Shaver Mysteries

[stereologist]

Richard Shaver would one day begin to hear voices from his welding tool. Later he would report hearing voices at night that told him about a world inside of the Earth. These voices would tell him about evil and good robots and a cruel life inside of the Earth and aliens and all sorts of strange things. He dragged in other ideas too besides a world inside of a hollow Earth such as Mu and Lemuria.

These stories would be told in a pulp fiction called Amazing Stories and championed by Ray Palmer, the editor. His name would be used to create a comic book character.

The Shaver Mysteries are put out there as real stories and readers ate them up. Harlan Ellison tried to corner Palmer and get him to confess that the stories were fiction, but Palmer would not say that.

Why are the deros (destructive energy robots) underground? The sun is poison. That leads Shaver and Palmer to eat only young things like young animals and young plants. One person referred to them as becoming vealotarians.

The following article suggests that the stories were cast as being fiction, but they were not. They were presented as true. That difference is clear when Palmer defends himself against the pressure by Ellison to state that the stories are fiction.

https://spookwire.com/the-shaver-mystery/

https://amazingstories.com/2013/02/the-art-of-the-shaver-mystery/

Quote

In 1943 Richard Sharp Shaver began writing letters to the then publisher of Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer detailing the existence of a sinister, ancient civilization living below the earth’s surface. In caverns deep underground these beings, called Deros, harbored fantastic technology and occasionally kidnapped people from the surface and performed unspeakable tortures upon them.

Shaver’s semi-coherent ramblings, which he claimed were delivers to him telepathically through his welding machine in the factory in which he worked (I’m not making this stuff up, I swear) caught Ray Palmer’s attention. Instead of referring him to a psychiatrist, Palmer contacted Shaver and encouraged his delusions, prompting him to write more and more about this fantastic story.

 

[stereologist]

34 minutes ago, Tuco's Gas said:

I really hope Shaver found the professional help he needed for his schizophrenia. But being that this all happened in the 1940s, that is doubtful. No psychotropic drugs back then. I wonder if his mental illness was why he wasn't serving in WWII? 

He was institutionalized for 8 years - till 1943. He claims that he was not institutionalized, but living in Lemuria. That is what the story calls the world underground.

https://www.skepticink.com/lateraltruth/2014/09/26/the-shaver-mystery-sermons-in-stones/

Quote

In the boring version, he went nuts after his brother died, lost his job and family, and ended up spending eight years or so in a mental institution, until his parents sprang him in 1943 and took him to live at home.

The other version was much more exciting.  The voices in his welding torch came from sinister beings called Deros, who lived in vast, ancient warrens of caves and tunnels deep in the Earth, and delighted in torture, sadistic perversion, and the taste of human flesh.  They were ugly, too, with noses like the trunks of mutant elephants.  Both telepathically and with advanced technology inherited from the vanished Elder Race, the Deros harassed, implanted dire suggestions into, worked malicious mischief against, and generally made life miserable for the poor sods who lived upstairs (the human race).  It was, indeed, a Dero named Max who had killed Shaver’s brother, and was now on the trail of Shaver himself.  In fear, Shaver quit his job, took to the road as a hobo, and ran afoul of the law—but while he was in jail, he was spirited away by a lady Tero, one of the good denizens of the underplanet, to spend eight years below ground observing the Deros and having adventures that would certainly make some amazing stories.

 

[stereologist]

What makes the Shaver Mysteries so interesting is that it garnered a huge number of believers. People began to write to the magazine that they too were being manipulated by the underground world.

https://amazingstories.com/2013/02/the-art-of-the-shaver-mystery/

Quote

People wrote letters attesting to the truth of Shaver’s claims. Sales increased and soon over 75% of the magazine’s content was given over to writings about the Shaver Mystery.

https://spookwire.com/the-shaver-mystery/

Quote

Dozens and then hundreds of letters poured in from readers who, one after another, confided that they, too, had encountered telepathic violence from the underground Deros, and a few even claimed to be some of the surviving humans they had kidnapped. Several readers, in their letters, winked slyly at Amazing Stories for telling the truth and disguising it as “fiction,” what a clever ruse to throw the Deros off!

Was this a case of mass hysteria? Probably thousands of people seemed to have joined the Shaver bandwagon.

[stereologist]

So here we have a made up story that gets corroborated by other people.

• There is no hollow Earth
• There are no beings living inside of this hollow Earth
• There are no abductions of humans by deros
• There is no Lemuria

Yet people back up the stories, This should be a lesson to everyone who thinks repeated stories or quantities of stories lend support to the story.

[stereologist]

14 minutes ago, Tuco's Gas said:

David Icke has way more believers than Shaver ever did! Hell, he had me half-believing after I read his first book. It had just enough science and plausible explanations for real world events and politics to lend just a modicum of credence to his Lizard People. LOL 

(If you're not familiar with Icke and his claims, and are looking for some light entertainment and a few smiles, Google him now!)

Remember that Icke is post internet and Shaver was back in the 1940s. What we find is that Icke and lots of other things are noting more than derivatives of Shaver. His stories are Shaverisms. At least that is what academics are suggesting. I was listening to a pod cast and it traced back a number of these sorts of stories back to Shaver and Palmer.

Shaver comes at a time when scifi was called something like scienta fiction. That was a name chosen by Gernsback. There were not many readers or authors at the time. His ideas have been the seed for many of those that followed.

[stereologist]

Another problem with the Shaver mysteries is that the story was presented by Ray Palmer as true. The publisher would never admit that these stories were the ravings of a mentally ill person that was institutionalized during the time they claimed to be underground in the world they called Lemuria.

Academics have stated that the Shaver Mysteries marks the start of the decline of the belief in science. Before that time there was great interest in the sciences and after that a movement would grow where we have people making all sorts of irrational claims about:

• Science is always overturned
• The paranormal will become part of science
• Science will allow all imaginary things to occur
• Science is as I want it to be
• Reality is what I want it to be
• If I don't like it then it is no longer part of reality
• Ultradimensional hypothesis
• Portals and windows into other dimensions

 

[jaylemurph]

The Deros are evil dwarf baddies in some Victorian pennydreadful for other, so fringe lunatics have been stealing others’ work for a long time...

—Jaylemurph

[stereologist]

On 2/28/2020 at 8:18 PM, jaylemurph said:

The Deros are evil dwarf baddies in some Victorian pennydreadful for other, so fringe lunatics have been stealing others’ work for a long time...

—Jaylemurph

Shaver had created something he called ManTong IIRC. It is the language of the people living inside of the hollow earth.

His Deros were detrimental robots.  He did this as a contraction. He had this idea that the letters of a word were meaningful parts of the word and assigned information individually as well as the whole word. He played this game of the letters and the words in a letter to Ray Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories. It was the letter on ManTong that convinced Palmer to publish the stories of Lemuria, the hollow earth world. This ManTong was supposed to be the original language of people and that all languages derive from it.

I would not be surprised to learn that Shaver stole the term deros from another source and simply created his ManTong analysis to fit the word.

 

[stereologist]

The sort of stuff Shaver was doing with the fictitious ManTong are shown by Gary Busey now.

https://www.garybusey.com/buseyisms/

Here is one: Bible - Basic instructions before leaving earth.

For a longer list see this link

https://www.laughteronlineuniversity.com/50-hilarious-buseyisms/

See number 19 on the list.

[Duke Wellington]

On 2/20/2020 at 4:36 PM, stereologist said:

Richard Shaver would one day begin to hear voices from his welding tool. Later he would report hearing voices at night that told him about a world inside of the Earth. These voices would tell him about evil and good robots and a cruel life inside of the Earth and aliens and all sorts of strange things. He dragged in other ideas too besides a world inside of a hollow Earth such as Mu and Lemuria.

These stories would be told in a pulp fiction called Amazing Stories and championed by Ray Palmer, the editor. His name would be used to create a comic book character.

The Shaver Mysteries are put out there as real stories and readers ate them up. Harlan Ellison tried to corner Palmer and get him to confess that the stories were fiction, but Palmer would not say that.

Why are the deros (destructive energy robots) underground? The sun is poison. That leads Shaver and Palmer to eat only young things like young animals and young plants. One person referred to them as becoming vealotarians.

The following article suggests that the stories were cast as being fiction, but they were not. They were presented as true. That difference is clear when Palmer defends himself against the pressure by Ellison to state that the stories are fiction.

https://spookwire.com/the-shaver-mystery/

https://amazingstories.com/2013/02/the-art-of-the-shaver-mystery/

 

One thing these people all have in common is no original thought.

They take the current ideas such as robots, aliens, and cities below the earth, and create a delusion centred around them. Let me ask why no alien abductee has every been able to describe a technology or science or philosophy that we dont know about yet?

The lack of original thought reveals the deluded for what they are - delusional.

Hearing voices coming from a welding tool is mental illness.

[stereologist]

1 minute ago, RabidMongoose said:

One thing these people all have in common is no original thought.

They take the current ideas such as robots, aliens, and cities below the earth, and create a delusion centred around them. Let me ask why no alien abductee has every been able to describe a technology or science or philosophy that we dont know about yet?

The lack of original thought reveals the deluded for what they are - delusional.

Hearing voices coming from a welding tool is mental illness.

Shaver is the original in the modern mashup stories.

His robots were not mechanical as we think of robots. Hs deros were robots in the sense of obeyed all commands and did not think on their own. At least that is my understanding.

He mashed together:

• paranormal
• spaceships
• hollow earth - although that idea goes back to probably Medieval times
• notion of being poisoned in the environment - by the Sun according to Shaver
• aliens
• ancient super civilization
• strange creatures
• lurid tales

[stereologist]

Here is an interesting link about what came out of Shaver's writings. It reveals how he led to some well known stories.

http://truefreethinker.com/articles/richard-shaver-and-best-deros-story-ever

Here is just one of those stories.

Quote

TERRY R. WRISTE: Anyhow, Dick got into trouble with the law, skipped Wisconsin and went into hiding. Oddly, it was during that lost period when you were the only one publishing new stuff by him, that I got his address and got involved with the little group of dedicated guerrillas who had decided, in a most unmetaphysical way, to take the best weaponry they could “into the caves” as Shaver would have it, and blow the mind controlling b******* up. Dick had given several previous groups directions, and they had gone. Mostly [they] didn’t come back, but a few did, and I met a few, including one World War Two vet who had been with a team that entered a so-called “cave” located, and get this, near Dulce, New Mexico, under the Archuleta Mesa.

Ken’s note: okay, now we are getting somewhere as this will no longer be merely about claims and fancy tales but real evidence.

ALLEN H. GREENFIELD: Isn’t that now said to be a joint Gray Alien-Human base?

TERRY R. WRISTE: You bet. I doubt there was anything there of the sort in 1948, though, and this guy and his team went through a door, and down what seemed to be an old –VERY old elevator shaft, into a city beneath the Earth, found the Dero – this is what I was told – blew up some machinery, got Rayed and mostly zombied, killed a few DEROtypes, and retreated back the way they came in. It was surprise that probably saved their asses, the few that came back.

This is a claim that the Dulce base story derives directly from Shaver.

People were asking where the entrances were to the land inside of the Earth. He gave several places. He gave Dulce NM and Brown Mountain NC.

 

[Duke Wellington]

1 hour ago, stereologist said:

Here is an interesting link about what came out of Shaver's writings. It reveals how he led to some well known stories.

http://truefreethinker.com/articles/richard-shaver-and-best-deros-story-ever

Here is just one of those stories.

This is a claim that the Dulce base story derives directly from Shaver.

People were asking where the entrances were to the land inside of the Earth. He gave several places. He gave Dulce NM and Brown Mountain NC.

 

Why are you buying into this delusional fantasy?

Its not very helpful to you, and its easy to see through.

Edited March 3, 2020 by RabidMongoose

[tortugabob]

Another wackjob story on UM.  Why is this story even on here?

[stereologist]

48 minutes ago, RabidMongoose said:

Why are you buying into this delusional fantasy?

Its not very helpful to you, and its easy to see through.

What am I buying into?

I am simply posting a thread about a topic which some academics suggest is the starting point for many of the anti-scientific groups that we see today that rely on distrust, rely on opinion being fact, rely on mixing and matching unrelated junk, rely on pretending that some delusion is reality.

There is reason to believe that the manner in which the Shaver Mysteries are presented leads to the UFO craze of the 40s and 50s.

[stereologist]

To continue with the Shaver Mysteries we need to also explore the impact of those mysteries with the sudden outbreak of UFO euphoria in the US. Authors seem to skip over the fact that Kenneth Arnold was not always a person that was challenged about his UFO story. He actually was hired by Ray Palmer, the person that promoted the Shaver Mysteries. As part of this promotion he hired Arnold to investigate the Maury Island UFO hoax.

Ray Palmer also published a book written by Arnold.

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Saucers-Kenneth-Arnold/dp/149910491X

Here we get the tie in:

https://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/maury-island-incident.htm

Quote

One of the most notorious -- and successful -- liars, the late Fred L. Crisman, actually bridged the gap between the Shaver mystery and the UFO mystery. Crisman first surfaced in a letter published in the May 1947 issue of Amazing Stories, in which he claimed to have shot his way out of a cave full of deros with a submachine gun. Palmer next heard from him the following July. This time Crisman said he had actual physical evidence of a flying saucer.

There we have the tie in. We have the Shaver Mysteries which is what might be referred to as a mash up of conspiracies and fringe ideas. We have UFOs and the reporting in the newspapers. Now we tie these two together and Ray Palmer will promote these through his publishing work and his talks at conventions.

What is interesting to me is that somehow today Ray Palmer is not mentioned in articles such as this one, yet he was a strong force pushing UFOs at that time.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-ufo-sightings-became-an-american-obsession/

 

 

[stereologist]

Here is a blog that credits Ray Palmer and the associated Shaver Mysteries with the UFO phenomenon.

Who is the blogger? Doesn't matter the material is written by John Keel.

https://noriohayakawa.wordpress.com/2017/07/11/ray-palmer-the-man-who-invented-flying-saucers-by-john-a-keel/

Quote

But the man responsible for the most well-known of all such modern myths – flying saucers – has somehow been forgotten. Before the first flying saucer was sighted in 1947, he suggested the idea to the American public. Then he converted UFO reports from what might have been a Silly Season phenomenon into a subject, and kept that subject alive during periods of total public disinterest. His name was Raymond A. Palmer:

Quote

The magazine might have limped through the 1940s, largely ignored by everyone, if not for a single incident. Howard Browne, a television writer who served as Palmer’s associate editor in those days, recalls: “early in the 1940s, a letter came to us from Dick Shaver purporting to reveal the “truth” about a race of freaks, called “Deros,” living under the surface of the earth. Ray Palmer read it, handed it to me for comment. I read a third of it, tossed it in the waste basket. Ray, who loved to show his editors a trick or two about the business, fished it out of the basket, ran it in AMAZING, and a flood of mail poured in from readers who insisted every word of it was true because they’d been plagued by Deros for years.”

 

The Shaver Mysteries were simply amazing because they altered the future in many ways. It is the connection between the past and the present in many fringe areas.

The Shaver Mysteries make it possible for Ray Palmer to form how people view UFOs. Shaver introduced the idea of alien abduction.

Quote

Shaver’s (Palmer’s) contribution to that issue was a 30,000 word novelette, “Earth Slaves to Space,” dealing with spaceships that regularly visited the Earth to kidnap humans and haul them away to some other planet. Other stories described amnesia, an important element in the UFO reports that still lay far in the future, and mysterious men who supposedly served as agents for those unfriendly Deros.

 

[stereologist]

If we continue the material written by John Keel we learn the following.

http://www.thejinn.net/man_who_invented_flying_saucers.htm

Quote

Palmer assigned artists to make sketches of objects described by readers and disc-shaped flying machines appeared on the covers of his magazine long before June 1947. So we can note that a considerable number of people - millions - were exposed to the flying saucer concept before the national news media was even aware of it. Anyone who glanced at the magazines on a newsstand and caught a glimpse of the saucers-adorned Amazing Stories cover had the image implanted in his subconscious. In the course of the two years between march 1945 and June 1947, millions of Americans had seen at least one issue of Amazing Stories and were aware of the Shaver Mystery with all of its bewildering implications.

So here we have the setting for the creation of the UFO experience. It is based on the Shaver Mysteries.

This is what is known as priming. People are more likely to view a situation in terms of things they expect to encounter. Tell someone that a record played backwards says "death by coronavirus" and they are likely to hear that. Tell them that this fuzzy photo shows a ghost or demon and they are likely to see that. Tell them that the photo is of someone vaping and they will likely see that instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

Let people know that there are flying saucers in the skies and when they see something they can't quite recognize it becomes a flying saucer.

Had Shaver and those claiming to experience the land of the deros seen cigar shape, or torus, or horseshoe shape, then the manner in which people experienced the UFO phenomenon early on would likely have been a different experience.

 

[Piney]

3 minutes ago, stereologist said:

This is what is known as priming. People are more likely to view a situation in terms of things they expect to encounter. Tell someone that a record played backwards says "death by coronavirus" and they are likely to hear that. Tell them that this fuzzy photo shows a ghost or demon and they are likely to see that. Tell them that the photo is of someone vaping and they will likely see that instead.

That's how cursing or curing some ills in Shamanism works. The Power of Suggestion, and it's more powerful than people think. 

[the13bats]

Great thread i missed when it ran,

Are we sure there was a shaver, as in palmer didnt make him up?

Palmer was seriously injured as a child and was small and i guess some would call a hunchback, he got into writing and making up stuff since he couldnt play with other kids.

He came off like a sideshow talker and not a shock hired Kenneth Arnold as a writer and changed the pulp rags name to "flying saucers"

 

[stereologist]

31 minutes ago, the13bats said:

Great thread i missed when it ran,

Are we sure there was a shaver, as in palmer didnt make him up?

Palmer was seriously injured as a child and was small and i guess some would call a hunchback, he got into writing and making up stuff since he couldnt play with other kids.

He came off like a sideshow talker and not a shock hired Kenneth Arnold as a writer and changed the pulp rags name to "flying saucers"

 

Good question. Shaver was a real person Palmer needed a boost and this helped his career immensely.  He had the wherewithal to see that Shaver's writings were of literary importance for a magazine like Amazing Stories. Then he did for that magazine what was done in the movies with Fargo in 1996. They claimed it was all true.

Shaver's disappearance into the world inside of the Earth with the deros coincides with his stay at a mental institution. But, that has no effect on the long-term effects of his story telling. Shaver has molded many of the ideas about UFOs and the hollow Earth and aliens and other ideas. Today we might call it a mashup. It was Shaver listening to a welding machine that created many ideas people think is modern although he did it nearly 80 years ago.

[Alchopwn]

On 2/21/2020 at 3:36 AM, stereologist said:

Richard Shaver would one day begin to hear voices from his welding tool.

Having read Shaver, he does seem to be very paranoid about homosexuals.  Those voices in his head were very homophobic.  That being said, as far as weird tales go, they are quite good.  Not up to the standard of Clark Ashton Smith, but quite good.  Certainly weird.  Certainly memorable.

Edited July 3, 2022 by Alchopwn

[Sir Wearer of Hats]

Being creeped out by Shaver’s deros is the earliest paranormal adjacent memory I have other than thinking I saw a devil in my bedroom, age perhaps 3 or 4 after going to the local fair (which had a ghost ride (that I never rode…. Being three or four at the time)).

[Knob Oddy]

The only thing I take away from this thread is, Never trust a man called "Dick Sharp Shaver"

Edited July 10, 2022 by Knob Oddy

[Duke Wellington]

On 2/20/2020 at 4:36 PM, stereologist said:

Richard Shaver would one day begin to hear voices from his welding tool. Later he would report hearing voices at night that told him about a world inside of the Earth. These voices would tell him about evil and good robots and a cruel life inside of the Earth and aliens and all sorts of strange things. He dragged in other ideas too besides a world inside of a hollow Earth such as Mu and Lemuria.

These stories would be told in a pulp fiction called Amazing Stories and championed by Ray Palmer, the editor. His name would be used to create a comic book character.

The Shaver Mysteries are put out there as real stories and readers ate them up. Harlan Ellison tried to corner Palmer and get him to confess that the stories were fiction, but Palmer would not say that.

Why are the deros (destructive energy robots) underground? The sun is poison. That leads Shaver and Palmer to eat only young things like young animals and young plants. One person referred to them as becoming vealotarians.

The following article suggests that the stories were cast as being fiction, but they were not. They were presented as true. That difference is clear when Palmer defends himself against the pressure by Ellison to state that the stories are fiction.

https://spookwire.com/the-shaver-mystery/

https://amazingstories.com/2013/02/the-art-of-the-shaver-mystery/

 

It was 1943, they didn`t know what we knew today.