Are UFOs Coming From Inside the Earth?

In March 1945, Amazing Stories published Richard Sharpe Shaver’s “I Remember Lemuria!”

The story described ancient inhabitants of Earth who had retreated into enormous subterranean caverns, leaving behind advanced machines capable of producing powerful rays, influencing minds and affecting people on the surface. Among their descendants were the Teros, generally presented as beneficial, and the Deros, destructive beings who used inherited technology for considerably less neighbourly purposes.

Shaver maintained that the central claims behind his stories were not simply inventions. Editor Raymond A. Palmer encouraged the ambiguity, presenting what became known as the Shaver Mystery as something readers should consider more seriously than ordinary pulp fiction. Letters arrived from people claiming experiences of their own with underground beings, strange voices, caves and hidden machinery. The Shaver material continued through Amazing Stories during the second half of the 1940s.

The timing is difficult to ignore.

An American mass audience was reading about technologically advanced subterranean beings and their strange machines two years before Kenneth Arnold’s famous June 1947 sighting near Mount Rainier helped launch the modern flying-saucer era.

So the idea that mysterious technology might come from beneath us did not arise as an attempt to explain flying saucers afterward.

The underground inhabitants were already waiting when the saucers arrived.

Ray Palmer Stood Between Both Stories

Ray Palmer provides an unusually direct bridge between the two worlds.

As editor of Amazing Stories, he had turned Shaver’s underground civilisation into one of the magazine’s defining controversies. When unidentified objects in the sky became a national obsession after 1947, Palmer moved increasingly into UFO publishing and investigation.

Jacques Vallée later noted in Anatomy of a Phenomenon that the Shaver Mystery formed part of the intellectual background surrounding the early American UFO period. The same readership had already encountered stories of hidden races, subterranean machinery and beings interfering with surface humanity before the extraterrestrial interpretation became dominant.

That creates an alternative genealogy for the UFO.

The usual sequence runs from mysterious object to extraterrestrial spacecraft.

The Palmer-Shaver world offered another possibility: perhaps the strange machines belonged to an older civilisation already present on Earth.

If something unknown crossed the sky, why automatically assume it had crossed interstellar space first?

Raymond Bernard Sent the Saucers Through the Poles

By the 1960s, the connection became explicit.

In 1964, Walter Siegmeister, writing as Raymond W. Bernard, published The Hollow Earth. Its wonderfully restrained full title promised both the truth about Admiral Richard Byrd’s supposed discoveries beyond the poles and “the true origin of the flying saucers.”

Bernard proposed enormous polar openings leading into a habitable interior world. He suggested that this inner realm could contain an advanced civilisation and explicitly asked whether the mysterious flying saucers might originate there rather than on another planet.

The model tied together several stories we have already encountered.

John Cleves Symmes had supplied the polar entrances in the nineteenth century. Hollow Earth literature supplied the interior world. Byrd supplied modern polar exploration. Flying saucers supplied vehicles capable of travelling rapidly between hidden territory and the visible surface.

Under Bernard’s interpretation, the poles were effectively airports.

The UFO did not descend from the stars.

It emerged from geography we had failed to recognise.

The Entrances Did Not Stay at the Poles

Once an advanced civilisation was placed beneath the surface, two enormous polar openings were no longer the only possible doors.

Earlier esoteric traditions had already populated Central Asia with hidden centres such as Agartha. Western occult interpretations increasingly placed secret masters and ancient civilisations beneath mountains or within inaccessible underground networks.

North America developed its own subterranean geography. Mount Shasta, for example, accumulated twentieth-century stories of surviving Lemurians inhabiting a hidden city beneath the mountain. By the 1930s, published occult literature had helped establish the mountain as one of the major American locations associated with an advanced underground civilisation.

Now several traditions could overlap.

A luminous object disappearing near a mountain might be interpreted as landing behind terrain.

Or entering it.

A cave might be an ordinary geological opening.

Or part of a much larger system.

A hidden city might belong to ancient survivors, spiritually advanced masters, non-human beings or whatever population a particular version of the story required.

The Hollow Earth did not need to be literally hollow from crust to crust anymore. A sufficiently large network of caverns, chambers or concealed bases could perform much the same narrative function.

Then the UFOs Began Going Into the Water

The ocean offered another route.

Reports of unidentified objects associated with water produced the term USO, or unidentified submerged object, within UFO culture. More recent official terminology has become broad enough to include the same conceptual possibility without adopting any particular explanation for it.

When the U.S. Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office in 2022, its remit explicitly included unidentified airborne, submerged and transmedium objects. In a December 2022 briefing, officials explained that the terminology was intended to cover anomalous observations in air, sea, space and other operational domains. They also said that, at that point, they had not identified credible analysed cases demonstrating actual transmedium movement from one domain into another.

The distinction is useful.

An object being reported near or beneath water does not tell us where it originated.

But once oceans enter the UFO geography, another possibility opens.

What if concealment is easier beneath kilometres of water than beneath kilometres of rock?

And if an unknown technology could operate both underwater and in the atmosphere, would we necessarily recognise the transition for what it was?

The old polar doorway had become an entire planetary surface full of possible entrances.

The Shaver Mystery Makes the Timeline Stranger

Looking backward from modern UFO mythology, Shaver’s underground world feels almost suspiciously well equipped.

His subterranean beings possessed ancient technology.

They used rays.

They influenced human perception.

They interfered with people on the surface.

Their civilisation was older than ours and largely concealed from ordinary humanity.

Later UFO narratives would repeatedly return to those same themes, although the inhabitants usually arrived from distant planets instead of caverns.

Was Shaver simply drawing on older subterranean fiction, occultism and the technological anxieties of his own period?

Did his stories influence the way later readers interpreted UFO encounters?

Or was Palmer correct to insist that something in Shaver’s material deserved investigation?

Those are different questions, and the historical sequence allows all of them to remain visible.

What cannot be denied is the order in which the stories appeared.

First came technologically advanced underground beings.

Then came the modern flying saucers.

Only afterward did popular culture overwhelmingly place their home among the stars.

Some UFO Researchers Eventually Stopped Looking to Space

By the late 1960s, even parts of UFO research itself were moving away from a simple extraterrestrial model.

In Passport to Magonia, published in 1969, Jacques Vallée compared modern UFO encounters with much older accounts involving fairies, supernatural beings, aerial apparitions and strange visitors. Rather than assuming every case represented spacecraft arriving from another planet, he asked whether the phenomenon might belong to a much older category of experience whose appearance changed with human culture.

John Keel pushed another version of this approach in Operation Trojan Horse in 1970. Keel used the term ultraterrestrial for intelligences he believed might exist alongside humanity without being extraterrestrials in the conventional sense. His model connected UFOs with apparitions, monsters, folklore and other anomalous experiences rather than treating them purely as machines crossing astronomical distances. Academic analysis of Keel’s work describes his ultraterrestrial hypothesis specifically as an alternative to the standard extraterrestrial interpretation.

Neither Vallée nor Keel was simply resurrecting Symmes’s giant polar holes.

Something subtler had happened.

The question was no longer merely whether UFOs came from Mars or Venus.

It had become whether the source might be here, but hidden from us in some more complicated sense.

“Inside the Earth” Can Mean Several Very Different Things

This is where modern discussions often collapse several hypotheses into one.

A literal Hollow Earth containing an internal surface illuminated by an inner sun is one idea.

A network of immense natural caverns inhabited by an older civilisation is another.

Artificial subterranean bases are another.

Cities hidden beneath mountains belong to yet another tradition.

An advanced civilisation beneath the oceans requires a different geography again.

And Keel’s ultraterrestrials or Vallée’s broader control-system ideas need not occupy conventional underground real estate at all.

“Below” can gradually turn from a physical direction into a description of hidden reality.

That transformation is worth watching because it mirrors what happened to Agartha and Shambhala. A concealed place can begin geographically, become spiritual, then return to popular culture as something almost technological.

Perhaps the question “Where are they?” was never as simple as it sounded.

What Would an Inner-Earth Civilisation Actually Require?

If the idea is taken physically, some obvious questions follow.

How large is the inhabited region?

How is it powered?

How does it exchange heat and material with its surroundings?

Where are its entrances?

How long has the civilisation existed?

Does it interact with the surface deliberately, accidentally or only through occasional sightings?

If its craft repeatedly enter our atmosphere, oceans or mountains, what physical traces should accompany those movements?

Those questions do not decide the hypothesis. They define it.

They also separate an actual subterranean-civilisation claim from the much looser idea that mysterious intelligences might coexist with humanity in some hidden domain.

The two are frequently discussed together, but they demand very different kinds of evidence.

What If “Alien” Is the Wrong Direction?

The extraterrestrial interpretation carries one enormous intuitive advantage.

The universe is extremely large. If unfamiliar beings appear here, it feels natural to put their home somewhere out there.

But Hollow Earth and ultraterrestrial traditions reverse the problem.

What if distance is not the relevant variable?

What if the unknown civilisation is older rather than farther away?

What if its advantage lies in concealment rather than interstellar travel?

What if unexplained craft occasionally reported near mountains, polar regions or oceans are interpreted incorrectly because the observer naturally assumes that anything capable of flight must ultimately have come from the sky?

None of those questions establish where UFOs originate.

They reveal how many assumptions are already hidden inside the word alien.

The Shaver Mystery populated the caverns before Kenneth Arnold saw anything near Mount Rainier. Raymond Bernard later connected flying saucers directly with the polar interior. Hollow Earth writers gave the craft entrances. Ocean reports moved the possible hiding place beneath the sea. Vallée and Keel widened the question further until the visitors did not necessarily need another planet at all.