From My Spooky Bookshelf: The Smoky God

I used to have two bookshelves- one where I put all the books for casual visitors to see, and another one in my bedroom where I kept all my “weird” books about astral projection and ufos and stuff. I called it my spooky bookshelf, after “spooky” Mulder from the X-files.

I thought it would be fun to periodically share a brief review of some of my favorite weird books, as a launchpad for conversation, and a diversion from the insanity of the day.

The first book is the one that makes me take the hollow earth theory seriously: “The Smoky God” by Willis George Emerson. Willis tells the story of Olaf Jensen, who is an old man at the time of their meeting. Olaf has a manuscript he has waited to publish until he was near death. The reason being, when he last tried to tell the tale, he was committed to an asylum and held there against his will for 20 years. He finally got out, built a life for himself, and collected articles over the years that might corroborate his story.

His story is, that as a young man in Norway, his father, a fisherman, decided to sail north with him in search of the North Pole. They eventually encounter some kind of craft piloted by a race of wise giants who take them into the inner earth where they stay for two years. When they eventually decide to return home, Olaf’s father is killed, and Olaf is rescued by sailors.

What made the book stay with me is the facts Olaf provides to corroborate his story. He describes the entrance to hollow earth as having massive flowers and wooly mammoths. He says that the pollen from these flowers blows out to sea and colors the snow. And in fact, there is a phenomenon of colorful snow in the north, attributed to plant material in the snow.

Olaf also claims that the presence of so many mammoth bones in northern Siberia is due to them washing up like driftwood on the shore. And it turns out, people to hunt for mammoth tusks in Siberia for the ivory.

The entrance to the hollow earth is apparently massive- like 1500 miles across. The whole thing supposedly curves inward in a toroidal shape, and as you sail in, the temperature becomes warm, and you can see land directly above you. The inner earth is lit by an inner sun, which you can look directly at, and it is also somehow related to the auroras. Olaf says the people of the inner earth call this sun, “The Smoky God,” hence the books title.

One other interesting polar anomaly: birds in the arctic don’t migrate south, they fly farther north. Maybe Olaf’s tale of a tropical land beyond the poles is true..