Charles Hutchins Hapgood (May 17, 1904 – December 21, 1982)[1] was an American college professor and author who became one of the best known advocates of the pseudo-scientific claim of a rapid and recent pole shift with catastrophic results.
He taught for a year in Vermont and directed a community center in Provincetown, also serving as the executive secretary of Franklin Roosevelt's Crafts Commission.
In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966) and The Path of the Pole (1970), Hapgood proposed the hypothesis that the Earth's axis has shifted numerous times during geological history.
In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, he reproduces letters that he states he received from the chief of a U.S. Air Force cartography section stationed at Westover AFB in 1961.
Hapgood and Erle Stanley Gardner thought the collection of clay artifacts known as the Acámbaro figures were created thousands of years ago.
Hapgood spent ten years working with New England medium Elwood Babbitt (1921-2001), attempting to make contact with notable figures from the past.
Babbitt, a retired carpenter and World War II veteran, had studied trance mediumship at Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment.