extraordinary%20encounters

Shaver was also vague on what was happening
in his life amid his growing realization of, and
interaction with, the reality of a literal underground.
It appears, from uncertain though
not entirely implausible inference, that he
spent some time in a mental hospital, and he
may also have served a short prison stretch for
bootlegging. On occasion Shaver intimated as
much, even as he less plausibly claimed to
have lived in the caves with the embattled
teros (“integrative robots”; again, like their enemies
the deros, beings of flesh and blood).
How long he supposedly lived there is also
unclear.
In any event, out of these elements came a
complex, alternate history of the human race.
Long ago, according to Shaver, extraterrestrials
known as Atlans and Titans or the Elder
Races colonized the Earth. (The Atlans lived
on Atlantis, the Titans on Lemuria.) These beings,
who possessed fantastic technologies,
lived extraordinarily long lives and never
stopped growing, owing to the integrative
(positive) energies cast out by the sun. Some
grew to fifty feet, a few considerably more.
Eventually, however, the sun changed and
began to beam detrimental (negative) energy,
causing, among other effects, aging and mortality.
To block the deadly rays, the Elders
built an immense Cavern World to house the
Earth’s fifty billion Atlans and Titans. But the
effort ultimately failed, and twelve thousand
years ago the Elders who survived fled to
other stars, leaving behind a small population,
which had fallen victim to the detrimental radiation.
Some wandered to the surface and in
time forgot their history as they became the
mortal and confused Homo sapiens. The others
stayed in the caves to become the sadistic,
cannibalistic idiots called deros. One other
group, the smallest of the three, was the teros,
who had escaped the negative rays but who,
for various reasons, had not joined the exodus
from Earth. Both the deros and the teros were
“robots” not because they were walking mechanical
contraptions but because they were
under the influence of, respectively, negative
and positive energies.
Shaver mystery 225
The deros used the advanced technologies
to torment surface-dwellers. As Palmer explained
it, they “have death rays, giant rockets
that traverse in the upper air . . . ground vehicles
of tremendous power, machines for the
revitalizing of sex, known as ‘stim’ machines
(in which these degenerates sometimes spend
their whole lives in a sexual debauch that actually
deforms their bodies in horrible
ways) . . . and ben rays which heal and restore
the body but are also capable of restoring lost
energy after a debauch” [Palmer, 1961]). Besides
causing plane crashes, madness, violence,
and other maladies on the surface, deros
sometimes abduct human beings, usually
women, and subject them to hideous tortures.
Their rays cloud human thought and keep
them oblivious to the deros’ existence. The
badly outnumbered teros are engaged in a
protracted but ultimately futile conflict with
their evil counterparts.
After its exile from Am a z i n g ,the Sh a ver myst
e ry passed from the attention of all but a tiny
band of occult and tru e - m y s t e ry enthusiasts,
who continued to re p o rt on and speculate
about deros and caverns in amateurish new s l e tters
as well as Pa l m e r’s periodicals. The “m y st
e ry” fig u red in a few not widely read UFO-era
books, including Eric No r m a n’s The Un d e r - Pe op
l e (1969) and Brinsley le Poer Tre n c h’s Se c ret of
the Ages: UFOs from inside the Ea rt h ( 1 9 7 4 ) .
Se veral writers of a skeptical bent have argued
that through Sh a ve r, as one puts it, Palmer “a lmost
single-handedly created the myth of
U F Os as extraterrestrial visitors” (Kafton-
Minkel, 1989). In fact, a connection betwe e n
the Sh a ver mystery and the international UFO
phenomenon of the past five decades has yet to
be demonstrated. Flying saucers as such did not
enter Sh a verian mythology until after the rest of
the world started talking about them.
A more interesting issue concerns the motivations
of the principals. Sh a ve r’s manifest belief
in experiences that could not have happened
in consensus reality leads some, such as
h o l l ow - e a rth chronicler Walter Kafton-Mi nkel,
to see Sh a ver as a visionary, “a member of
that ancient fellowship of re c e i vers of re ve a l e d