Charles Hutchins Hapgood (May 17, 1904 – December 21, 1982)[1] was an American college professor and author who became one of the best known advocates of a pseudo-historical claim of a rapid and recent pole shift with catastrophic results.
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Hapgood received a master's degree from Harvard University in 1929 in medieval and modern History. His Ph.D. work on the French Revolution was interrupted by the Great Depression. He taught for a year in Vermont and directed a community center in Provincetown, also serving as the executive secretary of Franklin Roosevelt's Crafts Commission.
During World War II, Hapgood was employed by the Center of Information (which later became the Office of Strategic Services and then the Central Intelligence Agency) and the Red Cross, and also served as a liaison officer between the White House and the Office of the Secretary of the War. After the war, Hapgood began a twenty-year teaching career in the humanities through faculty appointments at Keystone College (1945–1947), Springfield College (1947–1952), Keene State College (1956–1966), and New England College (1966–1967), where he lectured in world and American history, anthropology, economics, and the history of science.
Hapgood married Tamsin Hughes in 1941. They divorced in 1955. In later years he resided in Arizona and Richmond, New Hampshire. While living in Greenfield, Massachusetts, he was struck by a car and died on December 21, 1982. He is survived by two sons, Frederick (born 1942) and William (born 1944), and two grandsons.[1]
While at Springfield College, a student's question about the Lost Continent of Mu prompted a class project to investigate the lost continent of Atlantis, leading Hapgood to investigate possible ways that massive earth changes could occur and exposing him to the literature of Hugh Auchincloss Brown.
In 1958, Hapgood published The Earth's Shifting Crust which denied the existence of continental drift and featured a foreword by Albert Einstein. In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966) and The Path of the Pole (1970), Hapgood proposed the hypothesis that the Earth's axis has shifted numerous times during geological history.[2] In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings he supported the suggestion made by Arlington Mallery that a part of the Piri Reis Map was a depiction of the area of Antarctica known as Queen Maud Land. He used this to propose that a 15 degree pole shift occurred around 9,600 BCE (approx. 11,600 years ago) and that a part of the Antarctic was ice-free at that time, and that an ice-age civilization could have mapped the coast. He concludes that "Antarctica was mapped when these parts were free of ice", taking that view that an Antarctic warm period coincided with the last ice age in the Northern hemisphere, and that the Piri Reis and other maps were based on "ancient" maps derived from ice-age originals.[3] Later research concerning the paleoclimatology and ice sheets of Antarctica have completely discredited the interpretations by Hapgood that an Antarctic warm period coincided with the last ice age in the Northern hemisphere and any part of it had been ice-free at and prior to 9,600 BCE (approx. 11,600 years ago).[4][5][6]
Hapgood also examined a 1531 map by French mathematician and cartographer Oronce Finé (aka Oronteus Finaeus). In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, he reproduces letters received from the chief of a U.S. Air Force cartography section stationed at Westover AFB in 1961. At Hapgood's request, they had studied both Piri Reis and Oronce Finé maps during their off-duty hours, concluding that both were compiled from original source maps of Antarctica at a time when it was relatively free of ice, supporting Hapgood's findings.[3] Hapgood concluded that advanced cartographic knowledge appears on the Piri Reis map and the Oronteus Finaeus map, and must be the result of some unknown and advanced ancient civilization that developed astronomy, navigational instruments, plane geometry and trigonometry, long before Greece or any other known civilization.[7]
According to historians Paul Hoye and Paul Lunde, while Hapgood's work garnered some enthusiasm and praise for its thoroughness, his revolutionary hypotheses largely met with skepticism and were ignored by most scholars.[7] In the book The Piri Reis Map of 1513 Gregory C. McIntosh examines Hapgood's claims for both maps and states that "they fall short of proving or even strongly suggesting that the Piri Reis map and the Fine map depict the actual outline of Antarctica."[8][9]
Hapgood's unorthodox interpretations such as “Earth Crustal Displacement” were never accepted as valid competing scientific hypotheses, yet his ideas have found popularity in alternative circles. Librarians Rand and Rose Flem-Ath as well as journalist Graham Hancock base portions of their works on Hapgood’s evidence for catastrophe at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum.[1][10] Hapgood's ideas also figure prominently in the 2009 sci-fi/disaster movie, "2012."
Hapgood along with author Erle Stanley Gardner investigated the collection of clay artifacts known as the Acambaro figurines and became convinced they were made thousands of years ago by an unknown culture, a conclusion he acknowledged was rejected by reputable archeologists and paleontologists.[11] The figurines, which most archaeologists dismiss as an elaborate hoax, depict humans interacting with dinosaurs and various other "monsters" such as horned men. In the introduction to later editions of Hapgood's 1973 book, Mystery in Acambaro, David Hatcher Childress writes that Hapgood was convinced that they were authentic ancient artifacts which indicated that men and dinosaurs had cohabited together in the recent past, and that dinosaurs had not become extinct many millions of years ago.[1][12]
Actively interested in parapsychology and spirit communication, Hapgood spent a decade working with the New England medium Elwood Babbitt in attempts to make contact with notable figures from the past. Hapgood audiotaped and transcribed a number of Babbitt's "trance lectures" which purported to come from Jesus, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, and the Hindu god Vishnu,[13] using the material to publish his final three books:Voices of Spirit, Through the Psychic Experience of Elwood Babbitt (1975), Talks with Christ and His Teachers Through the Psychic Gift of Elwood Babbitt (1981), and The God Within: a Testament of Vishnu, a Handbook for the Spiritual Renaissance (1982). [1]