The next part in this series examining the science fiction origins of UFO and alien abduction accounts considers another story that supports a counterargument to the claim made by some of the most well-known names in ufology: that specific details of many UFO reports and alien abduction accounts are not found in science fiction. I argue that they are, and in fact, there is a wealth of sources for these details in lesser-known literature. This, I argue, makes teasing-out a possible objective reality to the UFO phenomenon, rather than it being more simply a product of cultural diffusion, all the more difficult.
This story further supports the psychosocial hypothesis of ufology. In it we see an antecedent to the ideas about otherworldly creatures and their advanced technology, an idea that would gain traction in mass media in the middle of the 20th century as it coalesced around spacefaring technology and an extraterrestrial hypothesis.
The Land of the Central Sun, by Park Winthrop1, appeared in the American monthly magazine, The Argosy. It was published in instalments between July, 1902 – January, 1903, decades before the popularity of American pulp science fiction magazines and reports about people meeting aliens and being taken aboard spacecraft entered the broader public imagination.
Published a few years before the North pole had been reached by Robert Peary in 1909, and the South pole by Roald Amundsen in 1911, it sits amongst other works of speculation and theorising about the hollow earth and its undiscovered populated subterranean cities.
Amongst its likely inspirations is the concave theory of a hollow earth proposed by Cyrus Reed Teed (1839 – 1908). In 1869, Teed, a medical doctor and budding alchemist, shocked himself in his “electro-alchemical laboratory,” causing a “supersensual vibration” and out-of-body experience. He saw glowing gold and purple spheres and encountered “the divine mother” who set him on a new path as a religious leader, after which he called himself Koresh (Teed, 1898).
Teed followed on from Captain John Cleves Symmes Jr. (1780-1829), who in turn followed Astronomer Royal Edmund Halley (1656-1742), both of whom proposed that the poles are actually openings in the earth’s crust and are entrances to its hollow interior made up of concentric spheres that contain some configuration of a habitable subterranean world.
Teed’s “Koreshan Cosmogony” was a rejection of the “prodigious fallacy” of the Copernican system. Earth is hollow, and his fantastic assertion was that we live on the inside. Suspended in the centre of that hollow sphere is the sun.
It’s this idea of a central illuminating body that gives title to the story of The Land of The Central Sun, and it’s an idea – coupled with the notion of a hidden technologically advanced population – that would be a defining feature of future hollow earth theorists such as (Gardner, 1913), (Neupert, 1942), and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar novels (1914-1942).
The Goddess of Atvatabar
In addition to the inspiration from Teed’s sincerely held belief in a hollow earth with a central sun Central Sun appears to draw heavily from another work of hollow earth fiction; The Goddess of Atvatabar (Bradshaw, 1892).
Reviewed to great acclaim it was serialised in daily instalments in The Boston Post in 1892 along with its many dramatic illustrations. “Jules Verne’s Romances Outdone,” was the bold claim in its subheading.
As we’ll see, Central Sun (which has no illustrations that I could find) reads like a recast rewrite of The Goddess of Atvatabar, using the same plot points and sequence. However, it replaces the Theosophical musings and Orientalism with Western images more familiar to an American adventure-story-reading audience.
Broadly speaking both stories include: heroes who enter the inner earth from the frozen polar area and emerge into an area with a tropical climate. They experience low gravity and a sense of weightlessness when approaching the boundary to the subterranean realm. They meet dwellers of the underworld who are wonderful hosts and who accommodate them in splendid private apartments. They quickly learn their language and become acquainted with their monarchy. Both inner earths have abundant riches “mountains of gold…as common as iron on the outside world” and glittering gems and diamond mines. The interior inhabitants operate flying machines and have electrical lights and machinery. There are also grotesque hybrid plant-animal creatures.
Both works feature a vast aerial battle with one side heavily outnumbered. Yet the smaller force defies the odds and are victorious. At their conclusion, there is a return to the earth’s surface, accompanied by a couple of the “distinguished strangers from beyond the Polar Gulf”.
UFO Images in The Land of the Central Sun
A Strange Flying Machine
The plot involves a sailing ship, the Garden City, which is bound from San Francisco to New York via Cape Horn. It is caught in a storm and sent off course far southwards toward Antarctica. Stranded in an ice field and having lost most of its crew overboard in the storm, its remaining five passengers are rescued by a strange airship, which to a modern audience resembles a UFO, and suddenly appears hovering above their ship.
The airship, named the Meteor, is piloted by the mysterious and charming Baron Montavo, who speaks to the stranded crew via a wireless telephone. Montavo lets down a ladder to them – an iconic UFO image in itself – and transports them and their luggage to safety aboard via a square platform elevator suspended from a wire cable.
Despite this apparently lighter-than-air machine being compared with dirigibles and airship designs of the day, there is no concern for weight-saving here. Instead, as an early example of the Steampunk aesthetic it contains “sumptuously appointed” cabins, a large saloon, divans “holstered in red plush”, mahogany lined walls, heavy plate-glass mirrors and other fine furnishings.
The Meteor resembles the strange flying machines featured in hundreds of newspaper stories across the United States during the 1896-7 airship wave – likely an inspiration. Some of these accounts described enormous floating vessels with powerful searchlights, created by a mysterious genius or secretive inventor – one of whom could easily be Baron Montavo himself. Other newspaper accounts described aerial vessels bustling with giggling socialites and crew, as if on a pleasure cruise, effortlessly drifting along in the skies above the American countryside, bewildering farmworkers below.
A Tasty Beverage
On arriving inside the airship the survivors are offered a glass of ambrosia-like beverage from a decanter by one of the Baron’s servants who has been instructed to make their stay as comfortable as possible. Here’s another motif found in some early contactee stories of the 1950s and abduction stories of the 1970s where abductees are given a drink to either restore their health, or to induce amnesia.
In the course of the story we discover that the Baron is not a native of the underworld. He was born on earth’s surface. A Parisian explorer, he became stranded at sea and was “abducted”. Overwhelmed by the sight of one of the underworld’s airships, he faints and wakes “tightly bound”. His screams alert the little people, bioluminescent dwarves who can navigate the darkness by their own light, and they revive him with a “delicious cordial”. Gradually acclimating to his new environment, he learns the language of these interterrestrials, earns favour with the subterranean monarchy, and becomes the pilot of the Meteor.
Something Superior To Human Skill
The Meteor, is described as being different to any airship the survivors had ever seen, and as “constructed by something superior to human skill”. It’s 100 ft long by 20 ft in diameter with no discernable bow or stern. The rescued crew of the Garden City, seeing no exterior mechanism are unable to determine the Meteors means of propulsion. In addition as they travel along inside it they are unable to perceive any sense of motion. It has a perfectly smooth exterior punctuated by “large convex glass ports, like bull’s eyes”. It’s a neutral grey colour constructed from some metal with a dull finish, and is topped off by a central cabin with a domed ceiling with portholes around it.
This metallic airship has all the traits of a “flying saucer” decades before the term would be coined after Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting.
As Baron Montavo becomes acquainted with his new guests he reveals little about the airship’s workings. We learn only that it can be effortlessly controlled by the push of a button and the operation of a joystick-type control. It has a complicated concealed propulsion mechanism with “no working parts” that is powered by a “very rare chemical” only found on the earth’s surface.
The Meteor is not just an airship but it is a transmedium craft able to travel on the surface of the ocean and also below it. However, its propulsion device limits it to travelling to and from the inner earth. It is not capable of leaving earth’s atmosphere or, for example, flying to the moon.
Little People of the Underworld
The underworld is a country divided into several “zones or belts”. When the Meteor arrives via a vertical tunnel below the ice of Antarctica it enters into a tropical zone. It has bright sunshine, green fields, abundant glittering gems and diamond mines.
It has a stratified society with a King and Queen who are co-equal rulers, a nobility of various “grades” who preside over a middle class.
Baron Montavo’s crew are made up of cherub-like dwarves who are “not more than three feet high”. The highest ranking of them, the Baron’s second in command, is described as having “curling blond ringlets” and wears a “deep blue” closely fitting jacket. The other dwarves are dressed identically.
The parallels between these uniformly attired diminutive workers and and their deference to the authority figure of the Baron, and the robotic grey alien drones and Nordic-type masters of future UFO lore are clear.
The lower class are humanoids even smaller than the dwarves. They are a “sturdy and powerful race”, yet “sullen and hard to manage”, they work in the diamond mines of the interior world and (unsurprisingly for literature of this era) don’t have a “charming” pink and white complexion of the other dwarves, but a “bright copper colour”, and are described as “rather stupid and sullen in appearance”.
Just like the Morlock’s in The Time Machine (Wells, 1995), or the “selectively bred servant class” of “ape-men” who pilot the UFO-like “flying shells” in La Fin D’illa (Moselli, 1925) [discussed here] the lowest class in the story have been enslaved for generations. They are uniformly dressed in “lustrous black material” – a dress code detail that would become a familiar motif found in many humanoid encounters, from figures seen in 1967 in Cussac, France2, the Jan Wolski abduction case in Poland, 1978, and the 1994 Ariel School encounter in Zimbabwe.
Absurd Behaviour
The dwarves’ dutiful robotic behaviour will also be familiar to anyone who’s read of witnesses to the absurd manual labour of aliens landing in a UFO – a machine of presumably untold technical sophistication – only to collect water, rocks, or piles of dirt:
“…a score or more of little men were working with pick and shovel, throwing the earth into small cars… were all dressed alike, in doublet and long hose, made from some lustrous black material, and each had on his head a small skull cap.” (p.524)
Perhaps these dwarves visit the surface to collect that “very rare chemical” necessary to power their craft, before boarding their UFO and disappearing back inside the earth?
Masterful Gaze
Baron Montavo has an “air of masterfulness” and ability to “look you through and through at a glance”. This will of course become one of the defining features of future contactee stories such as Adamski’s conversation with Orthon, a regal Venusian he claimed to have met in the Colorado desert (Leslie & Adamski, 1953) with whom he conversed telepathically by forming mental pictures of the questions he wanted to ask. Later exchanges with black-eyed aliens would become less cordial with aliens causing disturbing visions, culminating in the terrifying “mindscan” procedure (p.96, Jacobs, 1992).
Reptilian Hybrids
The underworld of Central Sun also contains strange hybrid animals, flying “cows”: “like seals with four short legs and two wings”. There are reptilian monsters too; agile flying alligators “possessed of almost human intelligence”. They are befriended by the mining class, and will ultimately take part in an attempted uprising of the middle and lower classes against the ruling elites.
Exotic Craft & Perpetual Motion Machines
Although the Meteor travels at a leisurely pace of 15 to 20 miles per hour as it traverses the narrow tunnel to the underworld, once there, there are other faster flying machines of various sizes that perform a kind of aerial jousting. They are described as a “horizontal cylinder with the upper third cut away” with pointed ends, like aerial canoes. They too are powered by some concealed undefined source. They are able to stop in mid air, change direction “as if on pivots” and accelerate “as if a charge of dynamite had been exploded under” them – although it’s not clear if it’s the proximity to the centre of the earth with it’s weakened gravity or the devices themselves that produce this physics-defying movement, it is a familiar central motif in UFO reports.
The advanced technology of the underworld is described as magical. At the push of a button servants are summoned, doors open out of nowhere, elevators and airships ascend or descend. There are “auto-cars” that hover swiftly over “glass like pavements”. Machinery runs on electricity, (or the intriguing sounding “magenticity” in The Goddess of Atvatabar) with self-recharging batteries allowing them perpetual motion.
The Secret
As with the Meteor’s undefined propulsion method the technology is essentially classified information known exclusivly to the ruling class. At one point the Baron remarks, “It would never do to let the common people into the secret”. Such secrecy mirrors the typical treatment of alien abductees, who are prevented from returning from their ordeal with any kind of artefact.
Central Sun – an inner-space opera – ends after a furious final battle, where the heroes, outnumbered, dispatch clumsily marauding monsters with deft shots from dual-wielded revolvers. With the assistance of the Baron and a new airship-rocket, described as “a thousand times more powerful than the Meteor”, they manage to escape the underworld.
All agree that secrecy of the technology that powers these exotic craft is to be maintained: they decide “to keep the secret of their mode of travel from all except the immediate members of the two families interested”. They return home to the earth’s surface clutching “bags of glittering gems” and the new airship, and its secrets, is purposely sunk far beneath the surface of the ocean.
Links
The Land of the Central Sun in The Argosy (1902-1903). [Hathi Trust are missing chapters 1-5]
Footnotes
- Park Winthrop is an author for whom, at the time of writing, I could find no other works or biographical information. However, as will be mentioned, the story virtually plagiarizes The Goddess of Atvatabar, so it’s likely a pseudonym. ↩︎
- Detailed in The A.P.R.O Bulletin July-August 1968 https://files.afu.se/Downloads/Magazines/United%20States/APRO%20Bulletin/APRO%20Bulletin%20-%201968%2007%2000%20-%20July-August.pdf ↩︎
Bibliography
Bradshaw, William Richard. 1892. The Goddess of Atvatabar: Being the History of the Discovery of the Interior World, and Conquest of Atvatabar. J. F. Douthitt.
H. G. Wells. 1895. The Time Machine; An Invention. New York: Henry Holt & Company. https://www.loc.gov/item/24030456/.
Jacobs, David Michael. 1992. Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Koresh, and Cyrus Reed Teed. 1898. The Cellular Cosmogony; Or, The Earth a Concave Sphere: Pt. I. The Universology of Koreshanity, by Koresh [Pseud.] Pt. II. The New Geodesy, by U.G. Morrow. Guiding Star Publishing House.
Leslie, Desmond, and George Adamski. 1953. Flying Saucers Have Landed. W. Laurie.
Marshall B. Gardner. 1913. A Journey to the Earth’s Interior – or – Have the Poles Really Been Discovered. Aurora, Illinois: Self Published. https://www.loc.gov/item/13022267/.
Moselli, José, Brian M. Stableford, and Jean-Félix Lyon. (1925) 2011. Illa’s End. Encino, Calif.: Black Coat Press.
Neupert, Karl E. 1942. Geokosmos: Weltbild der Zukunft : Forschungen über Weltbau, Natur und Ursprung des Lebens. Gropengiesser.
