This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 4, from 1991.
In the field of strange beliefs which go against common sense, one of the strangest is the idea that we live not on the outside surface of a sphere, but on the inside. In the USA in 1869 an angel appeared to Cyrus Reed Teed. It told him that the Earth is hollow and that we live on its inner surface and that the stars, Moon and Sun are all tiny bodies inside the sphere moving along very complicated paths.
In 1870 he described this in his book The Cellular Cosmogony, or the Earth a Concave Sphere. He believed God wanted him to found a new religion, so he changed his name to Koresh and began a cult called Koreshanity. It soon attracted believers. In the 1890s he took his colony of believers to Florida where they built the town of Estero. It was not until 1949 that the cult’s magazine, Flaming Sword, finally ceased publication.
The idea of an inside-out universe was also adopted in inter-war Germany by Peter Bender. He, and after his death Karl Neupert, led a cult which published several books during the Nazi period. They attracted the attention of the Nazi leadership, some of whom were attracted to many strange beliefs. In April 1942, a secret expedition, approved by Hitler and Himmler, set off to the Baltic island of Rügen. Led by Dr Heinz Fischer, it included some of Germany’s top radar experts.
After they arrived, their radar equipment was pointed into the sky at an angle of 45 degrees. The other scientists in the expedition assumed this was merely a test of the equipment. It was only after the radar had remained in this strange position for several days that Fischer told them exactly why they were there. Hitler wanted the inside-out cosmos theory proved scientifically. This was to be done by sending radar waves up into the sky where they would eventually hit another part of the inside of the sphere and be reflected back. After doing this the expedition were then to try to get an image of the British fleet in Scapa Flow.
The inside-out universe idea still has some supporters. Martin Gardner (Skeptical Inquirer vol 12, p355) recorded that in 1981 a mathematician, Mostafa Abdelkader, described in a mathematical paper how the universe could be mapped point by point into the inside-out cosmos model. In this mapping the further an object is above the surface of the Earth, the nearer it is to the centre of the hollow Earth, and the smaller it is. All the laws of the normal universe would be much more complicated, but to an observer in that universe everything would appear to be the same as to an observer in the normal universe.
Both models of the universe are valid, but in the inside-out cosmos the laws of physics are much more complicated. As there are no advantages in using this model, Occam’s Razor suggests it should be discarded.
- Read more in Umberto Eco’s The Book of Legendary Lands, 2013
