Richard Shaver in the Underworld
In 1932, Richard Sharpe Shaver was working on the assembly line at a Ford auto plant in Detroit when he began noticing something strange. Every time he picked up his spot welder, he found he could hear the thoughts of the other workers all up and down the line. If that wasn’t odd enough, he also began hearing the anguished screams of what he determined to be people being beaten and tortured in caverns miles beneath the earth’s surface. Shaver concluded that it was the unique configuration of the coils in his spot welder that allowed him to access these thoughts and distant sounds.
Disturbed by this, understandably enough, Shaver soon left his job with Ford. Around this same time, his brother died, a loss which affected him deeply, and he got married and had a baby daughter. Then he vanished for much of the next decade. In that time his wife died and her relatives took custody of his daughter, telling her her father was also dead.
While Shaver would claim he had spent many of those missing years living among an underground civilization in tunnels deep beneath the earth’s surface, later researchers and colleagues determined much of that time was spent in mental institutions.
Shaver re-emerged in 1943, when he sent a long letter to the Chicago-based offices of popular science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories. In the letter, he described an ancient lost language he called “Mantong” which, he claimed, was the true original source of all modern human languages. In Mantong, he explained, every letter carries with it a distinct idea or meaning, and the true meanings of words can be deduced by analyzing the interaction of the involved letters. The letter “D,” as just one example, connotes destruction and violence and evil. Words beginning with the letter “D” always carry with them a sinister subtext.
Upon first opening and reading the letter, which had been poorly typed on onion skin paper, the magazine’s managing editor muttered something about crackpots before dropping the letter in the trash. Curious after overhearing that “crackpot” comment, editor Ray Palmer retrieved the discarded onion skin pages and read it himself.
Finding it intriguing, Palmer ran the letter in the next issue, and was amazed when it generated such an overwhelming reader response.
After playing around with Mantong a bit and concluding Shaver might actually be onto something with this theory of his, Palmer wrote him a note asking how he’d come across such arcane knowledge. Some months later, Shaver responded.
In a ten-thousand word letter he entitled “A Warning to Future Man,” Shaver explained that he came to learn all he had through the time he’d spent in the aforementioned caverns and his direct dealings with the remnants of an ancient alien race who still live there to this day.
Tens of thousands of years ago, Shaver said, the earth was inhabited by wise immortal alien giants called Titans and Atlans who possessed advanced technologies we can’t begin to imagine. They had arrived on the planet (which they called Lemuria) aeons ago when the sun was newly formed. But over time the sun’s rays became radioactive, making the air and water poisonous for the Titans, who began to shrivel into deformed midgets. Worse, they Also began to age, which, being immortal, was something they had never done before. Packing up all their advanced machinery, they moved underground into a series of artificial tunnels which honeycombed the planet. There they built elaborate cities and carried on the best they could.
In terms of the radiation, however, things didn’t improve much, so a select few of the Titans and Atlans boarded flying saucers and returned to the stars, leaving their deformed brethren in the subterranean caverns.
Over time those left behind divided into two species. Using the beneficial healing rays of some of the machines, a small handful known as “Teros” remained wise and Kindly and human like, while the majority degenerated into monstrous and evil creatures known as “Deros.” (Which was short for “detrimental robots”). The Deros were in the habit of using their electronic rays to trigger natural disasters on the surface world and direct human thoughts down some very bad and dark paths. It could be argued that every destructive and malevolent thing that happens on the planet was caused by the Deros and their insidious rays. Beyond merely manipulating the surface world from a distance for their own entertainment, the Deros also regularly kidnapped large-breasted human women, who they tortured and ate. The Teros, meanwhile, while a decided minority, did what they could to interfere on the behalf of human kind.
It’s much, much more complicated than that. But you get the general idea.
Palmer was again intrigued, but the problem, from an editor’s point of view, was that it wasn’t a story. Not really, certainly not along the lines of what the magazine tended to run. It was more a lecture or a screed. So he took it upon himself to turn it into a story, while maintaining all of Shavers details and wild scientific theories. The result was the 31,000-word novella he entitled “I Remember Lemuria!,” which included characters and action sequences and sex set in Shaver’s hollow earth. The only alteration he made to Shaver’s original was one he later regretted. Instead of a narrator recounting actual events he had experienced directly in recent years, the narrator is recounting a distant memory of a previous life.
To be honest, what Shaver ended up producing was a pretty generic space opera complete with four-armed Martian girls, beautiful, translucent Venusian maidens and the standard array of pulp sci-fi hardware, though Shaver’s theories still lay at the heart of it.
Sensing he had a story with real potential, especially after coming up with a sure-fire attention-grabbing tagline for the cover (“The Most Amazing True Story ever told!”), Palmer wanted to increase the print run in anticipation. The war was still raging, however, and paper was hard to come by, making an increased print run out of the question. Palmer later claimed that at the time he mentioned this to Shaver. In response, Shaver asked for the name of the magazine’s production manager, and said he’d ask some of his Tero friends in the underworld if they might be able to help.
Two days later, as the story goes, Palmer’s production manager came into his office and announced an idea had come to him out of nowhere the night before. He’d just steal some paper from a detective magazine put out by the same publisher, and they’d have enough for an extra fifty thousand copies.
Whether the idea was in fact inspired by the Teros is unknown, but certainly worked into the mythology Palmer would come to call The Shaver Mystery.
The March 1945 issue, with Shaver’s story and that tagline on the cover, sold out completely. Shortly afterward, the letters started arriving. While normally any random issue of Amazing Stories might generate fifty letters in response, over ten thousand letters came in response to “I Remember Lemuria!”
Although most of the letters seemed to come from the magazine’s paranoid schizophrenic subscribers, Shaver had clearly tapped into something. A vast majority of the letters came from people telling the same story, that they, too had had dealings, both direct and psychic, with the ancient subterranean aliens.
Shortly after the publication of that first story, Palmer, hoping to get a better sense of how sincere Shaver was about all this, paid a visit to Pennsylvania, where Shaver was living with his second wife. When Palmer went to bed that first night in a room adjacent to Shaver’s, he said he began hearing voices coming from Shaver’s bedroom. There were five in total, some male, some female, of varying ages. They were discussing a human who had been tortured to death on the rack earlier that day, a mere four miles from Shaver’s home, and four miles straight down. Given many of the voices were talking at the same time, he concluded it couldn’t have been a bit of ventriloquism on Shaver’s part, and after covertly searching the home the next day he could find no hidden wires or microphones, so had to conclude he’d heard the voices of an alien race.
Whether or not Palmer’s story was true or simply part of an elaborate marketing stunt is irrelevant. Palmer put his faith in Shaver and the cave dwelling aliens, running at least one new Shaver story in each new issue, sometimes devoting entire issues to The Shaver Mystery.
The difference was, in stories like “Cave City of Hell,” “Invasion of the Micro Men,” “Earth Slaves to Space” and “The Return of Sathanas,” Palmer took a lighter hand when it came to the editing, and dropped the race memory angle. Instead of spinning yarns about things that happened twelve thousand years ago, Shaver was writing about things that had happened last year, or last week, while Palmer kept pushing the “true story” claim. It only made readers more obsessive.
In one later piece Shaver even took on his critics directly, claiming that despite prevailing geological theory, the inner earth was indeed honeycombed with thousands of miles of tunnels and caves larger than New York. He further claimed that Tomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, given their inventions, likely had direct (or at least psychic) contact with the Teros themselves, and that furthermore, the science he learned from the ancients allowed him to lay out the fundamentals of the Unified Field Theory before Einstein thought of it.
Sales continued to run at roughly fifty thousand copies per month more than they had pre-Shaver, and the letters continued to pour in from believers and skeptics alike.
By 1948, however, Shaver’s run at Amazing Stories came to an end. Palmer claimed they stopped because sinister forces had forced him to stop running the stories, while old guard fans of the magazine who pined for those earlier, Shaverless issues of Amazing Stories claimed a growing backlash, a letter-writing campaign and falling sales were the real reason.
Palmer was fired soon thereafter, but moved on to edit a string of other science fiction pulps through the Fifties, where Shaver stories continued to appear, if more sporadically.
When skeptical readers pointed out the eerie similarities between Shaver’s stories and earlier works, like Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race, Palmer liked to respond that it was simply possible these other writers had had their own encounters with the Deros and Teros. So there.
By the late Fifties, Palmer, still touting the Shaver Mystery to anyone who would listen, even began releasing an all-Shaver magazine he called The Hidden World. It lasted nine issues.
Through the Sixties and into the Seventies, Shaver abandoned writing in favor of a new quest for the truth. While hunting for physical evidence of the ancient civilization, he began to notice that, if looked at in the right way, in the right light and at the right angle, some rocks—many he found on his own property—contained writings and drawings, clearly inscribed there by our alien ancestors, He took to photographing and painting pictures based on what he saw on the surface of the rocks, and annotating them in detail for those who lacked a keen enough eye to see the truth. He even created rock libraries, and would mail out slices of rock with explanatory notes to those who requested them.
While the photos and paintings obviously didn’t have the kind of reach the pulp magazines did, they did garner a good deal of interest in the outsider art community, and were exhibited in a number of respectable galleries.
Shaver died in 1975, and his memoir The Secret World (co-written with Palmer) was published posthumously. To this day most of his stories remain in print and readily available in assorted collections, and The Shaver Mystery is still debated among science fiction and conspiracy fans.
Although possible earlier influences on Shaver’s vision, like Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Time Machine, are plentiful, The Shaver Mystery itself has had a clear influence of its own, and can be seen and felt in the shadows behind Jack Arnold’s 1956 The Mole People, the elaborate and confounding Montauk Project conspiracy, Douglas Cheek’s splendid 1984 monster picture C.H.U.D., The Residents’ 1982 concept album Mark of the Mole, and Craig Baldwin’s conspiratorial documentary about US foreign policy in Latin America, Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America. Those diehard adherents to the hollow earth theory continue to cite Shaver as gospel, and then of course there are all those clinical paranoid schizophrenics who blame their crazy, crazy visions on the use of a Shaver invention, the Thought Augmentor.
by Jim Knipfel