The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power

by Alec MacLellan

  Still more emphatic are the words of W. S. Blacket in his Lost Histories of America (1883), when he writes:

  It is part of the theory deducible from this work, that America, in ancient times, has been the residence of a great race of men, frequently mentioned in the literature of Europe as Oceanides – that is to say, living in the Ocean. The inhabitants of this land were not isolated and alone, but in frequent intercourse with the rest of the world.

  It was by a tunnel system which traversed the whole American continent and was then linked by way of Atlantis at one end, and via the Bering Strait at the other, I believe, that this ‘intercourse with the rest of the world’ – Europe, Africa and Asia, to be precise – was achieved. The conclusive evidence of this will become apparent later.

  These, then, are the facts of an ancient tradition of subterranean tunnels in North America. What modern evidence is there to support their continued existence today? My researches have revealed that there is strong evidence to be found in each of the four localities mentioned in the foregoing Indian legends: California, the Dakota region, the area of the Bering Straits and perhaps most important of all, Arizona, where actual investigation is now taking place.

  Let us start with California, though, for it is the land of ‘startling antediluvian finds’ according to Harold Wilkins, who cites several instances including ‘a skull of a man of apparently Tertiary age found 130 feet deep in a mine with lava over it, an image of a man of a very archaic type with unknown letters on the sides of the carving, a mysterious causeway 18 feet under a desert, and granite tablets in a passageway with signs of some antediluvian mining’. Such, he suggests, are further signs of California’s subterranean tunnels and underground dwellers which date back to at least the Atlantean era.

  A remarkable story has also been told by Tom Wilson, an old Indian guide who was famous throughout Southern California for years until his death in 1968. Tom was a member of the Cahroc tribe, whose legends spoke of a man named Chareya, a venerable figure who had long, flowing white hair and wore a close-fitting tunic. He apparently appeared among the Cahrocs from time to time and disappeared once he had completed his mission into a deep passageway which ran ‘no-one knew where’ according to Tom Wilson.

  Although most members of the Cahroc tribe believed that only the ghosts of the departed lived in the underworld, Tom was convinced there was an actual race of men and women living below the surface of California. His belief was founded on an extraordinary experience that his grandfather had undergone at the turn of the century. The elder Indian had apparently discovered a tunnel which ran for miles underground until it finally opened out into a cavern where dwelt a community of fair-skinned people. According to the old guide:

  My grandfather told me that these people made him welcome, and although he could not understand their language, he lived with them for some time. These people dressed in clothes that seemed to resemble leather, but which my grandfather said was not. Their cavern was illuminated by a pale, yellowish-green light from an unknown source.

  Eventually the Indian returned to the surface world, where his story was greeted with predictable scepticism. When young Tom Wilson heard the story from his grandfather, however, he was so impressed by the old man’s sincerity that he spent much of the rest of his life looking for the entry to the strange underground world. He remained convinced of its actuality until the day of his death, believing that the point of entry was somewhere in the regions where the Mojave Desert met the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

  If we move up the west coast of America to the state of Oregon we come across the story of another subterranean dwelling place said to be linked to a number of secret passageways. Several experts, including Eric Norman, the author of This Hollow Earth (1972), believe this story to be related to the legends of the Sioux and Mandan Indians which speak of mysterious tunnels in the Dakota region also leading to an underground kingdom. It is a theory not easy to substantiate, but does, I think, confirm the likelihood of there being subterranean tunnels in this area of the United States which are part of the greater network spreading north to Canada, and south to Mexico and South America beyond.

  The most recent discussion of the ‘ancient subterranean metropolis’ in Oregon appeared in a fascinating article, ‘About Caves and Other Secret Hiding Places in the World’, by George Wagner Jr, published in the January 1967 issue of Search. In discussing the various reports he had collected about the mysterious place, Mr Wagner mentions some specific details ‘written to me recently by one of my correspondents, Mr. Azerland’:

  He stated that about 75 miles northwest of Portland, Oregon, between Portland and the Seattle earth-faults, far down in the earth, where the earth was once flooded over, are the remains of a splendid city. My correspondent says that the city is about eight to ten miles underground, and is reached by a number of tunnels which radiate from it in different directions.

  Mr Wagner’s article gives the impression that he believes the underground city to be of Atlantean origins (citing the reference to flooding) and perhaps similar to other subterranean dwellings reported in South America and Asia. This would certainly strengthen the argument for it being part of the great world-network.

  Continuing still further north, into Alaska and the region of the Bering Strait, we can find more evidence of a subterranean tunnel. Among the people here, and in particular the ethnic race of Indians, the Athapascans, there is a belief in a subterranean race who have lived in harmony and secrecy since before the arrival of the Indians themselves. In his fascinating book, Arctic Adventure – My life in the Frozen North (1935), the intrepid adventurer Peter Freuchen makes a number of references to stories he heard among the Indians about the Eqidleet, or Inland People, who live below the surface. In the heart of Alaska, not far from the town of Tanana, he was shown crevices in the mountains where, he was told by his guide Asayuk, men had disappeared over the years to go and join the Eqidleet. Freuchen writes:

  The crevices were deep and broad, but Asayuk found a way in and out between them, seemed to know instinctively where they were, and took us safely to the land we sought. Asayuk told me of desperate men who had run away from home and gone into the mountains to get away from their fellow men. They had become ghosts or were taken in by the Eqidleet.

  The Eskimos who dwell in the far north of the continent also have a number of legends concerning a race of people living beneath the earth’s crust. These underground people have a system of tunnels through which they can travel to and from the surface world. According to William F. Warren in his book, Paradise Found, or The Cradle of the Human Race (1911), the Eskimos believe that their ancestors may well have come from this subterranean world which is lit by a perpetual light. They almost certainly knew of the whereabouts of the passageways, though these are now probably forgotten.

  Fascinating though all these reports are, the most important evidence and conclusions have come from the south of the United States, in Arizona to be precise, where a dedicated researcher named Charles A. Marcoux has spent the last quarter of a century investigating the legends of a subterranean world. To formalize his work, Marcoux has established the Subsurface Research Center in Phoenix, Arizona, having picked this particular locality because he is convinced an entrance to the subterranean tunnels exists in a curiously named local mountain range known as the Superstitious Mountains.

  Marcoux has made an intensive study of all the accounts of underground passageways throughout the world, and is already convinced that ‘a network of tunnels exists from Canada to South America, especially under Brazil, all of which are connected by tunnels with other parts of the world’. However, the tunnel network which particularly interests him is ‘the one that opens at various points in Central and South America, with an entrance in the Superstitious Mountains in Arizona’.

  According to Dr Raymond Bernard, who knows the shy and rather self-effacing Marcoux well: ‘He has been searching for twenty years for such an entrance; and while he has not
yet found it, he claims to have achieved contact with subterranean people. He is continuing his search, since he believes that finding such an entrance is humanity’s last hope of survival.’

  We shall be examining Marcoux’s claim of contact with subterranean people later in this book, but a word here about his plans if he finds the entranceway in the Superstitious Mountains. He believes that our atmosphere is being rapidly contaminated by radioactivity:

  I know that mankind cannot survive on the earth’s surface and must eventually go underground. Some believe that flying saucers will take them off the earth when the time comes, but my evidence on this matter proves to me that this is not possible. According to Heffling, the last time the earth was faced with the same problem which we face today, the Gods of Atlantis burrowed into Mother Earth and established underworld or subsurface kingdoms, and their remains can still be found there, along with their children. The same thing will have to be done today by present mankind in order to survive.

  My purpose is to start a colony and gather a group who can give up the outside world and start a new life, one that will not be easy, but better than that which they left behind. That is the purpose of my entering the Subterranean World, where those who exist there will direct me what to do.

  As I said, we shall return later to what Marcoux has to say on the Subterranean People and their lifestyle. But before leaving North America, there is one more extraordinary piece of information to be examined. This concerns the claim that a subterranean tunnel that is linked to the Agharti network actually exists beneath New York City!

  The claim is made by Robert Ernst Dickhoff in his book, Agharta (1951) during a discussion on the various locations in America, Europe and Asia in which the underground tunnels have been reported.* ‘Even New York,’ he writes, ‘can speak of elaborate tunnels which extend for miles under Central Park, of which most New Yorkers are blissfully unaware, except that it is admitted that these tunnels were dug by means unknown and are of great age.’

  That is the sum total of Dickhoffs statement. While there are, of course, innumerable tunnels beneath New York through which the subway travels, and indeed other disused passageways, there is no evidence that I have been able to find to substantiate the claim they are in any way associated with the legend of Agharti. As the reader will see when I come to present my thesis later in the book on the actual location of the Agharti network, it leaves New York rather off the beaten track.

  I do believe, however, that there is an explanation for suggestions of an underground passageway beneath New York, and that it lies in an extraordinary series of stories, presented ostensibly as based on truth, but in actual fact mostly fiction, which have become known as ‘The Shaver Hoax’.

  From the year 1945, there began to appear in an American ‘pulp’ magazine called Amazing Stories a series of related tales which put forward the theory that back at the dawn of time the Earth was the home of several races of people including the Titans and the Atlans. The author of the series, Richard S. Shaver (1907-1975), claimed that his information was based on a secret language, Mantong, he had discovered on pieces of rock covered with inscriptions which had been left by the Atlans and Titans before their departure from this planet.

  The stories maintained that the Atlans and the Titans were godlike immortals who created mighty civilizations, but when the sun began to emit harmful radiation they built underground tunnels and caverns in which to escape the rays. These, however, failed to provide the necessary protection, and the immortals were forced to abandon the Earth, some 12,000 years ago, leaving behind the remnants of their peoples in the tunnels. The exiles fell into two groups: the ‘Teros’, a peaceful, highly intelligent species, and the ‘Deros’, small, malignant creatures bent on evil. It was these ‘Deros’, said Shaver, that were responsible for all the evil in the world, the wars, disasters and accidents that have plagued mankind over the centuries. The writer also suggested that all the ancient ruins of the world, not forgetting the underground tunnels and caverns, which appeared to be well beyond the creative powers of the people of the periods in which they were built, were actually the handiwork of the Atlans.

  The series created a sensation when it appeared. The magazine’s circulation was boosted enormously, and it attracted over 2,500 letters from readers whose reactions varied from passionate belief in Shaver’s theories to outright ridicule. Some writers even claimed to have had actual encounters with the ‘Teros’ and ‘Deros’. For the following five years, the controversy over the series raged backwards and forwards, Shaver all the while maintaining his facts were correct, while scientists and geographers denounced it as nonsense. Today, the extraordinary saga is regarded as a hoax pure and simple in most quarters, and by readers of Science Fiction as a fraud that did much harm to the embryo genre of SF which was then trying determinedly to be taken seriously as a literary form. Until the day of his death, Shaver never retracted a word of what he had written, and it has been accepted that he may well have genuinely believed what he wrote. From an objective standpoint, it is only possible to say that there are a few fragments of arguable truth amidst much highly imaginative fantasy.

  As befitted a series which appeared in a Science Fiction magazine, most of the stories in Shaver’s saga take place in space and feature the continuing activities of the Atlans and the Titans, who now move from place to place in the Flying Saucers which occasionally visit the Earth – to keep an eye on our planet, of course. But in one of the most crucial tales in the series, ‘The Masked World’ {Amazing Stories, May 1946), there is presented ‘an incredible revelation of the world of horror hidden beneath modern New York – the caverns of the “Dero” ‘. In the course of this 50,000 word epic appears the following statement by Shaver:

  Within the dense archean basalt that upholds our modern surface usa – deep within the solidity of dark rock where no water can ever penetrate – lies a city. It is not so well known as modern New York directly overhead, but it has its friends, its enemies, and its slums – its lords and plutocrats. It is part of the ancient, forgotten underworld, not entirely unknown to surface man, but unrecognized as a terrible truth, a harmful factor, of his life. Ontal is a part of the civilization under our feet that is called ‘The Masked World’ by those who know.

  The underworld is an intricate maze of many levels of titanic caverns which reach everywhere under the surface of our modern surface world. But under New York the ancient highways that are in reality all part of one vast old planetcity that the Earth once was before it had a sun – here the ancient highways converge into a greater city of dwellings than anywhere else in the east … The underworld is so vast that little of it contains life, and not much has ever been fully explored. All of it is the handiwork of the ancient races who left earth those thousands of years ago.

  Shaver also speaks intriguingly of a ‘port of entry’ in New York through which ‘the favoured few’ are allowed to enter ‘The Masked World’, but gives not the slightest indication as to where this might be. When readers of Amazing later urged him to prove his claim by ‘leading a party into the caves’, he responded sharply: ‘I’m willing, but which entrance opens into a safe place where things are not waiting to engulf us? Naturally, I can’t take people into a place where they would become beaten slaves!’

  It is my belief that it is in the hugely publicized and controversial stories of Richard S. Shaver that we can find the origins of the rumours about mysterious tunnels under New York. I think, also, that there is little doubt that he found his inspiration for them in the books of Bulwer Lytton, Madame Blavatsky, Ferdinand Ossendowski, Nicholas Roerich and others that have been mentioned during the course of this book. Shaver made no secret of the fact that he was a voracious reader, and books on mysteries such as Subterranean Kingdoms and Secret Passageways filled his library shelves. He was actually only really following in the honourable footsteps of writers like Robert Paltock, who wrote The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), Ludvig Baron von Holbe
rg, the author of Niels Klim’s Journey Underground (1741), and Jules Verne, creator of the classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), as well as a host of lesser known twentieth-century writers, including Edgar Rice Burroughs with his novels about people living inside the globe, such as At the Earth’s Core (1923) and its sequel, Pellucidar (1924). It was just Shaver’s endless protestations that every word he wrote was true that ultimately diminished his work.

  Perhaps the one element of the Shaver stories many readers found most difficult to accept was the ‘Dero’s’ power to perpetrate all the evil that occurred on the surface of the earth. For to achieve this he said that they had at their command fearsome powers – powers that would certainly have got out of control in their destructive hands and resulted in the end of the world. It was a pity that Shaver could obviously not resist elaborating on the then developing fear of nuclear power – for if he had only looked closer at the works of Blavatsky, Ossendowski, Roerich, and in particular Bulwer Lytton’s story The Coming Race, from which he clearly drew a number of the facets of his story, he would have found a force eminently more believable, and in most respects just as powerful. The force known as Vril Power.

  Until this point in my study, we have only considered Vril Power in general terms. It is now time to look into its mysteries much more specifically …

  * Another American writer on the theme of subterranean dwellers, Dr M. Doreal, believes that there are also passageways to the underground world under Mount Shasta in California, at Sulphur Springs, Oklahoma, and beneath the famous Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Unfortunately, he cites no specific details as to where the entrance-ways might be, although there is a persistent belief that among the 226 passageways that branch out from the Mammoth Caves – spreading, it is said, for 160 miles – there might just be one that ultimately links up with a route to the underground world!