The Madman And the Midget (Voices from the underworld)

'The Shaver Mystery'


This story was published in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories.

It was credited with helping to boost Amazing Stories' circulation from 27,000 to 185,000




[Original headline: The Madman, The Midget And the Giants ]

Deep in the bowels of the earth, a mutant race of malevolent beings keeps thousands of kidnapped humans as slaves and sex toys before ultimately eating them.
At least that's what Richard S. Shaver believed and who cares that he was a raving lunatic? He had a good editor, who happened to be a hunchbacked midget, who turned Shaver's demented screeds into some of the most popular pulp magazine stories of the 1940s.

But the June 24, 1947 Kenneth Arnold saucer sighting over Mt. Rainier, Washington shifted popular attention to the skies, and the Shaver Mystery soon vanished from both the public mind, and, with the exit of editor Ray Palmer, from the pages of Amazing Stories as well. In the 1950s, Palmer, then editor of Flying Saucers from Other Worlds magazine, attempted to breathe new life into the Shaver Mystery by shortening the publication's title to simply Flying Saucers, and declaring that UFOs originated from deep inside our own world. He emphasized the fact that Shaver had described disk-shaped Dero flying machines as early as 1945, well in advance of the Arnold sighting. But the man in the street was looking up, and his attention would not be drawn earthward again until long after Richard Shaver and his Mystery had faded to little more than footnotes in paranormal history

www.100megsfree4.com...

www.bbc.co.uk...


[Edited on 4-9-2003 by quaneeri]

[Edited on 5-9-2003 by quaneeri]

What is it about this magazine that makes you spell-bound and want to tell us about it? In other words, what's going on?

Sounds very Icke-y... The Reptoids are coming! The Reptoids are coming!

Gazrok.

You have to love a guy who picks up signals from the underworld, through his welding machine at work.

Outrageous as it was,

Since the links are defunct now(obviously due to time):

“The Shaver Mystery: The Most Sensational True Story Ever Told.” “Formula from the Underworld” is fiction, Palmer tells readers at the beginning of the issue, but it is based on truth. The events were invented by Shaver, but the settings and context are real. There really is an underground world filled with strange technology and evil forces. Shaver has been there, has seen it in person. It is real.

Real, don't know about that but interesting read LOL.

Palmer was quick to transition to the new reality. His new magazine, Fate, was devoted not to science fiction, but to “true tales” of the strange and paranormal. In the early issues, Palmer collaborated with Kenneth Arnold in the investigation of the Maury Island saucer sighting over Puget Sound. In the midst of the heyday of the flying-saucermovement, Palmer published the writings of self-described contactee Orfeo Angelluci. Shaver, on the other hand, continued to look down. He became convinced that he could discern images in rocks that had been preserved from the time of an ancient lost civilization. Whether the images came from the distant past or from Shaver’s own mind, it is clear from his elaborate paintings that he really saw something in the stones he found on his farm.

Source

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Fast forward, the 1970s Mt Rainer tunnels:

In August, 1970, an expedition climbed to the top of the eastern-most of the two craters. When they arrived, instead of the crater they saw a round hole one thousand feet wide and five hundred feet deep, filled with snow and ice. In the white mass they found three large holes sloping downward from the inner wall of the crater. The holes sloped downward at an angle of between thirty-five and forty degrees.

The descent was difficult and dangerous. Deep in the crater there were corridors in the ice, some of them as much as thirty feet wide and almost fifteen feet in height. The members of the expedition took the danger in stride and continued to descend. The adventure led them into a cave of large and small corridors, some of which branched off and then met again at some other point. It was less like a maze than a system of tunnels. Some corridors led directly to the center of the crater; other dark passages led to dead ends. At a certain depth the explorers found a broad “highway” which sometimes widened into a hall and which followed the circumference of the crater wall. This “highway” alone was over a half-mile in length. For the most part, the floor of the passages was damp, muddy, and strewn with broken rock.

Source
Strange sounds came out of that cave.