Great classics of the UFO genre of literature belong to the circa-1950s era. This was the time when independent researchers approached the flying saucer manifestations with fresh eyes; a time when the U.S. government cover-up was still in its awkward learning-to-walk stage, and it is likely therefore that real information slipped through.
Some excellent work on that era is being done by such researchers as Kenn Thomas, author of a forthcoming book on the Maury Island incident, and Jim Keith, author of Casebook On The Men In Black. Two independent publishing houses, IllumiNet Press and Adventures Unlimited, offer free catalogs detailing their re-publications of some of this classic material. (I highly recommend writing to each publisher for their free catalog. Write to IllumiNet Press at PO Box 2808, Lilburn, Georgia 30226; phone 770-279-2745; fax 770-279-8007. Write to Adventures Unlimited at One Adventure Place, PO Box 74, Kempton, Illinois 60946; phone 815-253-6390; fax 815-253-6300.)
It was in reading Keith's Casebook On The Men In Black that I first came across mention of the Richard S. Shaver stories, "paranoid tales about the 'deros,' a malevolent humanoid race living inside the Earth who occasionally made forays above ground, and who degraded life on the surface by irradiation with harmful electronic rays." [1] Keith quotes as follows from the original Shaver stories:
Nothing about my fictional creations has been more misunderstood than the "dero." The dero is the human whose mind has been under the influence of detrimental flows of energy until he has become a detrimental robot -- shortened to dero.
He is a phenomenon peculiar to the caverns, the readers seem to think. I never meant to infer that the dero was confined exclusively to the cavern life, but only that the worst of earth's deros are to be found among the cavern people.
All earth people are to some extent deros, and especially considered from the viewpoint of all-over result, such as the results we got from our last war; all men are deros.
But in the caverns this stupid following of thought patterns without content of true reason is to be found organized, fixed, honored by the observance of centuries of stupidity; a form of state, a way of life. Up here we have not quite that sad a result from deros among us, as yet. [2]
I next came across mention of the Shaver stories while reading Gray Barker's classic, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. According to Barker, Shaver's "deros" (DEtrimental RObots)
(a) once inhabited Earth's surface, and now live in caves;
(b) derive pleasure from terrorizing, torturing and
exploiting surface people;
(c) playfully torture individuals, making them hear voices;
(d) engage in interplanetary traffic with evil beings from
other planets;
(e) direct harmful rays against mankind. [3]
But lest you think Shaver's stories are nothing more than =stories=, there are indications to the contrary. The mysterious Richard S. Shaver sent the legendary Ray Palmer, editor of the now-defunct "Amazing Stories" magazine, a manuscript which Shaver claimed was =true=. Palmer did not believe the story, and re-wrote it, disguised as fiction. But when the series based on Shaver's manuscript began appearing in "Amazing Stories" around 1945, "Palmer became less sure that Shaver was just imagining things." [4] The Shaver stories ran in Palmer's magazine for =5 years=, and were extremely popular. Circulation soared to 185,000, which is =huge= for what was a "pulp" magazine. The Shaver stories were =big=, in the late 1940s, and it is earnestly hoped that either one of the above two publishing houses (IllumiNet and Adventures Unlimited) or some other publisher will see fit to re-publish them.
I have been fortunate to obtain a copy of some of the Shaver stories, published as I Remember Lemuria and The Return of Sathanas in 1948. I am assuming that the copyright has expired by now, and so take the liberty of quoting freely. In his foreword, Richard S. Shaver writes, in part, as follows:
I am a simple man, a worker in metal, employed in a steel mill in Pennsylvania. What I tell you is not fiction! I can only hope that when I have told the story of Mutan Mion as I remember it you will believe -- not because I sound convincing or tell my story in a convincing manner, but because you will see the truth in what I say, and will realize, as you must, that many of the things I tell you are not a matter of present day scientific knowledge and yet are true!
I am no mathematician; I am no scientist. I have studied all the scientific books I can get -- only to become more and more convinced that I remember true things. But surely someone can definitely say that I am wrong or that I am right, especially in such things as the true nature of gravity, or matter, of light, of the cause of age and many other things that the memory of Mutan Mion has expressed to me so definitely as to be conviction itself.
I want to thank editor Ray Palmer, in whose "fiction" magazine, Amazing Stories, the stories in this book were first published, for his open mind and for the way he has received the things I have told him in addition to what I have written in this story of Mutan Mion of ancient Lemuria. It began when he published my ancient alphabet in "Discussions" and requested the readers to carry out checks of their own. [5]
Regarding Shaver's alphabet, Palmer writes:
January 1945 issue of AMAZING STORIES. Some of the reports by readers were subsequently published, but the great majority were not. These reports proved to be the most amazing the editor has ever received on anything published in his magazine. They would seem to indicate beyond all doubt that the "ancient language" of Mr. Shaver is part of an original "mother tongue" from which all Earthly languages have sprung. [6]
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[1] Casebook On The Men In Black by Jim Keith. ISBN:
1-881532-11-9.
[2] qtd. in Keith.
[3] They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers by Gray Barker.
ISBN: 1-881532-10-0.
[4] Ibid.
[5] I Remember Lemuria by Richard S. Shaver. Evanston:
Venture Books, 1948.
[6] Ibid.
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Synopsis [1]
I am a culture man, a product of the laboratories. During the process of my development to culture manhood, I roamed the culture forests of Atlantis, which is the name for Surface Atlan. Sub Atlan is just below Atlantis, while Tean City is located at the center of Mu, at a great depth below Sub Atlan. The walls of the great cavern in which Tean City is located are hardened to untellable strength by treatment with ray-flows which feed its growth until it is of great density. There are many other cities which grew through the centuries to vast size, but none so great as Tean City. Some are abandoned, but all are indestructible; their cavern walls too dense to penetrate or to collapse.
Since Tean City is located near the center of Mother Mu, gravity neutralizes itself by opposition. And I was going down into the city of many wonders!
Out on the street I took one of the many vehicles that are provided for travel about the city. These vehicles, their weight reduced by a gravity deflection device, are powered by motors whose energy is derived from a gravity focusing magnetic field, by which one side of a flywheel becomes much heavier than the other. This is accomplished by bending gravity fall in the same way that a lens bends a light ray.
Soon I neared the squat entrance to the shafts that fell from Sub Atlan to Center Mu, to Tean City. The elevator dropped sickeningly, so swiftly that a great fear grew in me that I would be crushed by deceleration when we finally stopped. Then, with little sensation, the car stopped. Here at the center of Mu I had become nearly weightless and the ceasing of even such swift motion did not have ill effects upon my weightless body.
As I was about to leave the elevator, my friend, the elevator control-man drew me aside. "Fear rides the ways down here," he whispered. "Fear is a smell down here that is ever in the nose -- a bad smell, too."
I left the elevator car and immediately was immersed in the sensually shocking appeal of a variform crowd, mostly at this hour, a shopping rush of female variforms. There were a great number of creatures of every shape. All were citizens; all were animate and intelligent -- hybrids of every race that space crossing had ever brought into contact, from planets whose very names are now lost in time. The technicons may have been wrong in the opinion of some when they developed variform breeding; but they have certainly given life variety. I had never seen so many variforms before. (Variforms are hybrids developed from many interplanetary life forms, mated by deliberate applications of mutative rays in the laboratories of Mu's technicons.)
It had indeed been a day of brainstorms, I mused, when some old technicon had realized that not only would a strong integrative field with a rich exd (energy ash) supply cause all matter to grow at an increased rate, but would also cause even the most dissimilar life-gens to unite. It has been the realization that had resulted in various form life. Most of the crosses by this method had resulted in an increased strength and fertility.
Travellers were gazing about lost in wonder at the vaulting glitter of sculptured pillars and painted walls, done by men of a calibre whose work ro like myself cannot grasp entirely. (Ro is a thing of simple repetitive life pattern easy to understand and control. To "ro" you is to make you do things against your will. A large generator of thought impulse can be set up to ro a whole group of people. "Row the boat" is modern and the meaning has become physical force and not mental force. "Ro the people" was an ancient method of government. "Romantic" was the name of such a government. Ro-man-tic: science of man life patterning by control. Any person is ro who is weaker than the mental impulses about him. Men are ro today because they are not self-determining, though they think they are.)
---------------------------<< Notes >>--------------------------- [1] Synopsis based on I Remember Lemuria and The Return of Sathanas by Richard S. Shaver. Evanston: Venture Books, 1948.
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Synopsis [1]
I became a member of my young girlfriend Arl's class. The class was dominated by the immense presence of the teacher, a son of the Titans.
But I sensed a strange, deeply buried and secret fear in the mind of the Titan. There was a gnawing something that a part of his brain dwelt on continually. Fear was a smell that was ever in the nose down here in Tean City. But I concentrated on the lecture:
"A great cold ball hung in space. Once it had been a mighty, living planet, swinging ponderously around a dying sun. Then that sun had gone out, and the deadly cold destroyed life on the once-mighty living planet. But the planet's forests had, in their many ages of life, deposited coal beds untold miles in depth -- clear down to the stony core of the planet. Hanging in space the dead immensity of this planet was largely potential heat, for its tremendously thick shell was mostly pure carbon."
"This carbon-encrusted planet was the sun, your sun and mine. A blazing meteor came flaming toward this cold ball. Deep it plunged into the beds of carbon. The fire spread swiftly -- an ever-fire of disintegrance, not the passing-fire of combustion -- and our sun was born into life-giving flame!"
"A carbon fire is a clean fire and contains no dense metals like radium, titanium, uranium, polonium -- whose emanations in disintegrance in suns cause old age and death."
"But then, sun heat was clean, and life sprang furiously into being on its daughter, Mu's surface. Nor did this life die -- death came only by being eaten. Then life suffered old age not at all, for there was no cause."
I could not help the question that sprang to my lips. "Why do you say 'Then life suffered old age not at all, for there was no cause.'? Is there cause now?"
The teacher looked at me. "You are new here, Mutan Mion. Therefore it is easy to understand that you have not heard. Yes, young ro, there is cause."
"I have spoken of the carbon fire as a clean fire. By this I mean that the atoms of carbon, when disintegrated, send forth the beneficial energy ash called exd which can be assimilated by our bodies and used to promote life-growth. However, the source of this ash is not carbon alone, but all other elements excepting the heavy metals such as I mentioned before. It is when these heavy elements begin to disintegrate in the ever-fire that we come to the cause of age."
"The particles of radium and other radioactive metals are the poison that causes the aging of tissue. These particles are thrown out by all old suns whose shell of carbon has been partly or altogether burned away, permitting the disintegrating fire to reach and seize upon the heavy metals at the sun's core. Our sun has begun to throw out great masses of these poisonous particles. They fall upon Mu in a continual flood, entering into living tissue and infecting it with the radioactive disease we call age."
"Eventually, if we remain on Mu, we will grow old, and finally die."
But that alone was not the strange, deeply buried and secret fear I had sensed in the mind of the Titan. "It is not the age poisons you fear," I accused.
"Come students," he said gently. "We will go now to the embryo laboratory."
Many strange machines filled the laboratory. But these machines were subordinate to the real science of this great room, being designed only to chemically and electronically nourish and develop the many human embryos that moved and grew in synthetically duplicated mother-blood in sealed bottles.
The older ones kicked and tugged healthily at the grafted umbilical tube which supplied the life fluid -- called Icor, the "blood of the gods." And it was this blood that was the subject of the lecture the Titan now gave us.
He told us of the upkeep and preparation of this fluid, both in the embryo and the adult; the difficult and important part being the process of detecting and removing the slightest trace of the radio-active poisons that cause age.
Once more the Titan commented on the proposed emigration from Mu, weaving it into his lecture. There seemed to me to be an undercurrent of double meaning in his motive for repeating it; a double meaning that I strove to associate mentally with the fear-thing that was something else.
Our aging sun (he said) threw off increasingly large amounts of these sun's seeds, small but dense and active disintegrative particles, and I learned that keeping Atlan's peoples young was an increasingly difficult job for the technicons. I learned that the coordinators were preparing the plans and ships for our migration to a young, new-born sun, where the infection that caused the occasional trouble with detrimental energy robotism or detrimental err in the human did not occur.
The detrimental energy robotism or detrimental err is mainly due to depolarization of the matter of the brain; it is no longer earth polared, it is sun polared -- and hence inducts the disintegrant flows from the sun into the brain by simple dynamic induction. A magnet could become sun polared and point to the poles of the sun just as an ordinary compass points to the poles of the earth. This is what happens to parts of the brain; they become sun polared. When the depolarization lies in the nervous system and ego recognition of activating centers, the victim is a killer or a repressive reactionary. It is simply true that man is an electrical machine which functions well when his energy flows are of his own creating, but functions especially ill when the energy flows are from the sun. Hence, a mind powered by sun particle energy flows of a detrimental nature becomes a robot. The result is robotism, or the inability to think constructively. Victims of detrimental err have but one basic thought, to kill, in keeping with the natural elemental instinct of the disintegrant metals.
We filed back into the classroom. For a long moment the Titan looked at us, and especially at me. Then he spoke.
"Somehow you have seen the fear in me. Perhaps you have sensed this in other places in Tean City. Yes, there was, and is, fear in me. And it is a fear that we all try to keep secret because those of us who show fear also show suspicion if not knowledge, and either has been equivalent to the signing of a death warrant. There are spying rays on us that seek out our knowledge and destroy us before we can coordinate it into an effective counteraction to the thing that is going on; to the thing we fear."
"It has come to me that certain groups of Atlan are against the projected migration, and the recent disappearance of several men important to our work lends color to the story. Of course we all know that the only units able to do anything of the kind would be the key leaders. Some of these may have accidentally suffered a severe flashback of detrimental ion flow, so that their will has become one under detrimental hypnosis."
---------------------------<< Notes >>--------------------------- [1] Synopsis based on I Remember Lemuria and The Return of Sathanas by Richard S. Shaver. Evanston: Venture Books, 1948.
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