I expected Hollow Earth to be another version of the same thing.
An obsolete scientific idea that became pseudoscience and somehow survived on the internet. It isn't quite that.
The further I followed it, the less it looked like one belief surviving and the more it looked like several different stories being assembled, taken apart and assembled again.
And somewhere along the way I ran into a problem that has much more to do with modern disinformation than with the shape of the planet.
Where does an abandoned idea go?
At one end of the story is Edmond Halley.
In 1692 Halley was trying to solve a perfectly real scientific problem.
The Earth's magnetic field appeared to change over time, and he proposed an explanation involving concentric spheres inside the planet.
His paper appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
He was wrong and yet that does not make him a conspiracy theorist. Science is full of hypotheses that turned out to be wrong.
Halley observed something, proposed an explanation and put it where other people could examine it.
But the diagram he left behind is wonderful because we know what came later.
A respectable seventeenth-century attempt to explain magnetism eventually sits somewhere in the ancestry of stories about secret civilizations, Tibetan masters, Nazi flying saucers, extraterrestrial Aryans and, most recently, Agartha memes on TikTok.
Halley would have been extremely confused.
The path between those two things is where it gets interesting.
A little more than a century later, John Cleves Symmes Jr., a former American army officer, announced that the Earth was hollow, habitable and accessible through enormous openings at the poles.
He didn't merely argue about it. He wanted to go there.
Symmes lectured, gathered supporters and tried to obtain backing for an expedition.
His followers lobbied Congress, and his ideas helped feed the broader campaign for American polar exploration.
The U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–42 eventually returned from the South Polar region without finding the opening Symmes had predicted, and the case for further Congressional backing faded.
The theory failed.
Something else survived.
Symmes had turned the inside of the Earth into a place.
There was somewhere to go.
And once there is somewhere to go, there can also be something waiting there.
Lester Chaplow's study of Symmes concludes that his most durable legacy was in Hollow Earth fiction.
Symzonia appeared in 1820. Poe later played with polar mysteries, Verne sent explorers underground, and an entire literary landscape of lost worlds and hidden civilizations developed around the possibility of somewhere beneath our feet.
None of that is particularly surprising.
Writers are supposed to invent things.
The trouble begins much later, when nobody quite remembers which parts were invented and that became obvious when I reached Agartha.
Today Agartha, Hollow Earth and often Shambhala are frequently presented online as pieces of some ancient common tradition. I had rather assumed they belonged together too.
They don't.
Julian Strube traces the Agartha legend through nineteenth-century writers including Louis Jacolliot and Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre.
Ferdinand Ossendowski then helped popularize Agharti internationally in his 1922 "Beasts, Men and Gods", describing a vast underground realm connected by subterranean passages. René Guénon took up the idea a few years later.
This was not Halley's concentric Earth and it wasn't Symmes's polar opening either.
They were different stories.
At some point they became neighbours.
Then, after being neighbours for long enough, they became relatives.
That raised what turned out to be a more useful question than whether the Earth is hollow: When did these things actually become connected?
The strange advantage of having real facts
That question becomes particularly interesting once the Nazis enter the story, because suddenly quite a lot of what sounds like conspiracy material is real.
The SS really did have the Ahnenerbe, an organization devoted in part to highly ideological research intended to support Nazi ideas about Aryan origins and prehistory.
There really was an SS-sponsored expedition to Tibet in 1938–39.
Goodrick-Clarke is useful here because he also shows how the genuine expedition later helped make imaginary Nazi-Tibetan and Agartha connections seem plausible.
The expedition itself produced zoological, botanical, geographical and ethnographic material. The occult story grew around it afterwards.
There really was a German Antarctic expedition in 1938–39.
Nazi Germany really did move important parts of armaments production underground as Allied bombing intensified. Concentration-camp prisoners were forced to work in tunnel systems producing weapons, including V-1 and V-2 components.
And after Germany surrendered, two German submarines really did arrive in Argentina in July and August 1945.
Summerhayes and Beeching later reconstructed how those genuine events, together with Operation Highjump and other poorly understood activities, were gradually joined into the mythology of a surviving Nazi Antarctic base.
They found no evidence that such a base existed, and concluded that the two U-boats could not have made the alleged Antarctic journey.
This is an excellent rabbit hole
Search Nazi Antarctica.
Real.
Search SS Tibet.
Real.
Search German underground factories.
Very real.
Search German submarines arriving in Argentina after the surrender.
Also real.
After a while you start having that unsettling experience familiar to anyone who has spent too long checking a conspiracy theory.
Hang on. How much of this stuff is actually true?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
But that still doesn't get us to flying saucers, secret Antarctic cities or an SS expedition to Agartha.
Something happens between the facts.
The Antarctic expedition becomes reconnaissance for a hidden base.
Underground factories become flying-saucer factories.
Two submarines become evidence of a secret evacuation route.
The Tibet expedition becomes a search for hidden Aryan masters or entrances to Agartha.
What makes this particularly effective is that checking the individual claims can make the larger story seem stronger.
Imagine that somebody gives you six unusual facts and you check them yourself and discover that all six are genuine.
By fact number five, you are probably beginning to trust whoever gave you the list.
But perhaps the thing that needed checking was never the six facts.
Perhaps it was the word therefore sitting quietly between them.
That is where Hollow Earth became a lot more interesting to me as a disinformation case.
A conspiracy does not have to be made entirely from false information.
Sometimes the raw material is perfectly real.
You can verify every node and still never verify the links.
Which brings us back to the question: If those links weren't part of the original history, when were they made?
For some of them, we can actually watch it happen.
Vienna starts joining the pieces
In 1950 a small circle began meeting in Vienna around Wilhelm Landig, a former Waffen-SS man. Rudolf Mund, another Waffen-SS veteran, and the Swiss engineer Erich Halik were among those associated with it.
Goodrick-Clarke describes the group as immersed in polar mythology, Atlantis, Aryan prehistory and the idea of a hidden spiritual centre somewhere in the Arctic.
When we first came across these men during the research, I had a fairly obvious question: Why?
Germany had just been destroyed. The regime they had served was gone. Europe was occupied. But why were former SS men sitting around Vienna talking about secret polar worlds and mystical technology?
For a while I wondered whether somebody was paying for it.
There was enough Cold War strangeness around Landig to make the question reasonable.
Goodrick-Clarke reports that after his release from British internment in 1947, Landig entered the postwar intelligence trade, selling low- and medium-grade Soviet information to Western security services.
But I found no evidence that an intelligence service was behind the occult mythology.
The less conspiratorial explanation may actually tell us more.
These men had lost.
Not merely the war. Their understanding of themselves had collapsed with it.
Goodrick-Clarke's account of Rudolf Mund is revealing.
Mund had regarded his Waffen-SS service as honourable. Defeat, captivity, the discovery of Nazi atrocities and the disgrace attached to the SS sent him searching for an imagined, nobler version of it, an esoteric SS supposedly devoted to a higher Aryan purpose.
Once you see that, the mythology begins to make a peculiar kind of sense.
Germany had been defeated.
Unless the real elite had survived.
The SS had become synonymous with atrocity.
Unless there had been another SS hidden inside it.
German technology had failed to win the war.
Unless its greatest technology had remained secret.
History said the Reich had ended.
Unless the history everyone knew was only the surface story.
This is the environment in which Erich Halik starts joining pieces that are now familiar from internet conspiracy culture.
Between 1951 and 1955 Halik wrote a series of articles for the Austrian esoteric magazine Mensch und Schicksal.
The postwar UFO craze was new, and he began mixing flying saucers with secret German technology, polar bases, an imagined esoteric SS, the Black Sun and older stories about Agharti.
Goodrick-Clarke later described these articles as containing, in outline, the kernel of the Nazi UFO mythology that would appear more fully decades later.
Strube found an especially useful example from 1952.
Writing under the name Claude Schweikhart, Halik claimed that surviving members of this imagined esoteric SS had withdrawn after the war into underground installations in the “upper caves” of Agartha.
Strube identifies the original article as “Um Krone und Gipfel der Welt,” published in Mensch und Schicksal in August 1952.
1952
That date matters.
Today you can encounter stories in which the Nazis discovered Agartha, possessed occult flying-saucer technology and escaped into secret polar bases, all presented as though this were some hidden history of the Third Reich itself.
But important parts of that “history” appear to have been assembled after the Third Reich was already gone.
Strube's broader conclusion is even more helpful.
He argues that the supposed esoteric character of National Socialism, especially the mythology of a surviving occult SS operating under the Black Sun, is largely a postwar construction rather than something with a historical foundation in the Third Reich.
That distinction is important to understanding this story.
There were strange racial theories, occult interests and pseudoscientific projects inside Nazi Germany.
That does not mean the finished package we now recognize as “Nazi occultism” existed there.
Much of it was built afterwards.
When fiction starts travelling as history
Wilhelm Landig then did something particularly interesting with the material.
He put much of it into fiction.
His 1971 novel Götzen gegen Thule contains a secret underground SS base in the Arctic, flying discs, the Black Sun, Tibetan elements, Thule and later Agartha.
Goodrick-Clarke describes Landig mixing older Aryan and polar mythology with new stories about surviving German technology and secret bases.
It was a novel.
You would think that would make classification fairly easy.
Instead the boundary began moving in the other direction.
During the 1970s, people including Willibald Mattern and Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel began circulating related material as purported hidden history.
Goodrick-Clarke specifically traces the expansion of Nazi flying-saucer mythology from Landig's fictional world into Zündel's publishing activity.
Now real Antarctic exploration, real submarines and the real Operation Highjump could sit beside Hitler-survival rumours, secret bases and flying saucers.
A fictional detail can be repeated as speculation.
The speculation can be cited by another writer.
A later writer cites that writer.
A documentary cites the later writer.
Eventually someone finds the claim online with several references underneath it.
It looks researched.
But several references are not necessarily several independent sources.
Sometimes they are descendants of the same story.
The Black Sun gives us an almost ridiculously neat example
If you have spent any time looking at modern far-right imagery, you have probably encountered the twelve-spoked design on the floor of Wewelsburg castle.
Today it is routinely described as though it had always been the secret occult “Black Sun” symbol of the SS.
It certainly looks old.
The floor is old.
The SS really did use Wewelsburg.
So the meaning feels old too.
Except the chronology says otherwise.
Goodrick-Clarke identifies Russell McCloud's 1991 novel Die schwarze Sonne von Tashi Lhunpo as the first work to explicitly identify the Wewelsburg floor ornament with the Black Sun myth.
Strube independently reaches the same conclusion.
He notes that the Black Sun described by the postwar Vienna circle was not the Wewelsburg floor design.
Only McCloud's 1991 novel explicitly claimed that the ornament represented the Black Sun.
Strube even notes that Miguel Serrano had discussed both Wewelsburg and the Black Sun in the 1980s without identifying one with the other.
1991
Not 1939.
Nothing about the physical object changed.
Its supposed history did.
A later interpretation became attached to an older object. Enough people repeated it and eventually the interpretation began to feel almost as old as the object itself.
That is a useful habit to carry well beyond this particular story.
When somebody tells us what an old symbol, photograph or quotation “has always meant,” perhaps the first question shouldn't be what it means.
Perhaps it should be: When did people start saying it meant that?
The floor ornament is genuinely Nazi-era. But there is no evidence the SS called it the “Black Sun.”
The specific identification of the Wewelsburg design with the Black Sun appears in a 1991 novel, decades after the Third Reich disappeared.
By the time the internet gets it, the seams are gone
By the late twentieth century, there was hardly any limit to what could be added.
The Chilean writer Miguel Serrano eventually constructed an entire cosmology around what he called Esoteric Hitlerism.
His trilogy, begun with El Cordón Dorado in 1978, absorbed a mixture of occult writing and the growing “Nazi Mysteries” literature of the previous decades.
Eventually Hollow Earth, Hyperborea, extraterrestrial Aryans, the Black Sun, Agartha and Shamballah could all occupy the same story.
Goodrick-Clarke describes Serrano having Hyperborea retreat into the interior of the Hollow Earth, where its inhabitants established the hidden cities of Agartha and Shamballah.
We have travelled a considerable distance from Edmond Halley trying to explain magnetism
But nobody made that journey in one leap and that is the part I find most useful.
One generation supplied the hollow planet.
Another supplied the polar openings.
Fiction supplied hidden civilizations.
Agartha supplied an underground spiritual kingdom from a different tradition.
Real twentieth-century history supplied Antarctica, Tibet, submarines and underground factories.
Defeated nazis supplied secret survivors.
Postwar UFO culture supplied flying saucers.
Novelists joined pieces together.
Conspiracy publishers moved some of them back towards “history.”
Later interpretations acquired old dates.
And eventually the internet inherited the pile with most of the seams already hidden.
A 2025 study of American ConspiracyTok gives us a useful description of what that looks like online
Alice Marwick and her colleagues found creators combining screenshots, fictional texts, personal anecdotes and other fragments into elaborate narratives that mimic some of the appearance of journalism or academic research while rejecting institutional authority.
The authors explicitly describe creators weaving unrelated evidence into compelling narratives and encouraging viewers to “do your own research.”
Hollow Earth is almost perfectly designed for that environment.
Search Nazi Antarctica and something real appears.
Search SS Tibet and something real appears.
Search German underground factories and something real appears.
Search U-boats in Argentina and something real appears.
The search engine has done exactly what you asked.
It verified the facts.
It did not verify the story someone built between them.
And now Agartha has changed again
In May 2026, Marten Risius and Christopher David reported preliminary findings from an ongoing research project examining a network of more than 43,000 Agartha-related TikTok videos.
They describe aesthetic camouflage, dog whistles, network building and weaponised irony among the ways far-right material can be mixed into otherwise ordinary online culture. The underlying research had not yet been peer-reviewed when they published their account, so those findings should remain provisional.
But there is another problem here that does not depend on whether the final study confirms every detail.
The person sharing an Agartha meme may not believe any of it.
They may think Agartha is real.
They may think it is hilarious.
They may simply like the imagery.
They may understand perfectly well what the Aryan or Black Sun references are doing.
All of them can circulate the same material.
Which leaves the traditional fact-checker in a slightly ridiculous position.
There is no Aryan civilization inside the Earth.
“I know. It's a meme.”
Fair enough.
But the meme can still carry something.
A set of symbols.
A set of enemies.
A suspicion of official history.
The idea that experts conceal reality.
The pleasure of belonging to the people who understand the hidden reference.
The assumption that somewhere beneath the boring public explanation lies the real story.
At that point, whether someone literally believes the Earth is hollow may be almost beside the point.
The original belief has become a vehicle
And that is where I ended up, somewhere I had not expected when I started reading about Edmond Halley's magnetic field.
I thought Hollow Earth would give us another example of an old false belief refusing to die.
Instead I found a story that kept becoming another story.
We are rightly taught to ask whether something is true. We should keep doing that.
But sometimes the strange facts really are true.
The expedition happened.
The submarine existed.
The photograph is genuine.
The document is real.
So when you go down one of these rabbit holes and discover, to your surprise, that several of the claims check out, don't stop.
Follow the citations backwards.
Find out when two ideas first appeared together.
Check whether the source began life as history, speculation or a novel.
And look carefully at the little word therefore because sometimes the lie is hiding in the space between two true things.
And now, you know.
Sources and further reading:
Edmond Halley, “An Account of the Cause of the Change of the Variation of the Magnetical Needle; With an Hypothesis of the Structure of the Internal Parts of the Earth: As It Was Proposed to the Royal Society in One of Their Late Meetings,” Philosophical Transactions, vol. 16, 1692, pp. 563–578. Halley's original paper proposing his concentric model of the Earth's interior.
Lester Ian Chaplow, Tales of a Hollow Earth: Tracing the Legacy of John Cleves Symmes in Antarctic Exploration and Fiction, Master of Antarctic Studies thesis, University of Canterbury, 2011. Chaplow examines Symmes's theory, its relationship to American Antarctic exploration and its survival in fiction.
Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods, New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1922. A primary source for the early twentieth-century Agharti story. It documents what Ossendowski published rather than proving the stories he reported. The 1922 edition identifies the author as Ferdinand Ossendowski; modern library catalogues also catalogue him under his full Polish name, Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, New York: New York University Press, 2002. Chapters 7–9 are particularly useful for Wilhelm Landig, Erich Halik, Nazi-UFO mythology, the Black Sun and Miguel Serrano.
Julian Strube, “Die Erfindung des esoterischen Nationalsozialismus im Zeichen der Schwarzen Sonne,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 20(2), 2012, pp. 223–268. DOI: 10.1515/zfr-2012-0009. The article reconstructs the genealogy of esoteric neo-Nazism and argues that the supposed esoteric character of historical National Socialism is substantially a postwar construction.
Colin Summerhayes and Peter Beeching, “Hitler's Antarctic base: the myth and the reality,” Polar Record 43(1), January 2007, pp. 1–21. DOI: 10.1017/S003224740600578X. The paper examines the German Antarctic expedition, U-530 and U-977, Operation Highjump and the subsequent mythology of a secret Nazi Antarctic base.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Dora-Mittelbau: Overview,” Holocaust Encyclopedia. This documents the construction of underground production facilities in response to Allied bombing and the forced use of concentration-camp prisoners to build extensive tunnels and factories associated with the V-2 program and other weapons.
Marten Risius and Christopher David, “Hollow-Earth myths and Nazi UFOs on TikTok are bringing white supremacism into the mainstream,” The Conversation, 5 May 2026. The article reports preliminary findings from an ongoing project analysing a network of more than 43,000 Agartha-related TikTok videos; the authors explicitly state that the underlying research had not yet been peer-reviewed.
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