extraordinary%20encounters

224 Shaver mystery
Cover of The Hidden World magazine, spring 1961,
containing articles on the Shaver mystery (Fortean Picture
Library)
i t y, Lemuria is a nineteenth-century inve n t i o n ) .
Palmer published it in Am a z i n g’s Ja n u a ry 1944
issue. By then, he and Sh a ver we re corre s p o nding.
Sh a ver produced a ten-thousand-word
manuscript titled “A Warning to Fu t u re Ma n , ”
which Palmer rew rote as a science-fic t i o n
n ovella, “I Remember Lemuria!” The story app
e a red under Sh a ve r’s by-line in the Ma rc h
1945 issue. Palmer presented it as a true story
based on racial memory, though Sh a ve r
claimed that he had re c e i ved his knowledge of
h u m a n i t y’s hidden history directly from beings
who live in a vast network of tunnels and cave s
under the Eart h’s surf a c e .
The response was a flood of letters from
curious readers and some from persons who
related unusual experiences that they thought
validated Shaver. A promotional genius with
the instincts of a carnival barker, Palmer
coined the phrase “Shaver mystery,” started a
Shaver Mystery Club, and opened Amazing’s
pages to allegedly factual material and sciencefiction
stories based on it. Palmer wrote that
when he visited Richard and Dorothy Shaver
at their farm, he heard mysterious voices that
“could not have come from Mr. Shaver’s lips.”
They were speaking first in English then in a
“strange language,” about a woman who earlier
that day had been “torn into four quarters
about four miles away and four miles down
[from the Shaver house]” (Palmer, 1961).
At least in its most vital phase, the Shaver
mystery ended in 1948, when pressure from
outraged science-fiction fans led Ziff-Davis,
Amazing’s publisher, to order its closing. That
same year Palmer and Curtis Fuller founded
Fate, dedicated to the “true mysteries” Amaz -
ing had featured along with Shaver matters,
and he left the science-fiction magazine the
following year. Not long afterward, Palmer
moved to Amherst, Wisconsin, where he
started Mystic (later Search) and Other Worlds
(later Flying Saucers). These publications carried
articles by and about Shaver. Between
1961 and 1964, Palmer published sixteen issues
of a trade-paper-formatted magazine, The
Hidden World, devoted entirely to the Shaver
mystery. Shaver died in 1975. Palmer, who
had continued to champion the “mystery”
while disputing some of Shaver’s interpretations,
died two years later.
Though to all but a few Shaver’s claims
were outlandish and absurd, even grotesque,
Shaver did not strike those who knew him as a
hoaxer. There seemed little doubt that Shaver
believed what he said, notwithstanding some
noteworthy inconsistencies in his testimony
over the years. For example, he told at least
four mutually exclusive stories about how he
learned of the Earth’s secret past and its subterranean
races. In his most frequent telling,
however, it occurred first through telepathic
messages from a mysterious woman, then as
mental voices emanating from depraved creatures
known as “deros” (from “detrimental ro -
bots,” though they were not robots as such;
see explanation on next page).
These experiences seem to have occurred in
the early 1930s. Always vague on dates,