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Richard Sharpe Shaver
Richard Sharpe Shaver
Richard Sharpe Shaver
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Shaver's first published work, the novella "I Remember Lemuria", was the cover story in the March 1945 Amazing Stories

Key Information

Richard Sharpe Shaver (October 8, 1907 – November 5, 1975) was an American writer and artist who 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). Shaver claimed that he had personal experience of a sinister ancient civilization that harbored fantastic technology in caverns under the earth. The controversy stemmed from the claim by Shaver, and his editor and publisher Ray Palmer, that Shaver's writings, while presented in the guise of fiction, were fundamentally true. Shaver's stories were promoted by Ray Palmer as "The Shaver Mystery".

During the last decades of his life, Shaver devoted himself to "rock books" – stones that he believed had been created by the advanced ancient races and were embedded with legible pictures and texts. He produced paintings allegedly based on the rocks' images and photographed them extensively, as well as writing about them. Posthumously, Shaver has gained a reputation as an artist; his paintings and photos have been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere.

Early life

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Richard Sharpe Shaver was born on October 7, 1907 in Virginia to Grace and Ziba Shaver.[1][2] He had two sisters, Claire and Isabella, and two brothers, Donald and Taylor.[2] The family moved to Berwick, Pennsylvania, when he was a young child.[1]

The family relocated again to Detroit, Michigan, when his older brother Taylor found work there with the Federal Immigration Service.[3] Shaver enrolled in the Wicker School of Fine Art and worked part-time as an art model.[3] At Wicker, he began a relationship with his teacher Sophie Gurvitch.[3] The pair married in Summer 1932, a few weeks after Wicker permanently closed.[4] They would have one daughter.[3] Shaver found work as a gardener and welder.[5]

In 1934, Shaver's older brother Taylor died from pneumonia, and Shaver's remaining family returned to Pennsylvania.[3] After his brother's death, Shaver was committed to the Ypsilanti State Hospital for mental health disorders by his wife, Sophie. He stayed at the hospital for nearly two years, with periodic visits home to Pennsylvania. During his hospitalization, Sophie was accidentally electrocuted by a space heater in her bathroom. Shaver signed custody of his daughter over to his parents. He was released from hospital, returned to his family's farm in Pennsylvania, and soon left to travel across the Northeastern United States and Canada. Shaver was arrested for stowing away on a merchant vessel in Newfoundland in December 1937, and in early 1938 he was deported from Canada and sent to Grafton State Hospital in Massachusetts. He was transferred to the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Michigan later that year, where he remained for five years. He began writing the year he was discharged, in 1943.[6]

The Shaver Mystery

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

According to Palmer (in his autobiography The Secret World), Palmer wrote back to Shaver, asking how he had learned of Mantong. Shaver responded with an approximately 10,000-word document titled "A Warning to Future Man". Shaver claimed to have worked in a factory where, in 1932, odd things began to occur. As Bruce Lanier Wright 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 hear the thoughts of the men working around him. More frighteningly, he then received the telepathic record of a torture session conducted by malevolent entities in caverns deep within the earth." According to Michael Barkun, 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".[7]

Shaver wrote of extremely advanced prehistoric races who had built cavern cities inside the Earth before abandoning Earth for another planet due to damaging radiation from the Sun: an example of a cryptoterrestrial hypothesis. 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 "Deros"—short for "detrimental robots". Shaver's "robots" were not mechanical constructs, but were robot-like due to their savage behavior.

These Deros still lived in the cave cities, according to Shaver, kidnapping surface-dwelling people by the thousands for meat or torture. With the sophisticated "ray" machinery that the great ancient races had left behind, they spied on people and projected tormenting thoughts and voices into our minds (reminiscent of schizophrenia's "influencing machines" such as the air loom). Deros 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 Mike Dash notes that "[s]ado-masochism was one of the prominent themes of Shaver's writings".[8] Though generally confined to their caves, Shaver claimed that the Deros sometimes traveled with spaceships or rockets, and had dealings with equally evil extraterrestrial beings. Shaver claimed to possess first-hand knowledge of the Deros 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 of 31,000. Palmer insisted that he did not alter the main elements of Shaver's story, but that he only added an exciting plot so the story would not read "like a dull recitation".[7] Retitled "I Remember Lemuria!"; it was published in the March 1945 issue of Amazing.[9] The issue sold out, and generated quite a response: Between 1945 and 1949, many letters arrived attesting to the truth of Shaver's claims (tens of thousands of letters, according to Palmer). The correspondents claimed that they, too, had heard strange voices or encountered denizens of the Hollow Earth. One of the letters to Amazing Stories 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 benevolent Tero.[10] 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" societies were created 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 Stories magazine had a great increase of circulation because of the Shaver Mystery, and the magazine emphasized the Shaver Mystery for several years. Barkun notes that, by any measure, the Shaver Mystery was successful in increasing sales of Amazing Stories. There was disagreement as to the precise increase in circulation, but Barkun notes that reliable sources reflect an increase in monthly circulation from about 135,000 to 185,000.[7]

From 1945 to 1948, Barkun notes that about 75% of the issues of Amazing Stories 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".[8] He also published in Other Worlds magazine; the first issue featured his story "The Fall of Lemuria".

Many science fiction fans felt compelled to condemn the Shaver Mystery as "the Shaver Hoax". These fans, already distressed by Palmer's shift away from the literary or hard science fiction of earlier years to often slapdash space operas, organized letter-writing campaigns to try to persuade the publishers of Amazing Stories to cease all Shaver Mystery articles. In fact, Palmer printed a number of critical or skeptical letters sent to Amazing Stories, and he and other contributors occasionally rebutted or replied to such letters in print. As Bruce Lanier Wright notes, "[t]he 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".[11] Dash writes that the "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".[8]

During 1948, Amazing Stories 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 said later that the Shaver Mystery had simply run its course and sales were decreasing.

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

Even after the pulp magazines lost 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.

Rock books

[edit]

During the 1960s and 1970s, now living in obscurity, Shaver searched for physical evidence of the bygone prehistoric races. He claimed to find 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 mail, sending a slice of polished agate with a detailed description of what writings, drawings and photographs he claimed 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. In 2009, Tucker curated "Mantong and Protong", an exhibition at Pasadena City College which pairs Shaver's work with that of Stanislav Szukalski. Shaver's art has also been exhibited in 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 U.S., Shaver's "rock book" photography was grouped with works by famous "outsider artists", including Henry Darger and Adolf Wolfli.

Influence and references to the Shaver Mystery

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[edit]
Shaver cover art
  • Shaver's first published work, the novella "I Remember Lemuria", was the cover story in the March 1945 Amazing Stories
    Shaver's first published work, the novella "I Remember Lemuria", was the cover story in the March 1945 Amazing Stories
  • Shaver's novella "Thought Records of Lemuria", his second published story, took the cover of the June 1945 Amazing Stories
    Shaver's novella "Thought Records of Lemuria", his second published story, took the cover of the June 1945 Amazing Stories
  • Shaver's run of Amazing cover stories continued in September 1945 with "Cave City of Hel"
    Shaver's run of Amazing cover stories continued in September 1945 with "Cave City of Hel"
  • "Quest of Brail" closed out 1945's Amazing Stories, with every issue featuring a Shaver cover painted by Robert Gibson Jones
    "Quest of Brail" closed out 1945's Amazing Stories, with every issue featuring a Shaver cover painted by Robert Gibson Jones
  • Shaver Mystery stories continued to dominate Amazings covers in 1946
    Shaver Mystery stories continued to dominate Amazing's covers in 1946
  • Some of Shaver's stories were written in collaboration with Philadelphia radio personality Bob McKenna
    Some of Shaver's stories were written in collaboration with Philadelphia radio personality Bob McKenna
  • The June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories featured the "Shaver Mystery"
    The June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories featured the "Shaver Mystery"
  • Shaver once wrote under the eccentric pseudonym "The Red Dwarf"
    Shaver once wrote under the eccentric pseudonym "The Red Dwarf"
  • Shaver also wrote more conventional stories for adventure pulps like Mammoth Adventures
    Shaver also wrote more conventional stories for adventure pulps like Mammoth Adventures
  • Shaver's stories continued to appear in Amazing after Howard Browne replaced Ray Palmer as editor
    Shaver's stories continued to appear in Amazing after Howard Browne replaced Ray Palmer as editor
  • Even after his work fell out of favor with Amazing readers, Ray Palmer continued to publish Shaver in other genre magazines
    Even after his work fell out of favor with Amazing readers, Ray Palmer continued to publish Shaver in other genre magazines
  • A special issue of Fantastic devoted to the "Shaver Mystery" was published in 1958
    A special issue of Fantastic devoted to the "Shaver Mystery" was published in 1958

Bibliography

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See also

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Footnotes

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References

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Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Richard Sharpe Shaver

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Richard Sharpe Shaver (October 7, 1907 – November 5, 1975) was an American writer, artist, and former welder best known for originating the "Shaver Mystery," a sequence of lurid tales serialized in the pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories from 1945 onward, depicting a concealed subterranean realm populated by malevolent "deros" (degenerate remnants of ancient Atlantean civilization) who wielded destructive ray devices to persecute surface dwellers. Shaver asserted these narratives stemmed from his own encounters with such entities during years spent allegedly exploring vast cave systems, though records indicate he instead endured auditory hallucinations and psychiatric distress while employed in factories, culminating in a brief institutionalization in 1934 without a definitive diagnosis. The stories gained prominence under the aggressive promotion of Amazing Stories editor Raymond A. Palmer, who framed them as authentic "thought records" from Lemuria—a lost continent predating Atlantis—and elicited thousands of reader testimonials corroborating similar persecutions, thereby elevating the magazine's circulation from 135,000 to nearly 185,000 copies per issue. Palmer's editorial enhancements amplified Shaver's crude, repetitive prose into sensational installments like "I Remember Lemuria" and "Thought Records of Lemuria," which blended elements of science fiction, horror, and conspiracy, drawing loose inspiration from earlier works such as A. Merritt's The Moon Pool. While the series polarized science fiction enthusiasts—repelling traditionalists with its gonzo style and purported factual basis—it marked a commercial pinnacle for the genre's pulp era, foreshadowing later fringe phenomena by externalizing personal torment as cosmic malevolence inflicted by hidden adversaries. In later years, Shaver retreated to rural Arkansas, producing "rock books" etched with symbols he interpreted as encoded extraterrestrial messages and collaborating sporadically on reprints in niche publications like The Hidden World, though mainstream dismissal prevailed amid attributions to paranoid delusion rather than verifiable phenomena. His oeuvre, spanning over a dozen Amazing cover stories and pseudonymous adventures, endures as an artifact of outsider creativity, underscoring the pulp medium's capacity to transmute individual pathology into mass cultural intrigue without empirical substantiation.

Early Life and Pre-Mystery Experiences

Childhood and Formative Years

Richard Sharpe Shaver was born on October 7, 1907, in Virginia, though his family relocated to Berwick, Pennsylvania, sometime before 1910, where he was raised. His parents were Ziba Rice Shaver (1875–1943), whose occupation is not well-documented in available records, and Grace Taylor Shaver. Little is known about Shaver's immediate childhood or early schooling, with primary sources on family dynamics or personal experiences during this period remaining scarce and largely unexamined in historical accounts of his life. In his late teens or early twenties, Shaver moved to Detroit, Michigan, pursuing interests in the arts. He enrolled at the Wicker School of Fine Arts around 1929–1930, working part-time as a nude model to support himself while studying. At the school, he met Sophie Gurvitch, initially a fellow student who later became an instructor; the two entered a relationship and married in 1933. Shaver's formative years also involved early political engagement, as he joined the John Reed Club—a communist-affiliated group for artists and intellectuals—in 1930 and spoke at a May Day rally in Detroit's Cass Park that year, reflecting leftist influences amid the Great Depression. These experiences in Detroit marked a transition toward his adult pursuits in art and activism, though they preceded his later claims of anomalous encounters by over a decade.

Occupational Pursuits and Alleged Incidents

Shaver's early occupational pursuits included manual labor in industrial settings. In 1932, he worked as a spot welder on the assembly line at a Ford automobile plant in Detroit, Michigan. Prior to this, he had aspired to a career in the arts, enrolling in classes at the Wicker School of Fine Arts in Detroit around 1930. These endeavors reflected a transient lifestyle marked by short-term employment rather than stable professional development. During his time at the Ford plant, Shaver alleged that his welding equipment began transmitting disturbing voices and thoughts, including screams of tortured individuals from subterranean caverns, which he attributed to electromagnetic interference from ancient technologies. He claimed this experience granted him telepathic insights into malign underground entities, prompting him to quit his job and embark on a period of hoboing across the United States. These assertions, detailed in his later accounts, coincided with personal tragedies, including the death of his brother and the loss of his wife after a brief marriage and the birth of a daughter; relatives subsequently informed the child that Shaver was deceased. Shaver's reported experiences escalated into institutional interventions. In 1934, following escalating paranoia and disruptive behavior, he was committed by his wife to a mental health facility, with records indicating placement at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan for psychiatric disorders. He spent approximately eight years in such institutions, including periods at facilities like Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, during which he claimed to have ventured into caverns encountering advanced beings—a narrative external sources interpret as confabulation amid symptoms consistent with schizophrenia rather than literal events. He was released in May 1943 and returned to his parents in Pennsylvania. Additional stints in prison were linked to his mental health crises and the persistent auditory phenomena he described from his welding days.

Development of the Shaver Mystery

Personal Visions and Initial Claims

In the early 1930s, while working as a welder at a Ford Motor Company plant in Detroit, Richard Shaver began experiencing what he described as voices emanating from his welding torch and nearby machinery. Shaver claimed these auditory phenomena were not mechanical noise or delusion but transmissions from ancient "telaug" devices—telepathic augmenters allegedly invented by long-extinct advanced civilizations to project thoughts across immense distances. He asserted that the voices spoke in "Mantong," an primordial language he purportedly deciphered on the spot, which formed the linguistic root of all modern human tongues and encoded knowledge of humanity's hidden history. Shaver maintained that these revelations directed him to subterranean realms beneath the Earth's surface, where he physically entered caverns via an access point during travels northward. There, he encountered two antagonistic races descended from ancient migrants fleeing cosmic threats: the deros (detrimental or degenerate robots), sadistic survivors who had commandeered ray-emitting machines to broadcast harmful vibrations causing human suffering, addiction, and moral decay; and the teros (integrative or true robots), a minority resisting dero dominance through sporadic interventions. Shaver detailed personal ordeals of capture by deros, subjection to agonizing ray-induced tortures simulating physical and psychological agony, and eventual escape back to the surface world. Following these purported events, Shaver experienced a nomadic phase, abandoning steady employment and facing institutionalization around 1934, which he attributed not to psychiatric disturbance but to targeted dero persecution via their influence rays. He insisted throughout his accounts that the visions and encounters were empirical firsthand observations, not imaginative fiction or hallucinatory episodes, positing them as causal explanations for widespread human maladies like disease, war, and vice—all externally imposed by dero technology rather than endogenous factors. These claims, unverified by independent evidence, crystallized Shaver's worldview of a concealed adversarial reality undermining surface civilization.

Collaboration with Ray Palmer and Initial Publications

In 1943, Richard S. Shaver contacted Ray Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories, by sending letters detailing his purported encounters with malevolent subterranean entities known as deros and a deciphered ancient alphabet called Mantong. Palmer, facing postwar declines in science fiction magazine readership, viewed Shaver's raw accounts as an opportunity to sensationalize content and increase sales, editing the material extensively to improve its coherence and narrative structure despite Shaver's limited literary skills. Shaver's first substantial submission arrived in 1944 as a lengthy manuscript outlining visions of ancient Lemuria, which Palmer reworked into the novella "I Remember Lemuria!", published as the cover feature in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories. Palmer framed the piece as a factual "thought record" from Shaver's mind, blending elements of science fiction with claims of authenticity to intrigue readers, though he privately doubted Shaver's assertions of literal truth and added the exclamation mark to the title to signal skepticism. This initial collaboration sparked a rapid succession of publications, with "Thought Records of Lemuria" appearing in the June 1945 issue, expanding on the dero-teros conflict and ancient technologies. Subsequent stories like "Cave City of Hel" in September 1945 and "Quest of Brail" in December 1945 maintained cover billing, as Palmer continued to refine Shaver's submissions into serialized installments that propelled Amazing Stories' circulation from approximately 135,000 to over 175,000 copies monthly by mid-1945. Shaver contributed irregularly due to personal circumstances, but Palmer's editorial interventions ensured a steady output, positioning the "Shaver Mystery" as a purported revelation of hidden Earth history rather than pure fantasy.

Content and Cosmology of the Shaver Mystery

Subterranean Races: Deros and Teros

In Richard Shaver's Shaver Mystery, the subterranean world beneath Earth's surface is depicted as a vast network of ancient caverns and cities inhabited by two primary races: the deros and the teros. These entities, according to Shaver's accounts, originated from advanced ancient civilizations such as the Titan-Atlans and Lemurians, who fled the planet's harmful solar radiation by relocating underground or to other worlds, leaving behind degenerate remnants. The deros, short for "detrimental robots," were described by Shaver as diminutive, sadistic beings driven by degenerative forces rather than mechanical constructs, despite the nomenclature. Shaver claimed deros utilized abandoned ancient technologies, including teleportation devices, death rays, and mechanisms for projecting illusions or inducing tormenting dreams, to abduct and harm surface-dwelling humans. These activities purportedly explained various earthly evils, from personal misfortunes to wars, as deros tampered with human affairs from their cavernous lairs. In early narratives like "I Remember Lemuria," deros were portrayed as "sun-bitten zany" mad variants of ancient rodites, afflicted by a "black death" radiation that induced insanity and hostility. Opposing the deros were the teros, or "integrative robots," a minority faction Shaver characterized as noble, human-like survivors who preserved their mental and ethical integrity against degenerative influences. Teros, also biological rather than robotic, employed similar ancient machinery for protective purposes, attempting to shield surface populations from dero incursions and maintain a fragile balance in the underworld. Shaver asserted that teros represented a beleaguered resistance, often outnumbered and engaged in ongoing conflicts with deros within the subterranean domains. This dualistic framework formed the core antagonism in Shaver's cosmology, with teros embodying resistance to the pervasive malice attributed to deros.

Ancient Origins and Technological Mechanisms

In the cosmology of the Shaver Mystery, Richard Shaver asserted that an advanced ancient civilization, comprising races such as the Atlans and Titans, originated on Earth millions of years ago, establishing thriving societies in regions like Lemuria (also termed Mu). These beings were described as ever-youthful giants, some growing to heights of 300 feet, who achieved interstellar colonization over thousands of centuries using gravity-defying spacecraft and variform breeding techniques for genetic enhancement. Shaver claimed their downfall stemmed from a cosmic catastrophe: an aging parent sun emitting radioactive particles that accumulated in air, water, and tissues, inducing rapid aging and death—a process he termed the "radioactive disease of age." This environmental degradation rendered the surface uninhabitable, compelling survivors to retreat into vast subterranean caverns where residual energies could sustain life, though delayed migrations to healthier stellar systems allowed malevolent factions to seize control. Shaver's narratives detailed these ancients' technologies as harnessing "exd," an integrative energy derived from disintegrating matter, which powered mechanisms for growth, matter manipulation, and anti-gravity propulsion. Central to this were ray projectors emitting beams such as ben-rays for beneficial integration and healing, stim-rays to amplify emotions, and telepathic rays for mind-reading via telaug devices; detrimental variants like dis-rays and needle-rays enabled disintegration, sleep induction, and torture. Underground installations featured embryo labs filtering age poisons with icor fluids, levitators for lifting massive objects, and conductive grounding rods to neutralize enemy beams, all reliant on periodic maintenance of ray filters and conductive metals to prevent malfunction. Post-catastrophe, Shaver maintained, deros—degenerate remnants—perverted these cavern-sourced energies (ter for detrimental, tre for integrative) into weapons for surface torment, including invisible rays projecting harmful thoughts, sabotage, and illusions, while tero factions preserved integrative applications for defense. These mechanisms, per Shaver, explained contemporary human misfortunes as echoes of ancient tech misuse, though no empirical verification beyond his accounts exists.

Publication History and Expansion

Serialized Stories in Amazing Stories

The Shaver Mystery serialized stories commenced with the novella "I Remember Lemuria!", published as the cover feature in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories. Editor Raymond A. Palmer introduced the piece as an authentic recollection from Shaver's experiences in a subterranean Lemurian civilization, incorporating elements of advanced technology and malevolent entities. This initial publication, illustrated prominently, sparked intense reader interest, generating over 2,500 letters, many purporting personal corroborations of similar phenomena. Palmer, capitalizing on the response, expanded Shaver's raw submissions—often cryptic and voluminous—into a monthly serial format, heavily editing and structuring them for narrative coherence while maintaining the claim of veracity. Key early installments followed: "Thought Records of Lemuria" in June 1945, depicting psychic records of ancient conflicts; "Cave City of Hel" in September 1945, exploring dero strongholds; and "Quest of Brail" in December 1945, involving interstellar pursuits. Each secured cover art by Robert Gibson Jones, emphasizing dramatic subterranean scenes. The serial dominated Amazing Stories content, appearing in nearly every issue from February 1946 through June 1947, with Palmer sometimes collaborating with radio personality Bob McKenna on episodes. Specific 1946 titles included "The Dream Calls for Blood" (February) and "Murder in the Lens" (May), while 1947 featured "The Red Legion" (June). Stories recurrently portrayed dero depredations using "ray" weapons to torment surface dwellers, interwoven with teros' counter-efforts. This proliferation boosted magazine circulation substantially, from prior levels around 150,000 to peaks exceeding 200,000 copies monthly. New Shaver serials halted in mid-1947 amid publisher Ziff-Davis concerns over credibility and reader backlash, though reprints persisted sporadically into 1948. Palmer's editorial framing as factual reportage distinguished the run from conventional fiction, fueling debates on its origins despite Shaver's insistence on experiential basis.

Self-Published Rock Books and Later Outputs

Following the decline in popularity of his serialized stories in Amazing Stories, Shaver collaborated with his wife, Dorothy, to self-publish The Shaver Mystery Magazine, with the first issue appearing in 1947. Issued irregularly from Chicago, Illinois, the publication ran for at least four issues through 1949 and featured Shaver's original writings, illustrations, and letters from enthusiasts, aiming to sustain interest in the Shaver Mystery independently of commercial pulp outlets. In the early 1960s, Shaver shifted focus to what he termed "rock books," natural stones—often agate slices and other minerals—that he claimed preserved pictorial records, symbols, and warnings from advanced pre-deluge civilizations, including Atlantean and Lemurian entities akin to those in his earlier cosmology. Beginning around 1960 while residing in rural Wisconsin, Shaver employed a technique he called "rokfogo" to slice rocks, photograph cross-sections with a 35mm camera and bellows for magnification, and hand-color images with felt pens to highlight perceived faces, scenes, and inscriptions depicting ancient technologies, battles, and rituals. By 1963, after relocating to Summit, Arkansas, Shaver established Rock House Studio, a mail-order operation where he produced handmade notebooks and self-published small booklets compiling his rock photographs, typewritten commentaries, and painted interpretations. At least five such booklets were printed locally, alongside a brochure advertising "pre-deluge art stones" for sale, with Shaver asserting these artifacts transmitted direct evidence of subterranean races and cosmic threats through embedded "thought records." He marketed them via classified ads and correspondence, emphasizing their role as verifiable warnings to humanity, though sales remained limited to a niche audience of collectors and former Shaver Mystery followers. This rock-focused output persisted as Shaver's primary creative endeavor until his death on November 5, 1975, encompassing hundreds of documented specimens and artworks that he viewed as empirical extensions of his prior claims, unmediated by editorial influence.

Reception During Shaver's Lifetime

Commercial Success and Fan Engagement


The Shaver Mystery stories significantly boosted the circulation of Amazing Stories during their initial run from 1945 onward. Publisher Ziff-Davis reported increases attributed to the sensational content, with editor Ray Palmer claiming the March 1945 issue featuring "I Remember Lemuria!" sold out completely, necessitating the diversion of paper supplies amid wartime shortages. Circulation figures rose from approximately 135,000 copies per issue to 185,000, reflecting heightened reader interest in the purportedly factual accounts of subterranean civilizations. Palmer, who heavily edited Shaver's submissions to emphasize their veracity, received a percentage of the resulting profits, underscoring the commercial viability of the series. Fan engagement manifested in an unprecedented volume of correspondence, with Palmer reporting thousands of letters from readers who endorsed the narratives or claimed analogous experiences with deros and their ray-based technologies. These responses overwhelmed the magazine's letters section, prompting expanded coverage of reader-submitted accounts, including personal testimonies of encounters with invisible tormentors. Some correspondents described receiving "thought records" or visions similar to Shaver's, fueling debates in the publication's observatory columns between skeptics and believers. Palmer actively solicited further submissions, tabulating and publishing select results to sustain momentum, which contributed to the series dominating multiple issues through 1946 and into 1947. Despite the enthusiasm, commercial success waned by 1948, leading Ziff-Davis to discontinue Shaver's stories under new editor Howard Browne, who prioritized more conventional science fiction amid declining sales. The initial surge, however, demonstrated the pulp era's appetite for boundary-pushing content blending fiction and alleged reality, with Palmer continuing to promote Shaver's work in subsequent ventures.

Contemporary Criticisms and Debates

Critics within the science fiction community, including prominent fans and writers, increasingly labeled the Shaver Mystery a deliberate hoax engineered by editor Ray Palmer to boost Amazing Stories circulation, which had surged from 135,000 to over 185,000 copies monthly by mid-1945 amid the controversy. Palmer vehemently denied this, asserting in editorials and correspondence that Shaver's accounts stemmed from genuine experiences with subterranean rays and entities, and he positioned skeptics as dismissive of empirical reader testimonies rather than engaging substantively. This debate intensified in fanzines and letters columns, where proponents cited anecdotal reports of "ray" effects like unexplained pains or visions as corroboration, while detractors argued such claims lacked verifiable evidence and mirrored folklore or hallucination patterns without causal mechanisms beyond suggestion. By 1947, mainstream periodicals such as Life and Harper's amplified the hoax narrative, portraying the Mystery as sensational pulp exploitation that blurred fiction and fraud, prompting backlash from traditional science fiction enthusiasts who viewed it as undermining genre credibility. Palmer countered by publishing reader affidavits and challenging critics to investigate alleged cave sites, framing the discourse as a battle between open inquiry and institutional gatekeeping, though no expeditions yielded artifacts or rays as described. Internal Ziff-Davis debates emerged when incoming editor Howard Browne in 1950 phased out Shaver features, citing reader fatigue and preference for conventional narratives over what he deemed unsubstantiated claims, leading to a sales dip but restoring space for diverse authors. Psychological interpretations surfaced contemporaneously, with observers noting Shaver's prior institutionalization in 1934 for auditory phenomena—attributed by him to dero rays but by medical records to possible schizophrenia-like symptoms—as evidence that the cosmology externalized personal delusions rather than revealed hidden realities. Defenders, including Palmer, rejected this reductionism, insisting Shaver's detailed mechanics (e.g., telorgic rays decaying minds over millennia) aligned with post-war anxieties about technology and decay, and urged causal testing via rock "thought records" that independent scrutiny found indistinguishable from natural formations. The controversy thus pitted experiential assertion against empirical null results, with no resolution beyond declining publication interest by the early 1950s.

Psychological and Empirical Assessments

Evidence Claims and Verifiability

Shaver's primary evidence for the existence of deros and teros consisted of his personal accounts of auditory hallucinations experienced while welding in a Detroit factory during the early 1930s, which he interpreted as communications from subterranean beings using "telaug" devices and harmful rays. He further claimed to have descended into underground caverns, witnessed ancient technologies from a pre-cataclysmic civilization, and recorded "thought records" via mechanisms that allegedly preserved mental impressions from Lemurian times. These assertions lacked physical artifacts, photographs, or independently verifiable samples, relying instead on subjective testimony that Shaver maintained was literal truth rather than allegory. Editor Ray Palmer amplified these claims by soliciting reader letters purportedly corroborating similar experiences, publishing hundreds in Amazing Stories from 1945 onward, but such accounts remained anecdotal and unconfirmed, with no coordinated empirical validation. Palmer organized informal expeditions to caves in search of entrances to dero realms, yet these yielded no discoveries of advanced machinery, rays, or races, and he repeatedly deferred promised "proof" to future issues without substantiation. Geological surveys and spelunking records from the era contradict the feasibility of vast, habitable subterranean networks capable of supporting millions, as proposed, due to structural instabilities and absence of atmospheric or energy signatures detectable by contemporary methods. Shaver's 1934 hospitalization for psychiatric issues, involving paranoid ideation predating his factory experiences, aligns the claims with symptoms of conditions like schizophrenia, where auditory phenomena and persecutory delusions are common, rather than external causal agents. No peer-reviewed studies or forensic analyses have upheld the veracity of dero rays or telaug effects, which violate principles of electromagnetism and biology as understood since the 1940s; for instance, alleged "ben" rays inducing pleasure or pain lack measurable spectra or biological markers in controlled tests. The 1947 World Science Fiction Convention passed a resolution denouncing the Shaver Mystery as unsubstantiated and a potential hazard to rational inquiry, reflecting contemporaneous skepticism absent empirical backing. Posthumous assessments, including archival reviews of Shaver's manuscripts and Palmer's correspondence, reveal embellishments for narrative appeal, with Palmer admitting in private to fictional elements while publicly blurring fact-fiction boundaries to boost circulation, which surged from 135,000 to 185,000 copies monthly by mid-1945. Claims of ancient origins, such as Atlantean migrations to inner Earth, find no archaeological or paleontological support, diverging from verified human migration patterns and technological timelines derived from radiocarbon dating and stratigraphy. Thus, the Shaver Mystery endures as unverifiable folklore, attributable to individual pathology and commercial opportunism rather than disclosed realities.

Interpretations of Mental Health Factors

Shaver experienced a pivotal incident around 1932 while employed as a welder at a Ford automobile plant in Detroit, where he reported that his welding equipment began transmitting the thoughts and voices of coworkers, marking the onset of auditory hallucinations that he later incorporated into his narratives. This event preceded his brief hospitalization for psychiatric issues in 1934, though records indicate no definitive clinical diagnosis was established at the time. Scholars have interpreted these experiences through the lens of the "influencing machine" delusion, a phenomenon documented in psychiatric literature since the early 20th century, wherein individuals perceive external devices or rays as sources of mental torment, often linked to schizophrenia or paranoid disorders. Psychological analyses of Shaver's accounts posit that the deros—sadistic subterranean beings wielding ray-based torture devices—served as a symbolic externalization of internal psychological distress, allowing him to frame personal traumas and perceptual anomalies as assaults by malevolent entities rather than endogenous mental processes. This framework aligns with causal mechanisms in delusional disorders, where sensory distortions, potentially exacerbated by occupational hazards like prolonged exposure to welding arcs or fumes, could precipitate hallucinatory episodes mistaken for telepathic or technological interference. While Shaver attributed his sensitivities to damage from ancient "telaug" rays encountered in caverns, empirical scrutiny favors neurochemical or neurotoxic explanations over supernatural ones, given the absence of verifiable evidence for such mechanisms. Contemporary observers and later commentators, including editor Ray Palmer, acknowledged Shaver's accounts as products of mental affliction, with Palmer editing submissions to render them more coherent while preserving their core delusional structure to appeal to readers. Despite this, Shaver's self-reported functionality—sustained employment and prolific output—suggests his condition did not preclude periods of lucidity, complicating blanket characterizations of schizophrenia, as symptoms varied in intensity without formal longitudinal assessment. Interpretations emphasizing mental health factors thus highlight a convergence of environmental stressors, perceptual vulnerabilities, and narrative coping strategies, rather than isolated pathology.

Later Career and Artistic Endeavors

Rock Photography, Paintings, and Interpretations

In the later stages of his career, following the decline of his pulp fiction publications, Richard Sharpe Shaver turned his attention to what he termed "rock books," primarily polished slices of agate and similar stones that he claimed contained embedded pictorial records and texts from ancient extraterrestrial civilizations. Relocating to Summit, Arkansas, in the 1960s, Shaver established a rock shop where he collected, photographed, and interpreted these specimens as corroborating evidence for the subterranean worlds and malevolent entities described in his earlier Shaver Mystery stories. Shaver's photographic approach emphasized revealing hidden details within the rocks' natural markings, using 35mm black-and-white film to capture cross-sections at various angles and magnifications, often including a ruler or coin for scale to underscore the physicality of the artifacts. He frequently hand-colored these prints with felt-tip pens to accentuate perceived imagery, arguing that photography provided a more objective medium than his prior artistic renderings, though he lamented the limitations of available equipment in fully decoding the stones. Locally printed booklets, such as Giant Evening Wings and Blue Mansions, compiled these photographs alongside his typewritten annotations, detailing techniques like oblique lighting to bring forth submerged patterns. Complementing his photography, Shaver created paintings and drawings by projecting enlarged images of rock slices onto surfaces using a toy opaque projector, then tracing and enhancing them with paints, pastels, soap flakes, or wax to reconstruct what he viewed as three-dimensional art or scripts. These works aimed to translate the rocks' purported contents—interpretations including ancient symbols, lettering, depictions of amphibious or spacefaring races ancestral to humanity, and even narrative scenes akin to fairy tales like Puss-in-Boots or Red Riding Hood—into accessible visual forms that echoed his theories of prehistoric technological societies and their conflicts with deros. Shaver maintained that such "rock books" functioned as durable libraries predating human history, embedding warnings or histories overlooked by mainstream geology due to interpretive bias or technological inadequacy. Shaver disseminated his findings through self-published pamphlets and a mail-order lending library in the 1960s, offering subscribers access to his annotated rock photographs and paintings for study, though these efforts garnered minimal contemporary validation beyond fringe interest. His interpretations, while internally consistent with his lifelong narrative of hidden ancient perils, relied on subjective pattern recognition without independent empirical corroboration, positioning the rocks as artifacts of a lost era rather than natural geological formations.

Personal Circumstances and Death

In the mid-1960s, Shaver relocated to Summit in Marion County, Arkansas, with his second wife, Dorothy "Dottie" Shaver, where they established a modest residence. There, he pursued interests in geology, operating what he termed the Rock House Studio on their property, from which he sold rock specimens and self-published materials interpreting patterns in stones as encoded messages from subterranean entities known as deros. These activities reflected his persistent belief in the "Shaver Mystery" cosmology, though conducted in obscurity away from mainstream publishing. Shaver's final decade involved minimal public engagement, focused instead on personal artistic output, including rock photography and paintings derived from his alleged receptions of extraterrestrial or ancient signals. No records indicate significant financial prosperity or family expansions beyond his marriage to Dorothy; earlier personal losses, such as the death of a sibling and first wife, had previously contributed to periods of instability, but his Arkansas years appear marked by relative seclusion. Shaver died on November 5, 1975, at age 68, in Marion County, Arkansas. He was interred at Layton Cemetery in Yellville, Marion County. The cause of death remains undocumented in available biographical accounts.

Enduring Legacy and Influences

Impacts on Science Fiction and Pulp Culture

The Shaver Mystery propelled Amazing Stories to unprecedented commercial heights within the pulp science fiction market, with circulation rising from approximately 125,000 copies per issue prior to the March 1945 debut of "I Remember Lemuria" to nearly 200,000 copies shortly thereafter. This surge prompted publisher Ziff-Davis to reallocate printing resources, as initial print runs sold out and reader demand for Shaver's serialized tales of subterranean deros and ancient technologies outstripped supply. The phenomenon exemplified the pulp era's reliance on sensational content to drive sales, contrasting with the more restrained editorial approaches of competitors like John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction. Shaver's narratives influenced pulp content creation by inspiring collaborative and derivative works from other authors, including Chester Geier, who penned Shaver Mystery-aligned stories and established the Shaver Mystery Club to rally enthusiasts. German writer Heinrich Hauser contributed pieces such as "Agharti" in June 1946, expanding the shared universe of hollow-earth lore and malevolent ancient rays within Amazing's pages. Editor Ray Palmer's promotion of these tales as factual accounts blurred genre boundaries, encouraging reader-submitted "evidence" and fostering an interactive ecosystem that prioritized escapist, fringe-tinged adventures over rigorous speculation. The Mystery ignited fervent debate in pulp fandom, polarizing readers between those who embraced its purported veracity—evidenced by expanded letters columns filled with endorsements and personal testimonies—and skeptics who decried it as exploitative fiction or delusion. This schism highlighted tensions in 1940s science fiction culture, where Palmer's emphasis on "bang-bang" action and pseudo-documentary style challenged the field's maturing aspirations toward literary credibility. Conventions like the 1946 Newark event saw backlash against Shaver's dominance, yet the controversy sustained engagement, injecting themes of hidden civilizations and technological torment into pulp tropes. Even after Shaver's primary run waned under new editor Howard Browne, his influence persisted in pulp publications, with stories appearing in magazines like Other Worlds Science Stories in 1952 and a dedicated Shaver Mystery issue of Fantastic in July 1958. This endurance underscored the Mystery's role in sustaining pulp science fiction's appetite for serialized, myth-building sagas amid declining magazine viability post-World War II.

Connections to UFOlogy and Broader Conspiracy Narratives

Ray Palmer, the editor who serialized Shaver's stories in Amazing Stories from 1945 onward, explicitly integrated UFO phenomena into the Shaver Mystery framework after leaving Ziff-Davis Publishing in 1949. In his subsequent ventures, including co-founding Fate magazine in 1948 with Curtis Fuller, Palmer promoted UFO sightings as evidence of vehicles emerging from Hollow Earth caverns populated by deros or allied entities, arguing that the Shaver narrative provided a terrestrial explanation for flying saucers predating the 1947 Roswell incident. This linkage positioned subterranean bases as UFO origins, contrasting with extraterrestrial hypotheses dominant in mainstream ufology. Thematic overlaps between Shaver's lore and UFOlogy extended to motifs of malevolent underground intelligences tormenting humanity via advanced rays, paralleling post-1947 reports of alien abductions, black helicopter precursors, and hidden bases like those alleged at Dulce, New Mexico. Shaver's "Nor"—benevolent, blonde extraterrestrial-like beings from ancient times—anticipated "Nordic" aliens in contactee accounts, such as those by George Adamski in the early 1950s, while dero tunnels evoked intra-terrestrial UFO exit points. Palmer reinforced these ties in Flying Saucers magazine, claiming deros operated saucer craft to project harmful energies, influencing fringe ufologists who favored Hollow Earth over deep-space origins. Beyond UFOlogy, the Shaver Mystery fed into broader conspiracy paradigms by framing surface-world ills as orchestrated by devolved ancient survivors wielding "telaug" mind-control rays from cavernous strongholds, a template for theories of elite cabals or interdimensional overlords suppressing human potential. This echoed 19th-century Hollow Earth speculations by John Cleves Symmes Jr. but added pulp sci-fi elements like robotic servitors and Atlantean degeneration, impacting pseudo-archaeological narratives of lost civilizations. Palmer's evangelism sustained these ideas in Fate and Mystic, where Shaver contributed intermittently post-1947, fostering a continuum from dero perils to modern underground threat models in conspiracy discourse. While lacking empirical validation, the framework's endurance reflects its appeal in externalizing societal anxieties through hidden causal agents.

References

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