On March 17, 1959, the U.S.S. Skate, a nuclear submarine, broke through the dense ice of the North Pole. Moments later, a group of submariners stepped from the vessel, one of them carrying an urn containing human ashes. They bowed their heads in the howling wind as their commander recited a prayer:
“On this day we pay humble tribute to one of the great men of our century. His indomitable will, his adventurous spirit, his simplicity, and his courage have all set high marks for those of us who follow him. He spent his life in the noblest of callings, the attempt to broaden the horizons of the minds of men.” The urn was opened, the ashes sprinkled into the air, and “the rifles cracked three times in a last salute.”
It is difficult to imagine a more eccentric ceremony. However, it was a perfect send-off for the Australian explorer Sir George “Hubert” Wilkins, whose life rivaled the most imaginative fiction.
Born in 1888, Wilkins grew up on a lonely farm 100 miles north of Adelaide, plowing the dusty fields by day and devouring books—a diverse mix of scripture, Jules Verne, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Charles Darwin—by night. After an extreme drought hit Australia in 1901 and killed much of his family’s livestock, Wilkins began reading more about climate science, hoping to one day prevent similar calamities. This interest in the weather quickly grew into one of the two obsessions that would steer the course of his life.
Wilkins’s other obsession stemmed from his relationship with his Aboriginal neighbors, members of the Ngadjuri tribe. Much of the local white population looked down upon them, judging their ancient customs and close connection with nature as primitive. Wilkins, however, saw them as equals and admired their relationship with the natural world.
He was particularly impressed by their demonstration of extrasensory perception (ESP), which Wilkins described in his book, Thoughts Through Space, as “knowing of some event which was taking place miles beyond their range of sight and hearing.” In Wilkins’s view, the Ngadjuri’s telepathic abilities seemed to ignore earthly physics. It caused him to wonder if they were tapping into spiritual powers that all humans possessed but had lost over time as modern life and new technologies distracted them.
A Heroic Age
Wilkins came of age toward the end of what is known as “the heroic age of Arctic exploration,” a mad scramble to map the few remaining blank spaces on world maps, especially around the North and South Poles. With his interest in climate science, Wilkins hoped to fill these desolate places with research stations that would provide “a comprehensive international weather service,” as he described it. But there was also the prospect of finding spiritual fulfillment. “When we travel in the lonely, desolate spaces of the polar regions we have time for contemplation,” Wilkins later wrote. “There we feel conscious of the greatness of God.”
It was not, however, a straight path that led to his becoming an explorer. There was a stint in a traveling carnival, then a job as a newsreel cameraman that took him to 27 different countries over 18 months, followed by a role as a photographer covering the First Balkan War, in 1913. Throughout these adventures, Wilkins’s interest in the paranormal grew. During his time as a cameraman he’d become acquainted with Arthur Conan Doyle, whose interest in mysterious phenomena stoked his desire to learn more. From then on it wasn’t uncommon to find Wilkins observing séances or demonstrations of clairvoyance wherever in the world he might be.
Eventually, in 1913, Wilkins was invited to join Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition, which explored 40,000 square miles of mostly unmapped terrain between the Alaska border and the Beaufort Sea. The three-year journey resulted in several notable discoveries, including lands previously unknown even to the Inuit, but it also saw a ship become icebound and a number of deaths among the expedition’s crew. Nevertheless, Wilkins’s goal of becoming an explorer had been fulfilled.
His new career was interrupted by World War I, in which he served as a combat photographer. If not for the photographic evidence—including an image of the fatal downing of the German ace pilot Baron Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron—the stories of his service would be hard to believe. He was wounded nine times, gassed, and blasted out of the skies while attempting to take aerial reconnaissance photos.
Having survived both a deadly Arctic expedition and a World War, he began working on a proposal for a global network of weather-monitoring stations. But adventure summoned him again when he was asked to join the great explorer Ernest Shackleton on his final expedition to Antarctica, in 1921. This expedition proved ill-fated, too. Shackleton died before reaching the Antarctic, but Wilkins, who was also passionate about ornithology, discovered a new variety of seabird (Wilkins’s bunting), classified a new genus of finch, and found evidence suggesting a geological link between New Zealand and South America.
While exploring the world, Wilkins continued to explore the mind. Indeed, his polar-expedition crew-mates frequently noted his interest in ESP. “He seemed to be, and regarded himself as, a natural receiver of radio,” remembered Douglas Jeffrey, the navigator on Shackleton’s expedition. “He could be far away from the radio room and pick up the radio messages as they came over the receiving sets inside the room. I’ve heard of this quality in people before, but only saw it in his case.”
Despite—or perhaps because of—the Shackleton expedition’s relative failure, it gave Wilkins the idea of using airplanes for exploration. After teaming with Ben Eielson—a gifted pilot from North Dakota—Wilkins spent the next two years accomplishing multiple death-defying flights in the polar regions. The duo’s most impressive achievement occurred in April 1928 with the first trans-Arctic flight in history, a 20-hour journey over the very top of the globe, from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Spitsbergen, Norway.
It brought the men fame, and after marrying the Australian actress and Broadway star Suzanne Bennett, Wilkins took up residence in New York City, becoming friends with the film director Cecil B. DeMille, who shared his enthusiasm for spiritualism and the paranormal.
He was wounded nine times, gassed, and blasted out of the skies.
Unfortunately, Wilkins’s partnership with Eielson came to an end just 19 months after their historic achievement, when Eielson was killed in an airplane crash. Wilkins was profoundly affected by this loss, announcing shortly thereafter that he was finished with flying. He believed he’d accomplished all he could from the air.
Lingering at the back of his mind was a conversation he’d had with Vilhjalmur Stefansson years earlier, during which his old expedition leader expressed doubts about aviation’s exploration potential. “You cannot learn much more oceanography flying over an ocean than you learn botany flying over a botanical garden,” Stefansson had told him. Instead, he had advocated the use of submarines. With this in mind, Wilkins announced his intent to embark on the most ambitious—and insane—submarine voyage in history. Instead of flying above it, he would now travel beneath the North Pole.
On Thin Ice
In 1930, after raising funds from multiple investors—including the media mogul William Randolph Hearst, who wanted exclusive rights to the story—Wilkins acquired a broken-down rust bucket of a submarine that was being decommissioned by the U.S. Navy. He renamed it Nautilus, after the vessel in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, at an official ceremony attended by Verne’s grandson. Walt Disney, who would adapt Verne’s book into a movie 24 years later, wished Wilkins well by sending him a drawing of Mickey Mouse waving from the conning tower of a submarine.
The Nautilus was fitted with several features to assist it on its Arctic mission—such as drills that would allow it to pierce the ice overhead—but the voyage quickly descended into disaster. Seawater flooded the generators, the wiring proved faulty, and a broken bilge pump resulted in sewage and oil swirling around the crew’s feet. Wilkins made it only a short distance beneath the polar ice before he was forced to turn back. Hearst, no doubt worried that Wilkins’s death would reflect poorly on him, sent numerous radio messages demanding that the mission be aborted.
Wilkins was undeterred. Upon returning home he looked for a better submarine, but the damage to his reputation from the Nautilus debacle hampered his ability to get funding. With financiers remaining skeptical of a new submarine journey, Wilkins turned to study the most mysterious frontier of all: the human mind.
Seawater flooded the generators, the wiring proved faulty, and a broken bilge pump resulted in sewage and oil swirling around the crew’s feet.
One of Wilkins’s fellow paranormal enthusiasts was the New York writer and screenwriter Harold Sherman. He and Wilkins had long discussed ways to test their notions of ESP. Then, in 1937, an opportunity presented itself.
In August of that year, Wilkins was contacted by the Soviet government, which sought his assistance on a search-and-rescue mission to find the pilot Sigizmund Levanevsky, a pioneer in long-range flight who had gone missing over the Arctic Ocean. As Wilkins packed his bags for Siberia, Sherman approached him with a proposal.
The two of them would schedule 30-minute blocks of time, three nights a week, in which they would attempt to communicate with each other telepathically while Wilkins was away. Wilkins would keep a diary of whatever thoughts he was sending from Siberia while Sherman would keep his own, writing down what came to his mind during those periods. Sherman would then give his diary to an independent verifier, who would later compare them with Wilkins’s diary. Outside witnesses were enlisted to observe Sherman and ensure the two men weren’t pulling any funny business.
Wilkins didn’t find any trace of Levanevsky during seven months of looking, but he did manage numerous feats that few aviators of his day would have dared to attempt—all while logging more than 40,000 miles of flying over mostly unmapped portions of the Arctic Ocean, frequently navigating solely by moonlight. In one instance, using instruments alone, he flew a mission that covered over 2,800 miles and lasted nearly 20 hours—longer than his historic flight over the Arctic—touching back down with only 10 minutes of fuel remaining.
He also dutifully carried out his ESP experiment with Sherman. Once he returned to the United States and their respective diaries were compared, it turned out that an astonishing 60 percent of the men’s thoughts had overlapped. Perhaps this was a result of their sharing so many interests, but it was nonetheless a startling percentage.
Many were skeptical of that figure, but Wilkins urged them to keep an open mind. “We may not have proved that telepathy between two people at some distance apart is beyond doubt,” Wilkins wrote, “but I was personally pleased to have been engaged in the experiment, and feel that we have proved that the subject is entirely worthy of much further attention.”
Encouraged by his findings, Wilkins was eager to discover more mysteries of the human mind—and perhaps the forces beyond it.
The Vastness of Space
He became friendly with Dr. William Sadler, a Chicago-based surgeon and psychiatry professor who had spent many years establishing a reputation as a debunker of psychics and spiritual mediums. There was one case, however, that Sadler couldn’t crack.
It involved a patient who would fall asleep and then, in a trance-like state, speak about humanity’s origins and place in the universe. Upon waking, the patient—whose identity Sadler never revealed—had no recollection of his utterances. Over 18 years, Sadler recorded the commentary in notebooks, speculating that his patient was channeling messages originating from “a vast order of alleged beings who claim to come from other planets to visit this world.”
Sadler eventually began sharing his notes with a select group, known as “the Seventy,” that included Wilkins. Wilkins was astonished. “To me,” he wrote to Sadler, “it is the first connected, clear exposition of the faith—the need for faith and the rewards of faith, a combination of considerations which seem to confront everyone no matter what race or colour, and notwithstanding their stature of education.”
Along with the rest of the Seventy, Wilkins began organizing the pronouncements into a book. During this time, he was reluctant to speak publicly about his spiritual beliefs, although he was happy to field questions if asked. One interlocutor was the young L. Ron Hubbard, who would later establish the Church of Scientology—an organization professing many similar beliefs to those held by the Seventy.
The Seventy’s efforts were finally published in 1955. Surpassing 2,000 pages, The Urantia Book defies any sort of easy summary, other than to say it attempts to combine science, religion, and philosophy into one coherent belief structure.
Wilkins carried his copy everywhere, even though it weighed more than four pounds. Of the book’s many, many passages, this was one of Wilkins’s favorites: “Man must learn to feast on uncertainty, fatten on disappointment, enthuse over apparent defeat, to invigorate in the presence of difficulties, to exhibit indomitable courage in the face of immensity, and exercise faith when confronted with the challenge of the inexplicable.”
“A vast order of alleged beings who claim to come from other planets to visit this world.”
Such New Age pronouncements saw The Urantia Book attract a cult following in the 1960s, counting among its fans Jerry Garcia and Jimi Hendrix, who took the book on tour with him.
After its publication, Wilkins willingly discussed the book in public and declared it his religion. In 1957, he consulted on Operation Deep Freeze, a series of U.S. military expeditions to Antarctica. James Waldron, a Navy helicopter pilot who bunked with Wilkins, recollected in his memoir:
“[Wilkins] always seemed to be reading from a Bible-sized book, and when I questioned him about it he told me that he belonged to a ‘religion’ that welcomed only a handful of members from each world throughout the universe.... He believed that the various members of this ‘religion’ communicated telepathically over the vastness of space.”
At the same time, Wilkins was trying to help countries across the earth communicate by more traditional means. That same year, he participated in an effort known as the International Geophysical Year, a collaboration between 12 countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, to build 50 research stations in Antarctica—a giant step in Wilkins’s lifelong dream to create “a comprehensive international weather service.” This collaboration helped lay the groundwork for the Antarctica Treaty, a diplomatic agreement designating Antarctica as a peaceful zone dedicated to scientific research.
As he approached 70, Wilkins appeared hale and hearty, and in 1958 he even appeared on the popular game show What’s My Line? But a few months later he was dead from an apparent heart attack. Due to his robust-seeming health and secretive government consulting work—during World War II he worked for the O.S.S., predecessor to the C.I.A.—some speculated that foul play was responsible.
One suspicious detail was that Wilkins’s body was found on the floor of his hotel room, neatly dressed in a suit and tie, his hands clasped peacefully over his chest—almost as if he’d prepared for the moment. According to his wife, there was even a small smile on his face. With everything arranged just so, the death almost seemed planned—or staged.
Yet perhaps it was not so strange an end. “To face death is not so very terrifying,” Wilkins had written, “for death is still the great adventure. The really trying ordeal is to face the uncertainty of living.”
Reid Mitenbuler is the author of Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation and Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age. You can read his essays on the making of these books here and here