On April 10, 1818, Symmes issued his broadsheet to all the world: I declare that the earth is hollow and habitable within, open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees, and pledged his life on it. Five hundred copies went to every college, senator, and eminent scientist in the country and abroad. He requested one hundred brave companions to depart Siberia with reindeer and sleighs, promising a warm and rich land past 82 degrees north. The theory became Symmes' Hole, and its pressure helped push Congress toward the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838 to 1842.
Two years after the circular came Symzonia, 1820, by the unidentified Captain Adam Seaborn, a utopian voyage into the hole that some scholars still attribute to Symmes himself. Poe lifted passages from it for Arthur Gordon Pym. The fiction fixed what the science could not: a usable location, a way in, a way home. Symmes died in 1829; his son Americus republished the theory in 1878; the hole kept appearing in novels long after both were buried.
The claim: Symmes attaching proof of sanity to his circular marks the exact moment fringe theory became modern, when the proposer anticipates the diagnosis and answers it in advance, a move every subsequent theorist, from Shaver to Grusch's defenders, has repeated. Verdict: sharp reading of a real detail. Symmes knew what the claim sounded like and filed anyway. The certificate proves self-awareness, not accuracy, and self-awareness is the one credential the fringe has always overvalued.
If the hole never existed, why does it have a name on the map of American culture?