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Fantastically Wrong: The Legendary Scientist Who Swore Our Planet Is Hollow

In 1869 an American physician named Cyrus Reed Teed, whose very own brand of medicine combined alchemy with zaps of electricity and doses of magnetism, electrocuted himself so badly that he passed out. Which is just as well, for when he came to, he realized he was the living incarnation of Jesus Christ. Not only […]

“If I shall seem to advance anything that looks like Extravagant or Romantick,” he wrote in 1692, “the Reader is desired to suspend his censure, till he have considered the force and number of the many arguments which concurr [sic] to make good so new and so bold a Supposition.” A German named Athansius Kircher, for instance, published Mundus Subterraneus in 1664, in which he claimed the Earth contains a central fire (kinda true, really) and vast underground lakes and lava chambers. “The Concave Arches may in several places shine with such a substance as invests the Surface of the Sun; nor can we, without a boldness unbecoming a Philosopher, adventure to affect the impossibility of peculiar Luminaries below, of which we have no sort of Idea.” (Read: I have no clue what's happening down there, so here's a guess.)

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