HOLLOW EARTH
EXPLORATION CLUB

Spent most of the last few nights trying to figure out who “Pennington” was.

Turns out he was real.

Which honestly just made this whole thing weirder.

Dr. Aldus R. Pennington.
Geologist.
Cambridge educated from what I can piece together.
Mostly worked in geomagnetic survey and polar geology.

Not some fringe crackpot either.

That’s the part that keeps bothering me.

Managed to track down two surviving publications tied to him.

• Magnetic Irregularities in Northern Crustal Surveys
• On Repeating Compass Deviation During Polar Transit

Both looked like they’d been through hell. Water stains. Library markings. Archive numbers scribbled all over them.

One had half the spine held together with what looked like ancient tape and bad decisions.

Still readable though.

Barely.

And the papers themselves are dry as hell.

Magnetic drift. Navigation inconsistencies. Survey correction work. Polar transit measurements.

Basically the kind of stuff normal people would read for five minutes before falling unconscious in a recliner.

But his name keeps showing up around reports involving:

• compass instability
• recalculated measurements
• atmospheric distortion
• survey disagreements between teams

And apparently he had a reputation for refusing to let people “clean up” inconsistent field data after expeditions ended.

Found one surviving archive reference describing him as:

“intolerant of retrospective correction practices.”

Translation: he got pissed when people changed numbers afterward to make reports line up cleaner.

Honestly fair.

What’s really getting me now is how fast this guy seemed to age.

The publication photo from the early 30s looks like a normal academic.

The later field image looks like a completely different person.

By the 40s he looks twenty years older than he should.

Either polar work ages people like milk or this guy stopped sleeping sometime around 1938.

Still trying to figure out why my grandfather circled him specifically.

No solid connection yet.

But I don’t think that photo ended up in the footlocker by accident either.