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Richard Sharpe Shaver
Richard Sharpe Shaver
Richard Sharpe Shaver
The June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories featuring the "Shaver Mystery" Richard Sharpe Shaver (October 8, 1907 Berwick, Pennsylvania c. November 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), in which Shaver claimed that he had personal experience of 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 Ray Palmer as "The Shaver Mystery".
Contents
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1 Biography 2 Aftermath 3 Influence and references to the Shaver Mystery o 3.1 Shaver in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror
3.2 Shaver and UFOs 3.3 Other influences 4 See also 5 References 6 Footnotes 7 External links
o o
[edit] Biography
Very little is known reliably about Shaver's early life. He 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 malign entities in caverns deep within the earth." According to 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."[1] Shaver said he then quit his job, and became a hobo for a period. Barkun writes that "Shaver was hospitalized briefly for psychiatric problems in 1934, but there does not appear to have been a clear diagnosis."[2] Barkun notes that afterwards, Shaver's whereabouts and actions cannot be reliably traced until the early 1940s. During 1943, Shaver wrote a letter to Amazing magazine. He claimed to have discovered 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 an approximately 10,000 word document entitled "A Warning to Future Man." Shaver wrote of extremely 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 Deros short for "detrimental robots." Shaver's "robots" were not mechanical constructs, but were robotlike 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 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 Dash notes that "Sado-masochism was one of the prominent
themes of Shaver's writings."[3] 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 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 31,000. Palmer insisted that he did not do anything to 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."[1] Retitled "I Remember Lemuria!"; it was published in March, 1945 issue of Amazing.[4] 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 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.[5] 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 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. There was disagreement as to the precise increase in circulation (with Shaver being accused of exaggerating the total), but Barkun notes that reliable sources reflect an increase in monthly circulation from about 135,000 to 185,000.[1] Shaver's rambling manuscripts were rewritten by Palmer, both to make them more readable, and to remove or deemphasize most of the explicit sexual content. From 1945 to 1948, Barkun notes that about 75% of the issues of Amazing featured Shaver Mystery contentsometimes 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."[3] 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 opera, organized letter-writing campaigns to try persuading the publishers of Amazing to cease all Shaver Mystery articles. 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."[6] 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."[3]
[edit] Aftermath
During 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 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. In 1971, Palmer reported that "Shaver had spent eight years not in the Cavern World, but in a mental institution."[6][7] Despite this fact, Palmer would insist that he thought the Shaver Mystery was genuine, though he suggested it occurred in a psychic, astral manner rather than by everyday physical reality. During the 1960s and 1970s, now living in obscurity, Shaver searched for physical evidence of the bygone pre-historic 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 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. 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 USA, Shaver's "rock book" photography was grouped with works by famous "outsider artists," including Henry Darger and Adolf Wolfli.
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."[9]
Rogers' Dero has appeared in dozens of his rock and roll concert and art prints and in 2004 became a designer vinyl toy line.