This photograph of Abigail Waite (1853–1928?) taken c. 1890 depicts a typical case of the “Innsmouth Look” in Deep One-human hybrids. (Propnomicon)
“During the winter of 1927–28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting – under suitable precautions – of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.
Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and it is even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived existence.”
–H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”
When the St. Bernard Parish investigations revealed the sinister implications of the growth of a nationwide Cthulhu cult to Louisiana authorities, there was no single agency able or empowered to assess the rising threat posed by hidden pre-human populations and prehistoric doomsday cults. It is probably a coincidence that, only seven months after Legrasse’s raid, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the Justice Department to create a national Bureau of Investigations (the direct forerunner of the FBI) over Congressional objections. On the other hand, Roosevelt was a devoted collector of Western legendry and a former New York City police commissioner: he might well have come across legends of K’n-Yan (Gray Eagle is reported to have survived well into the 20th century), or evidence of Ghoul attacks, or both.
This photograph of Abigail Waite (1853–1928?) taken c. 1890 depicts a typical case of the “Innsmouth Look” in Deep One-human hybrids. (Propnomicon)
Lousiana State Police forwarded their files on the St. Bernard Parish raid to the Bureau of Investigations in 1909, Bureau Chief Stanley Finch had the files classified and compartmented in a special unit he christened Unit 10, sometimes referred to in contemporary documents as “Unit X.” Finch charged Unit 10 first with gathering information on state and local investigations into NRE-related activity, and then with mounting its own inquiries. Unit 10 assisted in several raids over the next two decades, often under cover of, or cooperating with, anti-sedition or anti-terrorism actions against Communists or anarchists, which many nihilist NRE cultists were. Another common cover was Prohibition enforcement against bootleggers and moonshiners, as with the Robert Suydam case at Red Hook in 1925. With almost 15 years’ experience behind it when the Innsmouth cult revealed itself, the Bureau thought it was ready.
The decrepit state of Innsmouth even before the 1928 Raid can be seen in this photograph of the Eliot Street Pier, taken in 1925 by Michael Schefter, a factory inspector with the Massachusetts Department of Public Safety. (Propnomicon)
Casus Belli
The ongoing effects of the 1837 depression left most of the businesses in Innsmouth under the control – direct or otherwise – of shipping magnate Obed Marsh, who leveraged his profitable Pacific trade into ownership of the town’s mills and even a gold refinery. His success attracted followers, whom he initiated into a Tahitian cult disguised as a fraternal organization called the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Enemies of the cult disappeared or drowned until 1846, when a citizens’ vigilance committee led by Selectman Herman Mowry arrested Marsh and his acolytes. Two weeks later, half the population of the town (including Selectman Mowry) was dead and Marsh returned to power. Outsiders were told a plague had ravaged the town, and aside from an increasingly sinister reputation and medical reports of deformities among residents in the following generations (blamed on the effects of the “Innsmouth Plague”) the town slipped into relative obscurity after the Civil War.
The basalt Nan Madol complex on the Caroline island of Ponape served as the capital of a Cthulhu cult from approximately 1100 to 1628, when the local workers overthrew the Chau-te-leur dynasty, a clear cognate name to the NRE. Nan Madol means “the spaces between,” a clear reference to alien hyperspace (as the Necronomicon says: “Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal”) and furthermore, the complex rests on the Soun Nan-Leng reef. ONI feared that the German, then the Japanese, occupiers of Ponape would restore the cult and contact the Deep One city of Kahnihmw off the shore of the Nan Madol lagoon. (robertharding / Alamy)
Nevertheless, official interest in Innsmouth slowly renewed. In 1917, Draft officials in the town reported impossible deformities, and during World War I the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) initiated an internal investigation into several sailors from the Innsmouth area who proved unreliable in action: specific charges included smuggling and illicit fraternization, especially on Pacific stations. When confronted with the possibility of an ONI inquiry into the “Pacific ring” in early November of 1920, the Governor of American Samoa, Warren Terhune, shot himself in the heart rather than cooperate with the investigation.
The Case of Earl Hancock Ellis
The case next came to the attention of an eccentric US Marine Corps strategist, Lieutenant Colonel Earl Hancock “Pete” Ellis, who insisted on following up on the odd events in the Pacific personally. He may have first crossed paths with the cult while stationed in New Orleans in 1914, at which point his alcoholism became chronic. In 1921 Ellis brought his concerns to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., who gave him permission for an undercover mission to the western Pacific Islands. Ellis submitted an undated letter of resignation to the Marine Corps, and then traveled extensively throughout the Caroline and Marshall islands (including Ponape, New Guinea, and other stops on the Marsh trade routes) investigating the unidentified force or cult that had prompted Terhune’s suicide. Ellis’s mental stability deteriorated rapidly and he died, supposedly from alcohol poisoning, on the Japanese-occupied island of Koror on May 12, 1923.
The Office of Naval Intelligence sent Chief Pharmacist Lawrence Zembsch to collect Ellis’s remains – and his final reports – as soon as they learned of his death. After examining Ellis’s findings, Zembsch asked Japanese authorities to have Ellis’s remains exhumed and burned, and cabled an abbreviated version of Ellis’s terrified observations to the ONI. Zembsch himself then had a nervous breakdown after being “heavily drugged” by an unidentified assailant. Ellis’s complete reports disappeared, and the only other man who had seen them – Zembsch – died when a sudden earthquake smashed into Yokohama where he was recovering.
THE STRATEGY OUT OF TIME
Lieutenant Colonel Ellis also predicted the Japanese attacks that would draw the United States into World War II, authoring a comprehensive study of Japanese war plans in 1921, while attached to the Headquarters Marine Corps staff at Quantico. Entitled Operation Plan 712: Advanced Base Operation in Micronesia, Ellis’s paper correctly predicted both Japanese and American naval strategy in a war more than 20 years in the future.
Ellis had descended into a deep seclusion while writing Plan 712 throughout the previous year, and friends complained that his behavior had changed radically. The previously enthusiastic officer became standoffish and expressionless, with one friend and colleague complaining that it was as if “he had forgotten, for a time, how to move the muscles of his face.” After publishing the plan, Ellis complained of headaches and hallucinations of strange beings and desert cities. Although Ellis never credited his prophetic strategy to any supernatural insight, his MAJIC dossier, partly inherited from the ONI, speculated that Ellis may have been another target of “… the so-called ‘Great Race from Yith’ so frequently mentioned in connection with the Peaslee case of 1908–1913.”
Operation Ashdod
“And when they of Ashdod arose early on the morrow, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark of the Lord. And they took Dagon, and set him in his place again.
And when they arose early on the morrow morning, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him.
Therefore neither the priests of Dagon, nor any that come into Dagon’s house, tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod unto this day.”
–1 Samuel 5: 3–5
Over the next four years, the ONI followed Ellis’s leads in desultory fashion, and Unit 10, cooperating with the Coast Guard, expanded its surveillance to cover bootlegging and other smuggling operations run out of Innsmouth by patriarch Barnabas Marsh. On July 16, 1927, a young anthropology student named Robert Olmstead stumbled into the FBI office in Boston raving with breathless tales of bulging-eyed mutants and alien fish-cults. Unit 10 and the ONI both received Olmstead’s report and to their credit recognized the need for joint action: the United States needed to deal with a Deep One threat that had already breached its borders.
Between July 1927 and February 1928, military assets were secretly recalled from police actions in Central America and staged in New England to prepare for Operation Ashdod (named from a passage in the First Book of Samuel), a full-scale assault on the Innsmouth threat. The objective was not merely to eradicate the Innsmouth cult, but also to recover sufficient intelligence to finally understand the nature of the “Pacific threat” once and for all. The 66th Company of 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment pulled out of Nicaragua and staged at Camp Devens west of Innsmouth in December to prepare for the operation. The USS O-9 (also known as SS-70), an O-class submarine launched in 1918, providentially ordered to New London from the Panama Canal Zone, began loitering off the coast of Massachusetts in January.
A surprisingly well-publicized photograph of the USS O-9 (SS-70) in the Panama Canal Zone, officially dated to February 22, 1928, a week after the Innsmouth Raid she assisted by torpedoing the Deep One arsenal off Devil’s Reef. On the morning of June 20, 1941, while cruising with two other subs off the coast of Maine, an unknown force crushed her hull and pulled her under with the loss of all hands. (PD)
Despite the heavy military component, the operation was led, at least nominally, by the FBI. On the night of February 13, 1928, the Bureau passed down instructions for Massachusetts State Police to close all roads leading to and from Innsmouth. Bureau special agents moved into position at the town limits on Massachusetts state highway 1A, where they briefed Marine Corps troops on the full scope of the assault. At the same time, FBI men aboard the Coast Guard cutter USCGC General Greene, based out of Boston, briefed its captain and the commander of the O-9, Lieutenant J. T. Acree, received orders to sail into Innsmouth harbor to support a Marine operation against “bootleggers,” who were expected to receive support from “the seas east of Devil Reef.” Although a little mystified by the order, Acree stationed his boat above a deep submarine gorge near the reef.
The Marines encountered little resistance as they moved through the mostly abandoned streets of Innsmouth until they reached Federal Street. Clearing the ramshackle houses along the route they uncovered several slumbering families, all of whom professed their innocence and surrendered immediately. The Marines attempted to move the families out of the combat zone quietly, so they could continue toward the Marshes’ expected strongholds around New Church Green near the town center: the location of the Esoteric Order of Dagon and the Marsh, Gilman, and Eliot estates. However, a young girl and her mother, both of old Innsmouth stock, suddenly turned on their caretakers, wresting a Thompson submachine gun from a startled lance corporal and opening fire on the column from the rear.
Taking cover among the residences, the Marines returned fire, and then continued forward – but they knew that the element of surprise was now lost. The Marines began setting fire to homes and businesses as they passed them to ensure against another unexpected attack, and for the remainder of the battle surrendering townsfolk were shot out of hand, any survivors being taken as prisoners to the staging area outside town. Although this tactic (honed in the Philippines and Nicaragua) almost certainly prevented additional attacks from behind the lines, it also forced the few innocent Innsmouth residents to oppose the Marines, effectively stiffening the town’s resistance. Despite the presence of both the General Greene and the O-9 in or near Innsmouth harbor, several belligerents are believed to have escaped into the sea, where they attempted to summon reinforcements from their aquatic cousins in the nearby Deep One settlement, which recovered records and subsequent interrogations would identify as Y’ha-nthlei.
By 4.00am a Marine mortar barrage breached the Marshes’ hastily constructed defenses, allowing a platoon of Marines to begin a room-by-room attack on the old Masonic temple that had served the Esoteric Order of Dagon as its headquarters for almost 90 years. For the first time, the Marines found themselves in open battle with Deep One hybrids, and the under-prepared unit began taking heavy casualties.
At about the same time, O-9 detected the first significant Deep One activity in the gorge just beyond Devil Reef, reporting “flashes of light” and “a low, moaning roar that rattled the hull so hard it popped rivets.” Whether they were warned by fleeing hybrids or contacted telepathically, the Deep Ones were stirring. As the submarine dove below increasingly choppy seas, the O-9’s hydrophones detected a large object rushing toward the boat from the canyon. Acree ordered the crew to fire torpedoes, ultimately collapsing the walls of the canyon before the creature – if creature it was – could emerge. MAJIC’s official assessment later classified the O-9’s target as a huge amorphous bioweapon known as a Shoggoth, but given the limited sensor capability of the O-class submarine no definitive determination can be made.
Despite the loss of almost half a platoon in under an hour, the Marines ultimately eliminated the resistance within the Esoteric Order of Dagon’s temple, while the rest of the company moved on the massive, labyrinthine homes of Innsmouth’s most powerful residents. Even given the warning of machine-gun fire in the early stages of the attack, Innsmouth’s inhuman residents had been unable to prepare an adequate defense. By dawn, Operation Ashdod was over: the Marines withdrew, taking 249 prisoners back to Camp Devens, and Unit 10 began securing the town’s records, family libraries, financial documents, and Deep One artifacts for further study.
The Innsmouth Aftermath
“I am … contagious… I request you not to investigate the conditions of my death.”
–Columbia University anthropologist Buell Halvor Quain
On February 14, 1928, the United States government learned it had been at war for longer than it had been in existence. The Innsmouth raid took so many prisoners, and recovered so much intelligence – not just the crumbling tomes and scriptures from the Esoteric Order of Dagon hall, but bills of lading and payment from the Marsh Refinery – that the scope of the “Cthulhu cult” was finally, and terrifyingly, laid bare. An initial survey of captured documents broadly hinted that multiple species of nonhuman intelligences were arrayed against the United States specifically and humanity more generally, effectively threatening a global extinction event if unchallenged. In their first classified after-action report, Unit 10 agents asserted that “we appear to have uncovered a loose organization that transcends boundaries of nation and even species, dedicated to the destruction of this and every other state on earth. The antiquity of some of the documents collected suggests that this goal is longstanding. Their plan, if a strategy that extends across countless generations can even be called that, is already well under way.”
In 1930, following a prolonged legal battle, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began to fill the Quabbin Reservoir in the upper Miskatonic and Swift River valleys. The Secretary of War intervened in the case, ostensibly to guard Connecticut’s water rights, but in actuality to ensure the drowning of the town of Dunwich, a hotbed of Yog-Sothoth cultism. During the decade the reservoir filled, the Army Air Corps repeatedly bombed Dunwich and other sensitive valley sites including the meteorite-stricken Gardner farmstead: again the War Department cooperated, declaring the future lake bed the Quabbin Reservoir Precision Bombing and Gunnery Range. (James M.Hunt / Alamy)
Despite the exemplary cooperation between federal criminal investigators and the US Navy throughout Operation Ashdod, lines of communication began to break down almost immediately afterward. Unit 10 took steps to classify the Innsmouth evidence almost as soon as it was removed from the town. Citing the ONI’s open investigation into what now appeared to be a pervasive infiltration of Deep Ones into the Navy’s ranks, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover refused to share either the evidence or the results of the Bureau’s analysis with the Navy. This did not prevent the Bureau from turning to private industry to examine its findings – but these first attempts to correlate the contents of the “Innsmouth cache” would end badly.
In early 1930, the Bureau sent several samples of Deep One artifacts and remains to DuPont’s Purity Hall laboratory for chemical analysis by the prominent research chemist Wallace Carothers. Although the Purity Hall research did result in several critical breakthroughs – including the development of some of the first practical polyester fabrics – exposure to the alien materials exacerbated Carothers’ already serious depression. He committed suicide in a Philadelphia hotel room in April 1937 by drinking a cocktail of cyanide and lemon juice.
Unit 10 read astronomer William Wallace Campbell into its research program in 1935 after he retired from the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences. He was asked to assess the validity of some of the astronomical data found among the Esoteric Order of Dagon’s documents, in particular those documents which alluded to alien intelligences in nearby space. Campbell’s research was short-lived: by early 1938, he had begun experiencing unexplained neurological disorders that left him blind and unable to speak for long periods at a time. In June of that year, he leapt to his death from a fourth-story window in San Francisco.
The Bureau recruited a young Columbia University anthropologist named Buell Halvor Quain in 1935, following his year-long study of the culture and legends of isolated Pacific islanders. It was thought that Quain’s work would leave him well positioned to help translate and analyze certain religious texts and objects taken from the Innsmouth cache. Quain led two expeditions into the Brazilian interior in 1937 and 1938 to locate a native tribe that he believed was still speaking a “pure” (and possibly pre-human) language which underpinned much of the syncretic “Mythos” that the Cthulhu cult had adopted as its own. It was largely through Quain’s reports that the term “Mythos” was adopted in government documents after 1937. During his second expedition, Quain came to believe that he had contracted a mysterious linguistic disease; he quarantined himself from all human contact to prevent his condition spreading, finally hanging himself in early August 1939.
While the FBI took the lead in examining, correlating, and cataloguing the Innsmouth cache, the US Navy found itself in charge of almost 250 prisoners, most of whom were only partly human. Initial attempts to hold the prisoners at a single facility were plagued by escape attempts. After having to take extraordinary measures to thwart these attempts throughout the winter and spring of 1928, the ONI had the prisoners separated into small groups and sent to inland military hospitals and prisons throughout the Midwest and Southwest, where their access to so-called “friendly alien populations” was assessed to be less likely.
A US Marine detachment engages in a reconnaissance in force of Mi-Gö bases in Vermont, following a phosgene gas bombardment by Keystone B-6 bombers. This photograph, taken some time in 1937 or 1938, shows a Marine suffocating after removing his gas mask for unknown reasons: B-8 investigators suggested telepathic control, overwhelming panic, or an unknown side-effect on some personalities from handling Mi-Gö equipment. (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)
In the short term, the ONI debriefings were more productive than the Bureau’s disastrous attempts to comprehend the scope of their findings. As the Navy began to understand the scope of the threat, it prioritized immediate and aggressive, even ruthless, intelligence gathering. This was not without some cost to its own personnel: one very promising and open-minded investigator, a lieutenant on Pacific station on the USS Roper, had to be invalided out when he contracted a pulmonary infection from Deep One secretions. With few exceptions, prisoners whose intelligence value had been exhausted were tried and executed on charges of treason, though a small group of un-indicted detainees were still being held at the State Mental Hospital in Yankton, South Dakota, as late as 1949.
The decisive moment of the Innsmouth Raid (on land at least) comes when a squad of Marines led by Lieutenant Allen Schofler advances without orders, entering the Esoteric Order of Dagon temple from Broad Street through a side window rather than supporting the frontal assault across the New Church Green. Caught unprepared, the hierophant (shown in the golden tiara described in Olmstead’s testimony but not listed in the official inventory of captured temple paraphernalia) flees through a secret passage into the network of tunnels beneath Innsmouth. Although the two full Deep Ones shown would kill or cripple five men in Schofler’s squad before going down in a hail of .45 bullets, the rapid capture of the cult’s idol broke the morale of the Marsh clan and their Deep One allies. At the end of the day, the Marines’ superior rate of fire and unit cohesion overcame the unnatural stamina of the Innsmouth folk, who were armed (if at all) with spearguns and antique Civil War-era firearms.
Evolving Defense Schemes
The Navy’s rapidly evolving counter-NRE mission was (and would remain) highly compartmented, with ONI officers deployed to several critical locations to monitor the Mythos threat. By 1929, the ONI had secretly tasked a unit in the First Naval District (encompassing most of New England) with monitoring several NRE-linked sites in coastal waters. This watching brief was under the auspices of the district’s Communication and Information Service, which until World War I had largely employed local reservists and volunteers. After the Department of the Navy overhauled the entire Naval district system in 1931, this small detachment was renamed Section B-8, and reorganized as a special departmental unit tasked with monitoring current intelligence on potentially Mythos-related activity from all 17 naval districts and re-examining historical holdings to ensure that earlier indications of NRE-related threats had not gone unnoticed.
The discovery of several then-unidentifiable alien corpses – later determined to be Mi-Gö – in the aftermath of the 1936 Northeast Flood led Section B-8 to begin a series of visual surveillance overflights of New England. The overflights allowed B-8 to identify several previously unknown locations in northern Vermont that showed evidence of substantial occupation and excavation, as if the then-unknown creatures were mining the Green Mountains for some unknown but apparently valuable material. Sufficiently concerned about the possibility of additional non-human threats after its Innsmouth experience, the Navy worked quickly to organize three bombing runs over each of the sites, dropping conventional ordnance as well as phosgene and chlorine gas bombs on the sites within weeks of their discovery. The attacks were apparently successful. When a US Marine detachment reached the site on foot, they encountered no resistance, and recovered samples of advanced Mi-Gö technology that had been only slightly damaged in the attacks. In order to ensure that site exploitation could continue without undue public scrutiny, the former Mi-Gö operating base was absorbed by an expansion of the Army’s Camp Ethan Allen, which continues to serve as a testing ground for advanced weaponry to this day.
World War II
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 served as a significant distraction from the varied threats posed to the United States by Mythos entities; when Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor drew the US into the war in 1941, the immediate threat overcame lingering but less pressing concerns about K’n-Yan, Deep Ones, Old Ones, and their supposed alien masters.
One effect of this distraction was that a small Wisconsin publisher brought to press the works of H. P. Lovecraft in three volumes. The ONI did not learn of the leak until 1945, with the publication of The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales as #730 in the Armed Services Editions. The dangers posed by the Mythos were not completely forgotten, however: B-8 fell under the auspices of the counter-supernatural Supreme Allied Command: Shadow Theater (SAC:ST), and Vice-President Henry Wallace (an initiate into Central Asian traditions opposed to those of the Mythos) forced Hoover to promise full cooperation with SAC:ST operations, including cross-deployment of liaison personnel.
One of the few known photographs of a Unit 10 team in action depicts a squad deploying flamethrowers against part of a small Cthulhu-spawn colony on the island of Eniwetok in February 1944. Unit 10 discovered that Eniwetok rests on a Cretaceous seamount, a major outcropping of Cthulhu’s sunken continent of Yhe. Whether the Japanese intended to lure the Americans into a Mythos deathtrap or fortified the atoll in ignorance, the response was overwhelming firepower: the battleships USS Tennessee and USS Iowa, along with shore artillery, delivered over a kiloton of ordnance against both the Japanese and Mythos threats. (Osprey Publishing)
This hybrid B-8/FBI group, which retained the cryptic designator “Unit 10” throughout the war, tracked a variety of known Mythos actors to ensure non-human elements would not be inadvertently drawn into the war. They hoped that even if NREs and their servitors became formal belligerents, the Allies would not be caught flat-footed. In but one example, Unit 10 maintained an extensive record of remote Mi-Gö probes penetrating and observing Allied bombing columns, where confused pilots referred to them as “foo fighters.” In the Pacific Theater, limited new intelligence and the now-fully analyzed partial reports from Ellis’s undercover mission in the Caroline Islands led Unit 10 to issue warnings prompting Allied forces to skip a planned invasion of Ponape during the island-hopping campaign. Instead, dozens of B-24 and B-25 bombers blanketed Ponape despite a limited Japanese presence on the island, and the battleships USS Iowa and USS Massachusetts bombarded the island on Walpurgisnacht, 1944. Thanks to the Ponape bombardments and an unknown number of other still-classified missions, the worst of Unit 10’s fears were never realized.
The Château des Fausses Flammes in Auvergne, depicted after its destruction by the Maquis du Mont Mouchet in May 1944. Originally built on a pre-Roman foundation in the 9th or 10th century, Fausses Flammes became the center of a Melusine cult until its destruction by the pious monks of nearby Perigon. The decadent Duc des Esseintes rebuilt the château in 1875 and assembled one of the best occult libraries in Europe there. In 1944, the Nazis’ Projekt Leo targeted the Fausses Flammes library; a Unit 10 OSS team parachuted in to prevent the books falling into Kaltenbrunner’s hands, joining up with the local Resistance for what eventually proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for both. The Germans made off with portions of the library despite the château’s destruction; the Maquis were badly mauled in the fight and nearly the entire Unit 10 force ended the operation missing or captured. The confused reports of “living mummies” and “serpent vampires” do little to clear up the mysteries surrounding this obscure engagement. (LOC)
While Japan grappled with an even more extensive series of Deep One infiltrations in its own Naval ranks, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had ensured that Germany devoted significant resources throughout the war to the pursuit of occult knowledge, which he believed held the secret to ensuring Aryan domination over the known world. By the end of 1943, Nazi Germany had amassed the single largest extant cache of Mythos-related tomes, scrolls, and grimoires in existence. SS Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Reichssicherhauptamt (Reich Main Security Office; RSHA), tasked the catalog and study of this Mythos library to a Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service; SD) intelligence officer, SS Obersturmbannführer Werner Göttsch, as part of a program known as Projekt Leo. In January 1944, Göttsch consolidated 8,000 occult and Mythos tomes at Burg Niemes in the Sudetenland, where they could be studied “for potential tactical use” as the tide of the war began to shift in the Allies’ favor.
Over the following year, Göttsch and his adjutant, Sturmbannführer Hans Richter, collected almost 35,000 books and documents at Burg Niemes. They plundered Masonic libraries, private collections from the Hexenturm at Idstein and the Faussesflammes Chateau in Vichy France, witch-trial archives, and in July even the Abwehr’s extensive library. The Leo collection included kabalistic texts looted from synagogues, church documents acquired from fascist holdouts in Rome, and (although Allied bombing directed by Unit 10 destroyed the Greek copy at Monte Cassino) a Latin Necronomicon recovered from a ruined castle in Romania. Göttsch then selected one hundred of the most significant items and moved them to Altaussee, Austria, where he was to attempt a ceremony to summon a being or force that Kaltenbrunner believed would come to the immediate defense of a Germany under siege. By the time arrangements for the mystical working were complete, however, Allied forces had begun to close in on Austria from both sides. After hearing reports of the brutal Soviet assault on Vienna in April 1945, a terrified Göttsch sent word to nearby American units that he was willing to defect if he could be extracted before Soviet forces arrived, and emphasized that he was willing to hand over whatever he could about Projekt Leo.
A Unit 10 team swept into Altaussee to recover Göttsch and his holdings on May 8, 1945, just ahead of a much larger Soviet force. Although Göttsch was extracted successfully, agents were only able to recover less than half of the Leo trove before battlefield conditions forced them to retreat. Göttsch spent less than a week in a POW camp in Europe before being transferred to SAC:ST custody. Although his associates were all tried and executed at Nuremberg, Unit 10 recruited Göttsch after a substantial debriefing, and he served the United States in various capacities as an intelligence asset on NRE activity until his disappearance in 1974. There is no evidence that the Soviets captured any Projekt Leo personnel after the war, but they had almost certainly secured the remainder of the Leo documents for their own use by June 1945.
THREAT REPORT: MEGARKARUA SAPIENS
“Scientists to the last – what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forebears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn – whatever they had been, they were men!”
–Professor William Dyer, “Response to the Report of the 1930–1931 Pabodie Antarctic Expedition”
Megarkarua sapiens, perhaps better known to MAJIC agents as simply “the Elder Things,” are believed to have been the first complex multi-cellular organisms on Earth, arriving on the planet from a distant star system approximately 545 million years ago (MYA), just before a sudden explosion of biodiversity among the primitive bacterial life of the Precambrian era. Although some scientists have argued that the timing is mere coincidence, and that animal life would have developed even without the assistance and interference of the Megarkarua, the simple fact remains that many, if not most, of the extant species on this planet arose as the result of their engineering. Consequently, although the Megarkarua are rightly considered aliens by most observers, their place at the origin of what is otherwise considered “native” life on earth suggests that much, if not all, of the observable biodiversity on Earth is of similarly extraterrestrial origin.
Adult Megarkarua sapiens stand 2 to 2.7m tall. Their bulging, five-ridged, radially symmetrical bodies are equipped with wings, and thin stalks used for locomotion and grasping protrude from the bottom and center of their bodies. They are incapable of speech but can communicate telepathically with other species. They reproduce by sporification, and in their larval stages appear similar to non-intelligent, native, prehistoric echinoderms: fossilized crinoid Megarkarua young were once thought to be a separate species of echinoderm designated Arkarua adami. The creatures can hibernate almost indefinitely in response to isolation or environmental stress, with some living examples known to be at least 80 MYA.
Using bio-engineered alien or terrestrial slave-weapons called shoggoths, the Megarkarua expanded over the entire surface of the Earth, building cities both on land and underwater. The arrival of further extraterrestrial competitors (Flying Polyps ca. 500 MYA; Yithians ca. 450 MYA; Cthulhu ca. 350 MYA) slowly chipped away at Megarkarua dominance, but the real blow to their civilization came from within.
Although not truly sentient, shoggoths are clever, aggressive, and violent. They turned on their masters around 252 MYA, igniting a global war that incidentally drove 85 percent of Earth’s species extinct. After a multi-million-year struggle that splintered the continent of Gondwanaland, the Megarkarua defeated the shoggoths, reducing them to a few breeding pits. The inability of shoggoths to breed independently, no doubt a deliberate fail-safe, has since kept them from overwhelming vulnerable native species.
The war crippled the Elder Things, however, leaving them vulnerable to their rivals; the irruption of the Mi-Gö around 130 MYA eventually restricted the Megarkarua to Antarctica and the surrounding continental shelf. The glaciation of Antarctica finally ended the Elder Things’ civilization around 15 MYA.
MAJIC considers the few remaining shoggoth breeding pits strategically vital. They serve as a major motivator for the continued US and Russian presence in Antarctica; Russia has maintained a supposedly peaceful scientific base atop an abandoned Megarkarua settlement in Lake Vostok since 1964. Such Megarkaruan ruins can become unstoppable biological weapons factories, but the physical constraints of polar military operations and the dangers of escalating combat with non-dormant shoggoth defenses keep US options limited. The disastrous Pabodie and Starkweather-Moore Antarctic expeditions in the 1930s demonstrated that some Megarkarua have survived their eons-long hibernation; possible Soviet-Megarkarua contacts were an ongoing nightmare for MAJIC planners during the Cold War.
