FIGURE 10. Painting by Robert Gibson Jones for the front cover of the special “Shaver Mystery” issue of Amazing Stories (June 1947).
Shaver Mystery
BEFORE BARKER, there was Raymond Palmer, and before flying saucers, there was the Shaver Mystery. Call it a prelude to the grander drama of the UFO, which erupted into the American consciousness just as the Shaver Mystery was beginning to fade. Or call it a dress rehearsal. Or, to take the most extreme position, the matrix out of which the UFO was to emerge.
The name Shaver Mystery, given by Palmer, clung to it from its beginning. It’s not immediately obvious, though, what there was about it that made it a mystery to be solved rather than a story to be passively absorbed or a myth to inspire, to awe, possibly to terrify. It’s called by Richard Shaver’s name even though it was Palmer’s at least as much as it was Shaver’s. It was the synergy of the pair, to use that word once more, that made it possible.
They were an odd couple, as visibly a “unification of opposites” as were Betty and Barney Hill. Shaver, of Pennsylvania farming stock, was brawny and ruggedly handsome. Palmer was a city boy from Milwaukee, whom a spine-shattering childhood encounter with a beer truck had turned into a spindly-limbed, hunchbacked dwarf. Their religious views were starkly different.62 Shaver, the creator—or recipient, he would say—of a rococo mythology filled with uncanny beings, was fiercely atheist. All that counted for him was material reality, though not a reality that any scientist would recognize as such. Palmer, for all his eager though not unrestrained pursuit of the fast buck, was a believer in the power of the Spirit, the guiding hand of the being he called the “Deliberate Manipulator.”
As a child and again as a man of twenty, Ray Palmer had lain in hospitals on the edge of death. The doctors were emphatic: he was a goner. They gave him no chance. Both times, through Spirit, he summoned himself to life and walked out into the sunlight, crippled but vigorous. Where Shaver brought a nightmare vision of an earth that was a sun-poisoned, monster-ridden hell, Palmer brought a glowing faith in redemption through Mystery. This was the deepest meaning of the “mystery” in the Shaver Mystery, as well as its link with what would become the UFO.
MANTONG
It began with a letter.
The letter arrived in Chicago, in September 1943, at the editorial offices of the venerable science-fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories. It came from someone in Barto, Pennsylvania, calling himself “S. Shaver.” Obviously a crackpot, thought Howard Browne, the editor on fan mail duty. He snorted in contempt and tossed the letter into the wastebasket.
This, at any rate, is the legend that surrounds the Shaver Mystery’s birth. Legendary also is how thirty-three-year-old Ray Palmer, who outranked Browne at Amazing Stories, went diving into the wastebasket to rescue the letter and arrange for its publication in the letters column of the January 1944 issue. The letter was headlined “An Ancient Language?”
Sirs:
Am sending you this in hopes you will insert in an issue to keep it from dying with me. It would arouse a lot of discussion.
Am sending you the language so that some time you can have it looked at by someone in the college or a friend who is a student of antique time. This language seems to me to be definite proof of the Atlantean legend.
There followed an interpretation of the twenty-six sounds represented by the letters of the English alphabet. Each sound had its meaning; when put together in a word, they yielded a compound meaning in which the word’s hidden significance was revealed. A was “animal,” often shortened to “an.” B was “be,” to exist. D was “de,” a powerful and sinister symbol for the “disintegrant” force in the universe, the impulse that drives toward chaos and destruction. The opposite of “de” was “te,” the positive “integrant” force, represented by the letter T, which is the origin of the cross symbol . . . and so on, through the alphabet.
“A great number of our English words have come down intact,” Shaver wrote. He gave examples: trocadero, used for the theater, was a compound of “tero see a dero” (T + RO + C + A + DE + RO), “good one see a bad one.” (The tero and dero, “good ones” versus “bad ones,” were to play a central role in Shaver’s mythology.) “This is perhaps the only copy of this language in existence,” he wrote, “and it represents my work over a long period of years. It is an immensely important find, suggesting the god legends have a base in some wiser race than modern man.”
“Come down intact”—from what? Later, Shaver would explain: from Mantong, the primordial language of the cosmos (man + tongue), spoken by the extraterrestrial races of “Atlans” and “Titans,” who once colonized the earth and from whom we’re descended. He would also make clear that the discovery of Mantong wasn’t his own achievement, as he implied in his letter. He’d learned it from personal contact with other offshoots of these “Elder Races,” human but not quite human, who dwell in the caves that honeycomb the earth beneath our feet. For the present, though, Shaver contented himself with setting forth his linguistic theory, which he predicted would “arouse a lot of discussion.”
This was an understatement. Looking back, Palmer would compare what happened in the Amazing Stories mailroom to the scene in Miracle on 34th Street where the sacks of mail stuffed with letters addressed to Santa Claus at the North Pole are wheeled into court. He put the number of letters at fifty thousand. This was surely an exaggeration. But it’s just as certain that Shaver’s exercise in do-it-yourself philology—English was so close to ancestral Mantong that you could trace its words to their roots without bothering with foreign languages—called forth a response the like of which had never been seen.
Needless to say, Palmer heard cash registers ringing. He edited a pulp magazine; circulation figures were his life’s blood. But there was more than that to his fascination with this strange, unheard-of correspondent from Pennsylvania.
Palmer was the ultimate autodidact. His broken body had kept him from going to school with any regularity. Yet as a teenager he’d devoured boxful after boxful of books from the Milwaukee Public Library—sixteen books a day, by his estimate—with astronomy, ancient history, and mythology among his favored subjects. As magazine editor, he drew his readers with him into a shared investigation of the mysteries of existence. Their responses, he claimed, were his real education.
As far as Palmer was concerned, truth didn’t come from the elite “savants” who’d brainwashed us with their orthodox science, their conventional history, the official philology of their dictionary derivations. Its guarantors were the ordinary people in their multitudes, speaking “from some inner hiding place of the human mind.” And now this Shaver, with his revelation of the secrets of human language and through it a history never taught in schools, had raised a banner behind which they all could march.
TWO TALES OF LEMURIA
The two men struck up a correspondence. On Christmas Day 1943, Shaver sent Palmer a 10,000-word manuscript entitled “A Warning to Future Man.” Over the months that followed, Palmer turned this into a 31,000-word story that he ran, under Shaver’s name and the title “I Remember Lemuria!,” as the cover story for the March 1945 issue. (It appeared on the newsstands on December 8, 1944; wartime paper shortages had reduced the once monthly Amazing Stories to a quarterly.) Their partnership as author and editor would continue into the 1950s, long after the Shaver Mystery had faded.
But who exactly was the author? Where did Palmer’s editorial role stop? It’s often impossible to tell, and the problem is most acute with that first Lemuria story, where Palmer seems to have taken full control, imposing his agenda and passing off his own ideas and images as Shaver’s. The original manuscript Shaver sent Palmer no longer exists. We have to guess at what it contained from what Palmer afterward did with it.
“Sensational ‘racial memory’ story” ran the blurb for “I Remember Lemuria!” on the magazine’s cover. By racial memory, Palmer meant collective memory, the shared memory of the human race that transcends generations and centuries. The idea is expressed in words attributed to Shaver in a “foreword” promising that the reader “will forget that I am Richard Sharpe Shaver, and instead, am what science chooses to very vaguely define as the racial memory receptacle of a man (or should I say a being?) named Mutan Mion, who lived many thousands of years ago in . . . one of the great cities of ancient Lemuria!”63
“Attributed” to Shaver, but almost certainly not written by him. Racial memory was Palmer’s thing, not Shaver’s. Palmer was fascinated by the mysteries of memory, of his own memories that stretched back to infancy and beyond. He remembered, or thought he remembered, having been nursed by his mother as she sat by the window of their apartment, naked and beautiful, her hair red-gold in the sunlight and flowing to the floor. He remembered, impossibly, having seen Halley’s comet, which had visited the year he was born but was gone from the sky while he was still a fetus in the womb. He thought that Shaver’s claims of actually having been in the caves, which Shaver had already shared with him, would be too much for readers to swallow. If they were to accept Shaver’s stories as historical fact, calling them “racial memories” was the only way to go.64
And Shaver’s stories were fact; Palmer insisted on this. “For the first time in its history,” he wrote in the prepublication hype for Shaver’s debut story, “Amazing Stories is preparing to present a true story. . . . We aren’t going to ask you to believe it. We are going to challenge you to disbelieve it . . . take it or leave it. But we believe it to be true.”
“I Remember Lemuria!” is a tale of Paradise lost, Miltonian in its theme and some of its details, if not its literary quality. The Paradise equivalent is Earth, or rather the caverns that extend down to the core of the earth, into which the Atlans and Titans have descended to escape the poisonous rays of our dying sun. There they’ve built thriving cities, high-tech and harmonious, given to the pursuit of scientific learning and wholesome enjoyment. “Variforms” from multiple planets, web-footed Venusians and green-eyed girls from Mars, mingle and interbreed with the Atlans and Titans, who themselves came originally from space.
But something is horribly wrong. Unbeknownst to nearly everyone, a renegade Elder from among the Atlans has seized power, aided by hordes of vicious creatures called “abandondero” or (normally) just “dero.”65 These were originally human, but have been degraded by the sun’s killer rays into malformed dwarfs—stupid, cannibalistic, savagely cruel. Unlike the comfortably exotic variforms, these beings are genuinely, frighteningly alien.
The power of the rebel Elder and his dero must be broken, the Atlans and Titans relocated to a distant planet where there’s no sun to bring them disease and death. This is accomplished under the leadership of Princess Vanue, chief Elder of an extraterrestrial race called the Nortans—a ravishing female eighty feet tall, possessed of immense physical power and an erotic charisma that turns every male in her vicinity into her adoring, panting servant. (I suspect she’s Palmer’s creation and that she mirrors his “memory” of nursing with his mother, naked and lovely like Vanue and, in proportion to his infant self, nearly as gigantic.)
The Elder Races are evacuated from this tainted Earth. Some, however, are left behind, and we’re their descendants. Ignorant of our origins, we walk about under the sun, which after 12,000 years is still dying and poisonous. Thanks to that sun, our lives are brief and sorry affairs, far from the near-immortality of our ancestors. Beneath us, unknown to us, the swarms of dero remain entrenched in their subterranean caverns, growing more perverted and sadistic with each generation.
Though abysmally stupid—the rank stupidity of evil is a recurring theme with Shaver—the dero are heirs to the wondrous machinery left by the Elder Races. With their “stim rays,” they enhance the debauchery to which they’re addicted. With their “disintegrating rays,” they torment people on the surface, stirring up unrest and wars, causing crashes and train wrecks and cerebral hemorrhages. They’re responsible for belief in religion (says the atheist Shaver), presenting themselves to our imaginations as demons and goblins, ghosts and gods. Have you ever (asks Palmer) experienced an impulse to help a blind man across the street but then “you trip him and laugh as he falls into a mud puddle”? If so, you know what it is to think like a dero.
The second Shaver story, “Thought Records of Lemuria,” appeared in the June 1945 issue. Here it does seem to be Shaver’s voice, not Palmer’s, that we hear. The setting is the present, and the narrator-protagonist is a steelworker in a Detroit auto plant, as Shaver was from 1932 to 1934, driven half mad by voices from his welding gun. He hears savage commands: “Put him on the rack. . . . It’ll pull him apart in an hour! . . . Nice and slow, so he suffers plenty!” He hears screams of agony. The narrator’s name is given as Richard S. Shaver, and the story, for all its fantastic elements, is in large measure autobiographical.
Afraid he’s losing his mind, narrator Shaver flees Detroit. He winds up in a state prison, from which he’s helped to escape by a beautiful waif with huge sightless eyes, almost but not quite human. She’s one of the “tero,”66 the beleaguered minority among the cavern dwellers who, though impoverished, remain civilized and decent. Led into her underground world, he beholds through the equivalent of a television screen a scene like the ones he heard through his welding gun. It’s the dero in the act of torturing their captives for no purpose but sadistic delight. “You see,” the blind girl tells her horrified guest, “they will not allow their victims to die, but keep them alive through every torment by the use of the beneficial rays.”
This is our enemy’s pleasure palace; a Hell for helpless victims of their lust for blood and pain. From immemorial times, they have had such Hells in the underworld, and it has never ceased. You see, you surface Christians are not so far wrong in your pictures of Hell, except that you do not die in order to go there, but wish for death to release you once you arrive. . . . There has always been a Hell on earth, and this is one of them.
“I REMAIN IN THE CAVERNS”
Shaver wrote the story in January 1945; it was published some two months later. This was an era of hells on earth. Hitler’s deroesque death camps were being revealed, one horror after the other, by the advancing Allies. Soon the most hideous display of disintegrant energy the world had seen or imagined would level Hiroshima and Nagasaki, casting a permanent shadow over the human future. You’d have to be blind not to see the Shaver Mystery as a parable of its time.67
Yet it’s also rooted in the central fact of Shaver’s experience, which he spent much of his life denying, obfuscating, distorting. The ten years that preceded his Mantong-alphabet letter to Amazing Stories were spent mostly in mental institutions.
First in Detroit in July 1934, at the instigation of his wife’s family, who disliked him partly because he wasn’t Jewish, partly because they thought him a lunatic. He’d been hearing voices through his welding gun at the auto plant where he worked, much as he described in “Thought Records of Lemuria.” The voices began to follow him home. “He hears ‘echoes’ of voices talking about him,” a court document states, recommending he be committed, and an examining doctor found “a definite consciousness of a ‘dual mental personality.’ When he speaks he wonders if his words are uttered by someone else.”
Shaver would later tell Palmer that mental hospitals are dero hells “where they torment their victims for years without anyone listening to the poor devil’s complaints—for the ‘patient is having delusions.’” But at Ypsilanti State Hospital, where he stayed long term, he was given great freedom. He went home to his apartment for frequent visits with his wife, spent months with his parents on their farm in Barto, Pennsylvania. He was there at the end of 1936 when the news came from Detroit that his wife was dead, electrocuted in a freak accident with a portable electric heater.
He fled.
The record now becomes blurred and confused. For the next year and a few months, he wandered up and down the East Coast doing odd jobs, well supplied with imaginary companions. Tormenting dero traveled with him. So did helpful tero, including the blind girl described in “Thought Records of Lemuria,” whom he named Nydia68 and with whom he fell in love.
In an interview given in 1973, two years before his death, Shaver spoke of an extraordinary experience which, if there’s any reality behind it, has to be dated to this period.
I think when I really became aware of the underworld was when I was working for a fisherman down in Delaware Bay, not far from Annapolis. And, if you’ve ever been there, you know how the clouds—there are very beautiful cloud formations, and I noticed that the clouds were doing paintings, and somebody was painting on the clouds with some apparatus, and I could talk to them, and I did talk to them . . . mentally.
And for a period of time, a whole summer and fall, I got quite well-acquainted with the people of the underworld, just by talking to them with cloud pictures and mental voices. And that’s really the real beginning of the Shaver Mystery.
The clouds, and the shapes seen in them, function as portals to the world below—a paradox to be kept in mind when we consider the Mystery’s links to the nascent UFO tradition. It was about this time, Shaver told interviewer Eugene Steinberg, that he made his first and only visit to the caves.
I used to have my own shack along the beach, and I made an appointment by mental telepathy. She69 said it would be possible to visit and take a look around, because I asked them if it was, and they said yes.
So one night they came for me, two of them, and we went down to the beach, got in a boat, and went about maybe five miles along the beach in a power boat and into a sort of smuggler’s cave, sea cave, and went through maybe several miles of darkness, with very, very faint light to go by. They knew where they were going, but I couldn’t see much. And there we were, inside the Earth, almost on the same level as sea level.
I was there maybe four or five days or weeks, I didn’t keep track. . . . They were attacked by deros and all the people I knew were killed, and why they didn’t kill me, I don’t know.
When there wasn’t anybody there anymore but dead people, and I didn’t know which way to turn or where to go, I got in a boat and went back the way I’d come, and came out alone, went back to my shack. They wanted to know where I’d been, and I told them I’d been drunk. And that’s the way it was.
As in the Book of Job—“I only am escaped alone to tell thee”—boating back across the Styx, returning from the realm of the dead. The mythic, archaic overtones of this story, which may or may not have its origin in some actual bout of drunkenness of the lonely wanderer, are too plain to be missed.
At first sight it seems to contradict what narrator Shaver says at the end of the “Thought Records of Lemuria” story: “I remain here in the caverns.” But only at the literal level, where none of this really happened anyway. Understood as psychological testimonies, both are accurate. Shaver fled the caverns but also remained there. He would remain there for the rest of his life.
“I have become one of the underworld,” says Shaver the narrator, “of those who have been called trolls, gnomes and goblins in the old days.” The voice from behind the curtain is Shaver the author, who knows that what he’s undergone during his wanderings and incarcerations has set him apart, made him almost a different species from ordinary humanity. “I bid the surface earth farewell. I remain here in the caverns, absorbing wisdom . . . and loving . . . my little blind maiden.”70
PALMER AND LEMURIA
Palmer believed him, or he made a show of believing. He must have realized that, translated into psychological terms, Shaver’s vision of the subterranean world was far from the absurdity it seemed. In an interview twenty years later with the same Eugene Steinberg, Palmer came close to saying this explicitly.
Shaver’s eight years in the caves, Palmer told Steinberg, were in reality eight years in an insane asylum.71 This had to be admitted, yet not to Shaver’s discredit. He hadn’t retreated into his imagination, as the psychiatrists might say. The world he’d gone into was a real world, though entered only “mentally.” It was a world he shared with the fifty thousand readers of Amazing Stories who’d written to report the same experiences, to say they’d heard voices saying the same identical things, as though all tuned in to a hidden radio station. Shaver’s mythical caves and his real madhouses functioned interchangeably as metaphors for something dark and hellish within us, nevertheless concealing a marvelous machinery—mech, to use Shaver’s word for it—which, once recognized, could heal our lives.
Somehow interwoven with a place called Lemuria.
This word quickly became shorthand for the entire Mystery, starting with the titles of the first two stories in the Shaver cycle. (There would be dozens more.) Yet it’s never entirely clear what’s meant by it. In one of his long, learned-sounding footnotes to what’s ostensibly Shaver’s writing, Palmer explains it as a name given to Earth by “the first Atlan colonists,” and the Lemuria = Earth equation is certainly correct. It falls far short, however, of conveying the name’s full resonance.
For the occultists, Lemuria was a lost continent sunk beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean, corresponding to Atlantis in the Atlantic and to Mu in the Pacific. Unlike Atlantis and Mu, which are pure legend, Lemuria was originally a scientific hypothesis: a prehistoric land bridge that once connected India with South Africa and would explain, among other things, the distribution of the weird little monkey-like mammals called lemurs. Lemuria, “land of the lemurs,” was proposed as a name for this sunken bridge, and the name stuck.
Shaver drew his names for primordial Earth and its dwellers from lost continents. In “I Remember Lemuria!”, Earth is Mu or Mother Mu. One race inhabiting it is the Atlans; its place names are spinoffs of Atlantis or Atlantean. (We’ve seen that in his letter to Amazing Stories, he declared the Mantong alphabet “definite proof of the Atlantean legend.”) At first sight this seems puzzling; obviously the entire earth can’t be a sunken continent. Not unless the ocean waters, in Shaver’s unconscious thought, are symbolic of the forgotten past and the amnesia that enshrouds it.
It seems to have been Palmer, not Shaver, who was drawn toward Lemuria as the particular name for this planet as it once had been.72 In the books of ancient history and mythology that he soaked up during his invalid childhood, he’s likely to have encountered a Lemuria different from the sunken continent yet complementing it in his imagination.
The ancient Romans knew the lemures as fearsome ghosts from the underworld, from whom one averts one’s eyes in dread (and after whom the spooky little lemurs were named). An “olden rite, the nocturnal Lemuria,” was instituted to honor yet banish them, for like the dero, they’re bad company for the living. The householder must rise at midnight and perform a series of magic rites, never looking behind his back, for the ghosts are following. Only after saying, “Ghosts of my fathers, go forth!” nine times does he dare to turn around.
This Lemuria, dedicated to the ancestral dead whose sight cannot be endured, must have fused in Palmer’s mind with the land that sank into the realms of forgetfulness. It’s a landscape painted by Robert Gibson Jones for the cover of the June 1947 Amazing Stories, the special “Shaver Mystery” issue. (“That’s how it looks!” was Shaver’s comment when he saw Jones’s painting.)
We’re inside a vast, rough-hewn cavern from whose walls emerge nearly a dozen grotesque, gigantic figures, carved like idols from jade-green stone yet looking horribly alive, their eyes keenly watchful. Grim, towering, they look down on a man who tears through them in what seems like a jet-propelled ground vehicle, fleeing machine-gun fire directed at him by other men. The driver looks neither to the right nor to the left. The stone giants make no effort to impede him or to do anything but watch. But like the Roman householder, he must not allow himself to see them. If he did, he’d be paralyzed with dread.
FIGURE 10. Painting by Robert Gibson Jones for the front cover of the special “Shaver Mystery” issue of Amazing Stories (June 1947).
FIGURE 11. Painting by Robert Gibson Jones for the front cover of the “I Remember Lemuria!” issue of Amazing Stories (March 1945).
Jones also did the cover painting for the issue of Amazing Stories in which “I Remember Lemuria!” appeared. The inspiration was surely Palmer’s. The strange scene corresponds precisely to nothing in the story, yet makes vivid commentary on its theme.
An emaciated green creature, humanoid but grotesquely ugly, crouches inside a vertical glass cylinder ringed at its top and bottom by bronze-colored metal. He’s trapped there, a prisoner. At a control panel just outside the cylinder stands a beautiful woman, skimpily dressed in black leather, her right hand clutching a lever. Though she’s of normal human size, her headgear identifies her as the princess Vanue. Her captive, lemur-like with his huge eyes and pointed ears, is obviously a dero.
Is she preparing to blast him into space? He presses his hands, entirely human except for the talons at their tips, against the glass. His eyes stare at the woman, imploring. Though he’s horribly repulsive, there’s no trace of malevolence in his expression. Desolation, rather—the inconsolable grief of the forsaken child, the abandondero. He craves, he yearns toward the beauty on the other side of the glass, in plain sight, out of reach. And her expression, as she stares back? Not triumph, not glee, not righteous malice. Something more like astonishment, tinged with pity. One pull on the lever and she’ll be rid of this creature. But will she do it?
He’s a dero, a creature of evil. In his skin color, he foreshadows the “little green men” of flying saucer cliché, almost never actually reported in connection with UFOs but inescapable in the popular discourse about them. In his physiognomy and body habitus, he’s a caricature of the deformed, crippled Palmer, who in his later years entertained an image of himself as “a Martian who has been transported to Earth, and abandoned.” “I really am from Mars,” Palmer told people he caught staring at him, and when he set about writing his autobiography, he called it Martian Diary.
Palmer was known to have himself painted into Amazing Stories covers. He appeared on the cover of the July 1943 issue as an evil scientist confronted by a beautiful woman in a low-cut dress—his secretary Elaine—her gun pointed straight at his nose. On the “I Remember Lemuria!” cover, he’s done it again. The scene is a ghastly inversion of Palmer’s tender fantasy, or possibly memory, of himself as an infant at the breast of his lovely, nurturant mother (whose red-gold hair this woman has, though it isn’t quite flowing to the floor). She’s shut off from him by impenetrable glass, her breasts locked away behind a leather brassiere. But no, I don’t think she will pull that lever. These two will stay frozen, their gazes locked on each other, for eternity.
“The alien is within us,” Shaver announced, conveying psychological truth with an impossible myth of a nightmare world beneath our feet. To which Palmer adds, “The alien is me.”
SHAVER ASCENDANT
The war ended. Paper again became plentiful, though not immediately; Amazing Stories resumed monthly publication. The Shaver Mystery soared.
Of the fourteen issues published from March 1945 through January 1947, all but one included a story by Richard Shaver, and all but one of these stories were featured on the covers. The readers demanded it. So Palmer claimed, and he seemed to have the figures to back this up. The normal print run for the March 1945 issue would have been 135,000; Palmer finagled an extra 50,000; all 185,000 copies sold. The February 1946 issue, with Shaver’s “Invasion of the Micro-Men” on the cover, sold 261,611 copies.
The numbers are supplied by Palmer and probably should be trimmed back drastically. But there’s no doubt the Shaver Mystery was a smash hit; if it weren’t, Palmer couldn’t have stuck with it as long as he did. Letters confirming Shaver’s claims came pouring in and were printed in a newly inaugurated department of Amazing Stories significantly entitled “Report From the Forgotten Past?” (sometimes with, sometimes without the question mark).
The most eccentric and endearing of these “reports” came from two brothers in Los Angeles, ages twelve and sixteen, who’d received telepathic messages in Shaver’s support from their recently deceased pet turtle. More dramatic was a letter from a certain “A. C.,” supposedly an Army captain, who claimed that during the war he and a fellow officer had fought their way with submachine guns out of a cave in the mountains north of Kashmir. Palmer was “playing with dynamite” by publicizing the Shaver Mystery, A. C. warned. “For heaven’s sake, drop the whole thing!”
Shaver never felt sure of himself as a writer. Yet he was prolific. We know of seventy-eight stories authored or coauthored by him, initially in Amazing Stories and its sister pulp Fantastic Adventures, then—after 1949, when Palmer left the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company and Shaver became persona non grata there—in Palmer’s Other Worlds Science Stories. Not all his stories revolved around the central mythos of poison sun, underground caves, and ogre-like dero. Most, however, gave it at least a nod.
The drama of any given story might be fictional, might have a happy ending for its characters. The background stayed grimly immoveable: a world that was Hell with no Savior to redeem it, subject to powers of evil that might be warded off but never conquered or eliminated. This was a vision that people ought to turn away from with a shudder, yet which appealed to them by the hundreds of thousands. Believing the stories to mix fact and fiction, they speculated on where one ended and the other began. This was indeed a riddle to be solved. It may have been partly what people had in mind when they spoke of the “Shaver Mystery.”
Not everybody loved this mystery. A small but vocal group of hard-core science-fiction fans hated, hated, hated it. If it weren’t for its truth claims, it might have been forgivable—poorly written perhaps, but that was nothing new for science fiction. But with those claims it was an outrage, a corruption and a desecration of the genre to which they were devoted.
More than that, it was a hazard to the republic. In two articles published in a fan magazine, “Calling All Crackpots” and “Crackpot Heaven,” the writer estimated that the “crackpots” who read Shaver “number at least a million in the United States. They are, in the main, adults, and have educational levels ranging from near zero to those of Ph.D.’s engaged in technical occupations.” In such numbers, marching behind a man like Palmer, they could have real political clout. They might get on school boards, influence public education. The implication: they must be fought tooth and nail.
The science-fictioneers rose to the call. They made Palmer a pariah at their conventions. They bombarded publishers Ziff and Davis with letters demanding that Amazing Stories be purged of Shaver and all his works. (These were ignored; the sales figures were too strong to be argued with.) They passed resolutions denouncing the Mystery as antiscientific and “a serious threat to the mental health of many people.” They promised to “publicize our denunciation of this perversion of fantasy fiction, and . . . also the motives of those who advance it for money and the rationality of those who advance it from conviction.”
There was truth in all this. The Shaver Mystery was antiscientific; it did involve pursuit of the dollar; it was believed in for motives that, though far from contemptible, weren’t rational in any normal sense of the word. The violence of the reaction, however, seems fevered, more than a little hysterical. The Mystery had the power not only to captivate those for whom it was intuitively plausible but also to get under the skin of those who thought it nonsense.
As, in their turn, would the UFOs.
THE COMING OF THE SAUCERS
UFOs first appeared in the American cultural airspace on June 24, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold had his sighting of nine glittering silvery objects skipping “like saucers over water” over the Cascade Mountains. They’d been part of the Shaver Mystery for over a year. When Arnold’s headline-grabbing experience triggered the first of the great sighting waves and “flying saucers” were everywhere in the newspapers, Palmer was able to say, “I told you so.”
In his editor’s column in the July 1946 Amazing Stories, introducing the Shaver story “Cult of the Witch Queen,” Palmer wrote:
If you don’t think space ships visit the earth regularly, as in this story, then the files of Charles Fort,73 and your editor’s own files are something you should see. Your editor has hundreds of reports (especially from returned soldiers) of objects that were clearly seen and tracked which could have been nothing but space ships. And if you think responsible parties in world governments are ignorant of the fact of space ships visiting earth, you just don’t think the way we do.
“Cult of the Witch Queen,” coauthored with one Bob McKenna, appeared in the same issue. The action takes place in 1939. The narrator is a strapping, muscular steelworker known to his friends as “Big Jim.” Lured by a beautiful and mostly unclothed young woman who turns out to be from the planet Venus, Big Jim enters a darkened house in the slums of an unnamed city and follows her down what seem to be endless stairs, at last passing through a large door into a cavern filled with fancy, complicated equipment. The Shaver Mystery had been running for more than a year. The reader would know, though Big Jim doesn’t, who lives in those caves.
These dero, however, are not the usual repulsive dwarfs, but gorgeous women with a flair for sadomasochistic orgies. Only half unwilling, Jim is conscripted into an army sent to Venus to put down a rebellion against the vampiric witch queen of the title, who rules Venus at her cruel pleasure even though she’s originally from Earth. The Venusians, like us and like the dero, are offspring of the long-departed Elder Races and heirs to their mech, which they’ve retained the secrets of operating better than anyone on Earth. This explains why spaceships, left behind by the Elders, flow freely between the two planets.
At the end, having fled the caverns and the revolting savageries they conceal, Big Jim reflects that the whole thing might have been a dream. A descent, in other words, not into the physical earth but into himself. “It was a hell of a long dream, brother, if it didn’t happen,” he tells the young welder (unnamed, but obviously Richard Shaver) to whom he’s relating his story.
For years, Big Jim tells Shaver, people have reported “odd things . . . like chunks of machinery falling out of the sky. Strange shadows passing the face of the moon. Things that ‘look like ships’ crossing the moon IN FORMATION.” Science is baffled by the bizarre happenings. Only through the Shaver Mystery can they be understood.
The back cover of the August 1946 Amazing Stories, painted by Frank R. Paul,74 is a full-page illustration of skyborne “ships” in crescent formation, passing in front of a huge disk that the accompanying text identifies as the star Altair but that looks just like a full moon. Eleven “ships” are visible in the crescent; two others fly detached from it. They’re true flying saucers, disklike but with a raised center and a point on top, which gives them a look akin to a somewhat flattened call bell and also a female breast. Through round holes at their bottoms, they discharge hordes of gigantic wasplike creatures onto the rocky, cratered landscape below. Terrified bipeds, clothed but monkey-like, flee the swooping insects but are overtaken and seized by the huge pincers. The scene is supposed to be a planet of Altair but it might as well be Earth, with ourselves as the winged monsters’ prey; an accompanying commentary on Paul’s painting likens the hapless primates to “the average man . . . on our war-mad world,” while the predators are “masters of all they survey.” A year before Kenneth Arnold, the Shaver Mystery has expanded into the sky.
There was no way anyone could have known what Arnold was going to encounter above the Cascades or how the nation would respond. Yet, in a manner almost prophetic, the early 1947 issues of Amazing Stories sounded the drum rolls announcing its advent.
“Let’s make a few predictions,” Palmer proposed in the April issue. “First, let’s predict that within a few years, we will be visited from outer space, by a ship that will be seen all over the earth as it circles the planet, but such a ship as no one could have imagined even in our pages up to now.” The ship will be piloted by Titans, the Elder Races who left earth so long ago and are now returning; it will be suitably “titanic,” two hundred miles long. Obviously, this didn’t quite come true. But what was to happen in June of that year was close enough that Palmer could claim a hit.
In the special Shaver Mystery issue, which bore the cover date of June 1947 but went to press on March 13, Palmer quoted Shaver as having “declared that the Titans, living far away in space, or other people like them, still visit earth in space ships, kidnap people, raid the caves for valuable equipment.” One of the four Shaver stories published in that issue introduced a beautiful, benevolent sorceress of the subterranean world, who at first claims to be from “a far country” but turns out to be an extraterrestrial. “There is regular commerce between this cavern world’s people and the other planets,” she explains to her love-smitten male visitor. The drum roll was growing louder. Something dramatic, which neither Shaver nor Palmer had any way to know about in advance, was about to happen.
FIGURE 13. The cover of the Spring 1948 issue of Fate magazine. Image provided by Fate and used with permission.
And then it happened, and Palmer was triumphant. “A portion of the now world-famous Shaver Mystery has now been proved!” began his editorial column for the October 1947 issue. “On June 25 [sic] . . . mysterious supersonic vessels, either space ships or ships from the caves, were sighted in this country!”
Palmer wrote those words shortly before July 4, and the massive sighting wave already underway stunningly confirmed them. Were the “flying pie-pans, discs, what have you” from space? From “underground hideouts of an unknown race”? Possibly both? And what were they doing here? All a “mystery,” he declared, providing proof of the mystery, namely Shaver’s. “We’ll see more of them,” Palmer predicted, “and very soon we’ll find out what they are.”
Shaver was less enthusiastic. He knew that interplanetary spaceships were a far less important part of his mythos than Palmer made out; he must have sensed they were about to upstage him and his Mystery. The saucers, he suggested, might be spaceships here to deliver “cargos of wonder-mech.” Conversely, they might have come to loot mech from the caves, washing machines and refrigerators from the surface, to sell on other planets. Perhaps they were invaders, liberators, here to free subsurface Earth from dero domination. But that seemed too much to hope for. His prediction was the exact opposite of Palmer’s, its formulation so close to Palmer’s that it sounds like he was deliberately picking a fight: “I predict that nothing more will be seen, and the truth of what the strange disc ships really are will never be disclosed to the common people.”
The split between the two men had begun. The Shaver Mystery’s star, at its zenith in the special June issue, was beginning its long decline. Publishers Ziff and Davis were growing uneasy with it; perhaps the science-fiction fans’ crusade was beginning to have impact. Under pressure from his bosses, Palmer began to qualify his endorsements of the Mystery, to fudge on its truth claims. By the middle of July 1947, he’d sent out his first tentative feelers to a new dance partner: Kenneth Arnold.
The saucers were Palmer’s future. Pulling away from the increasingly chilly atmosphere at Ziff-Davis, he founded a new magazine, Fate, dedicated to the supposedly true mysteries of the universe. The first issue, cover-dated Spring 1948, featured Arnold’s account of his famous sighting. The wildly imaginative cover painting showed Arnold’s airplane amid the clouds, overshadowed by a pair of bronze-colored, metallic flying disks.75 In 1952, Palmer and Arnold coauthored a book, The Coming of the Saucers, which Gray Barker was later to call “the most fascinating saucer book I had ever read.”
Palmer’s science-fiction magazine Other Worlds Science Stories, which had become practically the sole outlet for Shaver’s writing, evolved in the late 1950s into a nonfiction publication first called Flying Saucers from Other Worlds, then just Flying Saucers. The disks, meanwhile, left Shaver cold. What obsessed him instead were “rock books,” pictorial records of prehuman civilizations embedded inside ordinary rocks. Sawed open, these rocks served as models for Shaver’s “rokfogos,” paintings suggestive of Mayan glyphs, claustrophobic and suffused with tormented and sometimes violent eroticism. (Example: “Amazons Defending Against the Attack of the Ape Bats.”)76 In 1975, Palmer published an assortment of these with Shaver’s commentary in a volume that also included his autobiographical “Martian Diary.” The cover was illustrated with a rokfogo and bore the title The Secret World By Ray Palmer. No mention of Shaver on the cover or spine. Shaver bore the wound of this betrayal until his death, which came on November 5, 1975, after a brief struggle with pancreatic cancer.
“He believed in only one God, eighteen days before [his] death,” his wife Dottie recalled. “Used to say there must have been more than one God because there was too many to take care of and be loved. Felt sorry for Jesus.”
Interviewed in 1973, Shaver admitted to Eugene Steinberg that he was no longer sure where the dero came from. “I wish I knew. . . . I don’t think they ever grew on Earth. . . . I think they came in from space as a kind of vermin chased away from other places, and that they’ve gotten residence in our underworld and are a terrible threat to everyone on Earth.” Shaver didn’t know, but Palmer did. The dero come from inside us. Trip a blind man into a mud puddle—or mock a crippled hunchback or cheat a trusting friend out of his due recognition on the cover of a book—and the dero is you.
THE “MYSTERY”
Why, after four years of tirelessly promoting the Shaver Mystery, did Palmer edge away from it, shift his signature “mystery” from the netherworld to the sky? A glib, cynical explanation lies close at hand.
The saucers, to use the language of the book title, were the coming thing. The Shaver Mystery, wildly popular as it was with Amazing Stories readers and those science-fiction fans who didn’t loathe it, never had much impact beyond them. A quarter of a million fans is a lot of readers. But compared to the US population of the time it was miniscule, just under 0.2 percent. The other 99.8 percent may be assumed never to have heard of Richard Shaver or the dero or the underground caves. Flying saucers, by contrast, were a national phenomenon from the beginning. What wonder, then, if Palmer crunched the numbers and decided the saucers would pay better?
This theory rests on a misreading of Palmer’s character. True, he was a shrewdie with an eye for the main chance. He was also a man of deep though selective integrity. He showed this in the early 1950s, when the market for science fiction shrank and it became clear there was no good living to be made from it. The real money was in soft-core porn. That was where Palmer’s good friend and admirer Bill Hamling, founder of a now-forgotten “men’s magazine” called Rogue, put his attention and cash. So did Palmer’s distant acquaintance Hugh Hefner, founder of an unfortunately well-remembered magazine of the same ilk. Don’t be a chump, they told Palmer. Come into the skin trade with us and get rich.
Palmer refused and stayed middling poor. His mission was to promote the real mysteries, those of the sky above and the earth beneath, which couldn’t possibly be the soulless, empty, mechanical things orthodox science made of them. For the pseudomystery of what a pretty woman looks like with her clothes off, he had no time at all.
In 1965, he opened himself to interviewer Steinberg about what the saucers meant to him, what the very idea of “mystery” meant. Steinberg asked if we will we ever solve the flying saucer mystery.
“No!” Palmer replied. And this isn’t a bad thing, but a good one.
Flying saucers are physically real, Palmer said, but real also in a more spiritual, metaphysical sense. Recognize that humanity’s spiritual development lags far behind its mechanical prowess, he told Steinberg. Recognize that the balance needs to be restored. Then
if there is a power somewhere which is interested in a balance on this planet, the flying saucers would be an excellent way to—just to make us think. So to prove to us exactly what they were would make us stop thinking again. We’ve got the problem solved, why go ahead further? So, I think the mystery is only going to deepen.
Without mystery, our minds stagnate. “If we knew exactly what the flying saucers were,” Palmer told his audience at a UFO conference a few months before his death in 1977, “. . . we would have solved the mystery, returned to boredom, and stopped thinking again.” The conventional textbooks numb our minds with their assurance that they possess “facts” and “knowledge,” whereas all that’s real is “the mysterious horizon beyond which lie unborn facts, and unresearched and unproved knowledge.”
“Mystery” isn’t a riddle to be answered or a crossword puzzle to be solved. It’s a metaphysical state wherein lies the salvation of the human mind and soul. This was the “mystery,” as Palmer called it from the beginning, that Shaver had birthed with his Mantong alphabet. Behind it lay a terrible and glorious world of “unborn facts,” whose promise and splendor Palmer intuited the moment he fished Shaver’s letter out of Howard Browne’s wastebasket.
This was a “mystery” of things below, foreshadowing the higher mysteries that were to be manifest in the heavens. With Kenneth Arnold, the higher mystery had made its appearance. The lower could be left behind, in honored obsolescence.
How did Palmer know this would happen? With what eerie prescience did he foresee, more than a year in advance, the coming of the saucers?77
The best answer seems to be that Palmer felt something latent, stirring, within the communal psyche of the nation. It was this that drew him to the Shaver Mystery in the first place. It involved an unconscious equation of below with above, which on the conscious, literal level seems strange—as incongruous, perhaps, as the notion of a descent to Ezekiel’s chariot.78 Aren’t “above” and “below” diametrically opposed? Yet we speak of the “depths” of space as well as of earth and sea, and for Shaver, ingress to the one “depth” could be through the other.
Big Jim discovers this in “Cult of the Witch Queen.” He’s marched through the underground caverns to a “black and silent expanse of water, whose farther reaches were lost in the darkness.” A “vast ship . . . like a submarine” is moored at water’s edge, and through a journey that’s never described—because it would make no sense in terms of conscious reality, but only of the unconscious where the black and silent waters equate with the blackness and silence of outer space—Jim and the others are carried on it to the planet Venus.
As we’ve seen, Shaver remembered having himself experienced something similar: a journey by boat into a sea cave, then through miles of darkness, until “there we were, inside the Earth.” The experience was triggered by what he saw in the sky: he “really became aware of the underworld” when he noticed something strange in the clouds.
For Shaver the materialist, all this was absolutely literal if logically incoherent. Palmer understood Shaver better than Shaver understood himself. He knew the truth of the Shaver Mystery, although it was only long afterward that he was willing to say it explicitly. All these depths—of earth, of sea, of sky—were metaphors for the psyche, the unconscious.
Again and again we’ve seen hints of a connection between Shaver’s underworld and the mythic land of the dead. Water—and the boat that crosses the water—takes you to both. Shaver’s world is Lemuria, with its overtones not only of a past sunk in forgetfulness but of terrifying ghosts that linger to torment the present.
What if that ghost world, that place of death, were to burst forth upon the living?
It happened in August 1945, while the Shaver Mystery was at its height. Palmer was writing his “Report From the Forgotten Past” for the December issue of Amazing Stories when he heard the news of Hiroshima. He understood at once what it meant. “War has come to a horrible pass,” he wrote. “It has come to its ultimate pass. With atomic energy at its disposal, the next war means the certain end of civilization.”
No longer is the destructive power of Shaver’s (imaginary or not) underground science the secret of the underground. It is on the surface now. Did it, PERHAPS, come from the underground? What strange guidance might our scientists have had?
“Imaginary or not.” He knew Shaver’s underground was an artifact of Shaver’s brain. He also knew that it was real and that it had exploded with all its terror into our world.
Nor was this the end. Palmer knew that too. The carnage of World War II having dragged itself to an exhausted finale meant no lasting victory of light over darkness, tero over dero. A new world conflict, equipped with vastly more dreadful weapons, had already begun to form. It was only a matter of time, Palmer intuited, before men and women would look into the sky—deeper, more remote and mysterious than Shaver’s caverns, yet functionally equivalent to them in the unconscious—and witness the mirroring of their fears: the incursion of something unknown, alien.
As death is unknown and alien.
June 1947. The coming of the saucers. The special Shaver Mystery issue of Amazing Stories. The month when the Doomsday Clock first appeared on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, signifying the annihilation not just of the individual as in generations past but of everything human.
That was also the month, according to some reckonings, when a rancher northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, stumbled on the strange debris that in the fullness of time would give birth to the most gripping, resonant, universally known tale in all the UFO mythology—a myth whose focus and essence is death.
Palmer’s redemptive “mystery” had its dark shadow. This was it.
Notes
62. A point emphasized by religious studies scholar Jeffrey Kripal.
63. Just what’s intended by “Lemuria” and what it means to “remember” it will occupy us presently.
64. He was soon to backtrack, endorsing Shaver’s claim of personal experience with the caves, regretting he’d “perhaps harmed the credibility of an incredible story by trying to make it less incredible.” But this was only after readers’ enthusiastic responses to “I Remember Lemuria!” had assured him they didn’t find it incredible at all.
65. Abandondero because they come from “abandoned caves and cities.” Alternatively, they’re the ones “abandoned” on Earth after the Elder Races decamp for the stars. Dero is normally treated as a contraction of “detrimental robot” or used to refer to a “condition” of “detrimental energy robotism.” But the dero aren’t robots, and elsewhere in the story ro is used for a human being, or specifically a male human being. Combined with the sinister de symbol, it would seem to mean “evil person,” as in the etymology of trocadero in Shaver’s original letter. This, of course, is exactly what the dero are.
66. Recall that te in the Mantong alphabet is the positive “integrant” force, the opposite of de.
67. Shaver himself noted the parallel: “Just so has Hitler, a dero, caused the weight of an entire nation of men to be thrown on the detrimental side of the scales. Other men are not smart enough, or well enough intentioned, to remove one Hitler. Notice the world conflagration resulting from the devotion of one nation to a detrimental energy robot.”
68. After a character from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii.
69. Nydia? The context gives no indication who’s meant by “she.”
70. By the time he wrote the story, Shaver was living with an earthy divorcee named Dottie, who never took his revelations seriously but, as his third wife, would stick with him until the end. But his heart belonged to Nydia.
71. A year and some months after his flight from Barto, Shaver was apprehended and eventually transferred back to Michigan, to the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he stayed until his discharge in May 1943. Subtracting his period of freedom in 1937–38, this comes to about eight years. Palmer seems not to have realized there was more than one institution involved and to have imagined that Shaver spent all eight years at the Ypsilanti State Hospital.
72. This will explain why Lemuria dominates the titles of the first two stories, yet hardly occurs in the stories themselves.
73. The quirky philosopher of the Bronx (1874–1932), whose four books chronicled hundreds or possibly thousands of anomalous events that science ignored because they just wouldn’t fit in. The classic “Fortean” event was the fall from the sky of something that oughtn’t to be there—fish or tadpoles, say, or enormous chunks of ice. But Fort also found many reports of strange objects or lights in the sky, which he suggested might be visitors from other worlds. These visitors might own us humans, Fort suggested (probably tongue in cheek), as a farmer owns the animals that graze on his acres.
74. Who seventeen years earlier had adorned the front cover of the November 1929 issue of Science Wonder Stories with an enormous disk flying through interplanetary space in near-vertical position, its elongated tentacles grasping New York’s Woolworth Building. On the strength of his 1929 cover, Paul has sometimes been proclaimed creator of the “flying saucer craze,” but this seems unlikely. The time lag is too great, and prior to 1947 flying disks appeared only sporadically in science fiction and its art, Paul’s oeuvre included.
75. Each with a doughnut-like hole at its center, suggestive of the holes at the bottoms of the aerial vehicles on the back cover of the August 1946 Amazing Stories, as well as Harold Dahl’s description of the objects he claimed to have witnessed in the sky over Puget Sound (see chapter 6).
76. Shaver had talent. Since his death, the rokfogos have been recognized and exhibited as “outsider art” in places like the California Institute of the Arts, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and Pasadena City College.
77. The claim that Palmer was “the man who invented flying saucers” and that, through the Shaver Mystery, he inspired the 1947 sighting wave and the following fascination with UFOs was first advanced in 1983 by John Keel in a slovenly but self-assured article. Later writers have parroted Keel’s designation, seldom seeming very sure what they mean by it. It can be defended, if at all, only by wild exaggeration of Palmer’s influence on the public at large.
78. See chapter 5.
