#richard sharpe shaver

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: The Shaver Mystery

Richard Sharpe Shaver: Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I call this the tale of the underground monster people that can control us with mind rays Stephen King: wow, that sure sounds like an amazing story! Shaver: yes Shaver: yes it is

Shaver: did you know that there’s a secret cabal of underground monsters who kidnap people for sexual torture and cannibalism? Koontz: gosh! That’s not real tho right? Koontz: it’s just a story right? King: yes dean it’s just a story Shaver: don’t tell him that Shaver: this is real

King: c'mon richard you're just having a laugh, it's all just a story Shaver: this is real Shaver: there's a secret cabal of underground monsters who kidnap people for sexual torture and cannibalism Shaver: and that's not all Shaver: wait until you hear what they’re doing to the soil

Dan Simmons: a secret cabal of underground monsters who kidnap people for sexual torture and cannibalism? Shaver: that's right Simmons: damn you could base a whole political worldview on that! Simmons: Simmons: are they in league with the queers and the muslims? Shaver: I don’t know what that is but probably Simmons: I knew it!

Simmons: these underground cannibals sound p legit to me King: dan i don't think they're real Simmons: oh I see, so you think that when i say "underground cannibals" that's, like, code for greta thunberg and that when i say we must stop the underground cannibals that's a veiled threat calling for the murder of greta thunberg and the public desecration of her carcass as a warning to all blue haired millenial they/thems? King: King: well i do now Simmons: wow steve Simmons: i think that says a lot more about you than me

Simmons: you know what these underground cannibals who prey on white women are like? Simmons: they're like "urban" "thugs" wearing "hoodies" Lovecraft: Simmons: and "baggy pants" Lovecraft: Simmons: if you know what i mean Lovecraft:

Simmons: i'm sorry, are these dog whistles too subtle? Simmons: i mean Simmons: Simmons: italians Lovecraft: [immediately starts sweating]

Simmons: so the underground cannibals are in league with george soros Simmons: and that caravan of latin refugees Simmons: that we were all so scared of about 3 years ago Simmons: and then just forgot about when it strangely failed to materialize Simmons: I can’t believe AM radio got that one wrong!

[docgold13]

I randomly googled Shaver Mystery and after reading Richard Sharpe Shaver's wiki I just can't stop thinking about how people with schizophrenia might have had a huge impact on scifi. Like take telepathy. A person hears voices and logically assumes they are hearing other people's thoughts. Richard thought he was telepathically picking up torture sessions from evil subterranean people. Like any person is capable of radical creativity but there must be something to schizophrenic peoples who are trying to make sense of disordered thinking. Idk am I out of line in saying that? I don't mean it in a derogatory way. Maybe they believe their own fantastical stories maybe they don't. As a person who grew up in a mentally ill religious family I also liken it to weird lore in the Bible. There's an all powerful man in the sky who can hear your thoughts. Sometimes believing in God made my mental illness better sometimes it made it worse. I imagine writing scifi is similar. You could get deeper in your delusions or you could feel validated in your writing.

That’s not out of line at all.  The human mind is endlessly fascinating 

It appears rather evident that the esteemed Richard Shaver did indeed suffer from some sort of paranoid schizophrenia. According to his friends and colleagues, Shaver truly believed that his life was being controlled by unseen forces residing in deep, subterranean caverns.  The voices that emanated from this underground realm were sometimes kind and benevolent, other times cruel and vicious.  Both voices spoke to him regularly, constantly assailing with all manner of ideas, assumptions and commentary.  

Shaver coped with these intrusive verbal hallucinations by creating a rich and textured mythology around it all.  The benevolent voices came from the righteous Tero; whereas the malicious voices came from the villainous Dero.  These two races of beings lived in the center of the earth and were the descendants of extraterrestrial travelers.  

The stories that Shaver wrote about the Tero and the Dero were super vibrant and rich.  They were fantastical, often absurd, yet told in such an ernest, convincing and multifaceted fashion that readers were just whisked away.  Fans couldn’t get enough of these wild tales his contributions to ‘Amazing Stories’ made it a hugely successful pulp periodical.   

Shaver’s ability to seize his psychological difficulty and use it for the benefit of his craft is similar to the mathematician John Nash, author Zelda Fitzgerald, jazz musician Buddy Bolden and painter Vincent Van Gogh.  This is not to suggest that genius is derived through psychological malady but rather there can be instances were extreme adversity can contributed to the brining about of something unexpectedly awesome.   

[roskirambles]

Horror Movie of the Day: Marebito (2004)

"They didn't see something that terrified them. They saw something because they were terrified. I want to feel that fear, to see what they did."

Takuyoshi Masuoka is a freelance cameraman who never goes out without a camera. He records everything, and has become obsessed with fear after witnessing ||the suicide of an old man|| in the train station. Descending into the labrynth of tunnels beneath the city, he finds what look to be people, maybe ghosts, who are deeply afraid and walk like animals. And after being warned about the Deros(named after the writings of Richard Sharpe Shaver) by one homeless man, he sees what looks to definitely be a ghost guide him to a cave, where a naked woman lies. One who eats blood, and after being rescued the girl(now referred as "F") needs food which Masuoka will provide.

Directed by Takashi Shimizu and co-written by Chiaki Konaka, if you’re familiar with the later’s work (Serial Experiments Lain, Digimon Tamers, Texhnolyze) you know you’re in for a trip. And you’re still not prepared: the movie is a relentless bombardment of mind-screwing elements involving conspiracy theories, violent murders and mentally disturbed people, all packaged in the obsession of one man who is glued to a camera yet mostly shot with verisimilitude until you don’t know if the man is just crazy or he’s really digging himself deep both literally and metaphorically into a metaphysical rabbithole.

Whatever the case may be, you're just stuck with either someone who is potentially abusive in his madness or that has somehow uncovered a dark reality of how the world actually works which unsurprisingly is not a placid feeling at all. It's obsession with cameras and surveillelance, with trying to make sense out of things through a lens that isn't our own eyes is still resounding, but it's such a deliberately confusing and revolting watch you're decidedly going out with more questions than answers.

[thedurvin]

Restarted reading “I Remember Lemuria” by Richard Sharpe Shaver (1948), the main book of the Shaver Mystery, after realizing the digital copy I had been reading was missing some sections, and MAN. This guy (both the author and the character, since these are supposed to be ancestral memories or a past life or something) is SO horny for weird ladies. There’s a 30ft woman with six arms that says “poor little thing, are you here because nobody loves you?”, there’s a huge snake woman beside him on the street that he imagines coiling her tail around him, and his love interest is a sparkly purple pony woman med student and he keeps bringing up how hot her tail is. He goes on and on about how hot they are and how he can’t concentrate on the plot and his mentor’s infodumps because of it

His work is so foundational to mid-century nerd culture, which is itself foundational to modern nerd culture, I genuinely can’t tell if this is a case of “nerds have just always been like this and he was one of the first to admit it” or if his personal tastes influenced everyone after him

[tiorx]

i have got to go to richard sharpe shaver's old house

[orderjackalope]

Amazing Stories sold the heck out of the Shaver Mystery with some gorgeous covers. Here are some of the best. (Though I think the Bible would like to have a word about what constitutes "The Most Sensational True Story Ever Told.")

(Also, love that the lady in "Gods from Venus" is wearing a purple satin outfit with a plunging neckline, poofy sleeves and granny panties, and accessorizing with a jaunty hat and a leather dance belt.)

Here's a second batch of Shaver Mystery covers featuring sexy (and frequently gigantic) ladies. And also, for some reason, Judy Garland about to be assaulted with a branding iron.

Monster-themed Shaver Mystery covers, featuring devils, tentacles, and the sexiest snake lady ever. Well, at least until the Japanese discovered snake ladies and made them all weird.

(Also, pretty sure that first devil is actually William Powell.)

And finally, not a Shaver Mystery cover, but definitely a classic of the sci-fi-women-in-peril genre. Oh, that incorrigble, handsy astrogar!

[garethschweitzer]

Richard Sharpe Shaver

[jareckiworld]

Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907-1975)  —  After the Big Flood   (pastel, felt pen, and ink on paper, c.1961)

[marxism-lenninism-schwabism]

So, I just learned about Richard Sharpe Shaver, and now I’m thinking that DnD’s derro are... almost certainly inspired by his writings. Not just because of the name, but also because of the. Part where Richard Sharpe Shayver’s dero are, also an evil species that lives underground and captures people to torture them, with access to advanced technology.

[zundernell]

[spaceintruderdetector]

Amazing Stories 6/1947

Featuring: Formula from the Underworld, Zigor Mephisto's Collection of Mentalia, Witch's Daughter, and The Red Legion; all by Richard Sharpe Shaver.  

https://archive.org/details/AmazingStoriesVolume21Number06_692

[mhuntington7]

THE GRAVE OF RICHARD SHARPE SHAVER, FATHER OF ALIEN MYSTERIES - Yellville, Arkansas. Layton Cemetery. Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907-1975) was an American science fiction writer, artist, cultural influencer, paranormal/UFO personality and “alien contactee” (and likely schizophrenic). Oh, and a historical “rock whisperer.” Shaver’s 40s-era “Shaver Mystery” stories in popular pulp-mag “Amazing Stories” - with tales of receiving messages from advanced civilized beings from hidden realms, the Deros - set the the sci-fi/alien visitor template for the culture in the years leading up to the Flying Saucer Age. Shaver, later in life, then focused on finding secret ancient alien visual narrative clues hidden in our Earth rocks - he shared his astonishing interpretations/finding in his famous “rock books.” Devoted fans sometimes travel to this area from afar seeking such Shaver rocks. Photo by Michael Huntington - April, 2022. @Huntington_Strange_Travels #StrangeTravels #MichaelHuntington #HuntingtonFamily #HuntingtonAdventures #ParanormalTravel #UFOs #InnerEarth #ShaverMystery #ShaverMysteryClub #RichardSharpeShaver #Deros #AmazingStories #RayPalmer #Subgenius #LaytonCemetery #YellvilleArkansas (at Yellville, Arkansas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdbgzyNl38s/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[sarkos]

As crazy as Cooper could often appear, in almost every lecture I've ever seen he would often pause to say something along these lines: "Don't believe me. Do your own research. Look at my sources and tell me I'm wrong!" He once dedicated an entire hour-long episode of his shortwave radio show, "Hour of the Time," to reviewing the lengthy list of books he had read in order to produce his epic, 43-part series entitled "Mystery Babylon," an in-depth analysis of how hermetic philosophies had impacted world history. You could disagree with Cooper's eccentric conclusions, but you really had to respect someone with the temerity to broadcast an hour-long bibliography over the radio. Even more surprisingly, his listeners hung on every word. If Cooper's listeners decided to follow his advice to fact check his numerous claims, they would have to read such lengthy and difficult tomes as "The Secret Teachings of All Ages" by Manly P. Hall and "Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry" by Albert Pike — and that's just scratching the surface. The supposed links between devil worship among the "elites" and secret societies like the Illuminati can be traced back at least as far as the 1870s, when French journalist Léo Taxil published "Les mystères de la Franc-Maçonnerie," a volume that purported to reveal the eyewitness accounts of a woman named Diana Vaughan. After converting to Catholicism, Vaughan confessed to having engaged in numerous satanic rituals with Freemasons. During one of these rituals, she saw a demon shape-shift into a crocodile and play the piano. The book was a huge success among Roman Catholics, many of whom were eager to lap up the most insane claims as long as they made the Masons look bad. Then, on April 25, 1897, the French newspaper Le Frondeur published Taxil's confession that Vaughan was wholly fictitious. Taxil boasted that his book was "the most fantastic hoax of our times." But even after his confession, people continued to believe in his 12-year prank. Indeed, fundamentalists of all varieties insist on quoting Taxil to this day. Jack T. Chick, the wildly successful cartoonist who founded Chick Publications (a California-based Christian publishing company designated as an "active hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center) used Taxil as a source in his most popular anti-Masonic tract, "The Curse of Baphomet." Rick and Gene's wild tales about "underground wars" between "white hats" and "black cats" — discussed in the first installment of this series — appear to have a more recent source: the Lovecraft-inflected 1940s horror stories of Richard Sharpe Shaver. In 1943, at the age of 36, Shaver became infamous among American science fiction fans for a series of allegedly true accounts he began publishing in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. Shaver claimed he had discovered a race of prehistoric extraterrestrials known as the Titans. Most of the Titans had abandoned Earth long ago, but a few remnants of their society had been left behind. There were two types of Titans still living on Earth, although they were hidden deep underground: the angelic Teros ("white hats" who sometimes intervened positively in human affairs) and the demonic Deros ("black hats," whose entire existence revolved around kidnapping, torturing and eating human beings).

The deep, twisted roots of QAnon: From 1940s sci-fi to 19th-century anti-Masonic agitprop | Salon.com

[steamedtangerine]

So, I finally saw Peele’s “US”...

(have not seen? proceed no further for some SPOILERS are here!)

Even if the movie seemed far-fetched, many had to find themselves admiring it’s imaginative approach as we would with something like Cabin in the Woods.

There is a lot to unpack and so many references to other films I could note (like twins flipping about like Pris from Blade Runner or an under-dwelling of impressionable bodies from an abandoned experiment like one episode of Venture Bros.)...but I am surprised with what is not being addressed online with theories abound.

Regarding the “experiment”: anyone recall how the Nazis were fascinated with scientific research into twins (not to mention their odd predilection for the occult-so “soul” as a metaphysical field of interest was not off the table for them)?

If not Nazis, was this about the subterranean DEROS (of Richard Sharpe Shaver phenomenal mythology). The Church of Subgenius regular mentions DEROS (and their inhuman experiments) and twins known as Nental Ives.

As one church pamphlet put it-- NENTAL IVES: clones of us in the spirit world whose duplicate lusts influence our behavior on this material plane.  Yes - JEHOVAH 1 smote us in primeval days with BAD BRAKES by which we cannot stop our devil twin from overcoming our 'better nature' and by which, furthermore, we cannot even begin to tell the difference between the two!  Brakes keep us from committing ANYTHING WE MIGHT IMAGINE IN OUR MOST DANGEROUS FLEETING FANTASIES, such as chopping off noisy children's heads and giving... well, all of us, even non-SubGeniuslike whimps of the second and third waters, are Jekyll/Hyde monsters of two conflicting Noggin Polarities in our personalities; the SHAFT OF SUPPRESSION rears its ugly Head in response to this utter psychosis which squirms for most of our lives only in the dim, unseen reaches of our behavior-pumps; we act completely normal most of the time, but who is to say at any given moment which side, the 'good' or the 'bad,' is currently in control of The Animal? Thank "God" we are usually never aware of the subconscious Armageddon which expresses itself, physically, in our paranoias, human Work Instincts and universanal compulsions, and, spiritually, in our unruly but subtle psychic powers - which result not so much from any 'inner aura' but rather from a somewhat mindless 'ghost' standing invisibly at our sides:  it is the half of our intelligence which is currently not controlling The Animal, it is the NENTAL IFE, and it erupts from its usual idiot blithering into weird, occult pheno-manifestations only when our turbulent mental background reaches such peaks of simultaneous crisis and repression as the stormy glandular rampages of adolescence!

On a personal note (and all for whimsical speculative purposes): where are some other places (other than a funhouse in Santa Cruz) that would harbor entrances to subterranean experiments like these? As far as SE Michigan is concerned, it could be anything from an abandoned factory in a neglected part of Detroit to some place Downriver (maybe Zug Island?). Could it be the tunnels of the abandoned asylums in Northville and Westland (Eloise)? For me, I tend to think that it has something to do with the Fairlane Towncenter. Many folks used to say that the Fairlane Towncenter was haunted (especially in the back interconnecting corridors and tunnels running through the place), and during a very stressful time in my life, I did witness some poltergeist activity....but that’s a different matter altogether (hey-maybe there were even other ways to get to what is now the defunct Hyatt than what used to be the monorail...Hmmmm?).

I’m beside myself with speculation......

[chiseler]

RICHARD SHAVER IN THE UNDERWORLD

In 1932, Richard Sharpe Shaver was working on the assembly line at a Ford auto plant in Detroit when he began noticing something strange. Every time he picked up his spot welder, he found he could hear the thoughts of the other workers all up and down the line. If that wasn’t odd enough, he also began hearing the anguished screams of what he determined to be people being beaten and tortured in caverns miles beneath the earth’s surface. Shaver concluded that it was the unique configuration of the coils in his spot welder that allowed him to access these thoughts and distant sounds.

Disturbed by this, understandably enough, Shaver soon left his job with Ford. Around this same time, his brother died, a loss which affected him deeply, and he got married and had a baby daughter. Then he vanished for much of the next decade. In that time his wife died and her relatives took custody of his daughter, telling her her father was also dead.

While Shaver would claim he had spent many of those missing years living among an underground civilization in tunnels deep beneath the earth’s surface, later researchers and colleagues determined much of that time was spent in mental institutions.

Shaver re-emerged in 1943, when he sent a long letter to the Chicago-based offices of popular science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories. In the letter, he described an ancient lost language he called “Mantong” which, he claimed, was the true original source of all modern human languages. In Mantong, he explained, every letter carries with it a distinct idea or meaning, and the true meanings of words can be deduced by analyzing the interaction of the involved letters. The letter “D,” as just one example, connotes destruction and violence and evil. Words beginning with the letter “D” always carry with them a sinister subtext.

Upon first opening and reading the letter, which had been poorly typed on onion skin paper, the magazine’s managing editor muttered something about crackpots before dropping the letter in the trash. Curious after overhearing that “crackpot” comment, editor Ray Palmer retrieved the discarded onion skin pages and read it himself.

Finding it intriguing, Palmer ran the letter in the next issue, and was amazed when it generated such an overwhelming reader response.

After playing around with Mantong a bit and concluding Shaver might actually be onto something with this theory of his, Palmer wrote him a note asking how he’d come across such arcane knowledge. Some months later, Shaver responded.

In a ten-thousand word letter he entitled “A Warning to Future Man,” Shaver explained that he came to learn all he had through the time he’d spent in the aforementioned caverns and his direct dealings with the remnants of an ancient alien race who still live there to this day.

Tens of thousands of years ago, Shaver said, the earth was inhabited by wise immortal alien giants called Titans and Atlans who possessed advanced technologies we can’t begin to imagine. They had arrived on the planet (which they called Lemuria) aeons ago when the sun was newly formed. But over time the sun’s rays became radioactive, making the air and water poisonous for the Titans, who began to shrivel into deformed midgets. Worse, they Also began to age, which, being immortal, was something they had never done before. Packing up all their advanced machinery, they moved underground into a series of artificial tunnels which honeycombed the planet. There they built elaborate cities and carried on the best they could.

In terms of the radiation, however, things didn’t improve much, so a select few of the Titans and Atlans boarded flying saucers and returned to the stars, leaving their deformed brethren in the subterranean caverns.  

Over time those left behind divided into two species. Using the beneficial healing rays of some of the machines, a small handful known as “Teros” remained wise and Kindly and human like, while the majority degenerated into monstrous and evil creatures known as “Deros.” (Which was short for “detrimental robots”). The Deros were in the habit of using their electronic rays to trigger natural disasters on the surface world and direct human thoughts down some very bad and dark paths. It could be argued that every destructive and malevolent thing that happens on the planet was caused by the Deros and their insidious rays. Beyond merely manipulating the surface world from a distance for their own entertainment, the Deros also regularly kidnapped large-breasted human women, who they tortured and ate. The Teros, meanwhile, while a decided minority, did what they could to interfere on the behalf of human kind.

It’s much, much more complicated than that. But you get the general idea.

Palmer was again intrigued, but the problem, from an editor’s point of view, was that it wasn’t a story. Not really, certainly not along the lines of what the magazine tended to run. It was more a lecture or a screed. So he took it upon himself to turn it into a story, while maintaining all of Shavers details and wild scientific theories. The result was the 31,000-word novella he entitled “I Remember Lemuria!,” which included characters and action sequences and sex set in Shaver’s hollow earth. The only alteration he made to Shaver’s original was one he later regretted. Instead of a narrator recounting actual events he had experienced directly in recent years, the narrator is recounting a distant memory of a previous life.

To be honest, what Shaver ended up producing was a pretty generic space opera complete with four-armed Martian girls, beautiful, translucent Venusian maidens and the standard array of pulp sci-fi hardware, though Shaver’s theories still lay at the heart of it.

Sensing he had a story with real potential, especially after coming up with a sure-fire attention-grabbing tagline for the cover (“The Most Amazing True Story ever told!”), Palmer wanted to increase the print run in anticipation. The war was still raging, however, and paper was hard to come by, making an increased print run out of the question. Palmer later claimed that at the time he mentioned this to Shaver. In response, Shaver asked for the name of the magazine’s production manager, and said he’d ask some of his Tero friends in the underworld if they might be able to help.

Two days later, as the story goes, Palmer’s production manager came into his office and announced an idea had come to him out of nowhere the night before. He’d just steal some paper from a detective magazine put out by the same publisher, and they’d have enough for an extra fifty thousand copies.

Whether the idea was in fact inspired by the Teros is unknown, but certainly worked into the mythology Palmer would come to call The Shaver Mystery.

The March 1945 issue, with Shaver’s story and that tagline on the cover, sold out completely. Shortly afterward, the letters started arriving. While normally any random issue of Amazing Stories might generate fifty letters in response, over ten thousand letters came in response to “I Remember Lemuria!”

Although most of the letters seemed to come from the magazine’s paranoid schizophrenic subscribers, Shaver had clearly tapped into something. A vast majority of the letters came from people telling the same story, that they, too had had dealings, both direct and psychic, with the ancient subterranean aliens.

Shortly after the publication of that first story, Palmer, hoping to get a better sense of how sincere Shaver was about all this, paid a visit to Pennsylvania, where Shaver was living with his second wife. When Palmer went to bed that first night  in a room adjacent to Shaver’s, he said he began hearing voices coming from Shaver’s bedroom. There were five in total, some male, some female, of varying ages. They were discussing a human who had been tortured to death on the rack earlier that day, a mere four miles from Shaver’s home, and four miles straight down. Given many of the voices were talking at the same time, he concluded it couldn’t have been a bit of ventriloquism on Shaver’s part, and after covertly searching the home the next day he could find no hidden wires or microphones, so had to conclude he’d heard the voices of an alien race.

Whether or not Palmer’s story was true or simply part of an elaborate marketing stunt is irrelevant. Palmer put his faith in Shaver and the cave dwelling aliens, running at least one new Shaver story in each new issue, sometimes devoting entire issues to The Shaver Mystery.

The difference was, in stories like “Cave City of Hell,” “Invasion of the Micro Men,” “Earth Slaves to Space” and “The Return of Sathanas,” Palmer took a lighter hand when it came to the editing, and dropped the race memory angle. Instead of spinning yarns about things that happened twelve thousand years ago, Shaver was writing about things that had happened last year, or last week, while Palmer kept pushing the “true story” claim. It only made readers more obsessive.

In one later piece Shaver even took on his critics directly, claiming that despite prevailing geological theory, the inner earth was indeed honeycombed with thousands of miles of tunnels and caves larger than New York. He further claimed that Tomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, given their inventions, likely had direct (or at least psychic) contact with the Teros themselves, and that furthermore, the science he learned from the ancients allowed him to lay out the fundamentals of the Unified Field Theory before Einstein thought of it.

Sales continued to run at roughly fifty thousand copies per month more than they had pre-Shaver, and the letters continued to pour in from believers and skeptics alike.

By 1948, however, Shaver’s run at Amazing Stories came to an end. Palmer claimed they stopped because sinister forces had forced him to stop running the stories, while old guard fans of the magazine who pined for those earlier, Shaverless issues of Amazing Stories claimed a growing backlash, a letter-writing campaign and falling sales were the real reason.

Palmer was fired soon thereafter, but moved on to edit a string of other science fiction pulps through the Fifties, where Shaver stories continued to appear, if more sporadically.

When skeptical readers pointed out the eerie similarities between Shaver’s stories and earlier works, like Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race, Palmer liked to respond that it was simply possible these other writers had had their own encounters with the Deros and Teros. So there.

By the late Fifties, Palmer, still touting the Shaver Mystery to anyone who would listen, even began releasing an all-Shaver magazine he called The Hidden World. It lasted nine issues.

Through the Sixties and into the Seventies, Shaver abandoned writing in favor of a new quest for the truth. While hunting for physical evidence of the ancient civilization, he began to notice that, if looked at in the right way, in the right light and at the right angle, some rocks—many he found on his own property—contained writings and drawings, clearly inscribed there by our alien ancestors, He took to photographing and painting pictures based on what he saw on the surface of the rocks, and annotating them in detail  for those who lacked a keen enough eye to see the truth.  He even created rock libraries, and would mail out slices of rock with explanatory notes to those who requested them.

While the photos and paintings obviously didn’t have the kind of reach the pulp magazines did, they did garner a good deal of interest in the outsider art community, and were exhibited in a number of respectable galleries.

Shaver died in 1975, and his memoir The Secret World (co-written with Palmer) was published posthumously. To this day most of his stories remain in print and readily available in assorted collections, and The Shaver Mystery is still debated among science fiction and conspiracy  fans.

Although possible earlier influences on Shaver’s vision, like Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Time Machine, are plentiful, The Shaver Mystery itself has had a clear influence of its own, and can be seen and felt in the shadows behind Jack Arnold’s 1956 The Mole People, the elaborate and confounding Montauk Project conspiracy, Douglas Cheek’s splendid 1984 monster picture C.H.U.D., The Residents’ 1982 concept album Mark of the Mole, and Craig Baldwin’s conspiratorial documentary about US foreign policy in Latin America, Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America.  Those diehard adherents to the hollow earth theory continue to cite Shaver as gospel, and then of course there are all those clinical paranoid schizophrenics who blame their crazy, crazy visions on the use of a Shaver invention, the Thought Augmentor.

by Jim Knipfel

[tiorx]

may get to talk about richard sharpe shaver for literature, so this means the threat of longwinded shaver posting hangs over all of your heads