Richard Shaver

From RationalWiki
(Difference between revisions)
Jump to: navigation, search
Line 34: Line 34:
 
...These ignorant people learned to play with these things, but not to renew them; so gradually they were mentally impregnated with the persistently disintigrative particles... these wild people, living in the same rooms with degenerating force generators, in time became dero, which is short for detrimental energy robot. When this process has gone on long enough, a race of dero is produced whose every thought movement is concluded with the decision to kill.|<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', pp.31-2</ref>}}
 
...These ignorant people learned to play with these things, but not to renew them; so gradually they were mentally impregnated with the persistently disintigrative particles... these wild people, living in the same rooms with degenerating force generators, in time became dero, which is short for detrimental energy robot. When this process has gone on long enough, a race of dero is produced whose every thought movement is concluded with the decision to kill.|<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', pp.31-2</ref>}}
  
Shaver stated that the deros could interfere with the surface world using mind control devices and death rays. Some could even walk on the surface world disguised as humans, although others were too deformed to pass muster.<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', p. v</ref> Shaver and Palmer also rewrote the laws of physics, as in this explanation as to how the Lemurians propelled their spacecraft:
+
Shaver stated that the dero could interfere with the surface world using mind control devices and death rays. Some could even walk on the surface world disguised as humans, although others were too deformed to pass muster.<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', p. v</ref> Shaver and Palmer also rewrote the laws of physics, as in this explanation as to how the Lemurians propelled their spacecraft:
  
 
{{quotebox|[G]ravity is the friction of condensing exd, ex-disentegrance, falling through matter into earth. By using a beam of similarly condensing particles of ex-disentegrance a harmless beam of upward gravity is obtained which can levitate matter slowly or drive it upward at immense speed. All space is filled with the ash from disintegrance of the suns of the universe. This, condensing again into matter, is integance or gravity.<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', p. 38</ref>}}
 
{{quotebox|[G]ravity is the friction of condensing exd, ex-disentegrance, falling through matter into earth. By using a beam of similarly condensing particles of ex-disentegrance a harmless beam of upward gravity is obtained which can levitate matter slowly or drive it upward at immense speed. All space is filled with the ash from disintegrance of the suns of the universe. This, condensing again into matter, is integance or gravity.<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', p. 38</ref>}}
  
Shaver's cosmology also includes two additional planets in the solar system: the tenth is two billion miles beyond Pluto, while the eleventh is named Quanto.<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', p. 42</ref>
+
Shaver's cosmology also includes two additional planets in the solar system: the tenth is two billion miles beyond Pluto, while the eleventh is named Quanto.<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', p. 42</ref> Quanto is inhabited by a race known as the Nortons or Nor-men, who "shun all suns and can only be found where the sun rays shine not".<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', p. 10</ref><ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', p. 50</ref>
  
 
==="I Remember Lemuria!"===
 
==="I Remember Lemuria!"===
"I Remember Lemuria!" takes the form of a fairly unremarkable pulp science fiction yarn set in the land referred to by Shaver variously as [[Mu]], Pan and [[Lemuria]]. Lemuria is home to two humanoid races called the Atlans and Titans (capable of growing to enormous proportions, they were the "giants in the Earth" mentioned in [[Genesis]]<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', pp. 27-8</ref>) along with an array of hybrids between these groups and alien races, dubbed "variforms". As an aside, Shaver has also spoken of a third humanoid race, the Nortons or Nor-men, who "shun all suns and can only be found where the sun rays shine not".<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', p. 10</ref> The main character is Shaver's supposed past self Mutan Miong, an inhabitant of the underground Lemurian city Sub Atlan (so called because it is located beneath Atlantis, or Surface Atlan).
+
"I Remember Lemuria!" takes the form of a fairly unremarkable pulp space opera that starts off in the land referred to by Shaver variously as [[Mu]], Pan and [[Lemuria]]. Lemuria is home to two humanoid races called the Atlans and Titans (capable of growing to enormous proportions, they were the "giants in the Earth" mentioned in [[Genesis]]<ref>David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: ''Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth'', pp. 27-8</ref>) along with an array of hybrids between these groups and alien races, dubbed "variforms". The main character is Shaver's supposed past self Mutan Miong, an inhabitant of the underground Lemurian city Sub Atlan (so called because it is located beneath Atlantis, or Surface Atlan).
  
Mutan reluctantly abandons his career as a painter to study medicine, and ends up learning of a plan to evacuate the Lemurians from Earth, thereby saving them from harmful effects of the Earth's sun, which would otherwise lower the Lemurians' age lifespan by centuries. Unfortunately, the plan is opposed by some groups of Atlans, and so it must be kept secret to avoid sabotage. Mutan and his love interest Arl (a purple woman with hooves and a tail) narrowly avoid a ray gun killing spree peformed by a group of evil Lemurians who want to hijack the escape so that they can have the new sun to themselves - "Such a view could only be the result of detrimental err", opines Mutan. Mutan and his comrades escape the attacking dero and flee into space, arriving on the planet Quanto.
+
Mutan reluctantly abandons his career as a painter to study medicine, and ends up learning of a plan to evacuate the Lemurians from Earth, thereby saving them from harmful effects of the Earth's sun, which would otherwise lower the Lemurians' age lifespan by centuries. Unfortunately, the plan is opposed by some groups of Atlans, and so it must be kept secret to avoid sabotage. Mutan and his love interest Arl (a purple woman with hooves and a tail) narrowly avoid a ray gun killing spree peformed by a group of evil Lemurians who want to hijack the escape so that they can have the new sun to themselves - "Such a view could only be the result of detrimental err", opines Mutan.
 +
 
 +
Mutan and his comrades escape the attacking dero and flee into space, arriving on the planet Quanto. Once they bring news of the dero to the Nortons who inhabit the planet, Quanto is also evacuated and Mutan travels to Nor, the planet where the Nortons originated.
  
 
===Response===
 
===Response===

Revision as of 15:09, 26 November 2011

The woo is out there

UFOlogy

Icon ufology alt.svg
Aliens did it and ran away
Icon bullshit.svg B   U   L   L
"The universe is a strange and wondrous place.
The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans."
Life is a scream in the face of a bright madness, then! Life is a silly sound like a death rattle from an insane clown dying in the night, then.
—Richard Shaver[1]

Richard Shaver (1907-1975) was an American writer known for his belief in a race of malevolent subterranean beings called dero.

Contents

Early life

Born in Berwick, Pennsylvania in 1907, Shaver studied art and joined the Communist John Reed Club as a young man; in 1933 he married fellow art student Sophie Gurivinch and had a daughter the same year.[2]

During the Depression Shaver found work as a welder in an automobile factory. He became paranoid, believing that people were following him, and was distraught by the death of his brother in February 1934; the following August his wife admitted him to Ypsilanti State Hospital. Decades later Shaver claimed that his stay at the hospital simply because he suffered shock following a case of heat stroke at work and was only there for two weeks, although his biographer Jim Probst found evidence that Shaver spent a longer time at hospital, but the exact length of his stay is unknown.[3]

Sophie Shaver subsequently died, and her parents took custody of the couple's daughter. Reportedly, the girl's grandparents told her that her father was dead as well. Shaver remarried twice, his second wife leaving him after finding papers indicating that he had been a mental patient.[4]

Mantong and the Shaver alphabet

In 1936 the magazine Science World ran an article by Albert F. Yeager in which he argued that six letters of the alphabet represented concepts, as well as sounds. The article caught the attention of Shaver, who sent a letter to the magazine claiming that he knew the hidden meanings of all twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Shaver called this alphabet of concepts Mantong, and claimed that it was the oldest language in the world.[5]

In Mantong, according to Shaver's theory, the letter A represents the concept of animal. B, meanwhile, means simply "be", while C means "see". D is one of the most important letters in the Shaver alphabet: it stands for "detrimental" and represents all that is negative in the world. Its opposite is T, for "integration", which represents positivity. And so on for every letter of the alphabet.

Shaver claimed that, using this alphabet, definitions can be derived from words. For example, "bad" means "be a de" - that is, to be "bad" is to be detrimental. The word "devil" is a combination of "de", for detrimental, and "vile". "Morbid" becomes "more be I de", a phrase which Shaver claims means "I don't want to be any more, I want to die".[6]

Partnership with Ray Palmer

Cover of June 1947's "All Shaver Mystery Issue" of Amazing Stories.

In 1943 Shaver sent a letter outlining his linguistic theory (and citing it as "definite proof of the Atlantean legend") to another publication, Ray Palmer's pulp periodical Amazing Stories. Palmer duly published Shaver's findings in the December 1943 issue of his magazine.[7]

The following year Shaver sent another piece of writing to Palmer: a 10,000 word article called "A Warning for Man". In 1945 this eventually saw print in the form of a 31,000 word story - it had, apparently, been re-written by the Amazing Stories staff - called "I Remember Lemuria!". This was a big hit with readers - reportedly, fanmail went from around 50 letters a month to 2,500.[8]

Material on the "Shaver mystery", as it came to be known, continued to run in Amazing Stories throughout the following years. The June 1947 edition was billed as the "All Shaver Mystery Issue", and described the whole affair as "The Most Sensational True Story Ever Told".[9] In a 2000 article, Bruce Lanier Wright summerises the stories as "an unforgettable blend of high-flying imagination with curiously homely touches, as when we encounter a highly intelligent snail-centaur named Hank."[1]

According to Shaver, while working as a welder he heard voices that were being projected into his head through the welding equipment. He claimed that the voices originated from an underground civilisation, and that, in a past life as a fellow named Mutan Miong, he himself lived in these underground cities. The inhabitants of these caves belong to a race of humanoids that originated in another solar system; once an advanced species, they had since degenerated. Shaver called these beings "dero", short for detrimental energy robots;[10] not because they are mechanical, but because they are slaves to detrimental energy.

Shaver outlined the origin of the dero as follows:

Long ago it happened that certain (underground) cities were abandoned and into these cities stole many mild mortals [sic - Shaver probably meant "wild"] to live... due to their improper handling of the life-force and ray apparatus in the abandoned cities, these apparatii became harmful in effect.

...These ignorant people learned to play with these things, but not to renew them; so gradually they were mentally impregnated with the persistently disintigrative particles... these wild people, living in the same rooms with degenerating force generators, in time became dero, which is short for detrimental energy robot. When this process has gone on long enough, a race of dero is produced whose every thought movement is concluded with the decision to kill.

Shaver stated that the dero could interfere with the surface world using mind control devices and death rays. Some could even walk on the surface world disguised as humans, although others were too deformed to pass muster.[11] Shaver and Palmer also rewrote the laws of physics, as in this explanation as to how the Lemurians propelled their spacecraft:

[G]ravity is the friction of condensing exd, ex-disentegrance, falling through matter into earth. By using a beam of similarly condensing particles of ex-disentegrance a harmless beam of upward gravity is obtained which can levitate matter slowly or drive it upward at immense speed. All space is filled with the ash from disintegrance of the suns of the universe. This, condensing again into matter, is integance or gravity.[12]

Shaver's cosmology also includes two additional planets in the solar system: the tenth is two billion miles beyond Pluto, while the eleventh is named Quanto.[13] Quanto is inhabited by a race known as the Nortons or Nor-men, who "shun all suns and can only be found where the sun rays shine not".[14][15]

"I Remember Lemuria!"

"I Remember Lemuria!" takes the form of a fairly unremarkable pulp space opera that starts off in the land referred to by Shaver variously as Mu, Pan and Lemuria. Lemuria is home to two humanoid races called the Atlans and Titans (capable of growing to enormous proportions, they were the "giants in the Earth" mentioned in Genesis[16]) along with an array of hybrids between these groups and alien races, dubbed "variforms". The main character is Shaver's supposed past self Mutan Miong, an inhabitant of the underground Lemurian city Sub Atlan (so called because it is located beneath Atlantis, or Surface Atlan).

Mutan reluctantly abandons his career as a painter to study medicine, and ends up learning of a plan to evacuate the Lemurians from Earth, thereby saving them from harmful effects of the Earth's sun, which would otherwise lower the Lemurians' age lifespan by centuries. Unfortunately, the plan is opposed by some groups of Atlans, and so it must be kept secret to avoid sabotage. Mutan and his love interest Arl (a purple woman with hooves and a tail) narrowly avoid a ray gun killing spree peformed by a group of evil Lemurians who want to hijack the escape so that they can have the new sun to themselves - "Such a view could only be the result of detrimental err", opines Mutan.

Mutan and his comrades escape the attacking dero and flee into space, arriving on the planet Quanto. Once they bring news of the dero to the Nortons who inhabit the planet, Quanto is also evacuated and Mutan travels to Nor, the planet where the Nortons originated.

Response

Although many readers were fascinated there appears to have been something of a backlash from science fiction authors - reportedly, one New York-based group of writers complained to the Society of the Suppression of Vice that the Shaver stories endangered the sanity of their readers, and there was apparently even an attempt to have the magazine banned from the mail. Eventually Palmer decided to resign as editor, and promote the Shaver mystery away from Amazing Stories.[17]

Post-Amazing

In 1948 Palmer published a book re-using the title I Remember Lemuria, along with Fate, the first of his several magazines dealing with ufology and the paranormal. In 1957 Shaver once again graced Amazing Stories when it devoted an issue to flying saucers.[18]

The two men went on to co-write a book entitled The Secret World. This was published in 1975, the year in which Richard Shaver and Ray Palmer both died.[19]

Other dero accounts

Since Shaver revealed his theories, reports of dero encounters have been made by others. One case comes from John Robinson, who claimed to have met a dero victim named Steve Brodie. Upon seeing an issue of Amazing Stories with material on the Shaver mystery, Brodie reportedly related to Robinson how, in 1938, he had met two cowled figures who rendered him unconscious by placing small devices behind his ears. Robinson says that Brodie woke up in a cave with some other men, who told him that they were prisoners of the dero; Brodie eventually found himself walking Manhatten, with no idea of how he got there. He later vanished again, said Robinson.[20]

Footnotes

  1. 1.0 1.1 http://www.softcom.net/users/falconkam/feardownbelow.html
  2. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, pp. 218-19
  3. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, pp. 219-20
  4. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, pp. 220
  5. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, pp. 221
  6. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, pp. 214-5
  7. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, pp. 221-2
  8. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, p. 223
  9. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, p. 226
  10. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, pp. iv-v
  11. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, p. v
  12. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, p. 38
  13. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, p. 42
  14. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, p. 10
  15. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, p. 50
  16. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, pp. 27-8
  17. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, p. 229
  18. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, p. 230-1
  19. David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver: Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, p. 232
  20. http://web.archive.org/web/20070217005222/http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk/arc/90/revis01.html
Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support