William Siegmeister was a Russian Jew who emigrated to New York as a teenager in the mid-1890s. Not long after he married fellow emigrée Rebecca (“Bessie”), and worked as a pharmacist while taking classes at Fordham to become an otolaryngologist. William and Bessie had two sons: Walter in 1903, and younger son Elie in 1909.

The Siegmeisters were secular Jews and free-thinkers who associated with socialists and anarchists. While this undoubtedly disappointed some distant Tevye-like patriarch muttering about tradition, that same authority figure would have been somewhat mollified by the fact that the Siegmeisters achieved tremendous financial success that pulled them into Brooklyn’s upper class.

If there was anything that the Siegmeisters believed in, it was education. They made sure their boys took advantage of every educational opportunity available to them. Younger brother Elie studied music at Columbia and Julliard, graduated cum laude, and became a world-famous composer and music educator. And if you’re wondering why we’re talking about the younger brother first, that’s because we’re going to spend the rest of this episode focusing his older brother, the screw-up.

Where to start with Walter Siegmeister? His story is bizarre and unusual, filled with twists and turns you could never see coming. Elie once said his brother was “fifty years ahead of his time” but he may have just been trying to be nice.

So maybe we just start at the beginning.

Fifty Years Ahead of His Time

Walter Siegmeister was not exactly a musical genius, but he was no slouch in the brains department either. He was a voracious reader who devoured anything he could get his hands on, loved conversing with his parents’ bohemian and intellectual friends, received honors all throughout high school, and attended Columbia where he graduated with honors in 1924.

The next six years of his life are a bit of a mystery. Most of the information we have comes from unreliable sources with failing memories or individual agendas to push. All we can say for sure is that he had no steady employment, and seems to have been sponging off his parents so he could travel and explore his intellectual interests.

How wide varied those intellectual interests were!

• He was an avid reader of the Bible but also studied other religions including Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Rosicrucianism. Personally he seems to have been an agnostic materialist, though he also believed faith traditions could be mined for universal and hidden truths.
• He was fascinated by the reproductive system. Not because he liked sex, mind you, but because he was revolted by it and may have been a life-long celibate.
• He was obsessed with the developing field of nutritional science. He may have even traveled to Germany to study biochemistry. (At least, that’s what he claimed.)
• Politically, he started off as a socialist but eventually became drawn to the idea of anarcho-primitivism.

After half a decade of faffing about, Walter returned to Brooklyn in the 1920s to resume his studies at New York University, where he received a Master of Arts in Education in 1931 and a PhD in the same field in May 1932. (If you are curious, his thesis was on the pedagogical methods of occultist Rudolf Steiner.)

Let me be blunt when I say that giving Walter Siegmeister a PhD was a terrible idea. Tbough he did well in academic settings he was primarily an autodidact, a self-educator. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but Walter was also a bit of an egocentric narcissist. He was convinced that his limited expertise in the field of education made him an expert in every other field he chose to apply himself to. No matter how half-baked or ill-informed his ideas were.

And oh boy did Dr. Walter Siegmeister have a lot of half-baked, ill-informed ideas.

The New Civilization Pioneers

Shortly before graduation Siegmeister started publishing a newsletter, The Dawn, to help share the strange ideas he had gleaned from his esoteric studies. At the time, this boiled down to a few big ideas:

• “Agriculture is the foundation of the nation’s well-being and when this foundation is undermined, the structure cannot stand.”
• The physical and social ills of the human condition could be cured by returning to the soil and the state of nature. This meant abandoning cities for the agrarian communities of our ancestors.
• “Returning to a state of nature” also also meant getting naked. Animals are natural and they don’t wear clothes, so you shouldn’t either.
• Human beings need to eat a diet of a “physiological necessity” rather than catering to “the appetites of a perverted palate.” That meant no cooked food. Our nearest evolutionary ancestors are vegetarians, so that also meant humans should be vegetarian as well.

To put it as simply as possible: Dr. Walter Siegmeister was a vegetarian agrarian communist nudist.

The Dawn gained a small readership and became the nucleus of a movement, the New Civilization Pioneers. In the summer of 1932 they started an experimental commune outside Mount Olive, New Jersey. It went… okay? It attracted several hundred nudists, made a few half-hearted attempts at farming, and sort of settled into a poverty-level subsistence that could not be self-sustaining in the long run. If the New Civilization Pioneers were to survive, they would need to do one of two things. They would either need to get better at farming, or they would need to start recruiting more members and taking their stuff.

The first was hard, and the second w as easy.

Siegmeister liked easy. He began reaching out to other like-minded groups to see if they’d be interested in joining him.

First Siegmeister reached out to the Russo-Canadian Doukhobors, who I am going to reductively describe as “Russian Mennonites” because if I have to explain them in detail we’ll be here all day. More specifically, he reached out to a radical splinter sect of the Doukhobors, the Sons of Freedom, who were attempting to solve their differences with the Canadian government through mass protest, public nudism, and terrorist campaigns that included arson and bombings.

Siegmeister made no attempt to understand the Doukhobor’s complex Orthodox theology or the Sons of Freedom’s specific political grievances. To them, nudism was a means, not an end. To him they were nudists sometimes, and he naively believed that would be enough to lure them to Mount Olive.

Surprisingly, it did not work.

Then he targeted the Llanites of Louisiana. The Llano del Rio Colony had been founded outside Los Angeles in 1914 as a way to test the ideas of socialist Job Harriman. It soon realized that when you guarantee a basic income to everyone regardless of how hard they work you wind up with a lot of people who are only there for a hand-out. The Llano Colony seemed stable to outsiders but had been collapsing for years. It survived for about a decade by aggressively recruiting new members and taking their stuff. When the California attorney general started to crack down on that, the colony relocated to Louisiana to take advantage of the lower cost of living (and also to shed the useless hangers-on who could not afford to move).

Siegmeister’s approach to the Llanites was a bit more subtle. He started contributing articles about the science of agriculture to the Llano Colonist newspaper, with each one gradually ramping up the sales pitch for the New Civilization Pioneers.

The Llanites were always open to new blood, but soon realized that Siegmeister was not planning on joining them and was actively trying to poach their members. They also realized that he had no idea what he was talking about. (At one point he declared no serious research had ever been done on agriculture in the American South. George Washington Carver would have been rolling in his grave, if he hadn’t still been alive.) Eventually they just started ignoring him.

Things did not look good at Mount Olive.

The New Civilization Pioneers Go Bananas

And then, a death in the family. Dr. William Siegmeister passed away in September 1932.

It was a sad day for Walter emotionally, but a great day for Walter financially. His father’s generous life insurance policy and savvy investments meant that his oldest son received a $200 check from the estate every month for the rest of his life. (That doesn’t sound like much, but $200 in 1932 is the equivalent of about $5,000 in 2025.)

Well. What should every good communard do when they come into money? Build a better commune, of course!

Siegmeister and the New Civilization Pioneers pooled their cash to purchase 4,000 acres of land on Orange Key, off of Panama’s Atlantic Coast. (English sources only say “Orange Key” so I’m not sure whether they mean Isla Naranjo Abajo or Isla Naranjo Arriba.)

The move to Panama would give the New Civilization Pioneers the room they needed to expand and thrive. Not only that, the new colony would be miles away from modern civilization, allowing them to let their freak flags fly and explore strange new ideas.

How strange? Well, here’s a quote from Professor Juan-Ramon Wilkins, a doctor of naturopathy…

We will drink no water. Water forms mineral incrustations in the body, as in a tea-kettle. We will derive our water from fruits. We will eliminate love and romance. Romance is really nothing but an irritation of the nervous system. Elimination of meat from the diet removes that irritation. That does not mean that we do not wish to have children to carry out our ideals of living. On the contrary — but in this matter we will follow the habits of the gorilla, which alters its diet during the mating season. We will only wear little clothing, possibly only shorts and sandals. Some will live nude, although it is not a nudist movement. There will be no toothpaste or soap. We will clean our teeth with the juice of the orange. And we will wash with clear water. We will let our hair grow. It improves thinking, since it stimulates the pineal and pituitary glands and it attracts ether waves. Vegetables will be taboo in our living methods. The gorillas never eat them. Herbs are for animals that bend downward. Roots are for animals with snouts. It is a biologcal fact that man is an upright vertebrate animal, which reaches into the trees for his livelihood. Our foodstuffs will consist of bread fruits, papayas, cocoanuts, bananas, and oranges. The winds of the ocean will be rich in iodine and potassium. And we will have all of the elements of an ideal diet.

And here’s another quote from Jacob N. Goldwasser, doctor of orthopathy…

Our new fruitarian colony will be a second Garden of Eden. Nudistic? No! We will wear shorts and sandals. We will not cut our hair, because in cutting your hair you lose a lot of valuable minerals. To pass our time we will go on hikes and have amateur theatricals… Nuts? No, just fruits.

Do men have fur all over them? Man is a tropical animal and must live where his skin can breathe all year ’round, and where fruit ripens on the trees so he can have his natural diet. I tried for years to live exclusively on fruit both back in Hugo (OK) and in New York, but the fruit for sale in New York was picked while unripe and does not have enough proteins.

The New Civilization Pioneers is an organization which has a growing membership. Dr. Walter Siegmeister, an orthopath, and Doctor Wilkins of the School of Naturopathy, left for Panama recently to inspect the colony site, 4,000 acres of banana trees and pineapples. Also coconuts. We estimate that each acre in time will support three to four families. But we do not intend to have any families. We believe in parthenogenesis, birth without previous romance, you understand. Fathers will not be necessary to be a race living in the sun, which is the principle of fertility. We expect it will take about 10 years to work that out. In the meantime we will have an annual mating season like the brides of the chimpanzees. Isn’t that finer than being married? Being married is like going to the country. Once a year for a few weeks is enough. I was once married but my wife did not share my views about this diet. You see, if you stick to this diet you are not very romantic. So we separated. We are against bread. Bread is made from grains and grains which are made to be eaten by birds which have gizzards. Have you a gizzard? Our new fruitarian colony will be a second garden of Eden.

So, here’s a quick summary of what Professor Wilkins and Dr. Goldwasser just said.

• Everyone will be as naked as possible.
• The colony will have no industry or agriculture.
• They will only eat fruit that they can pick off trees.
• They will not drink water.
• Any nutrients missing from their diet will be provided by the sea breeze.
• There will be no sex because it drained your vital juices.
• Colonists will reproduce parthenogenetically.

While not mentioned by Wilkins or Goldwasser, the New Civilization Pioneers’ promotional materials implied this lifestyle would allow the colonists to live forever.

To summarize, Seigmeister and the New Civilization Pioneers had evolved from vegetarian agrarian communist nudists into celibate fruitarian breatharian anarcho-promitivist nudist… wackadoos.

Well, at least the colony was in the hands of three capable… doctors? Or not, as it turned out. (Just in case the bits about ether waves stimulating our pineal glands hadn’t tipped you off.) Naturopathy is just a blanket term for a variety of “alternative” medical traditions. Orthopathy is naturopathy but focusing more on diet fads like raw food and fasting.

At least they had Dr. Siegmeister and his doctorate in education. Though by this point he was also claiming to be a doctor of threpsology, which is also not a real thing. But the important thing is he’d read a lot of books about it.

A colony founded by city slickers and devoted to either alternative medicine, nudism, fruitarianism, or anarcho-primivitivism was always going to have a rough go of it. A colony devoted to all of these principles, run by three aspiring RFK Jrs., was doomed to failure.

(Especially since the colony’s leaders had seriously underestimated how much land is required to maintain a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and they were also proposing to do away with the hunting. There’s also the problem that a fruitarian diet will lead to serious and possibly deadly nutritional deficiencies, as well as unspeakably foul-smelling squirty poops.)

To their credit, they really did try to make a go of it. Ramon-Wilkins took his family down to the islands in October 1933, and Goldwasser followed shortly after . The idea was that the first wave of colonists would prepare the land, so it would be ready for Siegmeister to bring down a much larger second wave of colonists ready to unleash their inner ape.

Siegmeister made it down eventually.

He does not seem to have brought anyone else with him.

Not for lack of trying, mind you. He did an enormous press blitz, sending press releases to everyone he could think of. Even the Doukhobors. No one was biting.

As Siegmeister grew desperate he even started downplaying the wackadoo aspects of the colony, instead claiming the colony would be an economic powerhouse, home to a metropolis larger than any American city. I don’t how he thought a group of anarcho-primitivists could make that happen. Or why any capitalist who found themselves on an island surrounded by naked weirdos trying to live like gorillas wouldn’t immediately ask for their money back.

Not that it mattered, because that appeal didn’t work either. The New Civilization Pioneers’ colony in Panama went under in less than a year and the organization did not outlive it.

At least we got an iconic photo of Siegmeister out of it, with a big bushy black beard and slicked back hair that made him look like Rasputin, stripped down to his shorts and hammering away at a typewriter in the middle of the jungle.

Biosophy

When the Panama colony collapsed Walter Siegmeister did not return to Brooklyn. Instead he moved to Florida and spent the next few years living the life of a beach bum: swimming, sunbathing, eating fresh fruit, and letting it all hang out.

As Siegmeister relaxed he attempted to reconcile his strange, unusual, and seemingly unrelated ideas into a coherent philosophy. The end result was a “new scientific religion of hygiene and eugenic living” which he called Biological Philosophy, or Biosophy for short.

(Which you should not confuse with any of the other movements called Biosophy, which are not related to this Biosophy in any way.)

…in place of an imaginary heaven after death for departed souls, Biosophy offers a real Earthly Paradise to be enjoyed during this life. In fact, Biosophy is the first religion of the world to offer such an Earthly Paradise and to make its chief concern to make this life happy, healthy and long-extended, rather than bother about the after-death fate of the souls of its followers, while resigning them to a miserable existence during their lives.

Biosophy is a religion without bibles, without superstitions, without theologies, without dogmas, without churches, without priests, without foolish ceremonials, without supernaturalism, and without gods created from the imagination of priests for their own self-aggrandizement.

For the most part Biosophy was nothing new, just a melange of ideas that had been kicking around in the subculture for years: alternative medicine, anarcho-primitivism, communism, fruitarianism, raw foodism, nudism, and abstinence tempered with a healthy dash of mysticism, Theosophy, plain old cultishness, and conspiratorial thinking. There was nothing Siegmeister hadn’t already experimented with and failed at.

What made Biosophy radical was its openly stated goal…

Restore the degenerate human race of the twentieth century to the beautiful and nearly immortal super-race it had been millions of years ago.

Apparently our ancestors were twenty-foot-tall physically perfect super-geniuses who refused to wear clothes and ate only raw food. The invention of civilization had forced them to abandon those practices and as a result we had shrunk physically, intellectually, and spiritually. By convincing us to reject modern society and re-adopt those practices Biosophy aimed to re-create “the very conditions under which the Buddha had been born” and give birth to a new race of supermen.

The idea was insane, straight out of Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril and Theosophy’s enlightened “root races” and pulp science fantasy. But Walter Siegmeister sincerely believed it, and would continue to elaborate on it throughout his life.

The Lake Istokpoga Colony

To promote Biosophy, Siegmeister began publishing newsletters and tracts with names like Diet and Health and Regeneration. In most of them he was careful to downplay the weirder aspects of his philosophy, instead choosing to focus on its purported health benefits.

He promoted the newsletters by taking out ads in the periodicals he was already subscribed to, which is to say, occult newspapers, naturist magazines, publications about alternative medicine, and cheap sci-fi pulps.

This soon brought him into contact with George R. Clements. Clements was a naturopath who wrote under a variety of pseudonyms including “Professor Hilton Hotema” and “Dr. Karl Krider” and “Kenyon Klamonti,” depending on whether his audience were health food nuts or esoteric religious weirdos.

Clements’ actual hustle was Florida real estate. He made his scratch by selling worthless swampland to out-of-staters and city slickers, promoting it as farm-ready land perfect for growing health food. Or to religious nuts, by promoting it as a great place to build up a cult in isolation.

Siegmeister was an out-of-stater, a city slicker, a health fod nut, and a religious nut. He was the perfect mark.

Clements told Siegmeister he could earn a fortune growing papayas in the Everglades, then use the proceeds to travel the world learning the secrets of the ascended masters. Siegmeister bought it hook, line, and sinker and purchased a large plot of land in Lorida, Florida.

You will not be surprised to learn that he did not make a fortune growing papayas.

You will be surprised to learn that he did not feel cheated. He actually loved it. He loved it so much he decided it was the perfect location for his next venture, and partnered with Clements to sell plots in the The Lake Istokpoga Colony.

Siegmeister and Clements hired hired teenager John Wierlo to serve as the colony’s handyman. Wierlo had his own colony/polycule, “The Children of the Soil,” composed of young people from colder northern states, who lived in a treehouse the swamp where they could throw away their clothes and neat nothing but fruit and pork each other all day. (Sounds fun to me.)

The problem was that “Florida real estate” had been synonymous with “scam” for decades. Only a few dozen people relocated to Lake Istokpoga, and many were not happy with the land once they got there.

Keeping the Lake Istokpoga colony functioning stretched Siegmeister’s finances, so he turned to other hustles to make ends meet. His primary sideline was selling health food through the mail. Well, I say health food. In reality he was buying dry animal feed in bulk, then repackaging and relabeling it as health food. He knew it was a scam, but justified his actions saying his ultimate goal was to help mankind and therefore the ends justified the means.

He would wind up doing that a lot.

One of his other products was a syrup of soy lecithin, which he marketed as a superfood with practically unlimited health benefits. Now, I don’t know how much you know about lecithin, but you should know is that while it’s a dandy emulsifier and a generally safe food additive, its health benefits are negligible and scientists already knew that.

Anyway, it turns out there weren’t a lot of people with the cash to relocate to Florida in the middle of the Great Depression. And fewer people interested in taking megadoses of lecithin.

In 1940 the Lake Istokpoga Colony collapsed for a few reasons.

• Several of the families who had bought plots near the colony were suing Siegmeister and Clements for misrepresenting the quality of the soil.
• Those who had come to the colony to live communally were mad at Siegmeister, who forced them to do tasks that benefitted him personally but not the colony in general.
• A harsh winter frost destroyed most of the colony’s crops forcing them to buy produce from outsiders.
• Most importantly the Food and Drug Administration and the Post Office became aware of Siegmeister’s unproven claims about the health benefits of lecithin. Their investigation led them back to Siegmeister’s equally dubious health and fitness newsletters and his scammy real estate business. They got an injunction that prevented him from using the mail, and began putting together a case for a fraud prosecution.

John Wierlo was having a bad year, too. Several members of the Children of the Soil had been hospitalized for severe malnutrition because it turns out humans can’t live on fruit alone. Another had died under mysterious circumstances, having either fallen out of the treehouse in her sleep or being savagely beaten before being pushed out of the treehouse. He could also see the way the political winds were blowing, and knew that when the United States entered World War II he was prime draft material.

Wierlo decided he could solve all his problems by leaving the country, and moved to Ecuador with the remaining members of his polycule. Siegmeister thought that sounded like a fine idea and followed them.

The Pan-American Society for Tropical Research

Siegmeister liked Ecuador. He liked it a lot. He decided it was the perfect place for, get this, a new Biosophical colony.

Recruits were becoming harder and harder to come by. Perversely, Biosophy’s embrace of a wide spectrum of fringe ideas actually narrowed its appeal, because there was always some aspect of it that someone could object to. Siegmeister realized that in order to reach a wider audience, he would have to hook them with something innocuous and gently ease them into the weirdness.

To that end, he partnered with journalist J.M. Sheppard to concoct a hoax that played out in slow motion over three years in the pages of The American Weekly. (If don’t know what that is, The American Weekly was a tabloid magazine that used to come with the Sunday paper, a more lurid version of Parade. If you don’t know what a Sunday paper is, ask your grandparents.)

The first installment of the hoax, “Blonde Girl Hermit of the Jungle”, dropped in December 1942.

Sheppard, presenting himself as a representative of the fictitious “Pan-American Society for Tropical Research,” recounted the tale of Dick and Marian Windish. The Windishes had been told by a college professor that a raw food diet would make them immortal. That reminded them of their childhood hero Rima the Jungle Girl, of W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, who gained virtual super-powers from a vegetarian diet. The Windishes decided they wanted to live forever, so they moved to Ecuador to begin living as fruitarian nudists. They asked Sheppard to find them some remote patch of jungle where they could escape the corrupting influence of the modern world, and he obliged.

When Sheppard went to check in on the Windishes later, Dick had died of dysentery but Marian had been completely transformed, “bronze-skinned, her golden hair now platinum blond from the tropical sun, her lovely body streamlined, but with all the curves exactly in the right places.” She took Sheppard on a tour of her Swiss Family Robinson-style treehouse and charged Sheppard with helping her find the ideal mate.

My husband must be a man who loves nature, hates money and everything that money buys or stands for. He must find the joy in nature’s world. He must travel on his own feet, discard all clothing, work only with the Earth to get his food from plants and trees, and never employ beasts of burden to do his work.

That’s where part one ends.

The article was a hit, partly because it featured sexed-up photos and leering painted illustrations of Marian Windish. The American Weekly received hundreds of letters from men volunteering to be he husband.

Marian, by the way, was a real person, a member of Wierlo’s Children of the Soil. She was pretty, though less “savage jungle goddess” and more “the most beautiful girl in the room.” She was also married, all of her brothers were still alive, and none of them were happy to be featured in the article.

Which may explain why Sheppard and Siegmeister decided to speed things up again in the second installment, “Hope to Breed a Super-Race in Ecuador’s Secret Jungles,” which dropped six months later in May 1943.

The article claimed that Windish had finally found her “perfect man,” the “ideal Adam” to her “bountiful Eve”: John Wierlo. Sheppard proved to be an equal opportunity ogler, objectifying Wierlo in the same way that he had earlier objectified Windish: “200 pounds of solid bone and muscle, clad in native garb after two years preparation in the jungle, living on uncooked food.”

Sheppard th en pulled back the curtain to reveal that Windish and Wierlo were not just intended to be a metaphorical Adam and Eve, but the literal genesis of a new super-race. Siegmeister was introduced as the man behind the curtain, a scientist with degrees in eugenics, biochemistry, and endocrinology (which, uh, he did not have). The good doctor blathered on for several columns, explaining his master plan…

Yes, Mr. Sheppard. What I have told you is true. I have come to Ecuador to oversee the creation of a Master Child, the father of a new race, who will restore order in this world of Chaos. This Father of a New Race will be the result of my twenty years of study in the sciences of eugenics, biochemistry, and endocrinology. And you, sir have precipitated my plans by writing your story about the woman whom I had selected to be the mother of this super-child — Marian Windish, who has lived now for two years in the jungles of Ecuador a life that I designed years ago for her.

The new race will be sun-worshippers, but they will not pray to the sun nor offer sacrifices. It will be only to keep ever present in their minds the fundamental truth that all life comes primarily from the sun, one of the basic facts essential to understanding of life and how to live. There is no more to religion in this than when a father takes his boy to see the mighty waterfall which operates the power plant that supplies the electric current for his home town.

It is not the world that is wrong, but the people in it, and the way they have made their world. What we need is a better race that can live properly right where they are… Our super-race community is going to make the rest of the world envious of its riches and come to take them. There will be no resistance; they will be welcome; in fact, that is just what we want. They will find no material possessions worth carrying away, for our riches will be within ourselfs, in health, happiness, and understanding. We can and will gladly give them everything we have, including the know-how to be like us — and yet we will have lost nothing.

Fro m there it becomes a sales pitch for potential recruits, suggesting that anyone who wanted to hang out with beautiful jungle goddesses and chiseled jungle hunks should come down to Ecuador and buy some land. If they proved worthy after a trial period they would eventually join Wierlo and Windish at their camp in “the Valley of the Sun” to live “amidst the ruins of the old Aztec Temple of the Sun God.”

(For some reason the article did not linger on the discovery of an Aztec temple in Ecuador, which would have been the archaeological find of the decade if it were true.)

The article noted it would not be easy. In the jungles all material things were to be forbidden, even clothing. There would be no cooked food. No money. (At least, not after they’d taken everything you’d brought with you.) And probably not even agriculture, which Siegmeister suggested was the origin of the capitalistic impulse and therefore had to be abandoned.

There would also be no attempt to plan or manage the community. If everything was working correctly there should be no need for planning, because nature would provide.

Who are the world’s most diligent planners? The Germans and the Japanese . Planning calls for bureaucracy to administer and a dictator to enforce. You might call this a plan to end all planning.

One has to wonder what Siegmeister and Sheppard were thinking. If the intent was to slow-walk people into the weirdness, they were moving way too fast. If the intent was to lure people to the jungle with hunks and honeys, they had just paired off the ones people were interested in. They did not seem to realize that Siegmeister came off less like as an eccentric genius and more like a mad scientist out of a Republic serial. They certainly did not seem to understand that people in 1943 might be a bit war y of anyone trying to create a “master race” and praising the Germans and Japanese.

The only people who seemed to react to the second article were other super-kooks. Most notable of these was Dr. A.J. Gerlach, who began working with Siegmeister to research nutrition. Gerlach seems to have been an actual scientist… but also seems to have worked for “The Lemurian Fellowship of Los Angeles” so it’s possible his academic credentials were suspect.

Wierlo and Windish were not happy that their names and likenesses were being used to promote this incoherent mess. They refused to cooperate with the hoax, and may threatened to go to the legitimate pre ss and spill the beans.

Also, and this is just me reading between the lines, the US Postal Service may have finally connected the dots between the Walter Siegmeister who w as appearing in the pages of The American Weekly and the Walter Siegmeister they were trying to prosecute for mail fraud.

All of this helps explain why the third and fourth parts of the hoax, “Disaster in Paradise”, which appeared in late December 1944, basically try to shut it all down. Sheppard breathlessly reported how it had all fallen apart.

Wierlo had gone mad with jungle fever and now believed himself to be t he Messiah. Windish had degenerated into a “toothless, emaciated, festering wreck, ahead of her years” while her brothers were either dead, lost in the jungle and presumed dead, or living skeletons, crippled and covered with oozing ulcers.

This seems to have been an attempt to discredit Windish and Wierlo, but it also seemed to undercut the idea that a fruitarian diet was heal thy. So Sheppard made sure she was nursed back to health and gave a little soliloquy about why fruitarianism is still good, actually…

Jack Sheppard, it’s you who are wrong. It isn’t nature or the jungle, its your false civilization that always steps in, with its clothing prudery and interferencee.

…before saying she then ran off with a third man (also not her real-life husband) to practice naked yoga on top of Andean mountaintops.

In the end, the hoax accomplished nothing.

Well, maybe just nothing: it got Sheppard and Siegmeister expelled from Ecuador.

Are You Being Poisoned by the Food You Eat?

Siegmeister slunk back to his homestead in Lorida. It wasn’t long before he was back up to his old tricks.

He resumed his mail-order health food business, expanding his product line beyond lecithin to include “the wonder herb of China” (regular old ginseng) and expensive glass distillators to purify drinking water (basic lab equipment which he purchased cheaply and re-sold after an exorbitant mark-up).

For some reason Siegmeister continued to use his real name, which was stupid because he was still prohibited from using the US Mail and the subject of a pending mail fraud prosecution. It wasn’t long before the Feds got word he was back in town and started sniffing around. Siegmeister fled into the swamp and lived in a pup tent for a few days, then gathered as much of his stuff as he could and fled. He wound up in California.

He was following John Wierlo again. Wierlo had moved out to Big Bear, declared himself to be the reincarnation of John the Baptist, renamed himself Johnny Lovewisdom, and started peddling a combination of fruitarianism and New Age spirituality to bored housewives from Palm Springs. He had been doing quite well for himself, probably because he was still a hunk and a half.

Siegmeister tried to piggyback off of Lovewisdom’s popularity by peddling health food to his followers, and churning out pamphlets about raw foodism and frutarianism with sensational istic titles like “Are You Being Poisoned bny the Food You Eat” a nd “Super-Health through Organic Super-Foods” and “Meet-Eating: A Cause of Disease.”

This time he had the foresight to publish pseudonymously as “Dr. Robert W. Raymond”, who by virtue of not having previously existed was not enjoined from using the mail.

SoCal proved less welcoming than Siegmeister had hoped. Lovewisdom wanted absolutely nothing to do with him and kept pushing him away. On top of that, the area was so full of kooks and weirdos that Siegmeister became lost in the shuffle. It wasn’t long before he decided to pack up shop and move on.

(Here’s where Lovewisdom leaves our story. While he was able to pull together a small following he never truly found mainstream success. In the late 1950s he returned to Ecuador to open a “Propriatory Shelter for the Apocalyptic Camp of Saints” in Vilacamba. There he divided his time between spreading bog-standard New Age wisdom and boinking gullible yet beautiful 20-year-olds. He maintained a fruitarian diet throughout his life despite suffering the effects of severe malnutrition including poor eyesight and loss of motor control. And yet he somehow managed to hang on until the year 2000, when he died at the age of 81.)

The Interplanetary Radio

From there Siegmeister went to Hawaii, where his next attempt to open a fruitarian nudist colony was frustrated by the high cost of real estate. If only he had arrived a decade later he might have been able to make his pitch to the New Age haole coming west from California.

Siegmeister spent the next decade kicking around Central and South America trying to open nudist colonies and selling dubious health food. During this period he used the pseudonym “Dr. Uriel Adriana,” since “Robert W. Raymond” had been banned from using the U.S. Mail.

He also seems to hav e spent more time reading the pulps.

Siegmeister had long drawn inspiration from popular fiction. The American Weekly hoax explicitly cited W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, but also showed clear influences from Henry de Vere Stackpole’s Jo hann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. His ideas about ancient super-races were clearly drawn from Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race. As the years went on he would increasingly draw inspiration from the “Shaver Mystery” hoax which was playing out in the pages of Amazing Stories at the time.

Wherever the pulps went, Siegmeister followed, and in the late 1940s that meant UFOs. While he never stopped promoting fruitarianism and nudism, his sales pitch became increasingly targeted to the UFO subculture. Ads for his products and colonies began to appear in fringe-y magazines like Ray Palmer’s Fate and Mystic, and Gray Barker’s Saucerian Review.

Siegmeister claimed to have encountered a Puerto Rican psychic named “Mayita,” Mayita was a so-called “interplanetary radio,” someone who could channel messages not from the dearly departed, but from extraterrestrials. One of Mayita’s controls was the “Great Mother” who lived on the Sun. Not like those medieval guys from that Rick & Morty episode, though, no, it turns out the Sun was actually quite pleasant and its rays only turned to light and heat when they hit our atmosphere even though that raises the que stion of what they did outside our atmosphere.

The Gr eat Mother was the literal ancestor of all life in the solar system, which she had birthed parthenogenetically some 150,000 years ago. Her giant super-amazons lived on Uranus until a freak accident led to the birth of the first man, Lucifer. Lucifer tricked his sisters into creating more men; invented meat-eating, clothes and war; tried to conquer the solar system and failed (destroying the planet between Jupiter and Mars and creating the asteroid belt in the process); and got banished to Earth to raise our degenerate race of humanity.

Mayita and the Great Mother claimed that a nuclear war would destroy civilization in 1970, which would render the planet itself completely uninhabitable by the year 2000. Thankfully, the Great Mother would send UFOs to relocate purified individuals to Mars, where they would be able to survive from the air itself. These pu rified individuals could be identified by “the degree of phosphorescent brain glow emitted by the pineal gland” created by the oxidation of lecithin.

There are a couple of reasons to believe that this was all a hoax.

• There are no references to Mayita outside of Siegmeister’s writings.
• The way her brand of wackadoo dovetails with Siegmeister’s is too neat to be coincidental. Parthenogenesis is the ideal means of reproduction? Our ancestors were giants? Meat-eating is bad? Lecithin will save humanity? It would make sense for one or two of them those beliefs to overlap, but all of them?
• It doesn’t help that the hoax wears its inspirations on its sleeve. The Great Mother is just one of Theosophy’s Ascended Masters, relocated to another planet. The cosmological origins of evil comes right out of the Shaver Mystery . The idea that friendly space brothers might save us from nuclear armageddon was omnipresent in the UFO subculture at the time.

What does it say about Walter Siegmeister that he would concoct an elaborate hoax involving space aliens and preying on fears of nuclear war, with the ultimate goal of selling more lecithin? Nothing good.

(To be fair, those who knew the man suggest that he actually believed the paranormal crap he was peddling. It may just be that he had a terrible inability to distinguish fact from science fiction.)

Anyway, it didn’t work, and Siegmeister was off to Guatemala to see if his shtick would play there.

It did not.

The New California Subtropical Settlement

In 1955 Siegmeister suddenly came into a large amount of money. This is often referred to as some sort of bequest, but if so it’s not clear from whom — his father had been dead for decades and his mother was still alive. It may be that the money was some sort of one-time payout from his father’s estate, or that one of his mother’s investments had paid off.

The timing couldn’t have been better. That $200 monthly check did not stretch nearly as far in 1955 as it had in 1932. It was still enough that Walter didn’t have to work, especially in Latin America with its lower cost of living, but not enough to allow him to enjoy anything other a lifestyle of genteel pover ty.

Siegmeister took the cash and decided to make one last stab at creating the Biosophical colony of his dreams, where nudist fruitarians would parthenogenetically birth a giant master race. He went down to Brazil and purchased 2,000 acres of land on San Francisco de Sul Island in Santa Caterina State, about halfway between Sāo Paulo and the Uruguayan border.

This was to be the New California Subtropical Settlement.

Here I am establishing a settlement of American vegetarians, organic gardeners, and advanced thinkers anxious to live in a part of the world where alone a New Age can arise.

Siegmeister actually made a point of crafting a different pitch for each market segment he was trying to reach.

• When talking to health food nuts and farmers, he took a page from Clements’ playbook and hyped up the fertility of the land. Apparently the soil of San Francisco was so good that the layabouts could survive just by picking wild fruit, while farmers would hardly have to lift a finger to reap bountiful crops. (This was not true. The land was wild and palatable varietals of fruit were hard to find. It would require a lot of work to clear for farming, and the soil wasn’t anything special.)
• To survivalists he played up the idea that after a nuclear war isolated San Francisco would be one of the last places on Earth to be contaminated by fallout. (This was also not true. Johnny Lovewisdom, of all people, noted that he based this claim on the fact that San Francisco was at the same latitude as a fallout-free zone in Chile. What he did not mention was that Chile was protected by the high Andes. The prevailing ocean and wind currents actually meant San Francisco would get more fallout than most of South America.)
• To UFO enthusiasts and religious freaks he stressed that the low fallout levels would make San Francisco the perfect place to hunker down after a nuclear war, so you could purify yourself by chugging lecithin and waiting for the UFOs to come whisk you to safety on Mars. (I’m not even going to bother to explain why this wasn’t going to happen.)

As usual, until the settlement became profitable Siegmeister made ends meet by selling mail-order health food, in this case, dried banana meal which he marketed as a superfood free from fallout. (Which it wasn’t, plus bananas are naturally radioactive to a very small degree.)

He needed that banana meal money, because he had trouble moving the land. Mostly this was because he was selling the plots at a truly outrage ous markup, ten times or more what he had originally paid for th em. When called out on this, he responded that he was doing this all for the benefit of the humanity, was operating at a loss, and would occasionally give away free plots to people who were interested in Biosophy but could not afford to move to Brazil. (Which were all true to some extent.)

For whatever reason the New California Subtropical Settlement never attracted more than a hundred colonists. Most of them were not Biosophists or fruitarians or UFO enthusiasts but hardcore survivalists who were not terribly interested in Biosophy and who thought Siegmeister was a filthy disgusting beatnik.

Agharta

With his legal problems a continent away, a small settlement puttering along, and a $200 monthly check that went a lot further in rural Brazil, Walter Siegmeister was in a nice stable place for the first time in decades.

He was finally able to take off his shirt, sit down at his typewriter, and start churning out articles, pamphlets, and books by the score. These were usually published under the pseudonym “Raymond W. Bernard”, because “Dr. Urial Adriana” had been banned from using the U.S. Mail. And they touched on almost every topic under the sun.

• He wrote about the health benefits of banana meal and lecithin.
• He wrote about the secret teachings of the Essenes (though he knew nothing about them other than what he had read in articles about the Dead Sea Scrolls).
• He wrote about how Jesus was not a real person but a constructed figure intended to neuter the work of more radical teachers (for which he had no proof, just conspiracy theories).
• He wrote about how parthenogenesis was the ideal means of reproduction.
• He wrote that a life of abstinence was the only way to maintain control over one’s precious bodily fluids and live forever.

His most important work from this period is 1956’s Escape from Destruction, his first real attempt to present Biosophy and his eschatology as a unified whole. On the surface it is a work of atomic age paranoia, primarily concerned with the methods of surviving a nuclear war and concluding, of course, that the best way to do so was to hunker down somewhere until you could be rescued by UFOs. Along the way he introduces people to Mayita, benevolent aliens, ancient super-races, fruitarianism, nudism, celibacy, parthenenogenesis, and more.

What’s interesting about the book is he seems to be waffling on exactly where the UFOs will whisk you to. Previously, he had thought it would be another world, probably Mars. Now he wasn’t so sure, and thought maybe they might whisk you deeper inside our world.

The idea that the ground beneath our feet was home to a vast hidden world of caves and caverns was not a new one; it dated back to antiquity. Siegmeister’s conception of the inner earth tended to draw less on classical models and more on popular fiction. Bulwer-Lytton’s Coming Race lived in vast subterranean caverns, as did the Ascended Masters of Theosophy, the lost civilizations of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar, and the malevolent dero and benevolent tero of the Shaver Mysteries.

He was also influenced by the locals.

In the 1950s Brazilian journalist O.C. Huguenin mashed together UFOlogy and Theosophy and wound up with something like a more benevolent version of the Shaver Mystery. His idea was that UFOs were not extraterrestrial but intraterrestrial in origin, piloted by the descendants of Atlanteans, Hyperboreans, and Lemurians who had survived the great nuclear catastrophe that had sunk their respective continents by fleeing into the inner Earth. They had recently been drawn to the surface the development of nuclear weapons, and were gaslighting us to make us think they were aliens while they monitored and judged our society.

Huguenin’s ideas were popular with Brazilian Theosophists, many of them members of the country’s elite, who picked up the ball and ran with it. Commander Paulo Strauss of the navy claimed the lost city of Agartha was hidden somewhere in the country. Professor Henrique de Souza not only claimed to have met Atlanteans, but to have married one.

Siegmeister was intrigued by how well these ideas fit with his own. He began attending Theosophical Society meetings and arranged to have private conferences with de Souza. (On at least one of these occasions he met de Souza’s wife, supposedly an agelessly beautiful 50-year-old Atlantean but who for all intents and purposes appeared to be an underage girl he was sleeping with.)

In these private conferences de Souza released retails which he had not revealed to the general public. Most notably, he told Siegmeister that the tunnels to Agharta could be found in the Roncador Mountains, and even gave him a secret password that would allow him to gain safe passage from the hostile natives who protected those tunnels.

The thrill of receiving this secret knowledge caused Siegmeister to radically shift his worldview. He now thought Mayita had been wrong; mankind’s salvation would not be extraterrestrial but intraterrestrial. He also decided there was no to need create a new utopia on the Earth, because one already existed inside the Earth. Creating utopias was hard work, after all. Far better to purify oneself and earn admission to one that had already been set up.

In 1960 Siegmeister published a new book variously called Agharta: The Subterranean World, Flying Saucers from the Earth’s Interior, or Nuclear Age Saviors. Calling it new is generous, actually: it was largely copied from Huguenin’s books, which were not available in English. The basic takeaway was that giants from an ancient race lived in a secret inner world, accessible through hidden tunnels, in a perfect utopia with no war, crime, disease, sex, money, clothes, or meat.

The book even named numerous locations where one could gain access the inner world. In addition to tunnels of the Roncador Mountains there were tunnels in Mammoth Cave, beneath the Great Pyramid, and deep inside King Solomon’s Mines. If you found one you could pop on down and visit the Atlanteans in the kingdom of Agharta.

Siegmeister himself claimed to have located these tunnels, though he had yet to reach the inner Earth. But he had talked to many Brazilians who had! Or rather, many Brazilians who had talked to other Brazilians who had. On occasion he had met guides who said they would take him to the inner Earth only to mysteriously disappear. (It never occurred to him that since he was paying top dollar in advance for tales of the inner Earth locals were happy to take it, spin some tall tales, and split before he caught on.)

His sales pitch also changed accordingly.

SURVIVE! LIVE IN SHANGRI-LA!

Famous author, explorer, Dr. Raymond Bernard has discovered paradisiacal subterranean cities of Brazil, inhabited by highly developed people (Atlanteans). Join the Aghartan Order. Entitles to bulletin plus aid in finding sanctuary with these marvelous people. Membership $5 yearly. Or send $1.00 for sample Aghartan Bulletin, complete details.

Despite years of searching, though, Siegmeister never found his portal to Agharta. His calls for assistance also fell on deaf ears; even his fans preferred to look for tunnels closer to home, despite Siegmeister’s warnings that all of the tunnels under the United States were infested with hostile dero.

Masars II

Shortly after the publication of The Subterranean World, Siegmeister began receiving letters from Dr. George Marlo, Director of the St. Louis-based UFO World Research. Or rather, letters from the organization’s secretary Ottmar Kaub, writing on Marlo’s behalf.

Dr. Marlo claimed to be in contact with the inhabitants of the inner earth, 14′ giants who called themselves Terrans. More specifically, he had met Sol-Mar and Zola of Masars II, a subterranean city located deep beneath South Africa. The Terrans had given him dozens of rides on their flying saucers, to both outer and inner space. The inner world was lit by a miniature sun and home to gigantic animals in addition to six vast subterranean cities. On one of these trips he had been appointed the Terran’s ambassador to the surface, primarily because he looked like their king. (Who must have been short, fat, and bald.)

Of course Marlo was not actually a doctor, but a former door-to-door salesman who had discovered conning UFO enthusiasts out of their life savings was far more profitable. He sold memberships to UFO World Research for $3.50, with the primary selling point being that members would get free UFO trips to the inner Earth. (Of course, the rides were always mysteriously canceled at the last second.)

Siegmeister fell for it hook, line, and sinker. He eagerly joined UFO World Research and remained a member for years, even though his promised saucer ride never happened. Somehow government agents, or men in black, or some Terran political intrigue always got in the way.

That did not stop Siegmeister from enthusiastically promoting Marlo to others. He told members of the Aghartan Order that the Terrans would give them free saucer rides from the U.S. to Brazil. Provided of course that they were celibate fruitarian nudists with plenty of lecithin in their system. (Marlo was not happy that he hadn’t been consulted before Siegmeister made this announcement.)

Siegmeister tried to push Marlo on other UFO influencers he was in touch with, most notably Ray Palmer of Fate and Gray Barker of the Saucerian Review. Palmer and Barker already dismissed Marlo as a hoaxer, so all Siegmeister really succeeded in doing was lowering their opinion of him.

It took years of canceled saucer flights for Siegmeister to realize he’d been had and cancel his membership in UFO World Research. And around the same time he also realized that the “secret password” de Souza had given him was worthless.

The Hollow Earth

For a few years Siegmeister was utterly directionless.

In 1962 he made yet another attempt to ingratiate himself with the Sons of Freedom when they launched another terror campaign against the residents of British Columbia. He suggested the sect might be happier down in Brazil and gave them an option on 2,500 acres of his property. Which he then turned around and represented to potential investors as a sale, which it definitely wasn’t.

In 1963 he wrote letters to Flying Saucer News and other similarly reputable magazines claiming that 19 English virgins had reproduced parthenogenetically, which was 100% not true.

But in 1964 he did something spectacular: he secured a New York publisher for his latest book, The Hollow Earth. It was the first time since the American Weekly hoax that he had been able to get his ideas in front of a mass audience. You would think he might try to rise to the occasion.

You would be wrong.

In fact, the book is so out there the publisher saddled it with a disclaimer: “We assume no responsibility for any opinions expressed (or implied) by the author.”

The best thing that can be said about The Hollow Earth is that Siegmeister stays on topic. His ideas about master races and fruitarianism and celibacy are nowhere to be seen, and his morbid fascination with nuclear war really only creeps in at the end.

The first part is… okay? It’s largely devoted to the then-current conspiracy theory that during 1947’s “Operation Highjump” Admiral Byrd flew over the North Pole and into the hollow Earth, and then attempting to prove it with unrelated facts and opinions with no real connection to the situation at hand. (The problem is that Operation Highjump was over the South Pole, and the quotes conspiracists used to bolster their claims had been selectively edited and taken way out of context. There’s also the problem that this section of the book had been plagiarized from the pages of Ray Palmer’s Fate magazine, which Palmer did notice and wasn’t happy about.)

The second section of the book builds on his earlier works about flying saucers but replacing his earlier beliefs about their extraterrestrial origins with new material about their intraterrestrial origins stolen fom the Shaver Mystery, Huguenin, de Souza, and Marlo… (who, remember, even he thought was a fraud). Again, nothing really new if you’d been following his work. Though to be fair, most people wouldn’t have been following with his work.

The book almost works. It’s a very Fortean collection of disconnected facts and opinions, paraphrased and presented in such a way to make you think that they build up to something larger, assuming you are willing to embrace an alternate reality where vibes are more important than things like facts and evidence. And like most Forteana it is all just an elaborate house of cards which instantly falls apart whenever you actually poke at it.

Descent

The publication of The Hollow Earth was probably the apex of Siegmeister’s career. You would think he would be on top of the world… except instead he just vanished.

He stopped taking out ads in UFO magazines and his crank letters also stopped. A few months later correspondence sent to him was returned to its senders marked “deceased.” A former business associate was eventually able to procure a Brazilian death certificate for Siegmeister’s mother, which stated that her son had died of pneumonia on September 10, 1965.

That would seem to settle the matter… unless you’re into UFOs and conspiracies. Rumors almost immediately began claiming that Siegmeister had been killed while looking for the tunnels, or had disappeared into the tunnels never to be seen again, or had finally got the saucer ride Marlo had promised him and was living the dream in Masars II.

Or maybe he was hiding out in rural Missouri, which seems a lot less glamorous.

Those who knew Dr. Walter Siegmeister personally believed he was genuine, that he truly believed what he was preaching. At the same time they could not deny that he was a plagiarist, a fabulist, a chiseler, and a crook. Maybe he was decades years ahead of his time. It’s not hard to imagine that if he was alive today he would not be an obscure kook but a social media wellness influencer peddling conspiracy theories alongside banana meal soaked in lecithin. I bet he’d be a huge success.

Thankfully, few people personally knew Dr. Walter Siegmeister.

Unfortunately, far more people know Dr. Raymond W. Bernard. The Hollow Earth was a massive success, mostly because of its sensational approach to the topic and its relative readability. It is still in print today, because Siegmeister’s death basically put it in the public domain, and has somehow become the de facto reference book on the subject due to its ubiquity. (I’m pretty sure I saw a copy in a RIF book fair as a child in the early 1980s.)

How would Siegmeister himself want to be remembered? Well, I can’t help but think of these words he put in the mouth of someone else.

It’s you who are wrong. It isn’t nature or the jungle, its your false civilization that always steps in, with its clothing prudery and interferencee.

And maybe not-Marian Windish has a point. Who can possibly judge Watler Siegmeister? Who among us can definitively say that our ancestors weren’t psychic giants who still live in the center of the Earth? Who among us can say that the ideal life doesn’t involves shedding all your clothes and eating nothing but fruit? Who can say that it’s still wrong to commit mail fraud and real estate fraud when your motives are pure and your heart is true?

Me. That’s who.