Are There Really Entrances to the Hollow Earth at the Poles?

The Polar Entrances Were a Very Specific Idea

The familiar image of a Hollow Earth with openings at both poles did not simply descend from ancient mythology.

It has an identifiable modern history.

In 1818, former U.S. Army officer John Cleves Symmes Jr. circulated his famous first circular announcing that Earth was hollow, habitable within and open around the poles. His theory initially involved several concentric spheres, each potentially possessing inner and outer surfaces capable of supporting life. James McBride’s 1826 account of Symmes’s system explicitly described Earth as “hollow, habitable within, and widely open about the poles.”

Symmes was not merely proposing an interesting shape for the planet. He believed an expedition could physically enter it.

His northern opening was imagined on an enormous scale, thousands of kilometres across, with its curvature so gradual that travellers might cross from the external surface to the internal one without encountering anything resembling the mouth of a cave. The temperature would become milder, vegetation might appear, and an entirely different geographical world could continue beyond what explorers thought was the pole.

That detail matters.

The original “Symmes Hole” was not supposed to look like a giant black drain in the Arctic Ocean.

You could theoretically sail into it without immediately realising what had happened.

The Poles Were Perfect Places to Hide an Entrance

In 1818, neither geographic pole had been reached.

Huge areas of the Arctic remained incompletely mapped, Antarctica was only beginning to enter European geographical knowledge, and nobody possessed aircraft or satellites capable of viewing the polar regions from above.

The poles therefore provided something almost impossible to obtain elsewhere on Earth: enormous unknown territories with legitimate geographical questions still attached to them.

Symmes repeatedly attempted to secure support for a northern expedition. His ideas attracted enough attention that supporters promoted them in lectures, newspapers and eventually political circles, although the expedition he imagined never departed.

The choice of location also solved a narrative problem that would recur throughout Hollow Earth literature.

If an interior civilisation existed, why had nobody encountered its entrance?

Because the entrances were placed precisely where almost nobody had been.

It was efficient geography.

Then Explorers Actually Reached the Poles

By the twentieth century, the unknown polar map was shrinking.

Richard E. Byrd became one of the most famous figures in that process. In May 1926, Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett claimed to have flown over the North Pole, although later examination of the navigation records has kept the exact achievement disputed. Byrd’s authentic 1925–27 diary and notebook survive in the Ohio State University collection and contain his notes associated with the flight.

There is much less uncertainty surrounding his Antarctic achievement. On 29 November 1929, Byrd, pilot Bernt Balchen and two other crewmen completed the first flight over the South Pole.

Byrd subsequently returned to Antarctica repeatedly, eventually becoming associated with the U.S. Antarctic Service, Operation Highjump and Operation Deep Freeze.

This should have made him merely an important polar explorer.

Instead, he became one of the central characters in Hollow Earth mythology.

Byrd Went “Beyond the Pole”

The phrase “beyond the pole” became enormously important.

Byrd spoke publicly about unexplored territory lying beyond the South Pole relative to his Antarctic bases. In the geography of an expedition operating from one side of Antarctica, “beyond the pole” could quite literally mean territory on the other side of 90° south.

Hollow Earth literature gave the phrase another meaning.

In 1959, F. Amadeo Giannini published Worlds Beyond the Poles, presenting a cosmology in which the conventional boundaries of Earth were radically reinterpreted. A few years later, Raymond Bernard’s The Hollow Earth made Byrd central to an explicitly Hollow Earth narrative involving polar openings and the origin of flying saucers.

Now “beyond” no longer had to mean merely across the pole.

It could mean through it.

That semantic shift changed the entire Byrd story.

The Secret Diary

The most spectacular version describes a hidden flight during which Byrd supposedly passed through a polar opening into a warm inner world.

In the document circulated as The Secret Diary of Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the aircraft experiences unusual compass behaviour, enters warmer conditions and encounters green landscape, animals resembling mammoths, advanced flying machines and a hidden civilisation. The narrative culminates in contact with beings concerned about surface humanity’s development of atomic weapons. Versions of this alleged diary circulated within Hollow Earth and UFO circles and were later published in book form, including Timothy Green Beckley’s The Missing Diary of Admiral Richard E. Byrd.

An interesting archival complication follows immediately.

An authentic Byrd diary really was discovered among his papers at Ohio State University in 1996. It concerns his 1925–27 activities, including the disputed North Pole flight, and has been transcribed and published by Ohio State University Press.

The famous Hollow Earth diary is a different document with a different publication history.

That leaves several questions worth keeping separate. When did the purported secret account first circulate? Who possessed it before its appearance in Hollow Earth publishing? Does an original manuscript exist somewhere? And how did a famous explorer’s genuine unpublished papers become intertwined with a second diary describing a radically different polar journey?

The existence of one Byrd diary does not automatically establish the provenance of the other.

Unfortunately for everyone trying to keep the story tidy, they share the same protagonist.

Highjump Made Byrd Even More Useful

Then there was Operation Highjump.

In 1946–47, the United States sent a large naval expedition to Antarctica involving thousands of personnel, ships and aircraft. Byrd was attached to the operation as officer in charge of the project.

As we have already seen elsewhere in this series, later narratives connected Highjump with Nazi Antarctic installations, flying discs and an unexpectedly hostile encounter beneath or around the ice.

Hollow Earth literature could add another possibility.

What if the strange craft did not come from Germany?

What if they came from inside the Earth?

Raymond Bernard explicitly combined Hollow Earth, Byrd and flying saucers, arguing that the polar openings provided a route between the surface and an advanced civilisation within.

The polar entrance had now accumulated three distinct histories: Symmes’s nineteenth-century geography, Byrd’s twentieth-century exploration and the post-1947 UFO phenomenon.

The entrance was becoming less a hole and more a junction.

Then Satellite Photographs Produced a Black Circle

Spaceflight should have simplified the argument considerably.

Instead, it supplied one of Hollow Earth imagery’s most enduring photographs.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the American ESSA meteorological satellites produced early global and hemispheric images of Earth. Some surviving polar composites appear to show a dark or blank circular region around the pole, and copies of these images have circulated for decades as possible photographs of a polar opening.

The technical history of the images is interesting in its own right.

ESSA imagery was not always a single photograph of an entire hemisphere. NOAA and National Snow and Ice Data Center documentation describes computer processing in which individual satellite frames were assembled into polar-stereographic mosaics. The archive also records gaps arising from acquisition, processing and satellite limitations.

Modern satellite products continue to be assembled from multiple orbital passes. NASA explains that a global Suomi NPP image, for example, is constructed by piecing adjacent swaths together rather like a quilt.

That gives the famous black circles two very different lives.

In remote-sensing history, they belong to the technical problem of constructing polar imagery from orbital data.

In Hollow Earth imagery, they look uncannily like Symmes finally receiving aerial photography.

The same black circle can therefore be read as missing data or missing geography depending on the story surrounding the image.

But People Have Now Physically Reached Both Poles

The exact geographic poles themselves are no longer inaccessible points on a blank map.

In August 2020, the international MOSAiC Arctic expedition took the research icebreaker Polarstern to the geographic North Pole during its year-long study of the Arctic sea-ice system. The North Pole lies within the Arctic Ocean, where drifting sea ice changes constantly rather than providing a fixed continental surface.

At the other end of Earth, the geographic South Pole sits on the Antarctic ice sheet. The U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is positioned at 90° south, roughly 2,835 metres above sea level, and has supported scientific work there since the International Geophysical Year era. Seismological observations have been conducted at the South Pole for roughly six decades.

This changed Hollow Earth geography again.

If the entrance was not visibly sitting at precisely 90° north or 90° south, where was it?

The answer in later versions often became near the poles, beyond the poles, hidden beneath ice, concealed within an inaccessible region, or accessible only under particular circumstances.

The hole moved without abandoning the polar idea.

Perhaps “Entrance” Does Not Always Mean a Hole

Modern Hollow Earth narratives do not all require the Symmes model.

Some still imagine enormous physical openings leading gradually into an inner surface. Others describe tunnel systems beneath Antarctica, Greenland, Tibet or major mountain ranges. Agartha traditions supply concealed underground cities. UFO narratives add subterranean bases and craft moving through hidden entrances.

Still other versions treat the transition as something stranger: an energetic boundary, dimensional passage or region that does not behave like ordinary geography.

At that point the question changes substantially.

What would count as finding the entrance?

A cavern?

An anomalous magnetic region?

A warm area beneath ice?

A military exclusion zone?

A place where navigation behaves strangely?

A passage that only becomes accessible under specific physical or consciousness-related conditions?

The further the entrance moves from ordinary geography, the less useful an ordinary map becomes for deciding what its proponents actually mean.

Why the Poles?

That may be the most durable question of all.

Symmes placed openings there when both ends of Earth genuinely represented geographical uncertainty. Later explorers entered those blank regions, and Byrd became the ideal figure around whom a new version could form. Early satellite mosaics then produced black polar areas that visually resembled the nineteenth-century model. UFO culture supplied travellers capable of using the entrances, while Agartha and other subterranean traditions supplied somewhere for those travellers to go.

The poles also possess a peculiar symbolic quality.

Every direction changes there. Longitude converges. Ordinary compass behaviour becomes awkward near the magnetic regions. Day and night operate on seasonal scales unfamiliar to most of humanity. One pole sits on moving ocean ice; the other on a vast elevated ice sheet.

They are real places that already behave unlike ordinary places.

Perhaps that is why Hollow Earth mythology rarely chooses an entrance outside Birmingham.

The poles were the edges of the known map, then the targets of heroic exploration, then strategic military regions, then objects of satellite surveillance. Each new technology that made them more visible also supplied new photographs, anomalies, stories and questions.

John Cleves Symmes imagined that if someone simply travelled far enough north, the surface would gradually curve inward and another world would begin.

Two centuries later, the literal geography has been explored far beyond anything Symmes could have imagined, yet the polar entrance remains firmly embedded in Hollow Earth mythology.

Did the entrance disappear as the map improved?

Did later writers simply move it somewhere harder to observe?

Or was the idea of the polar doorway never entirely about an ordinary hole in the ice in the first place?