Long Ago
Long ago, there were people who believed the Earth was hollow—a thin outer shell and a void in the center. There are still people who believe in this void, except they say creatures from outer space live there. Others have different fears. in the 1960s, the Congress of the United States was considering legislation to finance the drilling of a test well under the ocean in an effort to penetrate the ocean floor and sample the underlying material. Several concerned people wrote letters telling their senators and representatives
that if such a hole were bored, it would unplug the stop so to speak,
and all the ocean's water would drain away into the middle of the
Earth!
(The Five Biggest Ideas in Science, Charles Wynn and Arthur Wiggins, 1997, p. 65)
