of Admiral Byrd’s earlier polar expeditions. By virtue of his wealth, Harold Byrd was part of the inner circle of the rich and powerful in Texas, which included Lyndon Johnson and John Connelly. Did the secret cabal somehow have a hand in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Was the conspiracy of murder birthed in a Houston hotel room?
In any case, to many in the UFO and conspiracy theory communities, Admiral Richard E. Byrd is not merely some benign fatherly figure smiling at us from the pages of 20th century history. While Byrd is commonly thought of as a national hero and a courageous explorer of the forbidding wastelands of the Polar Regions, those who look a little deeper soon discover a disturbing darkness and subterfuge that entangles the American icon in many a wicked web.
MICAH HANKS ON THE NAZI CONNECTION
From the darkness surrounding Byrd, his cousin and the JFK assassination, we move along to what may be even darker terrain, as described by author and podcaster Micah Hanks.
“It’s one of the most famous conspiracies,” Hanks writes, “associated with the end of the Second World War: that a group of Nazis escaped to Antarctica, where they had a secret base established to aid in the furtherance of their top secret flying saucer development program. Such tales have been the stuff of legends for decades now, and the persistence of rumors like these offer an alternative to popular theories about alien visitors that remain a hallmark of modern UFO lore.”
Hanks refers to a 2006 discovery by Ohio State University scientists who claim to have located some kind of “gravitational anomaly” located below Wilkes Land, Antarctica. It was later speculated in the tabloid press that the anomaly could be the long-sought “secret Nazi UFO base” in question.
There is some legitimacy to this idea, according to Hanks, stemming from the fact that the Nazis did mount an expedition to the South Pole in 1938-39, though there is no proof they attempted to establish a more permanent stronghold there. Ironically, according to Hanks, the idea of Nazi UFOs in Antarctica has less to do with anything the Nazis actually did than with what Admiral Byrd himself said about it.
Hanks quotes from a 1947 interview with Byrd, published in a Chilean newspaper, thusly: “The admiral stated that he didn’t want to frighten anyone unduly but that it was a bitter reality that, in case of a new war, the continental United States would be attacked by flying objects which could fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds.”
“As one can see,” Hanks continues, “such wording easily lends itself to the idea of a connection between the Nazi UFO mythos and something going on at the South Pole.”
THE HOLLOW EARTH AS CLASSIC LITERATURE
Jules Verne’s 1864 novel, “Journey To The Center Of The Earth,” is often credited with being the first book to deal with the concept that the Earth could possibly be hollow. But, in actuality, Verne’s classic tome was written about a hundred years after the release of a book that purports to be a real account of the author’s exploits in the underworld.
As far as is known, Niels Klim’s “Underground Travels,” originally published in Danish as “Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum” (1741), is a purportedly real journey as described by the author, Ludvig Holberg. It is being published here in English by Global Communications without tampering or unneeded editing. The complete title in English is: “NIELS KLIM’S JOURNEY UNDER THE GROUND, BEING A NARRATIVE OF HIS WONDERFUL DESCENT TO THE SUBTERRANEAN LANDS, TOGETHER WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE SENSIBLE ANIMALS AND TREES.“
Ludvig Holberg is the most eminent writer among the Danes in the 18th century. University-educated and well-traveled, he wrote treatises on law as well as histories, satires and comedies.
“There are many persons of both sexes in my country who believe in fairies and supernatural beings and who are ready to swear that that they have been conveyed by spirits to hills and mountain caves,” writes Holberg.
The work starts with a foreword that assures the reader that everything in the story is a real account of the title character’s exploits in the Underworld. The story begins in the Norwegian harbor town of Bergen in 1664, after Klim returns from Copenhagen, where he has studied philosophy and theology at the University of Copenhagen and graduated magna cum laude. His curiosity drives him to investigate a strange cave in a mountainside above the town, which sends out regular gusts of warm air. He ends up falling down the hole, and after a while he finds himself floating in free space.
Klim, the hero of the tale, is said to be transported to the world underground, where he meets with some “surprising” adventures. Many strange creatures inhabit this new world. Trees are introduced that have the power of speech and musical instruments discuss questions of philosophy and finance.
This introduction is followed by a short section called “Apologetic Preface,” in which descendants of Klim the Great add a prefix to the new edition where they swear to the authenticity of the story and seek to amend the bad reputation with which the publisher has unfairly been burdened by readers who believe the book is all fantasy.
Whether or not one lends total belief to the story told by Holberg and Klim, it is in any case a fascinating tale of adventure, redemption and coming to know one’s true self in a world previously unknown to mortal man.
“Our Hollow Earth” also includes a chapter by Hercules Invictus, a frequent contributor among Beckley’s writers. Hercules writes about the physical heaven and hell as described in Greek mythology. The Rivers of the Underworld, also an element of Greek mythology, are neatly summarized by Deanna Jaxine Stinson. Deanna’s husband, Paul Dale Roberts, recounts the story of a cave in Guatemala reputed to be an entrance to a Hollow World where the UFO occupants are said to reside. Scott Corrales covers similar territory in the wider exploration of Latin American entrances to the Underworld.
Beliefs in and about the Hollow Earth span the centuries and cut across all cultural and metaphysical lines. If you’re new to the subject, “Our Hollow Earth: An Inner World Paradise, Or A Gateway to Hell?” will provide the introductory overview that will start your education along the right path. If you’re a longtime student of the strange, you owe it to yourself to read the contributions from writers of the present time along with the resurrection of Ludvig Holberg’s breezily fascinating 18th century adventure story, which you likely are unaware of.
Just what IS down there? Is there an unseen enemy beneath our feet, threatening to conquer us with mind-blowing wicked technology when they feel the time is right? Or is there some gentle race of Inner Earth inhabitants who guard their secret paradise from us savages here on the surface?
The complete duality of the Hollow Earth mystery inevitably gives one pause, does it not?
SUGGESTED READING:
OUR HOLLOW EARTH: AN INNER WORLD PARADISE, OR A GATEWAY TO HELL?
SUBTERRANEAN WORLDS INSIDE EARTH by Tim Beckley
BEST OF THE HOLLOW HASSLE by Mary Jane Martin and Tim R. Swartz
RICHARD SHAVER: REALITY OF THE INNER EARTH by Tim R. Swartz
ADMIRAL BYRD’S SECRET JOURNEY BEYOND THE POLES by Tim R. Swartz
Spectral Vision 