Charles Hapgood

Who Was Charles Hapgood?

Charles Hapgood was a professor and author who was born in 1904. He died at the age of 74 when he was struck by a car in Massachusetts on December 1st, 1982 . He studied at Harvard University and was is the process of completing doctorate in French history when he had to take a hiatus due to the Great Depression. He spent the next few years of his life holding various jobs and serving in the war effort. Affter the war, Hapgood went on to teach at multiple different universities until 1967. In his 22 years of teaching, Hapgood taught many different humanities such as history, anthropology, economics, and the history of science. It was during his time teaching at Springfield College that he started to explore the idea of the lost city of Atlantis after his students started asking about the lost continent of Mu. While researching the earth’s crust and the way it shifts, Hapgood was introduced to the writings of Hugh Auchincloss Brown, who was an electrical engineer responsible for the theory of catastrophic pole shift. Many of the ideas found in Brown’s writings can be seen as in influence in Hapgood’s own writings and theology. He continued studying these ideas throughout the rest of his career and well into retirement.

Elwood Babbitt

During his retirement years, he became close friends with a retired carpenter, World War II veteran and medium, Elwood Babbitt. His ultimate goal in this friendship with Babbitt was to attempt to connect with important people from the past. In his time with Babbitt, Hapgood would record and transcribe his “trance lectures” which he believed came from Albert Einstein; Mark Twain; Jesus; and Vishnu, a Hebrew god. These interactions are what inspired his last three books: Voices of Spirit, Through the Psychic Gift of Elwood Babbit, Talks with Christ and His Teachers Through the Psychic Gift of Elwood Babbitt, and The God Within: A Testament of Vishnu, a Handbook for the Spiritual Renaissance. After Hapgood’s death, his cousin Beth Hapgood compiled the last of Babbitt’s trance lectures and published them as Dare the Vision and Endure in 1997.

Hapgood's Theory of Polar Shift

Hapgood published his first novel, The Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Sciences in 1958. This novel was later updated and republished in 1970 as The Path of the Pole after he was told by Albert Einstein, who did the foreword for the original book that some of the details in his theory may be inaccurate. These novels were about his theory of polar shift. Hapgood rejected the actuality of a continental drift, arguing that the earth’s axis had actually shifted multiple times. He suggested that about 11,600 years ago the poles shifted about 15 degrees. He argues that part of Antarctica was actually ice free, and a civilization during that time could have actually mapped it out . This civilization would have predated Greek civilization what are currently credited with being the first with this type of scientific advancement. He further stated that the ice that formed on the poles is responsible for destabilizing Earth’s rotation, but is not responsible for the changes in the axial orientation. The biggest change that Einstein suggested Hapgood make in his theory and book is that the ice on the caps is insufficient to cause polar shift.

Hapgood came to these published ideas through Arlington Mallery’s suggestion that part of the Piri Reis Map was Queen Maud Land, an area of Antarctica. Hapgood published this idea in his novel Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age in 1966. Also in this novel, Hapgood recreates letters he claims came from the chief of a U.S. Air Force cartography section stationed at Westover Air Reserve Base. Hapgood points out that within these letters, they say that after studying Oronce Finé maps and the Piri Reis Map, they support Hapgood’s findings that these maps came from a time period when Antarctica was not covered in ice. This, therefore, is evidence to his claim that they came from a civilization that had significant scientific advancements before civilizations in Europe.

Disputing His Claims

Continental Drift

Charles Hapgood’s first major contribution to the pseudoscientific world was denying the existence of continental drift. At the time when The Earth’s Shifting Crust was published, continental drift was a theory proposed by Alfred Wegener. Wegener’s theory was first published in 1912, but was not widely accepted at that time. It was not until Harry Hess’s own theory about continental drift was published in the 1960s that this theory gained traction . This theory is strengthened by the addition of seafloor spreading theory. Seafloor Spreading theory surmises that new seafloor is generated by mantel material through ridges with the old floor material eventually going down those same ridges and being reused as mantel material.

Charles Hapgood was not completely wrong when he discussed a polar shift. This idea is more modernly known as polar wandering. What Hapgood proposed was a cataclysmic pole shift of around 30 degrees whereas the poles have actually only shifted maybe 1 degree per million years or slower . Even more recently, there was a belief that a more catastrophic polar shift occurred during the Jurassic time period between 160-145 Ma of over 30 degrees but this has been refuted by a study published in 2021 . This study done in Greenland used new paleomagnetic data that disproves the idea of a catastrophic polar shift and instead supported Evgeniy V.Kulakov and his team’s findings that the Earth’s polar shift is only at about 0.7 degrees per million years. They believe that the previous idea of a “Jurassic monster polar shift” is a result of previously used data.

True Polar Wander

Overall, the idea of a cataclysmic pole shift like Hapgood suggested has been widely disproved by scientists. The exact rate of the polar shift is still up for debate although, geophysicists at the University of California, Berkley have studied True Polar Wander (TPW) in planets and moons and have found that internal structures would not be able to keep up with a rate of 3-12 degrees/Myr of TPW . This connects to Hess’s widely accepted theory of continental drift. In order for the poles to shift at such a high rate, it would require the earth’s mantle material to come through and deposit through seafloor ridges. This would have to take place at such an accelerated rate that many experts, like Rose, do not believe it to be the case. Major continental tectonic plates like Eurasia, the Americas, Nubia, and Antarctica, are believed to move at a rate of less than 3 cm a year while smaller continental plates like the Australian continent move up to 6 cm a year . This movement is created by the process of seafloor spreading and this rate cannot support a large, much less a cataclysmic polar shift as Hapgood suggested.