According to his story, which he told to the abducted Baxter students, Mole Man left his family after he devolved his younger sister into a lungfish and turned his father over to the government for money. His first bioexperiment went unsuccessfully and he sneaked into Europe in the guise of a washerwoman (he adds that he kept the costume and later added sequins to it). He was led to the ruins of the underground civilization by an insane Italian man who was a part of a NATO expedition to find the lost city, the third group to try. (The first two groups perished and the rest of the third group either starved to death or killed each other.) Though Mole Man found the Italian man's insane antics amusing, he later fed the Italian to an underground monster to gain the monster's trust.