Alien Secrets: The Vril Society

The Vril Society is a troublesome topic because there's no authentic proof that this secret society really existed, even though there's no shortage of people who claim that it did. What makes the Vril Society really weird is that it started out as a science fiction story and from an author who is rarely connected these days with anything short of a joke.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (infamous author of the opening line, "It was a dark and stormy night") was a Victorian-era writer. In 1870, he published a science fiction novel, The Power of the Coming Race, which describes an underground race of superhuman angel-like creatures and their mysterious energy force, Vril, an "all-permeating fluid" of limitless power. The story goes that the people, called Vril-ya, are able to control this energy source with their minds, both to do good as well as to destroy. And, so the story goes, they're filling up the inside of the Earth and are about to come out onto the surface looking for new real estate. And of course, before they can build their terrestrial civilization, the pesky humans will have to be destroyed.

The book was a huge success and was partially responsible for a wave of speculation that the earth was indeed hollow and filled with aliens. The Vril-ya were supposed to be the descendants of Atlantis who crawled into the Earth's core to escape the deluge that destroyed the legendary city, and the novel became a favorite among true Atlantis believers. More important, the term Vril became widely used as a description of "life-giving elixir."

In 1935, German rocket scientist and science fiction author Willy Ley fled Nazi Germany and came to the United States. In an article two years later, he mentioned that there was a group called Wahrheitsgesellschaft (Society for Truth) that formed to look for the real existence of Vril in order to build a perpetual motion machine, among other goals. Based on Ley's mention of the group, other researchers began making claims that a real Vril Society did exist in Germany, before and after World War II.

In 1960, Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels published their speculative book, Morning of the Magicians, in which they made claims about the Vril Society in Berlin being the precursor to the Thule Society and the Nazi Party. Others have built upon their somewhat sandy foundation to claim that the Society did indeed manage to communicate with the Vril-ya and that the Nazis built a Vril-powered flying saucer, the V-7, that made a flight to Prague in 1945. At the end of the war, the Vril Society, so the story goes, packed up its kit, took its flying saucers, and flew to a secret underground base in Antarctica. It has also been claimed that Vril technology allowed the Nazis to land on the Moon in 1942, where they built an underground base that still exists today. One small book for man, one giant delusion for mankind.