Edmund Kiss was a follower of the pseudoscience Welteislehre (World Ice Theory). Welteislehre was a pseudoscientific hypothesis created by Hanns Hörbiger and Philipp Johann Heinrich Fauth during the 1890s. Welteislehre suggests that the Earth and all other cosmic planetary bodies were made out of ice. One of the claims made in Hörbiger's book Glacial-Kosmogonie was that the Earth once had six satellite moons and that sometime in the ancient past, five of these moons were destroyed. According to Hörbiger, this event would have caused global flooding and the formation of continent-spanning glaciers. According to Hörbiger, flora and fauna could only survive at high altitudes such as those found in the Himalayas and the Andes. Kiss was attracted by the claim of global ice and wanted to explore the Andes for evidence to prove Hörbiger's theory.