Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) by Jules Verne finds a small group of scientists and adventurers heading into the Earth, where they discover living dinosaurs and a great sea, before they finally find their way back to the surface through the Stromboli volcano in southern Italy.
But this is not the first time man has fantasised about a new world inside the Earth, like the English astronomer Edmund Halley, who in an article in 1694 suggested that the Earth was comprised of several hollow spheres within each other and that the internal planets might be inhabited.
The idea of a kind of underworld was also found in many places in ancient mythology and also in Christianity, where Dante Alghieri’s The Divine Comedy from the 14th century and John Milton’s Paradise Lost from 1667 helped shape the idea of a subterranean hell.
Today, the idea of the hollow Earth is only held by the most die-hard conspiracy theorists, such as ‘Doctor’ Walter Siegmeister, who, in his book Hollow Earth from 1964, explains the mystery of both UFOs and Atlantis based on the theory of a hollow, inhabited interior world.
Seen below is one of Édouard Rious illustrations for Jules Verne’s science fiction classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864).
