Paranormal Investigations - The Shaver Mystery

Like many other paranormal "events", The Shaver Mystery is a great starting point to look at a wide variety of possibly weird events and conspiracy theories.
The Shaver Mystery was originally published in the science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories back in the 1940s.

This series was about a sinister, ancient civilization that lived in caverns under the earth, and was written as fiction.
But the editor of Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer, said that these stories were real events, wrapped in the guise of fiction.
(By the way, the more eagle-eyed among you may recognize the name Ray Palmer. Yes, the DC superhero The Atom, was named after Mr. Palmer. Palmer himself was only four feet tall)

Back in 1943, a man named Richard Sharpe Shaver began writing letters to Amazing magazine, claiming he had discovered an ancient language called "Mantong,".
Mantong was allegedly the source of all Earthly language.
Palmer analyzed this language and decided it had some merit. Then he wrote Shaver back asking how learned of Mantong.
This is where the fun began.

Shaver responded to Palmer's inquiry with a 10,000 word manifesto titled "A Warning to Future Man."
A Warning to Future Man told the story of an ancient civilization that had been forced underground by the damaging rays of the Sun, where they built vast underground cities.
Finally, the damaging radiation from the Sun became too great, and they fled the Earth for another planet.
Some of the members of this ancient civilization had stayed on the earth though and were called "Teros"...the good guys.
While others that stayed had degenerated and become "Deros", which Shaver called "detrimental robots", not because they were actually mechanical, but because they had developed a robot-like savage behavior.

The Deros lived in the abandoned cave cities, and would occasionally venture out to abduct humans for food, or just to torture them.
The Deros had access to the ancient’s devices, one of which was a ray that could project evil thoughts or even voices into the minds of the humans that had evolved on the Earth.
When they weren’t just messing with the human race, the Deros would amuse themselves by causing illnesses, airplane crashes, catastrophic natural disasters and just mayhem in general.
And when that got boring, they would travel to other planets via spaceships and hook up with some equally evil extraterrestrials.

How did Shaver know all this?
He claimed he had been captured by the Deros and had been their prisoner for several years in their subterranean cities.

I will stop and note here that Shaver was hospitalized for psychiatric problems in 1934.
But interestingly, there never seemed to be a clear diagnosis of his problems.
He claimed that one of the welding guns on his job site, (because of the coil's field attunements) allowed him to hear the thoughts of people around him.
And he also claimed that he was in telepathic contact with the Deros, and could hear the torture sessions carried on deep within the earth.
Add to this that Shaver's whereabouts and actions could not be reliably traced until the early 1940s, leaving about eight years unaccounted for.

Well that was enough for Palmer.
He took the 10,000 word manuscript and padded it out to over 30,000 words (though he claimed not to embellish anything, just make it easier to read) and published it in the March 1945 issue of Amazing, changing the title from "A Warning to Future Man." to "I Remember Lemuria!"
The issue quickly sold out.

And that’s not all...
Between the years of 1945 and 1949, Palmer claimed the magazine received "tens of thousands of letters" telling of incidents similar to The Shaver Mystery, where people encountered underground cities or heard strange voices.

Notable among these is a letter from Fred Crisman.
If you have read my Paranormal Investigation Hubs, you may remember that name from the Maury Island incident I mentioned in the other UFO article.

Crisman sent a letter to Amazing Stories claiming that he ran into the Deros while fighting as a commando in Burma during World War II.
His letter stated...
"My companion and I fought our way out of a cave with submachine guns. I have two 9" scars on my left arm that came from wounds given me in the cave when I was 50 feet from a moving object of any kind and in perfect silence. The muscles were nearly ripped out. How? I don't know. My friend has a hole the size of a dime in his right bicep. It was seared inside."
Crisman claimed in a follow up letter that he and a companion later found another Deros city underground in Alaska.

Now to be fair, Crisman is as much of a mystery as Shaver's story.
According to some reports, he was a writer, educator, political provocateur, broadcaster and disruption agent.
Other sources say that he worked for the OSS during the Second World War, he was a veteran of Operation Paperclip, a gunrunner with strong links to organized crime, and/or a Captain in the Army Air Corps.
According to Jim Garrison, he was a person of interest in the JFK assassination.

From the years of 1945 to 1948, Amazing Stories published Shaver Mystery stories, sometimes to the exclusion of almost everything else.
Hard core science fiction fans began to resent this and one young writer named Harlan Ellison allegedly badgered Ray Palmer into admitting that the Shaver Mystery was just a "publicity grabber".
Palmer later said "publicity grabber" was not the same thing as "hoax" though.
Critics also did something that the doctors could not do back in 1934.
They pointed out that Shaver (and a lot of his fans) seemed to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

In 1948, Amazing stopped all publication of Shaver's stories.
The magazine's owners said that the Shaver Mystery had run its course and that the sales were decreasing, but Palmer claimed the magazine was pressured by sinister outside forces to stop the stories.

In one last hurrah in 1951, Life Magazine examined the story.
But after several years, Shaver faded into obscurity.

Shaver passed away in November of 1975 in Summit, Arkansas.
A few years before his death, Palmer revealed that the eight missing years of Shaver's life, he spent as a catatonic in a psychiatric hospital.

Up until Shaver's death, he searched for "rock books", that he believed had been created by the great ancients.
He even ran a "rock book" lending library through the mails, where he sent out rocks he thought had been inscribed with ancient text by Atlanteans using laser like devices.

Although it may seem easy to dismiss these wild stories of the Deros today, you have to look at it like this...

Four years before Kenneth Arnold saw his UFOs and eighteen years before the Betty and Barney Hill abduction, there was a man writing stories about flying saucers and abductions...true or not.

Shaver and Palmer blended The Hollow Earth Theory, Mu, Atlantis and the aforementioned UFOs and alien abductions into a series that rivaled the works of science fiction and fantasy writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and captured the imaginations of readers for over 60 years.

That in itself is no small feat.