Part of the vast Fortean network, though himself not much of a Fortean.
Charles Hutchins Hapgood came out of the same Bohemian milieu that birthed the early Forteans, though he was a second generation: it was his mother and his father who were contemporaries of Dreiser and Hecht and De Casseres and their ilk. Charles was born 17 May 1904—making him two years younger than Thayer, and two years older than Fort’s search for anomalous reports—in New York City to the writers Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce. Both Hutchins and Hapgood belonged to New York’s early twentieth-century Bohemia, their lives chronicled, by the Christine Stansell, among others—and themselves, Hutchins anonymously writing a memoir of his various affairs—the Hapgoods had an open marriage—that was published by Boni & Liveright (Fort’s publishers) the same season as “Book of the Damned.” The Hapgoods were a fairly prominent family of more than middling means. Charles was the second of four children, with an older brother Harry, and younger sisters Miriam and Beatrix. Neith found that her gender circumscribed her Bohemian freedoms, as she was moved out of the City to Westchester to raise them, while Harry continued his carousing.
Charles attended Scarborough School in Westchester; the family had homes in both New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. The family traveled quite a bit, which may be why they weren’t in the 1910 or 1920 censuses; Miriam was born in Florence. (His brother, Boyce, died in 1918, a victim of the influenza pandemic.) Charles continued travel, apparently spending a good portion of the 1920s abroad: he headed to England, France, Italy, and Switzerland for study and travel in October 1922, and doesn’t seem to have returned until July 1924. In February of the next year, documents show him returning from a Caribbean trip. He then attended Harvard, just as his father had, receiving an A.B. in 1929. The 1930 census has him living at home in Provincetown with his parents and and two sisters. Hutchins and Neith were both listed in the census as writers; Beatrix, twenty years old, was neither at school nor working. Miriam was a painter. He also made a short European trip this year, returning from France in June.
Charles Hutchins Hapgood came out of the same Bohemian milieu that birthed the early Forteans, though he was a second generation: it was his mother and his father who were contemporaries of Dreiser and Hecht and De Casseres and their ilk. Charles was born 17 May 1904—making him two years younger than Thayer, and two years older than Fort’s search for anomalous reports—in New York City to the writers Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce. Both Hutchins and Hapgood belonged to New York’s early twentieth-century Bohemia, their lives chronicled, by the Christine Stansell, among others—and themselves, Hutchins anonymously writing a memoir of his various affairs—the Hapgoods had an open marriage—that was published by Boni & Liveright (Fort’s publishers) the same season as “Book of the Damned.” The Hapgoods were a fairly prominent family of more than middling means. Charles was the second of four children, with an older brother Harry, and younger sisters Miriam and Beatrix. Neith found that her gender circumscribed her Bohemian freedoms, as she was moved out of the City to Westchester to raise them, while Harry continued his carousing.
Charles attended Scarborough School in Westchester; the family had homes in both New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. The family traveled quite a bit, which may be why they weren’t in the 1910 or 1920 censuses; Miriam was born in Florence. (His brother, Boyce, died in 1918, a victim of the influenza pandemic.) Charles continued travel, apparently spending a good portion of the 1920s abroad: he headed to England, France, Italy, and Switzerland for study and travel in October 1922, and doesn’t seem to have returned until July 1924. In February of the next year, documents show him returning from a Caribbean trip. He then attended Harvard, just as his father had, receiving an A.B. in 1929. The 1930 census has him living at home in Provincetown with his parents and and two sisters. Hutchins and Neith were both listed in the census as writers; Beatrix, twenty years old, was neither at school nor working. Miriam was a painter. He also made a short European trip this year, returning from France in June.
In the early 1930s, Hapgood returned to Harvard to work on his advanced degrees. He received an MA in Medieval and Modern History—granted 1932—and set to work on a Ph.D. dissertation about the French Revolution, but quit school because of the Great Depression. He spent a year teaching in Vermont, then went to work directing a community center in Provincetown and acting as executive secretary of the Fine Crafts Commission. It was during this period that he met the future Fortean and research scientist Frederick Hammett. Hammett was fairly sick this time, and upset that he could not participate in wartime efforts as the world fell into another conflagration. In 1940, Hapgood was living in Provincetown with his cousin, making $1,200 annually for his arts job—that wasn’t much, the equivalent of about $21,000 per year today—and Elizabeth, his cousin, wasn’t listed as having a job. But he was living at the family home, which was worth about $4,500.
In 1941, he married Tamsin Avery Hughes. They had two sons, Frederick—named in honor of Hammett—born in 1942, and William in 1944. (His father also died in 1944.) Hapgood served in military intelligence, working for the Center of Information, later renamed the OSS, with the red cross, and as a liaison between the White House and the War Department. He was living in Washington, D.C., at the time on 18th Street. He was tall—5’10”—and slight, 165 pounds, with blue eyes and blonde hair. Around this time, his sister, Miriam, was in Taos, and new the poet and Fortean Ella Young. Taos was an artist colony that attracted a number of Bohemians. Hapgood was out of government service by 1945, and took a teaching job at Keystone College, in Pennsylvania, moving to Massachusetts’s Springfield College in 1947. He stayed there until 1952.
Hapgood’s specialty was the history of science; reportedly, he turned toward fringe ideas in 1949. In an anecdote reminiscent of the beginnings of the so-called Drayson Problem—a Fortean favorite during the 1940s—Hapgood was stumped when a student, Henry Warrington, asked him a question about the lost continent of Mu. Hapgood decided to have the class investigate the question of Atlantis’s existence. It was a technique seemingly borrowed from Harvard, which was also orienting the history of science around specific case studies. And, indeed, scientific education was turning this way, too, the scientific method less often taught as a list of rules and more often out into practice. In the house of this research, Hapgood came across the work of Hugh Auchincloss Brown, who argued that accumulation of ice at the poles caused cyclical changes in the earth’s axis that were massive and catastrophic, shifting the crust of the earth.
This research consumed Brown for the next two decades, as he put together a couple of books that expanded on these ideas. The first was 1958’s “Earth’s Shifting Crust,” which gathered evidence for regular slippages in the earth’s land and water masses: the last one, in 9,500 BC moved the North Pole to its current position from Hudson Bay, and had started the process by which the South Pole would be covered in ice; it was naked at the time. Hapgood was also writing articles on his ideas, and presenting them at History of Science conferences, though without much interest.
At the same time, he became intrigued by complementary mysteries. There were the weird figures in Acambaro, Mexico, that suggested the conventional archeological history of the Americas was incorrect. There was also the so-called Piri Reis Map, from the 1500s, but only rediscovered in the 1900s, which he was convinced showed the South Pole before it was covered in ice—and again suggested a radical revision to the known history of the earth. He worked some of these ideas into 1966’s “Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings,” which argued that mediaeval maps called ‘portolans’—used by sailors to navigate from port to port—proved that there must have been a worldwide maritime civilization in 7000 B.C. He continued to puzzle over these ideas, putting out a revised version of “Earth’s Shifting Crust” in 1970, and writing up his ideas for children as well.
Amid this writing, Hapgood suffered some personal setbacks. His mother died in 1951. He and his wife divorced in 1955. The following year, he moved to Keene State College, in New Hampshire. He underwent what seems to have been fairly intensive psychoanalysis starting around 1954; in 1958, he reported that he’d written a case study on himself—over 700 pages long—and believed he’d made a breakthrough: he’d increased his earning power and capacity to handle money. “I recommend it fervently,” he said. His newfound powers, though, didn’t seem to last, as the following year he had to put off marrying his fiancée because of money troubles: he was making six thousand dollars a year, by his own report, and half of that went to his children. Meanwhile, he was working on a Ph.D. dissertation, hoping to pick up where he had left off more than a quarter-of-a-century before. It doesn’t seem to have ever been finished. In 1966, he moved to New England College, also in New Hampshire, where he taught world and American history, anthropology, economics, and the history of science for a year. Apparently, he retired around this time.
In the 1960s, Hapgood became wrapped up with the psychic Elwood Babbit, who claimed to be able to channel the voices of dead people; he had trained at the Edgar Cayce Institute. Hapgood introduced Babbit to his cousin Beth—with whom he had lived back in 1940—who was also interested in spiritualism. Charles recorded Babbit’s trance medium sessions, and in 1967 started transcribing them, writing down communications from Jesus, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Vishnu, and Hammett. Beth helped to establish a school in his honor, and would connect Charles and Babbit to the Brotherhood of the Spirit New Age commune. In 1975, Charles published a book of Babbit’s sessions, “Voices of the Spirit.” In 1981 came “Talks with Christ.” Beth edited the posthumous volume, “Dare the Vision and Endure,” which came out in 1997.
Charles Hapgood was hit by a car on 21 December 1982 and died. He was 78.
***********************
Hapgood likely heard about Fort or the Fortean Society from Hammett; in his papers at Yale University is a file labelled Hammett, with letters dating back to 1941, and a copy of Doubt 41 (July 1953) with a column eulogizing Hammett. Likely, Hapgood, who along with his cousin Beth, seems to have been interested in fringe ideas for a long time, became a member at some point. He also could have stumbled across Doubt, if he hadn’t before, while researching Earth’s Shifting Crust, as he followed up on the Drayson problem. But, really, the weight of the evidence is against Hapgood being inspired in any systematic way by Fort or the Forteans, and against him deriving much support from Forteans-as-Forteans. Nonetheless, he was part of the broader network.
The really interesting story in regard to Hapgood and the Forteans is that he was intent on creating what might be called a Fortean science, or sciences—a coherent body of knowledge that overturned conventional history and archeology in return for an understanding of the world’s past that incorporated and explained anomalies, that made room for folklore and legends. And he received, at least initially, some support from mainstream sources. The founder of the discipline of history of science in America, George Sarton, encouraged him. So did one of the founders of science journalism in America, at times reviled and times respected by Tiffany Thayer—the man who had trashed a manuscript version of Fort’s “Book of the Damned,” when Dreiser sent it to him: Waldemar Kaempfert. And most impressively, Albert Einstein was intrigued; he swapped ten letters with Hapgood, and wrote the introduction to “Earth’s Shfting Crust,” just before he died. Einstein was also an ambiguous figure in the Fortean firmament, a symbol of dogmatic science—the force behind the speed of light, and the man held responsible for getting rid of the idea of ethers and vortices, both of which were prized by many Fortean theories—and yet he was humane, and spoke out against scientific hegemony.
Hapgood found this support—limited though it was—because the idea of continental drift, though around since the early part of the 20th century—had yet to take hold, and Hapgood’s ideas explained important parts of earth’s geological history: explained the connections of flora and fauna across vast oceans, explained the shape of the continents, gave a mechanism for how land masses could move over time, and change. It was a subject to which Einstein was drawn late in his life, and he found himself recruited by both Immanuel Velikovsky—who published his own rewriting of prehistory organized around a series of catastrophes, Worlds in Collision, in 1950—and Hapgood. (Velikovsky and Einstein were friends, having worked together for the formation of the state of Israel.) Einstein disagreed with Hapgood’s initial assessment that the weight of accumulated ice was enough to cause the earth’s axis distortion and, in subsequent editions of his work, Hapgood conceded the point, and urged the search for other causes.
Einstein and Hapgood exchanged several letters through 1955, and Einstein wrote a foreword to Hapgood’s first book, which appeared a couple of years after Einstein died. Meanwhile, Hapgood heard mention of the Piri map, and set his students to studying it, as he had once gotten them to work on the problem of lost continents. As has been pointed out by numerous commentators, Hapgood and his students used a number of questionable techniques in theyr analysis—they ignored the place names on the maps, and only looked at the shapes; and even the shapes, they assumed, were a composite of maps, and so any stretch of coastline did not have to connect to other stretches necessarily, allowing them to orient the map in unusual ways, following the suggestion of earlier (also speculative) researchers who said that the map depicted, in part, some of un-iced Antarctica. Also around this time, Hapgood became intrigued by the Acambaro figures.
In early 1957, Hapgood reached out to the Fortean zoologist Ivan Sanderson on these matters. Hapgood and the author Erle Stanley Gardner—creator of Perry Mason—were intrigued enough by the figures that they wanted to go to Mexico and see them. Supposedly found by Waldemar Julsrud in 1944, the clay figurines seemed to depict humans and dinosaurs both, suggesting that the two groups had inhabited the earth at the same time—if true, cause for massive revisions in ideas about human prehistory. Hapgood wanted Sanderson to come along and study the zoology of the area, as well as the zoological features of the figurines. Behind all of this was Harry Steeger, who had converted Argosy magazine from a pulp fiction magazine into a men’s adventure magazine. “This is the most important single archeological discovery of all time, except perhaps the discovery of Troy,” Hagood said. He also wanted to know if Sanderson would write him a letter in support of his application for a Guggenheim award—the two had already had some contact by this point.
In that earlier correspondence, Sanderson sniffed at Argosy as an unworthy magazine—although that probably reflects his writing for one of its competitors; in time, Sanderson would be associated with Argosy. He also refused the request to write a letter of reference: Sanderson knew where he stood within the scientific community, and realized that his recommendation would hurt Hapgood’s chances, rather than help them. (For the same reason, he would not do a blurb for the book, either.) He was interested in the Acambaro figurines, however. The two men, Hapgood and Sanderson, would stay in close contact for several years, and Sanderson would work to get supporters for the book through backchannels.
At the time, Hapgood was feeling very isolated—he’d divorced and lost to death his three biggest supporters—and had soured on mainstream science: “Frankly, Ivan, I care very little for the opinion of the ‘scientists.’ I already know what they will think, It will take them 25 years to get used to the idea. I propose to take the case to the bar of public opinion, and let the ‘scientists’ catch up with the procession when they want to.” He had tried to get papers published in both “Science” and “Nature,” to no avail, and was working to get his ideas into magazines, though that was proving hard as well. At the same time, Sanderson was attempting to drum up interest in his European contacts, but was meeting the same wall of science. Hapgood tried to think of himself as a modern Darwin, who also, Hapgood knew from studying the history of science, had received little support early on, though now his ideas were considered conventional wisdom. (So much so that Fort satirized some of the ideas associated with him.)
In the fall of 1957, Hapgood did get an article in “Main Currents in Modern Thought,” a magazine put out by the Foundation for Integrated Education. Hapgood was using the same agent as Sanderson—Oliver Swan—and “The Earth’s Shifting Crust” found a publisher in Pantheon. It was released 12 May 1958. The book followed in the tradition of Velikovsky’s series of books, but, despite Einstein being connected to both men, it was not so much the case that Hapgood was influenced by Velikovsky as they worked in parallel. There were other Fortean precedents, notably F. Amadeo Giannini and his “Worlds Beyond the Poles.” Sanderson, who had been very involved in the development of Hapgood’s arguments, helped to spread the word about the book, too, letting Pantheon employees copy his own mailing list so that that book could meet an audience receptive to challenging ideas. Sanderson also helped to get Hapgood onto Long John Nebel’s radio show, which concerned itself with fringe scientific ideas.
It’s not that Hapgood’s book received laurels, certainly. In “Astounding,”—which had promoted Dianetics, after all—P. Schuyler Miller panned the book, for example. But Einstein’s name certainly opened a few doors, and there were a few willing to give it a hearing. The Saturday Evening Post published an article based on Hapgood’s ideas. In 1960, he published an article in “Esquire,” “The Mystery of the Frozen Mammoths,” and also put out, through Putnam, a child’s version of his book, “Great Mysteries of the Earth.” Unsurprisingly, he also found support among Forteans other than Sanderson. Among them was Tiffany Thayer himself.
Thayer had nursed his own heretical idea, only rarely presented, that the earth was growing through a series of cataclysms, changing its shape from tube to sphere over the millennia, which could account for various anomalies. And so he was immediately drawn to “Earth’s Shifting Crust.” In Doubt 58 (October 1958), he called it “an important book,” though he thought that Hapgood himself did not see all of the implications of what he was writing. He noted that Sanderson wrote effusively about it—and also that Hapgood was already a member of the Society, suggesting long term, if subterranean, Fortean connections. Thayer said he was doing a page-by-page commentary, but nothing ever came form the enthusiasm, and Thayer was dead in less than a year.
Hapgood was not in a mood to rest, though he continued to deal with much insecurity. He was considering taking a trip to Acambaro with the proceeds from his Saturday Evening Post article. He continued to pour over ancient maps—he told Sanderson in December that he thought he’d identified the place of ancient Atlantis—and play with ideas, increasingly seduced by ideas further and further from the scientific consensus. Sanderson was encouraging him to read the collected works of occultist Lewis Spence; he corresponded with the Fortean writer Harold T. Wilkins; and in January 1959, he started an intense correspondence with Fortean Frederick G. Hehr, who was also interested in the Acambaro figurines and had developed his own alternative theories of prehistory as well as physics and chemistry. His experience of the carnivalesque mystery spots in Oregon and California—both operated by Forteans—combined his ideas, proving to his satisfaction that ancient alien technologies were creating vortices.
“Aside from the records laid down in geologic formations, Sagas and holy records I also gained access to a part of the records as taught by our Venusian teachers of civilization,” Hehr wrote Hapgood in early February 1959. Hapgood was giving up on science—he told Sanderson he was thinking about going to a chiropractor for some ill; he didn’t know anything about chiropractic, but assumed that since the American Medical Association was against the practice, it must be worthwhile. And the Ph.D. dissertation on which he worked was “a book anatomizing the dogmatic science of the 19th Century and its further degeneration in the 20th Century.” He was open to the idea of flying saucers, too, which Sanderson had earlier introduced into their correspondence. Yet he also knew that taking on too many mysteries, and especially such controversial ones, would harm his case: first prove that there was an ancient civilization of advanced technology, then puzzle out its origin. Hapgood repeated the same idea to Hehr.
Which was a wise choice by Hapgood, but it is clear he resented mainstream ideas quite a bit. He was intrigued by Sanderson’s cryptozoological research—bigfoot, giant penguins—and there was even a hope that Sanderson’s patron, the oilman Tom Slick, might sponsor Hapgood, too, though that never came to pass. Hagood and Sanderson had different ideas about mammoths in North America, which caused Hapgood some problems—he thought he caught flack for Sanderson’s lack of consistency: there was a price to be paid for drifting too far from the consensus, since, whatever his resentment, he wanted to be appreciated by authorities. He presented his ideas about Antarctica being inhabited by humans at the History of Science convention in 1962, for example. The stress continued to be hard on him, and Sanderson recommended he consider yoga—psychotherapy did not work on him or his wife, but Yoga had been a boon and he thought Hapgood could benefit as well. Sanderson also told Hapgood to forget about the Acambaro figurines; he’d been to Mexico, while writing a book about the continent of North America, and determined they were probably a hoax.
Hehr was convinced that World War III was imminent. “I would not worry too much about acceptance by the scientific fraternity,” he wrote 9 February 1959. “The prelude to the next war is stepping up in tempo and intensity and from what I know this civilisation [sic] will come to a sudden end in July 1960. (Knew first about the nuclear 1960 date in February 1945). The next civilisation will be better and more openminded as the new race is very different from the present average.” Hapgood shared some of this pessimism, a sense that the world was nearing its end—and his ideas could be pointed to as support of this contention by others. When 1962 rolled around—without Her mentioning anything about he apocalypse-that-didn’t-happen—a Bahá’í sect prophesied rising seas (perhaps volcanoes and earthquakes, too). The group said the catastrophe would be brought about via the earth’s shifting crust, and cited Hapgood as his source.
By the mid-1960s, Hapgood seems to have calmed some about the future of the world. He published his 1966 book, which was acknowledged as being the result of a great deal of research, though the reasoning was questioned severely by archeologists. He published “Mystery in Acambaro” in 1973. In the 1970s, he corresponding with the editors of Fate magazine, deepening his connection to the Fortean community—which itself was evolving quite a bit in the wake of Thayer’s death, the end of the original Fortean Society, and the irruption of more radical metaphysical theories—even as he unapologetically left mainstream science and humanistic knowledge to pursue research in spiritualism.
His own, earlier research proved influential on these newer theories. Hapgood was a source in Erich von Daniken’s “Chariots of the God” and revised ancient astronaut theories. David Hatcher Childress followed up his research on Acambarao figures (as did Young Earth creationists). Robert Temple, who wrote “The Sirius Mystery,” was an acquaintance. Theorists of Atlantis, such as Rand Flem-Ath, looked to him as a source of information. Graham Hancock, author of “Fingerprints of the God,” also found inspiration in Hapgood. Here was an accredited professor, who had received approval from Einstein himself, who studied history and argued for advanced ancient civilizations—how big of a step was needed to argue that those civilizations had been seeded or taught by a aliens? “The Path of the Pole” was reprinted in 1999. Childress republished “Mystery in Acambaro” that same year.
In 1941, he married Tamsin Avery Hughes. They had two sons, Frederick—named in honor of Hammett—born in 1942, and William in 1944. (His father also died in 1944.) Hapgood served in military intelligence, working for the Center of Information, later renamed the OSS, with the red cross, and as a liaison between the White House and the War Department. He was living in Washington, D.C., at the time on 18th Street. He was tall—5’10”—and slight, 165 pounds, with blue eyes and blonde hair. Around this time, his sister, Miriam, was in Taos, and new the poet and Fortean Ella Young. Taos was an artist colony that attracted a number of Bohemians. Hapgood was out of government service by 1945, and took a teaching job at Keystone College, in Pennsylvania, moving to Massachusetts’s Springfield College in 1947. He stayed there until 1952.
Hapgood’s specialty was the history of science; reportedly, he turned toward fringe ideas in 1949. In an anecdote reminiscent of the beginnings of the so-called Drayson Problem—a Fortean favorite during the 1940s—Hapgood was stumped when a student, Henry Warrington, asked him a question about the lost continent of Mu. Hapgood decided to have the class investigate the question of Atlantis’s existence. It was a technique seemingly borrowed from Harvard, which was also orienting the history of science around specific case studies. And, indeed, scientific education was turning this way, too, the scientific method less often taught as a list of rules and more often out into practice. In the house of this research, Hapgood came across the work of Hugh Auchincloss Brown, who argued that accumulation of ice at the poles caused cyclical changes in the earth’s axis that were massive and catastrophic, shifting the crust of the earth.
This research consumed Brown for the next two decades, as he put together a couple of books that expanded on these ideas. The first was 1958’s “Earth’s Shifting Crust,” which gathered evidence for regular slippages in the earth’s land and water masses: the last one, in 9,500 BC moved the North Pole to its current position from Hudson Bay, and had started the process by which the South Pole would be covered in ice; it was naked at the time. Hapgood was also writing articles on his ideas, and presenting them at History of Science conferences, though without much interest.
At the same time, he became intrigued by complementary mysteries. There were the weird figures in Acambaro, Mexico, that suggested the conventional archeological history of the Americas was incorrect. There was also the so-called Piri Reis Map, from the 1500s, but only rediscovered in the 1900s, which he was convinced showed the South Pole before it was covered in ice—and again suggested a radical revision to the known history of the earth. He worked some of these ideas into 1966’s “Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings,” which argued that mediaeval maps called ‘portolans’—used by sailors to navigate from port to port—proved that there must have been a worldwide maritime civilization in 7000 B.C. He continued to puzzle over these ideas, putting out a revised version of “Earth’s Shifting Crust” in 1970, and writing up his ideas for children as well.
Amid this writing, Hapgood suffered some personal setbacks. His mother died in 1951. He and his wife divorced in 1955. The following year, he moved to Keene State College, in New Hampshire. He underwent what seems to have been fairly intensive psychoanalysis starting around 1954; in 1958, he reported that he’d written a case study on himself—over 700 pages long—and believed he’d made a breakthrough: he’d increased his earning power and capacity to handle money. “I recommend it fervently,” he said. His newfound powers, though, didn’t seem to last, as the following year he had to put off marrying his fiancée because of money troubles: he was making six thousand dollars a year, by his own report, and half of that went to his children. Meanwhile, he was working on a Ph.D. dissertation, hoping to pick up where he had left off more than a quarter-of-a-century before. It doesn’t seem to have ever been finished. In 1966, he moved to New England College, also in New Hampshire, where he taught world and American history, anthropology, economics, and the history of science for a year. Apparently, he retired around this time.
In the 1960s, Hapgood became wrapped up with the psychic Elwood Babbit, who claimed to be able to channel the voices of dead people; he had trained at the Edgar Cayce Institute. Hapgood introduced Babbit to his cousin Beth—with whom he had lived back in 1940—who was also interested in spiritualism. Charles recorded Babbit’s trance medium sessions, and in 1967 started transcribing them, writing down communications from Jesus, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Vishnu, and Hammett. Beth helped to establish a school in his honor, and would connect Charles and Babbit to the Brotherhood of the Spirit New Age commune. In 1975, Charles published a book of Babbit’s sessions, “Voices of the Spirit.” In 1981 came “Talks with Christ.” Beth edited the posthumous volume, “Dare the Vision and Endure,” which came out in 1997.
Charles Hapgood was hit by a car on 21 December 1982 and died. He was 78.
***********************
Hapgood likely heard about Fort or the Fortean Society from Hammett; in his papers at Yale University is a file labelled Hammett, with letters dating back to 1941, and a copy of Doubt 41 (July 1953) with a column eulogizing Hammett. Likely, Hapgood, who along with his cousin Beth, seems to have been interested in fringe ideas for a long time, became a member at some point. He also could have stumbled across Doubt, if he hadn’t before, while researching Earth’s Shifting Crust, as he followed up on the Drayson problem. But, really, the weight of the evidence is against Hapgood being inspired in any systematic way by Fort or the Forteans, and against him deriving much support from Forteans-as-Forteans. Nonetheless, he was part of the broader network.
The really interesting story in regard to Hapgood and the Forteans is that he was intent on creating what might be called a Fortean science, or sciences—a coherent body of knowledge that overturned conventional history and archeology in return for an understanding of the world’s past that incorporated and explained anomalies, that made room for folklore and legends. And he received, at least initially, some support from mainstream sources. The founder of the discipline of history of science in America, George Sarton, encouraged him. So did one of the founders of science journalism in America, at times reviled and times respected by Tiffany Thayer—the man who had trashed a manuscript version of Fort’s “Book of the Damned,” when Dreiser sent it to him: Waldemar Kaempfert. And most impressively, Albert Einstein was intrigued; he swapped ten letters with Hapgood, and wrote the introduction to “Earth’s Shfting Crust,” just before he died. Einstein was also an ambiguous figure in the Fortean firmament, a symbol of dogmatic science—the force behind the speed of light, and the man held responsible for getting rid of the idea of ethers and vortices, both of which were prized by many Fortean theories—and yet he was humane, and spoke out against scientific hegemony.
Hapgood found this support—limited though it was—because the idea of continental drift, though around since the early part of the 20th century—had yet to take hold, and Hapgood’s ideas explained important parts of earth’s geological history: explained the connections of flora and fauna across vast oceans, explained the shape of the continents, gave a mechanism for how land masses could move over time, and change. It was a subject to which Einstein was drawn late in his life, and he found himself recruited by both Immanuel Velikovsky—who published his own rewriting of prehistory organized around a series of catastrophes, Worlds in Collision, in 1950—and Hapgood. (Velikovsky and Einstein were friends, having worked together for the formation of the state of Israel.) Einstein disagreed with Hapgood’s initial assessment that the weight of accumulated ice was enough to cause the earth’s axis distortion and, in subsequent editions of his work, Hapgood conceded the point, and urged the search for other causes.
Einstein and Hapgood exchanged several letters through 1955, and Einstein wrote a foreword to Hapgood’s first book, which appeared a couple of years after Einstein died. Meanwhile, Hapgood heard mention of the Piri map, and set his students to studying it, as he had once gotten them to work on the problem of lost continents. As has been pointed out by numerous commentators, Hapgood and his students used a number of questionable techniques in theyr analysis—they ignored the place names on the maps, and only looked at the shapes; and even the shapes, they assumed, were a composite of maps, and so any stretch of coastline did not have to connect to other stretches necessarily, allowing them to orient the map in unusual ways, following the suggestion of earlier (also speculative) researchers who said that the map depicted, in part, some of un-iced Antarctica. Also around this time, Hapgood became intrigued by the Acambaro figures.
In early 1957, Hapgood reached out to the Fortean zoologist Ivan Sanderson on these matters. Hapgood and the author Erle Stanley Gardner—creator of Perry Mason—were intrigued enough by the figures that they wanted to go to Mexico and see them. Supposedly found by Waldemar Julsrud in 1944, the clay figurines seemed to depict humans and dinosaurs both, suggesting that the two groups had inhabited the earth at the same time—if true, cause for massive revisions in ideas about human prehistory. Hapgood wanted Sanderson to come along and study the zoology of the area, as well as the zoological features of the figurines. Behind all of this was Harry Steeger, who had converted Argosy magazine from a pulp fiction magazine into a men’s adventure magazine. “This is the most important single archeological discovery of all time, except perhaps the discovery of Troy,” Hagood said. He also wanted to know if Sanderson would write him a letter in support of his application for a Guggenheim award—the two had already had some contact by this point.
In that earlier correspondence, Sanderson sniffed at Argosy as an unworthy magazine—although that probably reflects his writing for one of its competitors; in time, Sanderson would be associated with Argosy. He also refused the request to write a letter of reference: Sanderson knew where he stood within the scientific community, and realized that his recommendation would hurt Hapgood’s chances, rather than help them. (For the same reason, he would not do a blurb for the book, either.) He was interested in the Acambaro figurines, however. The two men, Hapgood and Sanderson, would stay in close contact for several years, and Sanderson would work to get supporters for the book through backchannels.
At the time, Hapgood was feeling very isolated—he’d divorced and lost to death his three biggest supporters—and had soured on mainstream science: “Frankly, Ivan, I care very little for the opinion of the ‘scientists.’ I already know what they will think, It will take them 25 years to get used to the idea. I propose to take the case to the bar of public opinion, and let the ‘scientists’ catch up with the procession when they want to.” He had tried to get papers published in both “Science” and “Nature,” to no avail, and was working to get his ideas into magazines, though that was proving hard as well. At the same time, Sanderson was attempting to drum up interest in his European contacts, but was meeting the same wall of science. Hapgood tried to think of himself as a modern Darwin, who also, Hapgood knew from studying the history of science, had received little support early on, though now his ideas were considered conventional wisdom. (So much so that Fort satirized some of the ideas associated with him.)
In the fall of 1957, Hapgood did get an article in “Main Currents in Modern Thought,” a magazine put out by the Foundation for Integrated Education. Hapgood was using the same agent as Sanderson—Oliver Swan—and “The Earth’s Shifting Crust” found a publisher in Pantheon. It was released 12 May 1958. The book followed in the tradition of Velikovsky’s series of books, but, despite Einstein being connected to both men, it was not so much the case that Hapgood was influenced by Velikovsky as they worked in parallel. There were other Fortean precedents, notably F. Amadeo Giannini and his “Worlds Beyond the Poles.” Sanderson, who had been very involved in the development of Hapgood’s arguments, helped to spread the word about the book, too, letting Pantheon employees copy his own mailing list so that that book could meet an audience receptive to challenging ideas. Sanderson also helped to get Hapgood onto Long John Nebel’s radio show, which concerned itself with fringe scientific ideas.
It’s not that Hapgood’s book received laurels, certainly. In “Astounding,”—which had promoted Dianetics, after all—P. Schuyler Miller panned the book, for example. But Einstein’s name certainly opened a few doors, and there were a few willing to give it a hearing. The Saturday Evening Post published an article based on Hapgood’s ideas. In 1960, he published an article in “Esquire,” “The Mystery of the Frozen Mammoths,” and also put out, through Putnam, a child’s version of his book, “Great Mysteries of the Earth.” Unsurprisingly, he also found support among Forteans other than Sanderson. Among them was Tiffany Thayer himself.
Thayer had nursed his own heretical idea, only rarely presented, that the earth was growing through a series of cataclysms, changing its shape from tube to sphere over the millennia, which could account for various anomalies. And so he was immediately drawn to “Earth’s Shifting Crust.” In Doubt 58 (October 1958), he called it “an important book,” though he thought that Hapgood himself did not see all of the implications of what he was writing. He noted that Sanderson wrote effusively about it—and also that Hapgood was already a member of the Society, suggesting long term, if subterranean, Fortean connections. Thayer said he was doing a page-by-page commentary, but nothing ever came form the enthusiasm, and Thayer was dead in less than a year.
Hapgood was not in a mood to rest, though he continued to deal with much insecurity. He was considering taking a trip to Acambaro with the proceeds from his Saturday Evening Post article. He continued to pour over ancient maps—he told Sanderson in December that he thought he’d identified the place of ancient Atlantis—and play with ideas, increasingly seduced by ideas further and further from the scientific consensus. Sanderson was encouraging him to read the collected works of occultist Lewis Spence; he corresponded with the Fortean writer Harold T. Wilkins; and in January 1959, he started an intense correspondence with Fortean Frederick G. Hehr, who was also interested in the Acambaro figurines and had developed his own alternative theories of prehistory as well as physics and chemistry. His experience of the carnivalesque mystery spots in Oregon and California—both operated by Forteans—combined his ideas, proving to his satisfaction that ancient alien technologies were creating vortices.
“Aside from the records laid down in geologic formations, Sagas and holy records I also gained access to a part of the records as taught by our Venusian teachers of civilization,” Hehr wrote Hapgood in early February 1959. Hapgood was giving up on science—he told Sanderson he was thinking about going to a chiropractor for some ill; he didn’t know anything about chiropractic, but assumed that since the American Medical Association was against the practice, it must be worthwhile. And the Ph.D. dissertation on which he worked was “a book anatomizing the dogmatic science of the 19th Century and its further degeneration in the 20th Century.” He was open to the idea of flying saucers, too, which Sanderson had earlier introduced into their correspondence. Yet he also knew that taking on too many mysteries, and especially such controversial ones, would harm his case: first prove that there was an ancient civilization of advanced technology, then puzzle out its origin. Hapgood repeated the same idea to Hehr.
Which was a wise choice by Hapgood, but it is clear he resented mainstream ideas quite a bit. He was intrigued by Sanderson’s cryptozoological research—bigfoot, giant penguins—and there was even a hope that Sanderson’s patron, the oilman Tom Slick, might sponsor Hapgood, too, though that never came to pass. Hagood and Sanderson had different ideas about mammoths in North America, which caused Hapgood some problems—he thought he caught flack for Sanderson’s lack of consistency: there was a price to be paid for drifting too far from the consensus, since, whatever his resentment, he wanted to be appreciated by authorities. He presented his ideas about Antarctica being inhabited by humans at the History of Science convention in 1962, for example. The stress continued to be hard on him, and Sanderson recommended he consider yoga—psychotherapy did not work on him or his wife, but Yoga had been a boon and he thought Hapgood could benefit as well. Sanderson also told Hapgood to forget about the Acambaro figurines; he’d been to Mexico, while writing a book about the continent of North America, and determined they were probably a hoax.
Hehr was convinced that World War III was imminent. “I would not worry too much about acceptance by the scientific fraternity,” he wrote 9 February 1959. “The prelude to the next war is stepping up in tempo and intensity and from what I know this civilisation [sic] will come to a sudden end in July 1960. (Knew first about the nuclear 1960 date in February 1945). The next civilisation will be better and more openminded as the new race is very different from the present average.” Hapgood shared some of this pessimism, a sense that the world was nearing its end—and his ideas could be pointed to as support of this contention by others. When 1962 rolled around—without Her mentioning anything about he apocalypse-that-didn’t-happen—a Bahá’í sect prophesied rising seas (perhaps volcanoes and earthquakes, too). The group said the catastrophe would be brought about via the earth’s shifting crust, and cited Hapgood as his source.
By the mid-1960s, Hapgood seems to have calmed some about the future of the world. He published his 1966 book, which was acknowledged as being the result of a great deal of research, though the reasoning was questioned severely by archeologists. He published “Mystery in Acambaro” in 1973. In the 1970s, he corresponding with the editors of Fate magazine, deepening his connection to the Fortean community—which itself was evolving quite a bit in the wake of Thayer’s death, the end of the original Fortean Society, and the irruption of more radical metaphysical theories—even as he unapologetically left mainstream science and humanistic knowledge to pursue research in spiritualism.
His own, earlier research proved influential on these newer theories. Hapgood was a source in Erich von Daniken’s “Chariots of the God” and revised ancient astronaut theories. David Hatcher Childress followed up his research on Acambarao figures (as did Young Earth creationists). Robert Temple, who wrote “The Sirius Mystery,” was an acquaintance. Theorists of Atlantis, such as Rand Flem-Ath, looked to him as a source of information. Graham Hancock, author of “Fingerprints of the God,” also found inspiration in Hapgood. Here was an accredited professor, who had received approval from Einstein himself, who studied history and argued for advanced ancient civilizations—how big of a step was needed to argue that those civilizations had been seeded or taught by a aliens? “The Path of the Pole” was reprinted in 1999. Childress republished “Mystery in Acambaro” that same year.
