Rainbow City
W. C. Hefferlin wrote Amazing Stories about his adventures in Rainbow City, an abandoned extraterrestrial metropolis under the Antarctic ice. Though its inhabitants were long gone, they had left their advanced technology in place. Hefferlin's account of the space people's secrets failed to impress those readers who knew something about science; they wrote to jeer at the Rainbow City man's elementary errors, causing Hefferlin to drop out of sight for a year. He reappeared under the sponsorship of Borderland Sciences Research Associates, an occult-oriented group headquartered in Vista, California. In various BSRA publications Hefferlin and his wife , Gladys related that Rainbow City's inhabitants were a race that had settled on Mars to escape the evil Vhujunka. When the atmosphere of Mars become unbreathable, they emigrated to earth and settled in seven great cities (Rainbow City being the greatest of all) on the continent of Antarctica, then a tropical paradise. Unfortunately, the Vhujunka found out where they were and attacked, scattering the settlers all over the earth and, incidentally, tipping the earth over on its axis, which is how Antarctica got to be such a frigid place.
Rainbow City was revived in 1951, in Robert Ernst Dickhoff's self-published Agarttha: The Subterranean World, and again in 1960, in Rainbow City and the Inner Earth People, by Michael Barton, writing as Michael X. Barton also revived the Shaver mystery, reporting that Venusians and Masters were allied in a struggle to wipe out the Vhujunka. He further claimed to be receiving psychic communications from the long-deceased Marshall Gardner, who enthusiastically endorsed Barton's book.
Far and away the most popular of all such books was The Hollow Earth (1964), by Raymond Bernard, the pseudonym of Walter Siegmeister. Siegmeister was a strange character who had operated on the fringes of the occult scene since the 1930s, promoting assorted enterprises such as a South American utopian colony (which the U.S. Post Office concluded did not exist) and publishing his bizarre theories about sexual intercourse (which he believed to be unhealthy) and the male sex (a mutation that ought to be eliminated). The Hollow Earth contributed little new to the inner-earth legends and in fact quoted at length from nineteenth-century texts on the subject; the rest of the book focused on Ray Palmer's ruminations as well as speculations about the alleged conspiracy to hide the truth about the hollow earth, flying saucers, and pole holes. Yet the book sold well, went through numerous printings, and introduced many readers to the subject.
Shaver's version of the inner earth dominated Secret of the Ages, a 1974 book by Brinsley le Poer Trench (later Lord Clancarty). According to Trench, an occult-oriented saucer enthusiast, evil inner-earthers regularly kidnapped surface people and brainwashed them into becoming their agents. Now, he said, the "ground work has ... been prepared for a takeover of this planet by those who live inside it."
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