Skid Roche

I’m sorry to say that the planned voyage to the center of the Earth — through a giant hole in the Arctic — well, folks, there’s no easy way to say this. I’m afraid the trip has been cancelled.

If you were one of the folks who coughed up about 20 large to secure your spot on the trip, well… I guess you’ll travel a little lighter now without all that cash to weigh you down.

The trip was originally planned for June 26-July 19, 2007 by tour leader and adventurer Steve Currey, who had secured the use of a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker to take him and his companions to the vicinity of the North Pole, where several Arctic explorers had reported sighting land over the years, thus lending creedence to Currey’s assertion that the whole world is hollow and you can get there by hitching a ride with the Russkies and then carjacking the Clauses’ ATV.

The idea of a Hollow Earth has been around since ancient times, but got its 20th-century boost in 1906 with the publication of William Reed’s The Phantom of the Poles. Numerous writers emerged later as Hollow Earth proponents, one of the most celebrated being Richard Sharpe Shaver who, from 1945-49, claimed in a series of ostensibly factual piecs in Amazing Stories that he had personally interacted with a malevolent and ancient race inhabiting a honeycomb of caves beneath the Earth. Amazing editor Ray Palmer apparently rewrote many of Shaver’s “memoirs” to edit out some of its more incoherent aspects as well as its explicit sexual content.

The “Shaver Mystery” took hits from the science fiction community, who considered it pseudoscience (gasp!) as opposed to science fiction. Its detractors included a young writer named Harlan Ellison, who got Palmer to admit that the “Shaver Mystery” was a publicity-grabbing stunt. In 1948, Amazing all but abandoned Shaver (who spent much of the rest of his life plagued by… wait for it… mental illness), but Hollow Earth proponents have persisted to this day, with the Antarctica, Tibet, Peru, and California’s Mount Shasta proposed as hatches to the underworld, in addition to the ever-popular North Pole.

Saying that the 2007 Currey trip was “originally” planned for this June-July is a bit incorrect, actually, since the trip had been postponed several times already since it was first announced in 2004.

Unfortunately, it looks like this postponement may be a keeper. Provo, Utah-based adventurer and tour leader Steve Currey (whose principal claim to fame seems to be that he accidentally invented the self-bailing rowing raft, which “revolutionized the river rafting industry” — ample qualification, I agree, for a trip to the center of our hollow Earth) died last year, under circumstances that seem suspiciously vague. “Quietly and peacefully?” That’s how you always go when you’ve been shot by a blow dart fired by Bulgarian hitmen hired by the corebound Lava Lords and their Mantle Man agents.

Said a grieving poster on New Age guru David Icke’s site: “I’m noticing a pattern of people dieing young when the go against the accepted realities of this world and point out the existence of the truth that will lead to the revealing of the illuminati. bit of a coincidence he dies suddenly a week before leaving the outer earth to discover the inner one. - Get Richard Branson on the phone!”

What more need be said?