Richard Sharpe Shaver

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The June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories featuring the "Shaver Mystery"
The June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories featuring the "Shaver Mystery"

Richard Sharpe Shaver (b. October 8, 1907 Berwick, Pennsylvania, d. 1975 Summit, Arkansas) was an American writer and artist.

He achieved notoriety in the years following World War II as the author of controversial stories which were printed in science fiction magazines, (primarily Amazing Stories), wherein Shaver claimed that he had personal experience with a sinister, ancient civilization that lived in caverns under the earth. The controversy stemmed from the fact that Shaver and his editor/publisher Ray Palmer claimed Shaver's writings, while presented in the guise of fiction, were fundamentally true. Shaver's stories were promoted by Palmer as "The Shaver Mystery".

Contents

[edit] Biography

Very little is reliably known about Shaver's early life. He claimed to have worked at an automobile factory, where, in 1932, odd things began to occur. As Bruce Lanier Write notes, Shaver "began to notice that one of the welding guns on his job site, 'by some freak of its coil's field atunements,' was allowing him to read the thoughts of the men working around him. More frighteningly, he then picked up the telepathic record of a torture session conducted by malign entities in caverns deep within the earth." (According to Bakun, Shaver offered inconsistent accounts of how he first learned of the hidden cavern world, but that the assembly line story was the "most common version." (Bakun, 116) Shaver said he then quit his job, and became a hobo for a period.

Bakun writes that "Shaver was hospitalized briefly for psychiatric problems in 1934, but there does not appear to have been a clear diagnosis." (Bakun, 115) Bakun notes that afterwards, Shaver's whereabouts and actions cannot be reliably traced until the early 1940s.

In 1943, Shaver wrote a letter to Amazing. He claimed to have uncovered an ancient language he called "Mantong," a sort of Proto-World language which was the source of all Earthly language. In Mantong, each sound had a hidden meaning, and by applying this formula to any word in any language, one could decode a secret meaning to any word, name or phrase. Palmer applied the Mantong formula to several words, and said he realized Shaver was on to something.

Palmer wrote to Shaver, asking how he had learned of Mantong. Shaver responded with a 10,000 word document entitled "A Warning to Future Man." Shaver wrote of tremendously advanced pre-historic races who had built cavern cities inside Earth before abandoning Earth for another planet due to damaging radiation from the sun. Those ancients also abandoned some of their own offspring here, a minority of whom remained noble and human "Teros", while most degenerated over time into a population of mentally impaired sadists known as Dero--short for "detrimental robots." Shaver's "robots" were not mechanical constructs, but were robot-like due to their savage behavior.

These Dero still lived in the cave cities, according to Shaver, kidnapping surface-dwelling people by the thousands for meat or torture, and using the fantastic "ray" machines that the great ancient races left behind to project tormenting thoughts and voices into our minds. Dero could be blamed for nearly all misfortunes, from minor "accidental" injuries or illnesses to airplane crashes and catastrophic natural disasters. Women especially were singled out for brutal treatment, including rape, and Dash notes that "Sado-masochism was one of the prominent themes of Shaver's writings." (Dash, 229) Though generally confined to their caves, Shaver claimed that the Deros sometimes traveled by spaceships or rockets, and had dealings with equally evil extraterrestrial beings. Shaver claimed first-hand knowledge of the Dero and their caves, insisting he had been their prisoner for several years.

Palmer edited and rewrote the manuscript, increasing the total word count to a novella length 31,000. Palmer insisted that he did nothing to alter the core elements of Shaver's story, but that he only added an exciting plot line so the story would not read "like a dull recitation." (Bakun, 116) retitled "I Remember Lemuria!"; it was published in March, 1945 issue of Amazing.[1] The issue sold out, and generated quite a response: between 1945 and 1949, letters poured in attesting to the truth of Shaver's claims (tens of thousands of letters, according to Palmer). The correspondents, too, had heard strange voices or encountered denizens of the hollow Earth. One of the letters to Amazing was from a woman who claimed to have gone into a deep subbasement of a Paris, France building via a secret elevator. After months of rape and other torture, the woman was freed by a group of Teros. (Dash, 230) Another letter claiming involvement with Deros came from Fred Crisman, later to gain notoriety for his role in the Maury Island Incident and the John F. Kennedy Assassination. "Shaver Mystery Club" chapters sprang up in several cities. The controversy gained some notice in the mainstream press at the time, including a mention in a 1951 issue of Life magazine.

Palmer claimed that Amazing saw huge boosts in circulation because of the Shaver Mystery, and the magazine emphasized the Shaver Mystery for several years. Bakun notes that, by any measure, the Shaver Mystery was successful in increasing sales of Amazing. There was disagreement as to the precise increase in circulation (with Shaver being accused of exaggerating the total), but Bakun notes that reliable sources reflect an increase in monthly circulation from about 135,000 to 185,000. (Bakun, 116)

Shaver's rambling manuscripts were rewritten by Palmer, both to make them more readable, and to remove or downplay most of the explicit sexual content. From 1945 to 1948, Bakun notes that about 75% of the issues of Amazing featured Shaver Mystery content--sometimes to the near-exclusion of any other topic. Historian Mike Dash declares that "Shaver's tales were amongst the wildest ever spun, even in the pages of the pulp science fiction magazines of the period." (Dash, 229)

Many in the community of science fiction fans felt compelled to publicly condemn the Shaver Mystery as "the Shaver Hoax." In fact, Palmer printed a number of critical or skeptical letters sent to Amazing, and he and other contributors occasionally rebutted or replied to such letters in print. As Bruce Lanier Wright notes, "The young Harlan Ellison, later a famously abrasive writer, allegedly badgered [Palmer] into admitting that the Shaver Mystery was a 'publicity grabber'; when the story came out, Palmer angrily responded that this was hardly the same thing as calling it a hoax." [2] Dash writes,"critics of the 'Shaver Mystery' were quick to point out that its author was suffering from several of the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, and that many of the letters pouring into Amazing recounting personal experiences that backed up the author's stories patently came from the sorts of people who would otherwise spend their time claiming that they were being persecuted by invisible voices or their neighbor's dog." (Dash, 229)

[edit] Aftermath

In 1948, Amazing ceased all publication of Shaver's stories (Palmer would later claim the magazine was pressured by sinister outside forces to make the change; science fiction fans would credit their boycott and letter-writing campaigns for the change; the magazine's owners later said that the Shaver Mystery had simply run its course and sales were dropping).

The Shaver Mystery Clubs had a surprising degree of longevity: representatives of a club discussed the Shaver Mystery on John Nebel's popular radio show several times through the late 1950s; Nebel thought the discussion was entertaining, but in extant recordings, he was also openly skeptical about the entire subject.

Even after the pulp magazines faded from popularity, Palmer continued promoting the Shaver Mystery to a diminishing audience via the periodical The Hidden World; Lanier describes the magazine as "Shaver in the raw" with little of Palmer's editing. Shaver and his wife produced the Shaver Mystery Magazine irregularly for some years.

In 1971, Palmer reported that "Shaver had spent eight years not in the Cavern World, but in a mental institution." [2] [3] Despite this fact, Palmer would insist that he thought the Shaver Mystery was genuine, though he suggested it occurred in a psychic, astral way rather than in everyday physical reality.

In the 1960s and 1970s, now living in obscurity, Shaver looked for physical evidence of the bygone pre-historic races. He found it in certain rocks, which he believed were "rock books" that had been created by the great ancients, and embedded with legible pictures and texts. For years he wrote about the rock books, photographed them, and made paintings of the images he found in them to demonstrate their historic importance. He even ran a "rock book" lending library through the mails, sending a slice of polished agate with a detailed description of what writings, drawings, and photographs were archived by Atlanteans inside the stone using special laser-like devices.

Shaver never succeeded in generating much attention for his later findings during his lifetime, but there have been exhibits of Shaver's art and photographs in the years since his death. Artist Brian Tucker created an exhibition about Shaver's life and work in 1989 at California Institute of the Arts, and presented Shaver's work again in later years at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Gallery of Chapman University in Orange County, California. Shaver's art has also been exhibited in art galleries in New York City, and in a traveling exhibition of "Outsider photography" called "Create and Be Recognized" that originated at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2004. In that exhibition, which toured the US, Shaver's "rock book" photography was grouped with works by famous "outsider artists," including Henry Darger and Adolf Wolfli.

[edit] Influence and references to the Shaver Mystery

  • In his UFO books of the mid-1950s author Morris K. Jessup promoted a story similar to the Shaver Mystery, with good and bad space aliens influencing humanity, is found
  • As noted above, writer Harlan Ellison reportedly thought the Shaver Mystery was nonsense. If so, that didn't stop him from apparently borrowing elements of the mystery for at least one of his stories. "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet" featured 26 brief stories, some a few pages long, others a comprising only few sentences. One story, "The Elevator People" reports that "There are five hundred buildings in the United States whose elevators go deeper than the basement." Those unfortunates who descend to the caverns emerge nearly catatonic after being "treated" by the evil cavern inhabitants. (Ellison, 167)
  • Similarly, though Shaver is never mentioned in Jeff Long's novel The Descent (1991), The Shaver Mystery looms heavily over the book: a worldwide network of subterranean tunnels is uncovered, as are their ancient subhuman inhabitants.
  • Shaver's Dero have also appeared in SubGenius mythology.
  • Artist Jermaine Rogers has often used his version of the Dero in his many posters used to advertise rock music concerts. Rogers has approached the subject of the Dero with an ambiguity that have taken as proof that he truly believes in these beings. Starting in 1994, Rogers began including images of his Dero in several poster advertisements for rock and roll concerts. The Dero as depicted by Rogers are huge, 6 ft. tall teddy bear-like beings, with leering grimaces and bulging red eyes. The artist has stated that this description is but one of the many 'masks' the Dero are using to disguise themselves in their interactions with surface dwellers. Rogers has taken the general premise of the DERO and combined it with ancient legend and myth, fringe psychology, and his own personal interpretation. In Roger's telling, the subterranean world of the Dero is alive with strife, rebellion, and intrigue...wherein beings bred by Dero overlords (known as 'Veil') have secretly conspired against them to foster their downfall. While Rogers discusses Shaver quite frequently, he says that Shaver 'was fooled. The Dero ravaged his mind so often that much of what he says can't really be trusted. His ideas about the Dero became so fanciful and out there that it became easy for skeptics to dismiss him as a nut. A fraud. There were no aliens. No rape and torture. That's all very fanciful and helped sell pulp magazines. The Dero have much more complicated goals than that. But Shaver's shouts of 'evil Dero!' distracted any reasonable authority from investigating Dero rationally. Shaver was disinformation.' Rogers' Dero has appeared in dozens of his rock and roll concert and art prints and in 2004, became a designer vinyl toy line.
  • (There is reported to be an obscure connection between the Shaver Mystery and the German Thule Society.[citation needed] Both Shaver and Palmer are said to have been in contact with a former Bavarian Gauleiter who was also a member of the occult society.[citation needed])

[edit] Shaver and UFOs

In the summer of 1947, Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen some unusual flying objects near Mt. Rainer. His report sparked widespread interest in unidentified flying objects, and Palmer was quick to argue that the "flying saucers" were validation of the Shaver Mystery--for several years, he noted, Shaver had mentioned the Deros' supposed spaceships. The idea that Shaver and Palmer had somehow predicted or pre-staged the "flying saucer" craze was later championed by writer John Keel. His 1983 article "The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers" (first published in Fortean Times) declared that "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."

However, UFO researcher Jerome Clark would argue just the contrary: "It must be stressed that Palmer did not depict the deros' 'rockets' as disc shaped. Nonetheless in later years, some would insist, with more hyperbole than reason, that through Shaver's yarns Palmer 'invented flying saucers'. In fact, Palmer's influence beyond his relatively minuscule audience of science fiction fans and Forteans was nonexistent." (Clark, 201)

[edit] References

  • Bakun, Michael, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America; University of California Press Berkeley, Los Angeles, 2003; ISBN 0-520-23805-2
  • Clark, Jerome, The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial; Visible Ink, 1998; ISBN 1-57859-029-9
  • Dash, Mike, Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Unknown; Overlook Press, 2000; ISBN 0-87951-724-7
  • Ellison, Harlan, Strange Wine (paperback edition), Warner Books, 1978; ISBN 0-446-89489-3
  • Keel, John, The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers" [1]
  • Klochko, Deborah and Turner, John, eds., "Create and Be Recognized: Photography on the Edge," San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004.
  • Mott, Wm. Michael, This Tragic Earth: The Art and World of Richard Sharpe Shaver [2], TGS/Hidden Mysteries Publishing, 2007; ISBN 0-9786249-5-5
  • Mott, Wm. Michael, The Deep Dwellers from Caverns, Cauldrons, and Concealed Creatures, Expanded Second Edition [3], TGS/Hidden Mysteries Publishing, 2000, 2007; ISBN 0-9786249-4-7
  • Roth, Christopher F., "Ufology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult." In E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces, ed. by Debbora Battaglia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.
  • Skinner, Doug, What's This? A Shaver Revival?, Fate, June 2005
  • Tucker, Brian, "Shaver Declared a Master Surrealist!," Shavertron (online publication), 2003(?).
  • Wright, Bruce Lanier, Fear Down Below: The Curious History of the Shavery Mystery (2000)

[edit] External links

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