In ancient times, almost all peoples were convinced of the existence of a vast underworld. Hades among the ancient Greeks, Sheol among the Jews, Agharti among the Buddhists, Svartalfheim among the Normans … The list could be continued.
Already in modern times, the so-called theory of the hollow Earth appeared, claiming that there are vast inhabited worlds underground, and perhaps even an inner luminary. Among her supporters were such outstanding minds as Edmond Halley and Leonard Euler. But the greatest public resonance was destined to find the theory of a man with a very literary surname Bender.
During the First World War, a certain Lieutenant Peter Bender fought on the Western Front as part of the German aviation formations. In one of the air battles, his airplane was shot down, and the German pilot was captured by the French. It is difficult to say whether Bender received a head injury when the plane crashed, which subsequently had a certain effect on his mental abilities, but in any case, being in a prisoner of war camp, from nothing to do, the pilot began to avidly read occult literature. Among other things, he got his hands on several popular publications on Korekhism.
Corehism was a theory or even a doctrine developed by the American physicist Cyrus Teed. It mixed radical ideas such as communism, alchemy, belief in reincarnation and celibacy. This "ingenious" concept came to Teed's mind after he received a severe electric shock during one of the laboratory experiments.
Having regained consciousness, he suddenly realized that people live on the inner surface of a certain sphere, inside which an artificial Sun, created by ancient beings, shines. Stars and other astronomical objects are a consequence of the refraction of its light, and gravity is only centrifugal forces arising from the rotation of the sphere.
To his own question, what evidence we have that the Earth is not hollow, Teed replied: “We have no evidence - neither direct nor indirect. On the contrary, everything indicates that it is hollow. When Cyrus Teed died of beatings received in a fight, members of his religious community decided that he would definitely be revived. They put his corpse in the bathroom and kept it there for several days - until the health service forced them to bury the decaying body.
The universe is inside a stone, a stone is inside the universe
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The captured pilot also got acquainted with the works of another apologist for the theory of the hollow Earth - Marshall Gardner. As a result of this fascinating reading in the head of the lieutenant, his own theory was born, in the most bizarre way combined with the idea of the curvature of space. Based on the material studied, Peter Bender came to the firm conviction that our universe is enclosed in a huge stone. The size of this stone simply defies description. On all sides it is surrounded by a different-sized layer of air atmosphere, which gradually dilutes to an absolute vacuum as it moves away from the rock.
And in the center of this unimaginably huge stone is a kind of spherical mass of primeval matter, which gave life to the entire cosmos, forcing it to revolve around itself. Our planet Earth, a small Sun and Moon rotate around the ball of primary matter in a kind of gas bubble. The rest of the space of the "bubble" is completely filled with a cloud of bluish gas permeated with silver sparkles. - it is them that the inhabitants of the Earth take for the stars shining in the sky.
The change of seasons on our planet depends on the position of the heavenly bodies in relation to the central ball of pra-matter. Solar and lunar eclipses also occur. One of the fundamental points in Bender's theory was the assertion that light rays do not fall on the Earth vertically, but pass along a fairly complex trajectory. But infrared rays go clearly in a straight line. In this regard, as the author of the theory believed, we constantly get a completely distorted idea of the true structure of the universe, but we take it as the only true one.
This false belief turns out to be extremely tenacious, since no one simply could think of to question the seemingly obvious.
It is hard to judge by what criteria this theory of the former military pilot gained acceptance in the Third Reich, but it became so popular that it was even included in the school curriculum. What exactly attracted the bosses of National Socialism to her remains a mystery forever. This is all the more strange, since among them there were many well-educated people who graduated from world-famous universities.
Rise and fall
Be that as it may, the theory has become extremely fashionable. Bender received all sorts of benefits from the authorities and became something like the founder of a new scientific school, the head and consultant of a number of classified projects. Not being a member of the NSDAP, and, by and large, being in captivity of his own fantasies, a very specific theorist could not comprehend in any way that sooner or later they would certainly demanded practical results that could be used in the military field.
And then one day the creator of the next theory of the hollow Earth was invited "upstairs" and demanded a concrete return from his mental constructions. Peter Bender hesitantly stated that on the basis of the curved space hypothesis, one can try to grope with infrared rays for enemy equipment clusters, but for this it is necessary to determine the most successful point in the curved space. Such a point, in his opinion, is the island of Rügen located in the Baltic Sea.
The SS men got down to business and in a matter of weeks created a secret project, to the implementation of which they also attracted the famous infrared technician Heinz Fischer.
The idea was to look from the island of Rügen with infrared rays to the main base of the British fleet at Scapa Flow. In April 1942, Fischer arrived on the island with the equipment and began trying to penetrate the "warped space" in Scapa: Flow. in order to see the British fleet in the bay. However, all attempts were unsuccessful.
Bender was sent to gruel in one of the concentration camps, where he died. According to eyewitnesses, in the camp, the ex-pilot looked half-messed up. He constantly repeated about his theories, obsessively talking about the development of his own hypotheses and new revelations, giant spheres, balls and the principles of mirror reflections. Something said about the "children of the mirror gods" who built absolutely amazing universes. But nobody took him seriously and almost nobody listened to him.
UFOs and Mirrors
Bender's amazing theories gradually faded away, sinking into oblivion. In the forties, shortly after the war in Germany, separate brochures were still published on the topic of the hollow structure of the Earth, but soon everyone forgot about the fantasies of the unfortunate Bender. However, books on the same topic appeared later. So, in 1969, the work "Hollow Earth" was published overseas, allegedly written by a certain Dr. Raymond Bernard. The author became an innovator, having “registered” a UFO under the surface of our planet.
But even before the publication of his creation, the doctor disappeared without a trace in the caves of South America, which gave his fans the confidence that he himself managed to get to the underworld. And exactly twenty years later, a book by Walter Cafton-Minkel appeared with the intricate title "Underworlds: 100 thousand years of dragons, gnomes, the dead, disappeared races and UFOs in the bowels of the Earth."
The story of a pilot who died in a concentration camp has another continuation. Towards the end of the 20th century, the famous Soviet theoretician Professor Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky put forward the concept of a mirror universe with parallel spaces contracting according to the laws of reflection so that another sphere, often even larger in size, is placed inside the spherical cavity of the object. In one planet, the same Earth, there may be hidden mirror Earth-2, significantly superior to the original. And on which of them we actually live is not yet known. This concept aroused genuine interest in world scientific circles, but at the same time few people remembered a former military pilot named Bender.
Andrey CHINAEV