Speaker 1: Hey, they're Monster Talkers.
Speaker 2: Before I get into anything, I just wanted to say
thank you for all of the outporting and supportive emails
and Patreon signups that we've been having.
Speaker 1: I haven't found a new job yet, and I don't
want to.
Speaker 2: Turn these intros into the Blake Job Update podcast, but
I do want to say we saw a twenty one
percent growth in our support on Patreon and that is
so helpful, and on behalf of Karen and myself, we
really really appreciate the new backers immensely. Please, if you
want to support the show's Patreon dot org forward slash
monster talk and we would love to have you can
even join at the free level and it gets you
access to the discussions on these episodes and lots of
bonus material.
Speaker 1: And then I mentioned that while Karen and Matt were
in England, Matt got laid off too. Hey, wow, twenty
twenty five is so hard on us.
Speaker 2: I kind of see it being used as an insult
or a threat in the future. Hey, Jeric, I hope
you get twenty twenty five. Oh man, I'm sorry, mister.
I don't know what got into me no, but he
deserves that.
Speaker 3: Like that.
Speaker 2: You know what, I'm still able to find tremendous satisfaction
in doing.
Speaker 1: Historical research on monsters, and I'm.
Speaker 2: Enjoying Lucy, the library kitten, who's the newest addition to
the Munschtalk family.
Speaker 1: We adopted her just a few.
Speaker 2: Days before I got laid off, but you know what,
She's been an absolute delight and so feeling that cat
shaped hole in my heart that the other two cats
we have have failed to feel for more than a decade.
And I'm not going to brag, but the people who've
been defending those two jerks for a decade have all
had to admit that Lucy is a lot more interactive
and affectionate or you know, she's like an actual pet
instead of whatever those bozos are. Anyway, next week I
will share my research on the van Meter monster with you.
I'm really getting into the research zone on that one,
and I love sharing my process, so I hope you'll
tune in for that. I was gonna do that for
this week, but I could not stop researching long enough
to write my script, which is a fun place to
be for research, but not.
Speaker 1: Conducive to getting an episode about the door.
Speaker 2: So it's another flashback this week, but this one has
a bit of a value add I've combined our two
part coverage on the Shaver Mysteries, which is all about
the Hollow Earth and the rise of flying saucer culture
in the mid twentieth century, and it's also about the
birth of science fiction. It's about Nazis, and it's about
all sorts of weirdness that never disappeared from our culture
so much as metastasized. This is a wild ride and
it's all here in one giant episode for you. I've
even combined all the show notes into one big brain drop.
Speaker 1: So have fun.
Speaker 2: Enjoy me and Jerry Drake and Jebcard as we dive
into one of the most influential yet largely unknown narratives
from the annals of weird Shitology Monstertal. Monster Talk is
supported by listeners like you. Find out how you can
contribute via Patreon or with reviews at monster talk dot org,
forge slash support. Your contributions, large or small, make a
huge difference.
Speaker 1: Thanks.
Speaker 2: In the twenty eleven book Idiot America, author Charles Pearce
opens his story of the dumbification of American culture with
the classic exemplar of wingnut ideas ignacious Donnelly, author of
the eighteen eighty two book Atlantis The Antediluvian World. While
it was Plato who gave us the legend of Atlantis,
it was Donnelly who turned out the template for all
modern variants of the Lost Continent. It was a strange idea,
and apparently as enticing as it was wrong. Piers uses
a very specific word to describe Donnelly and his ideas.
Speaker 1: He refers to both as crackpot.
Speaker 2: Crackpot is said to come from the word cracked, which
means faulty, and pot being used as a slang for
a person's head.
Speaker 1: But whether that's right or wrongheaded.
Speaker 2: The more obvious metaphorical references to that of a ceramic
pot with a crack in it. On first glance, it
looks like a sound vessel, but it simply won't hold water.
A crackpot idea won't hold water either, But that doesn't matter,
because it turns out that even the most cracked crackpot
idea can hold infinite quantities of belief. This is part
one of a two part series on the Shaver mysteries.
We're going to be talking about the Hollow Earth, ancient astronauts, Nazis, UFOs,
comic books, science fiction, and much much more. Get ready
for a strange trip.
Speaker 3: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before. A giant,
hairy creature.
Speaker 4: Part ape, part mats in Luckness, a twenty four mile
long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland. Get the
creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 3: Monster tal.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Blake Smith.
Speaker 2: You know I read our reviews on iTunes and I'm
really happy that so many of you have enjoyed the
show enough to take a moment to give us a
very positive review. But I also take the criticisms to
heart as well. One that we get occasionally and then
I'm going to try to address in this two part
episode is that when we deep dive into topics that
I and my guests know well, we sometimes forget to
contextualize all the name dropping during the interview. I try
to augment the show notes with links that will fill
in those gaps. But if you find that there's something
we mentioned in this show that you don't recognize or
we don't have a reference to, please shoot me an
email and I'll add it to the show notes. You
can always contact me at Blake at MonsterTalk dot org.
So in point, the topic of these next two episodes
is the Shaver Mystery. What is the Shaver Mystery? Well,
it's a complicated story, which is why this is such
a long coverage. But the nutshell version is that in
the nineteen forties, a man named Richard Shaver wrote about
mysterious experiences he had in which he was receiving information
from telepathic evil robots inside the earth. That's right, Shaver
believed that evil monsters lurked inside a hollow Earth and
could influence the lives of us mere mortal surface dwellers.
Now that may sound like science fiction, but I want
to save the really fascinating twist and turns for our guests,
which we'll come up during these discussions. As we've got
two returning fan favorites, archaeologist and author of the book
Spooky Archaeology, doctor Jeb Card and researcher doctor Jerry Drake,
who previously joined us to discuss grimoires and the amazing
Jack Parsons. You can find fascinating episodes featuring their wit
and wisdom in our archives MonsterTalk dot org. But before
we dive into a story that deals so heavily with
the topic of a hollow earth, I think it would
be useful to do a really brief overview of the
history of the theories around that topic. Now, we could
start in a lot of places, For example, the writing
of Athanasius Kircher, who's sixteen sixty five compendium Munda Subterraneus
or The Subterranean World, had been inspired by his own
trips inside Mount Vesuvius to see the roiling and boiling
gas emitted from the hellscape of a volcano. He wrote
about giants and dragons and other legendary dwellers of caves,
and many things that make me desperately want to read
this huge and prodigious work. Even if the factual accuracy
of his speculations are wildly wrong, the illustrations are amazing.
To do a comprehensive history of the hollow Earth for
this show would be impossible. There's far too many legends
involving giant caverns, lost civilizations, holes in the polar regions, suns,
and a scis eye of an inverted globe.
Speaker 1: It just goes on and on and that's just the nonfiction.
Speaker 2: But let's skip quite a bit forward from ancient stories
of holes that lead down into hades and other sorts
of myths and legends, and instead we'll arbitrarily start our
modern conceptions of the hollow Earth with someone we usually
think of as a scientist, Sir Edmund Halley of Comet fame.
Now it might seem odd for a person so firmly
associated with the birth of science to postulate a hollow earth,
but how he was trying to account for a recently
discovered anomaly. The Earth appeared to have four magnetic poles
and they wandered around wildly, so how could this be.
Speaker 3: To explain it, he.
Speaker 2: Postulated that the multiple poles were from multiple spheres which
were inside the Earth that moved in ways that accounted
for the wandering, and also accounted for the Earth having four,
when no magnets on the surface ever have but two.
We now know that he he had left to a
complicated conclusion to explain a phenomena was actually based on
incomplete data. The poles do move, but we only have
two of them. As wild as his idea was, there
are actually layers within the Earth, just not the strange
sort of bull's eye of concentric circles you would see
if his model of the world were correct. Now, I'm
not a geologist, but thanks to some very clever science experiments,
we now know the Earth's solid crust moves around on
a sea of molten rock, and deep within that rock
is a denser metallic core. The spinning of all this
material generates to the magnetic field, which in turn protects
us from harmful cosmic radiation and gives us the marvelous
polar lights. Thanks to seismic readings during earthwake activity and
an understanding of density, distance, speed, and many other basic physics,
researchers have used seismic data, almost like a sonogram, to
infer much about the Earth. Among those discoveries, none of
them confirmed a hollow Earth. It was just a notable
starting point with his paper in sixteen ninety two. And
these things don't just die once they've been published. They
live on, they mutate. Even when the scientific world rejected
or ignored much of Holly's writing about this, others republished it,
including the Reverend Cotton Mather, who included it in the
volume he composed on Christian Philosophy and others would come
up with their own ideas as speculations. In seventeen twenty one,
a French adventure novel titled an Account of a Voyage
from the North Pole to the South Pole via the
Center of the Earth was published. I think the title
is a fair summary for our purposes. A whirlpool carries
a ship through the Earth from the North Pole to
the South Pole, and many adventures are had. In seventeen
forty one, The Journey of Neil's Clym to the World
Underground was published by Ludwig Holberg, whose work appears to
have been heavily influenced by Halley's conceptions of spheres separated
by empty spaces. In eighteen eighteen, five hundred copies of
an Amazing Letter was sent out to papers, politicians, schools,
and basically anybody the author thought might be influenced. And
that author was John Cleves Sims, and he was not
shy and stating, I declare the Earth is hollow and
habitable within, containing a number of solid concentric circles, one
within the other, and that it is open at the poles.
He went on to say in side it would be
tropical and stocked with plants and animals and perhaps even
a people. And all he asked was for one hundred
brave companions, well equipped to venture from Siberia to the
North Pole to have a look. We'll hear more about
Sims in our interview, but spoiler alert, he did not
make it to the Hollow Earth.
Speaker 1: Are the polls?
Speaker 2: Weirdly, nobody wanted to fund his speculative investigation, but he
spent the rest of his life lecturing and lobbying for
such a trip, and at least one of his sons
took up the.
Speaker 1: Cause after his father.
Speaker 2: Sims claimed to have come up with his Hollow Earth
concepts by himself, but it did have remarkable parallels to
Halley's version. In eighteen twenty a novel came out called
Simsonia Voyage of Discovery, about a trip to the southern
opening of the Hollow Earth. The author, a man called
Adam Seaborne, is speculated to have been Sims, using a pseudonym.
Simms also petitioned Congress to organize an expedition.
Speaker 1: But that went nowhere.
Speaker 2: Still, it would not be the only time Congress was
lobbied to fund such a trip. In eighteen twenty six,
James McBride published a book called Sims Theory of Concentric Spheres,
which argued in support of Sims theories. A man named
Jeremiah Reynolds joined Sims in a touring lecture series, but
the two men eventually went their separate ways, splitting into
two Hollow Earth factions. Reynolds was a persuasive lecturer, and
his work may have contributed to the support of the
Great United States Exploring expedition of eighteen thirty eight to
map Antarctica's coast. In eighteen thirty three, Edgar Allan poe
O published manuscript Found in a Bottle, which featured elements
quite similar to Sims and Reynolds theories, as well as
travel to Antarctica. In eighteen sixty four we get Jules
Verne's beloved Journey to the Center of the Earth. A
popular book, it describes a scientific expedition into a hollow
Earth filled.
Speaker 1: With strange life and adventure.
Speaker 2: Eighteen sixty four is also the same year that a
zoologist named Philip Sclater came up with a theory about
a lost continent between India and Madagascar to explain why
the animal life in both places are so similar. He
concluded that there must have been a continent between them,
which he called Limoria, after the famous Lemurs of Madagascar.
We'll get back to Lemoria shortly. In eighteen sixty nine,
a patent medicine and electrical and magnetism doctor I'm using
scare quotes around doctor named cyrus Ted says that he
had an experience where he discovered the alchemist's Philosopher's Stone,
and then he was visit by the goddess creator of
the universe, who told him he should save the human race.
He rebranded himself as Korreesh and founded a new religion
called Korshianity, one of the beliefs of which is the
earth is hollow and that we live inside the sphere
of it. He would not be the last religious latter
to change his name to Koresh and start a cult,
nor the most famous. In eighteen eighty eight, Madame Helena
Bolovotsky published The Secret Doctrine, one of the foundational texts
of Theosophy, a mystical thought movement whose influence we discussed frequently.
She included Lemuria as a lost home of ancient masters
with all sorts of strange and mystical powers. In nineteen
o five, a book was posthumously published by an American
named Frederick Oliver. The book was titled A Dweller on
Two Planets. It told the story of an Atlantean who
was reborn as a Civil War veteran and is later
led into a secret world by a mystic master, a
subterranean world ridden under California's Mount Shasta and full of
ancient fantastic technology from Atlantis. In the introduction, Oliver explains
that he didn't write the book himself, rather, the content
was channeled through him that will become important later in
our timeline. In nineteen oh six, William Reid argued in
his book Phantom of the Poles that at both polls
there's actually a huge hole thousands of miles wide, instead
of land or ice. He also thought that there are
no meteor rocks, but they're just rocks from inside the
earth thrown out by volcanoes from these holes. In nineteen
oh nine, two teams raced for the North Pole. One
was led by Frederick Cook, the other by Robert Perry.
It's hard to say if either team really made it
precisely to the pole, or if they did, which one
got there first, but neither observed one thousand mile wide hole,
which would have been hard to miss. In nineteen thirteen,
Marshall Gardner questioned whether Cook or Perry really got close
to the polls in his book A Journey to the
Earth's Interior, or have the polls really been discovered. Gardner
did encourage aerial exploration of the polls to investigate these
large holes that he postulated. In nineteen fourteen, Edgar Rice
Burroughs published At the Earth's Core, which became a series
known as the Pellucidar books. His Hollow Earth has dinosaurs
and adventure and ape men and Strange Peoples. In nineteen
thirty one, Limoria, the Lost Continent of the Pacific was
published by Harvey Spencer Lewis using the anagrammic pseudonym Wishar
Spinley Survey. He melded elements from Theosophy and the book
A Dweller onto Planets and created an even more elaborate
tale of an advanced Limorian technology under Mount Shasta. These
ideas perhaps inevitably led to splinters of religious belief forming
around them. One of the most famous was and still is,
the the I Am movement, whose name recalls Ascended Masters,
as well as the Old Testament Bible tale of Moses
and the Burning Bush. The Iam movement was started by
Guy and Edna Ballard and dealt with many of the
same ideas as presented in A Dweller Onto Planets and
adds in the character of Saint Germain as the ascended
Master who guides this tour into the Limorian subterranean wonderland
under Mount Shasta. The nineteen thirty four book Unveiled Mysteries
describes this tale. The similarities between the two books led
to a fascinating court case where the family of the
late Oliver sued the Ballards for plagiarism, but ultimately they
lost because Oliver had claimed he didn't write the book himself.
Remember he claimed to have channeled it and to not
be the author.
Speaker 1: Whoops.
Speaker 2: The Ballard's I Am movement still exists, though the movement
had a good bit of drama themselves in the nineteen
forties when the government revoked their tax free religious statf
German World War I Air Force veteran Peter Bender picked
up the Kureshian ideas of the Hollow Earth, and in
the nineteen forties he worked with the Nazis to try
to use this secret knowledge of their advantage.
Speaker 1: Remember that Koresh thought we were.
Speaker 2: Inside the spherical Earth, and all the evidence to the
contrary is because of optical illusions. I wasn't able to
find primary sources about the experiment that Bender and his
team conducted, but a couple of versions seemed to agree
that he traveled to the Black Sea with a team
to build a device that would either look into the
sky to detect enemy ships or to project something into
the sky to confuse enemy radar. But whatever the actual
plan was, it didn't work, and Hitler was apparently furious
with the waste of resources, so Bender and much of
his team ended up in a concentration camp, where Bender
apparently died in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 1: We get to the.
Speaker 2: Subject of our episodes, our two part discussion the collaborative
writing of Richard Shaver, a mentally troubled artist in Welder,
and Raymond A. Palmer, a science fiction magazine editor and
science fiction writer. Together there are stories of a hollow
Earth filled with evil robots and lost civilizations. Drove a
massive social discussion. Now, if that sounds like a bunch
of wacky history with no relevance to modern times, you'd
be wrong.
Speaker 1: Like I said at the.
Speaker 2: Top, a crackpot idea may not hold water, but it
can hold infinite amounts of belief, and the influence of
Shaver's and Palmer's collaboration is still being felt today and
will likely continue to be felt for decades.
Speaker 1: A lot of links, including two issues.
Speaker 2: Of Junior Skeptic around the topic of hollow Earth by
Daniel Loxton that do a great job of a more
detailed primer on this topic. We'll be linked in the
show notes, plus many of the articles and books that
we just discussed. So buckle up, We're going on a
deep dive into the hollow Earth with our speed linking guides,
doctors Jerry Drake and Jeb Carr. This is more obstrutal,
so I'm going to try to put a little bit
of order to this, and we'll just get started by
saying welcome to Jeb Card and Jerry Drake. Thank you
very much for coming back to talk to us again
on Monster Talk. Absolutely the reason I've asked you to
come here tonight is to talk about a topic which
is a little bit obscure. I think most people will
not have heard of these people and this whole idea
of the Shaver Mysteries. But I think as we start
to dig in on it, you'll see that it is
a topic which is absolutely critical, foundational, even for a
lot of what we think of is weirdology today.
Speaker 3: I'll just study you straight out. As I found out
on Twitter this weekend, apparently more people know the DC
Comics character Ray Palmer than I was aware of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's so just I guess we should
probably introduce these characters and talk about who we're talking about.
So I wanted to talk about Richard Shaver, Richard Sharp Shaver,
who is at least at least the co author, if
not the author, of something that was known as the
Shaver Mysteries, and we'll talk about what that is. But
it kind of comes out of the hollow Earth, and
it kind of comes out of possibly mental illness. But
it was brought to the public by a guy named
Ray Palmer who was running a magazine called Amazing Stories
and Amazing Stories. You may know from the Steven Spielberg
inspired TV series. I guess he produced it, but it
was a magazine back in I guess the late thirties
up into well, it's actually still around now, but it's changed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but for the most part, really the
thirties to the fifties. In any real recognizable, exactly important way.
Speaker 2: It sort of parallels a lot of the sort of
I guess weird tales as well, sort of the same
kind of idea where it's still around, but is it
really you know so well.
Speaker 3: I we'll get into this, but I think they're actually
there's an important distinction between you know, there's there's several
big ones, but weird Weird Tales will get into why
that's important, and then you have astounding and and then
you get amazing stories. And those latter two are pioneers
of what's now called science fiction, but they at the
time the word was sort of scientifiction or or you know,
various terms when fandom and science fiction were beginning to
emerge after the era of sort of the weird tale
and weird tales, And we'll we'll talk more about that,
because that's actually integral to understand.
Speaker 2: Palmer, I think, so, I think this is absolutely true.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's an interesting time.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's this post World War One era when
sort of the world of science fiction that we knew
it under guys like H. G. Wells and Jules Verne
was morphing kind of merging in with the lovecrafty and
weird tale and it was getting voice in these publications.
And they were cheap reads. I mean they sold for
ten cents quarter at that time period, and you know,
people could sit down around the you know, put their
feet up and read something that was more lurid than
what they were getting on the on the radio. I mean,
don't forget most of this stuff as post Hayes code.
So movies are not as interesting as and lurid as
magazines like Amazing or True Detective or what people were able.
Speaker 5: To buy, you know, down at the news rack.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can basically see this progression of them them
starting as adventuring fantasy, romances and westerns and all that,
then being sort of increasingly the dregs where all kinds
of lurid stuff goes. Some of it's sexually lurids, some
of it's just other lurid. And as we're going to
see this bifurcates into one could argue, more proper science
fiction and fantasy, which then becomes the world of the
paperback and then these that basically go into the sweats
of the fifties and early sixties. Listeners probably know them
best for the Frank Zeppa Weasels ripped my flesh comes
from one of these stories of burly men fighting Nazi
dominatrixes and wild animals or both or all the above,
and then these end up just basically being the origins
of like mass porn magazines.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean it's funny to watch because you know, my
nineteen thirties issues of these magazines are very readable and
you could give them the kids.
Speaker 5: By the fifties it's pornography.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and writers like you know, more serious writers Block
and people like that who got started in these pulps
move on to paperbacks and novels and then later television
of course.
Speaker 3: So the thing for kids is that comic books also emerge. Yeah,
they also take a chunk.
Speaker 6: Of those comic books become less dirty, which is what's funny,
Like post the comic books become less dirty and lurid.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well there's a whole nother story there with the
seduction of the innocent and right easy comics and yeah,
so yeah.
Speaker 3: Well I think they're getting that from these roots, though.
Speaker 2: I mean absolutely, yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 6: Guess to set the stage, we're at a time when
when Lovecraft has died, and you know, the these magazines
are being dominated by a weird, kind of transitionary kind
of writer that will turn into the modern science fiction
writer of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. And so Richard
Sharp Shaver comes on the stage at a time when
people are looking for content.
Speaker 5: I mean, to borrow.
Speaker 6: A phrase from the Internet, they're looking for stuff to
publish that will sell magazines.
Speaker 3: And there's one more piece. Many of these people are
not so much Shaver, but many of these people are
very young. Many of the people that are not only
so the thing that becomes fandom, the thing that becomes comics,
it becomes the fandom that supports all of this in
the nineteen thirties, a lot of it coming from people
like the Lovecraft circle, like Robert Block, for example, are teenagers,
and there are some that are older, but a lot
of them, not only fans, are teenagers. They get jobs
out of it. And we're going to see that with
Ray Palmer, where these basically these kids. So the fact
that this sounds a hell of a lot like the
Internet and creepypasta. There's multiple reasons. One, it's where everything
that's not allowed in polite society goes and it's run
by basically man children.
Speaker 6: Well, don't forget when Shaver shows up. It's nineteen forty three.
The US has been in World War two for a
couple of minds, so it's a time for escapism. People
who are too young to go to the war are
reading these things, versus people who are too old to
go to the wars are kind of publishing and trying
to monetize them. So it's a really weird time in
American literature where people just want to think about something
that's not the Second World War.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's true, but it's probably worth mentioning that this
whole field of scientif fiction comes from a guy named
Hugo Gernsback, and we get the Hugo Award from him.
But he to me, when I was reading about this
and the birth of fandom, it felt almost like he
was sort of a Fagan character because he was relying
so much on these young kids to kind of pull
the stories together, and he was doing a lot of
reprints of HG. Wells that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Well, if that sounds a lot like early comics too,
all the exploitation of the creators of all these characters
that are now billion dollar industries.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's true, and I think Gernsmack wanted
to professionalize it, and he wanted it to be a
new kind of thing. He wanted this science fiction to
inspire mostly boys, I guess, to be science people, to
promote science and technology.
Speaker 3: But well, I want to name drop something that I
think we've all pulled from here. An excellent book by
Fred Natis the man from Mars Ray Palmer's Amazing Pulp Journey,
which is a biography of Palmer, but a lot of
it's also about Shaver. And the reason I want to
name drop that right now is I think this also
might help as a sort of a statement. Is where
we're going, he argues, and he pulls us from someone else.
I'm not going to pull up the flipnote that you
have three basic characters, each of which is sort of
striving in a different direction. You have Hugo Gernsback, who
helps create scientifiction and literally wants to teach physics with it.
Like he literally wants to teach science and astronomy and
have like the core of the story be a science thing,
and let's have some characters to sort of sell it
to the youth. Like that is how he sees it.
And it's the it's the bright future. You've got your
John Campbell, who we will probably talk about more, who
is kind of in the mold of the self made
man and adventure and daring do but still science. And
I want to bring in kind of literature, and he
wants to make it legitimate literature. And then the third
strain is Palmer, and as we're going to see, he
basically wants to mix this world with an already existing
world of occultism, theosophy, weird ideas, weird tales, all of that.
And these are the three kind of forces straining here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's well said.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: And I think that although Campbell doesn't come up a
lot in The Man from Mars, uh, his role in
establishing science fiction yeah, to be what it is. It
is kind of hard to overstate. Isaac Asimov basically divides
the world of science fiction into before and after Campbell,
Like the coming of Campbell was like the single event.
So though he.
Speaker 3: Has his own weird aspects that we might get too,
and indeed we might we might clear that up.
Speaker 2: And I feel like, well, I want to talk about Shaver.
I mean, this is an episode about Shaver. It does matter,
I think to talk a little bit about Palmer. Uh.
Speaker 3: And I don't think you can divorce them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I think no.
Speaker 3: I mean there are a lot of ways.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So they're in terms of the product that is the
Shaver mysteries, they're they're one person. I mean, you have
Janitor Shaver who was probably mentally quite mentally ill, not
probably was, versus a guy who had quite an imagination.
But one thing that I want to do to set
the stage a little further is that if these stories
had not hit the mark, we wouldn't remember them, they
wouldn't have been successful.
Speaker 5: What we're really talking about are sort.
Speaker 6: Of these what becomes a kind of hollow Earth conspiracy.
And in nineteen forty three, when this shows up, the
concept of the hollow Earth is super relevant and valid.
Speaker 5: At that time. You know, the Nazis have built a.
Speaker 6: Lot of their sort of social religion around the concept
of rill and the idea of these earth energies. Hitler
had this idea that there could well Hitler and his people,
that you that the Earth might be on the inside,
that us the people might be on the inside of
the earth. And so he sent expeditions across the Atlantic
to try to see if he could see the British
positions by looking out across the sky and all this
weird stuff.
Speaker 3: Do we want to do a very very very like
one sentence each short trajectory of the hollow Earth, because
because you just dropped rill, so I think you should
ideas ideas of the hollow worth that you can find them,
or ideas of a world inside the world. You can
go back at least to the late Middle Ages. You
can hear this idea in various places, but it usually
gets associated, at least from the tellings I've heard, with
the sort of the Enlightenment period, and particularly Edmund Halley.
Speaker 5: Yeah, ally is the first querson to scientificize it.
Speaker 3: If you want to see it, to argue that there's
there's weird magnetic fields and other things that can be
explained by there being multiple shells of earth inside, and
there's various versions and then a sort of local here
around here. John Clive Symes or John Cleeve Simes, a
hero of the War of eighteen twelve in southwest Ohio
here not the war part where he settled, where his
father settled, also from the Revolutionary War. He was obsessed
with this idea of Halley's and tried to convince in
the early in eighteen eighteen the American government to fund
an expedition through a hole in the poll to what
he called in a novel Simsonia to get inside and basically, hey,
we're already conquering a continent. We're in the continent conquering business.
Let's go do this. And he sent out circular one
to everyone in Congress, everyone he could think of, which
included a statement that he wasn't crazy. It was always
a good start. And while this didn't really catch on,
it did actually help inspire the first major scientific expedition
of the United States federal government into the South Atlantic,
which actually helped create the Smithsonian in terms of part
of its collections. And there is a monument in Hamilton, Ohio,
about twenty miles from here, where he is buried, and
on top of it is a concrete will. It was concrete,
but stone hollow earth the next big one. And Jerry,
I suspect you probably know this better than I do
would be Edward Bulwer Lytton.
Speaker 6: And he writes a book called The Coming of the
Future Race, which is interesting in its parallels to the
as we'll talk about to the the original title of
Shaver's uh first manuscript, which was called a Letter of
Future Man. Yeah, I'm actually I'm actually holding a copy
of Sims's circular.
Speaker 5: Here in my hand.
Speaker 2: Oh, if you could scan it, we could put it
in the show notes.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'll do a scan of some of the stuff.
Speaker 2: It does have. I mean that that is one of
my favorite bits of American marketing, uh, with the you know,
if if you'll pay, but I will happily go to
the poll and explore.
Speaker 6: It's out for not a It's just like that's how
David ply This makes all his money. I'm not really
looking for Bigfoot, but if you pay me, yeah, I'll
go on for Bigfoot. Yeah. Buller Lytton writes a work
of fiction which deals with this idea of earth energies
called Vrill, which is that's another whole mythology that we
don't want to get into, but the sort of wielded
by frog descended humanoids from the Earth.
Speaker 3: By the way, you all know Bulger lit the employs.
Speaker 5: By the way, in mythology, they.
Speaker 3: Kind of do, they kind of dot into it.
Speaker 5: They become the reptoids later on.
Speaker 2: They yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: He's the it was a dark and stormy night guy.
Speaker 5: He is.
Speaker 6: He's the guy who wrote the novel with the But
the thing to remember about about Buler Litton is this
is a work of fiction, and it is a work
of fiction that hits home so strongly with a subset
of Vulcan ranch Germans, people who kind of believed in
land and blood and all that great late eighteen eighties stuff.
Speaker 3: And also theostists, I mean, Blevati praises.
Speaker 6: It, and they decided just to believe it. They just
take it it's true.
Speaker 3: And either like it's supposedly fiction, but it clearly isn't
because he's so tuned into everything we already know. So
we're going to see this happen again in the twentieth
century where he writes a novel and you have a
major part and you know, theospice are not obscure. They're
a major part of the Western occult tradition, and they're like, yes,
this is all actually a thing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's and that's kind of scary. In itself. But
that's also sort of what happens with the Shaver mysteries,
is that people start to believe it even though it
was never actually meant to be true, because it fits
so well into this tradition of the hollow Earth, underground
societies and all that stuff. One thing I did want
to bring up before we get too deep into it,
you know, I think I've got to copy this thing
lean here too.
Speaker 5: Remember the Mound that HP Lovecraft.
Speaker 6: Miz Elliot Bishop the Ghost wrote for Zelia Bishop. I
think it's like twenty nine to thirty, but a version
of it comes out in nineteen forty and Weird Tales,
which of course is White Ray Palmer's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh no, I strongly suspect. So we'll get to
what Shaver talks about. I think I think one other
just we should mention for completeness. So there's not I
think a huge amount of relevance. Abraham Merritt's The moon Pool,
which was a big influence on Lovecraft and I think
sort of helped bridge the gap between the Coming Race
and the Mound and Shaver. But no, it is hard
to read the Mound and not imagine that it's an
influence on Shaver as far as.
Speaker 6: I can tell, the earliest American version of these sort
of underground kingdoms being real.
Speaker 5: Comes from a guy named G.
Speaker 6: Warren Schulfeldt who was arguing that he had found a
This is in nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 5: It shows up in the Los Angeles Times.
Speaker 6: He argues, Oh, yeah, underground city, you know, outside of
LA right, inhabited by a bunch of lizard people.
Speaker 3: Well, people that worship the lizard totem, that's correct, like
Native Americans.
Speaker 6: And it gets sort of they were, and there actually
was some sights there, and allegedly the Smithsonian conspiracy came
in and they took all the bones, et et cetera,
just the.
Speaker 5: Way they take.
Speaker 6: I do as they do, as they do.
Speaker 3: So before we go further into Shaver, I would I
would argue that we need to. So we mentioned the
mound basically for the listeners. Zelia Bishop is living out
in Oklahoma, wants to have a story about a ghost
indigenous woman and a headless dude ghosts okay, yeah, and
a mound. And Lovecraft runs with this and writes this
huge story about uh super underground in human quasi human
civilizations and here's the point. They are super scientists. They
can basically control anything, including biology. They can phase through things,
they can create like limbless zombies and all of that.
And they derive their only pleasure because their society has
gotten to the end of where societies go from sadistic entertainments.
Speaker 6: Thedistic torture and entertainment. Yeah, the city is called Kenyon,
and the mound is a real place. It's in a
place called Binger, Oklahoma. I've actually been there. I grew
up near Dallas, and of course, as soon as I
got a car, i had to go see the only
piece of Lovecraft country in my part of the country.
And it's a weird place. I think it's a woodbine outleer.
For the geologists in the audience, there's those. Those are
pretty common in the area of Oklahoma and North Texas
that were not fully scourged by the by the glaciation,
and it is weird looking. So it does look a
lot of people thought for a long time that it
was man made and some kind of a pyramid. So
Zelia had something to work with. I think it's called
Dead Woman Mound, and the story that she came up
with is basically local local folklore. But what Lovecraft rights,
I'm sure is not what she no.
Speaker 3: I think literally he gets she gave him like one sentence.
Speaker 6: It's like one sentence if I remember the day Book, right,
it's like one sentence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he expanded quite a bit then, Yeah, it's I think.
Speaker 3: I think it's the longest of his ghost writings. And
while it's really important, it is also really friggin hard
to read. Though I'll say this, I'd still rather read
it than I remember Lemuria.
Speaker 2: So just I want to make sure we mentioned it.
I we went through a litany of Hollow Earth and
this sort of thing. Did we mention Egar, Rice Burros
and Pollucidar?
Speaker 3: No, we did not.
Speaker 2: I think we should because go ahead. In addition to Merit,
Shaver was a big fan of Eggarrice Bro's Pollucidar stories,
which are yet another hollow war story, as is a
Journey to the Center of the Earth by HG.
Speaker 3: Wells, which also has evil reptile people. So with I
think psychic powers, hypnotic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, animal hit says I remember correctly, it's it's like glamouring.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and correct me.
Speaker 6: If I'm wrong.
Speaker 3: They get there with a drill, but the evil lizard
people on under the ground. They control like I think
ape men that are called sagoths, which is awful interesting. Yeah,
they use hypnotic powers to create a slave. Yeah, I've
never heard of it.
Speaker 6: Well, I think if you want to talk about Wells
and Vern's influence on Shaver, we'll drop one more, and
that's the time machine, which has the Morlocks and the Eloi,
and that breaks down. I mean, we're gonna mention it
later pretty pretty cleanly into the concept of the Tarots
and the Darrow's are Tarot and Darrow. So I mean,
I guess the question is you know somebody was reading.
I guess the way to set the stage is to
say that in nineteen forty three, when Richard Shaver writes
this letter a Note the Future Man to Ray Palmer,
the idea of a hollow earth full of alien races
is not only in the pop culture, it's actually taken
quite seriously by people.
Speaker 5: So it arrives.
Speaker 6: Shaver arrives at the right time for for what he
has to offer to be accepted by the populace.
Speaker 3: He does.
Speaker 2: Although his initial writing would be what would you call that?
The slush pile are the kook Puppet, the crank file, it's.
Speaker 3: It's the Green Letter Brigade.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 2: His initial submission is not a narrative. It's not a story.
Speaker 3: Okay, so let's we want to talk about where he
gets it from.
Speaker 2: Well, let's talk about Yeah, let's mention what it is,
and then we can talk about where you can get him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, well, I mean, yeah, he sends in,
according to Palmer, sends to amazing stories, which at this
point while Palmer, when he takes it over, starts to
lean it less from and now you will learn astronomy
to basically pulp daring do basically what we would know
today as space opera like Star Wars. Basically he turns
it more or to Star Wars if you want to
use that as a as a shorthand. It's science fiction,
it's fantasy, it's it's the movies, it's comic books, like,
that's what it is. This guy Shaver's like, by the way,
here's ten thousand words. I have deciphered a ancient language
that's part of evil robot monsters under the ground. And
also all of this is real, So you.
Speaker 6: Know who is Shaver? He's born in nineteen oh seven
in Burrowick, Pen, which is actually not far from where
I'm at right now.
Speaker 5: It's right outside Wilkes Barre. In fact, we rove through there.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's where the area I grew up just above,
just north of the border.
Speaker 6: Gotcha. Yeah, I'm sitting here in York, PA tonight, so
it's not to NPA's high Strangeness area anyway. But what's
interesting about the guy is he does a lot of
wacky stuff, like he's in the John Reid Club and
he kind of bums around for a long time. He
later tells people that he was living as a hobo
at a time when he was actually in I believe
the Ipsilanti State Mental hospitals. Yeah, he's got a serious
history of mental illness, but he does manage to get married.
He's clearly a voracious reader, and that the gist of
this letter that he writes to Palmer is about his deciphering.
Decipherment of this letter that he calls mantong, which sounds
suspiciously to me like mantong. Basically, what he's decided is
that every letter of the alphabet, and by this he
means the English alphabet, not some er.
Speaker 5: You know, proto Indo European alphabet has.
Speaker 6: A symbolic meaning of like.
Speaker 5: A.
Speaker 6: I don't want to say. But what he's actually saying
is that like the letter A represents a concept, the
letter B represents a concept.
Speaker 3: Well, the natis gives one. He gives the example of ape.
Apes have animal power energy.
Speaker 6: Yes, animal power energy. And in the case of the darrow,
which are the evil robots, that's detrimental energy robot. Yeah,
and the good guys are integrated robots, because in his language,
the word integration is the best thing you can be.
And for some reason to me this sounds completely idiotic.
But for some reason, this is what god Ray Palmer going.
Was this linguistic concept that he thought was definite proof
that the legend of Atlantis was true.
Speaker 3: I'm not so surprised by that. So the thing this
immediately reminds me of is the work of Brassier di Borborg.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It is an important is an important Mayanist, an important
student of Maya anthropology history. He is works in archives,
he writes fiction. In the middle of the nineteenth century,
he finds parts of an actual Maya book, a Maya codex.
He also finds more finds a elements of the Popol Vu,
which is this incredibly important piece of literature. All the
others had also found it. But the thing that he's
most known for, and that is the most important, is
that he finds in the middle of the nineteenth century
a copy of Verlas Angeles closest to Yucatan. Basically, colonial
Spanish culture was incredibly litigious. It was assumed that people
in office would be corrupt, so when you left office,
you had to provide a defense of yourself, and the
Archbishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa, had done this in
the late sixteen hundreds. As to what did he do,
he described the place he worked, Yukaton and the Maya people,
and this is where we get a lot of information
about early information about Maya kalndricks and numerals. The most
important page is he gets this Maya noble to help
him translate Maya writing Maya hieroglyphs uh, and he asks
the guy please write ade please, because he's like, write
a sentence in your language. And he writes matingati, I
don't want to. I don't want to and he then
writes letras and it's a and B and C and dysh.
It's a and bay and say and day and a
et cetera in Spanish, and that's important. Landa writes this,
Delando writes this down. It is basically lost. Rosser Diborborg
finds it in the middle of the nineteenth century, and unfortunately,
in addition to being a good archivist, Brassard Borborg was
obsessed with Atlantis conspiracy theories and other ideas of weird shitology.
So he finds this thing and he doesn't interpret it
the way it eventually is interpreted. We eventually realize the
work of your e Canora is off in the nineteen
fifties that when Diego DeLanda says, damn Mace, give me
the letter for h the guy writes ah and chay.
He writes out two syllables, and canaras offf eventually figures
it out, and that way goes the Miyad acidpherment, and
that's a whole other story. DeLanda or excuse mean not Dalanda.
Bros Barborg takes this at face value oh eight, initially backwards.
Then he starts making translations, but he they're completely insane.
Right on top of that, he believes that each one
of these letters has a super secret meaning in symbolism
that ties it back to the destruction of Atlantis, because
of course it does.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: And on top of that, he thinks he finds the
name of Atlantis moo. Right, He basically create establishes the
word moo being associated with lost sunken continence. He inspires
his stuff is found in the work of ignatious Donnelly,
who basically creates the modern content of Atlantis, with Atlantis
the anti Liluvian world. It inspires the Lon Jean's and
Yucatan and many others.
Speaker 6: Well, Jeb was talking. I brought up that chapter and
he's dead right, Like, there's a whole chapter here where
Donnelly lays out how the Mayan alphabet is basically a
history of it is a subtext history of Atlantis.
Speaker 5: I'll scan you some of those pages because it is
sweet and we.
Speaker 3: Don't want to go too far down this road. You've
actually talked about it before, but not so much that.
But that word move continues to get associated with ideas
of sunken continents, including symbolic writing in the nineteen twenties
found on the Moostones dug up by William Nivin. I
happen to have four of them in the lab and
interpreted by Colonel I'm doing a lot of air quoting.
You can't see James Church word. All of this is
part of the sort of theosophy and Theosophy adjacent occult world,
which also produces the Ohaspi Bible, which Ray Palmer was
a huge promoter of.
Speaker 6: Right, So, I guess the question is who's who's the
person who out of the maybe hundreds of.
Speaker 5: Thousands, if not millions.
Speaker 6: Of words that got written about the Shaver mysteries, who's
the person that knew all that stuff?
Speaker 5: Was it Shaver or was it Palmer? Or was it
some of each?
Speaker 3: I think some of each, but a lot of it's Palmer,
I think, Yeah, I think so, I think Palmer.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 2: I think the original manuscript is what ten thousand words,
and yeah, Palmer bumped it up to yeah, thirty thousand.
So but while we're talking about linguistic scholars, this this
whole thing about extending the meaning by looking at each
letter and applying symbolism to that. And another famous, uh
sort of linguistic scholar who has done that very successfully
is Gary Busey.
Speaker 3: Right, Okay, So I'm I'm pretty proud about knowing not
knowing what the you're talking about. Really, I mean, I
know there's a motorcycle accident at some point.
Speaker 2: Gary before before the motorcycle accident was a very intimidating actor,
h and he played a lot of heavies. Uh. And
after the accident he had I mean apparently, uh, some
some brain damage. Where your helmets? People? Is the I
think the message you where your helmets?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 2: But yeah, he he constantly does this thing where he
will take a word and then he will take each
letter of the word.
Speaker 3: I had successfully forgotten that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So it's the same kind of thing.
Speaker 4: I have a hobby that's really wonderful because it helps
me understand the meaning of one word with the sentence
that reflects the words meaning and definition. These are called
beer seisms. The word now in ow no other way,
the word team, team together, everyone to change more.
Speaker 6: Well. One of the things we should mention then, is
where Shaver does get it from. So he's he's working
a welding job one day. Man, this is a little vague,
and we don't quite know what happens before that.
Speaker 3: Before that, there's the whole thing with the demon.
Speaker 5: Oh, go ahead, I'm not clear on that.
Speaker 3: So yeah, So before that, his brother dies and he
becomes obsessed with the idea that a demon is stalking
him and his family. And I believe the demon's name
is Max. I don't think it's the brother's name. I
think it's the demon's name. I could be wrong about that. Like,
so that's.
Speaker 6: Already happened before about what you're about to say. So
he's already got that going on and paranoid, yes, and
his welding machine malfunctions, and he believes that it gives
him the ability to hear the voices from his coworkers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can hear what you're thinking exactly.
Speaker 6: And then later on this power develops into his ability
when he's laying in bed at night, to hear the
voices of these darrows first and then these tarots later,
and they essentially start to tell him this story about
the Mantong language. And if we are shooting influencing rays
into his brain, which is not an uncommon symptom of
unchecked schizophrenia what they used to call paranoid schizophrenia. This
is something that actually is in my field a little bit,
so I don't feel bad about being a doctor of
cognitive behavioral studies. The influencing machine is a concept where
people believe that they are being told something or given
information from outside their body. And it was first documented
in the late seventeen hundreds, but there have been a
couple of famous people since then who have actually had
the influencing machine talking to them in their lives. Famously,
who is the killer up in New York City?
Speaker 5: His dog told.
Speaker 3: Yeah, David.
Speaker 6: So that's a classic example of the influence machinefluence.
Speaker 3: The phrase you're using on the origin of the influencing
machine and schizophrenia written by Victor tosk in nice dreaded
nineteen and that that you.
Speaker 6: Know, I mean, it's still a concept that we use
in cognitive studies. The idea of the influence machine is
a way of externalizing the internal voice and concrete to
concretizing it, if you want to use that phrase. The
question that we ask ourselves is, you know, was you
know obviously if somebody were walking down the street today
and said their welding gun was telling them, you know
about these ancient races of people, we wouldn't think twice
about wanting to have them medicated. But in the old days,
you have to wonder is Padre Pio was he somebody
that was influenced by that Saint Francis. I always kind
of wonder how much of our mythology is simply the
result of really compelling voices in people's head. And I
think Shaver is a great example of how people can
get carried away. I mean, the guy, in a way
was actually a victim more than a perpetrator of any
kind of oh hoax.
Speaker 3: I would absolutely agree with that. I don't know if
you can say that Shaver was exploited, especially since once
he starts working with Palmer he seems to at least
get better in terms of his everyday life. Although we'll
talk about the Rock books thing. But yeah, no, he's not.
I don't know if exploits to write work, because maybe
there's actually some kind of art therapy or something going
on here. Palmer, on the other hand, I'm sure we
will talk about where this all goes. Yeah he yeah,
he's not a victim of anything. Well, he's a victim
of a truck. That's a different discussion.
Speaker 6: So the book they eventually come up with, but it's
novella length. It's over thirty thousand words. I mean, it's
a chunky story. I reread it the other day and
it about it about gave me a headache because I
was trying to read it in the original format, which
was not real smart.
Speaker 5: It's it's called I remember Lemuria.
Speaker 6: And you know, Lamuria is the fictional continent that was
supposed to hypothesize to exist between Madagascar and India.
Speaker 3: Initially starts as a scientific hypothesis but versapically gets picked
up by Theosophists, specifically Blavatski in the eighteen sixties.
Speaker 6: And this is another piece of concretization of something that's
totally fictional or hypothetical. It has the name Lemuria because
the guy who postulated the original idea didn't understand why
the creatures of Madagascar were more similar to the creatures
that were found living We're in the fossil record in India.
Speaker 3: It's literally lemur Ea, lemur Ea, and it comes from
Murs and the theosophists actually, and of course Palmer himself
decided that that was the actual name of the place.
Why not, Yeah, I mean, why not?
Speaker 6: It was a good name. You could have called it Moo.
You could have called it Atlantis or I believe that
Tamil have in their mythology a sunken continent that the
Theospis ofventually in the modern era sort of connected Lemurria with.
But nope, they went straight with the basic name.
Speaker 3: And it's kind of hard to separate Moo and Lemuria.
Like Moo is clearly supposed to Churchwards, Moo feels a
lot like Levatski's Lamurria, and most people, I think, actually
combined the two. I'm not sure it matters except in
very specific historical contexts, right, But you know.
Speaker 6: If you're trying to explain Easter Island or Stoneworks in
Polynesia and stuff Tulu, it's a very convenient uh rhetorical
device to have stuck out there in the Pacific.
Speaker 2: And I'm drinking a Moscow mew right now, So that's
that's awesome.
Speaker 5: So a Moscow I'm wandrincken.
Speaker 2: Well, a Moscow move move, it's got the I've got
my Crystal Skull vodka, uh and fresh lives.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, as always, I'm concerned about the malaria, so
I'm having some quinine.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, so I have read the biography of Ray
Palmer and I've read some of the biography of Richard Shaver,
but what I failed to read, or I found it
very difficult to read, was the actual I remember Lemoria.
I just had a hard time. But it's such an
influential thing, Jerry, were you able to get into it.
Speaker 6: I've read it a couple of times now, I read
it magnificently.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I h this is my first time through it
specific for this podcast, and I'm not sure I'm ever
going to forgive you Blake.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I I couldn't. I will because now I have
to solid air.
Speaker 6: I'm not.
Speaker 3: I'm not really sure you do. Actually, I like, what's
it like? Well, okay, let I there's a fawn girl.
It starts right there. I don't know it's it was
nearly incomprehensible.
Speaker 6: Imagine, I don't know the John Carter of Mars written
by four chan, and.
Speaker 3: But more than a touch of tumbler with which the
furry elephant.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, apparently a lot of riders work on it,
and I don't get that sense at all. It feels
like somebody wrote it out in a in a day. Yeah,
you know, progressively getting a little bit drunker.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just when they go on, just constant trash jargon
like stem rays and knees and that, and like seventy
foot tall snake women who you know, the the elders
get bigger and bigger and constant, the constant allure of
giant women. And yeah it the Internet has existed for
far longer than you realize. Wow, it just happened to
be on paper.
Speaker 6: So it's got I mean the first ti I'm looking
at it here the first paragraph says, this will give
you a flavor. I was working in the studio of
Artan Grow when I heard a great laugh behind me.
If ever there was a derision in a laugh, there
was a derision in this one. I flung down my
gaudy brushes and my palate, and turned about in rage
to find the master himself, his red cave, red cave
of a mouth wide open in his black beard. I
cooled my temper with an effort for great Indeed is
artan Grow, master artist of subatline. The whole damn thing
goes on like that one big run on paragraph. It's
Lord Dunsany to the fiftieth degree. Oh funky phrases, you know,
weird hoogety boogey kind of made up place names.
Speaker 5: It's just very difficult to reach.
Speaker 3: Well, I would go even farther than that. I would
absolutely agree that what you just read with the run
on sentences is quite representative. But there's there's two there's
there's several other elements. So one there's footnotes. Oh yeah,
there's footnotes to try to make this be more real.
So for example, at one point we're looking at where's
his footnote? Oh yes, uh, soon I was striding between
the pillaring fangs of the great Beast's mouth. That was
the door of the Hall of Symbols, where the school's
school ways converged. About was the bustle attendant to any
roll at way station bearers rushing traveling, gazing about, lost
in wonder at the vaulting glitter of sculptured pillars and
painted walls done by men of a caliber whose work
row like myself, cannot grasp entirely. Roe having a footnote
here again are we had to appeal to mister Shaver
for application amplification. We certainly got it, and along with
some amazing thoughts. Roe, he says, is a thing of simple,
repetitive life pattern, easy to understand and control. To row
you is to make you do things against your will.
A large generator of thought impulse can be set up
to row a whole group of people. Row the boat
with w the other row doesn't have is modern and
the meaning has become physical force and not mental force.
Row the people was an ancient method of government. Romantic
was the name of such a government. Row Man Tick
science of man life patterning by control. And it continues.
It's like that for the whole thing, except for when
he's admiring the tale of his fawn girlfriend.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And by fawn I mean half dear.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, I just came back from an
anime convince, So yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: The whole book is like that and gets worse as
it goes, because once it mentions and rais and it's like,
now I'm going to have forty of them.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Like I said, the Mound is considered one of Lovecraft's
worst stories, and it is a thousand times more readable
than this.
Speaker 6: My assumption is that from the footnotes is basically that's
the meat and potatoes of shape.
Speaker 3: That actually came from Shaver.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, I think.
Speaker 3: I think the vast majority of the ancient society stuff
came from Palmer, who again was deep. So we mentioned
the Ohaspi Bible. Now that's the thing I have not read.
I have sampled it. It is fifteen hundred pages, but
it's basically a theosophy adjacent early kind of ancient Aliens book,
like one hundred and thirty years ago, and he shape
Palmer eventually became such an at a hero and advocate
of it. He republished it and was putting it out there.
I get the feeling that almost all of the La
Murious is coming from is coming from Palmer. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, well, you know, Palmer is obviously also well
read in the classics of sci fi, and his first
pro sale was to Gernsback and it was a story
called the tim Ray of Jandra, and in that there's
an ancient city in a lost jungle and the people
in there are trying to drill to the center of
what a hollow earth, which is full of riches. So
he had already gotten that hollow earth sort of mentality.
Speaker 3: But then there's horrible disaster, which is also every turn
in I remember Lemuria.
Speaker 2: So we got the hollow earth, but we also have
this whole thing about the Darrow and the taro. Can
you explain that that's uh, because because she ever believed
people were influencing him these these it was it wasn't
just that there's a hollow earth, it was that the people.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, the hollow earth is like literally the least
part of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Well, let's let's call the Atlanteans. They're the people
that lived on Atlin And apparently in the far distant
past we can call it. Can we skype in Robert
Shock to confirm or deny this? Apparently in the far
distant past, the sun had a solid like a like
an M and M shell around it, and as it
began to fail, the people that lived on this continent
could not survive. So there was a plan to.
Speaker 6: Vacate the earth to go elsewhere and survive, but a
large group, a contingent of the society, didn't want to
do it, so they were sort of sabotaged in their
attempt and YadA YadA, YadA, giant sexy women and daring
do Later, a bunch of folks decided to stay behind
and Morlock style, they sort of devolved into these pot
bellied you know, disease they've got all kind of heart
diseases and weird stuff wrong with them. Bad guys who
are very similar to the residence of Kenyon in Lovecrafts.
They're sadistic exactly. They're totally decadent, totally animals.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I will.
Speaker 3: Say the original Morlocks. I kind of like them. I'm
not a big fan of the evoy but continue.
Speaker 6: The society has has declined, and these these detrimental energy
robots that Darrow's are still around, and they're sort of
the influencing machine that is that is pestering poor Shaver.
Speaker 3: And they're harmed by the sun's rays because the sun's
rays are toxic to everything. And at one point Shaver
and Palmer, once they've become partners and actually end up
living near each other, try to improve their diets by only,
according to Shaver's teachings, eating very young things like young
plants and young animals because they haven't been exposed to
the sun long. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Gross, It's like I'm not a vegetarian. I'm a vialetarian.
Speaker 6: Yeah, a vegetarian, but still gross. I like I like
my cheese to be old though.
Speaker 5: Not sun exposed.
Speaker 6: So the tarots, on the other hand, are the are
the integrated robots, and they are analogous kind.
Speaker 3: Of the angels.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they're like angels and probably linked to angelic beings,
and they're the ones trying to help the human race
resist the the negative influence of the darrow And And
the story is really a lot about that first battle.
The first story I remember Lemuria is all about that.
Then the return to Snathas is the second one, and
that's sort of what happened back on on Moo later
on down the road related to this conflict. And I
get I don't One thing that I've not been able
to understand is what the Darro's motivation is is like,
are they're not really trying to conquer the earth.
Speaker 3: I think that they're just broken. I think that they're
just diseased and so they just do evil things because
their minds are warped.
Speaker 5: That seems to be the case.
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't know if they're a metaphor for
you know, Nazis and Japanese imperialists at the time, or
I'm always trying to find uh, you know what.
Speaker 3: I By the time it gets to Palmer, I think
they may be atamor metaphor for something else, because no
theorists you know where I'm going with that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, here we go.
Speaker 5: If no Jews, no news, right.
Speaker 3: I mean no, the Palmer later gets into some real
trouble with with anti Semitism. Yeah, and this is this
would not be the only example of various secular conspiracy
theories basically replicating the medieval blood libel, which then goes
through which trials and ghost are also stuff and has
never gone away, which we see in stuff like Pizzagate
and QAnon today. And there's more than a hint of that.
And frankly, I would argue some of the artwork used
to illustrate the DROs looks a lot like stereotypes of
anti Semitic stereotypes of the twentieth century.
Speaker 6: So if you ever, if you ever take a look
at that All Shaver Mystery edition that's got the Darrow's
on it, it is a virtual you know who's who
gallery of anti Semitic execs.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't show that imagery in class when
I talk about this, and I talk about the origins
of flying saucers in case you were anywhere we're going
and all of that, I don't show that stuff because
I'm like, yeah, no, it's it's Yeah, no, I think
that's kind of where this is going.
Speaker 2: We probably need to take a break. When we come back,
let's talk about how this stuff does lead into the
world where Ray Palmer becomes the father of flying saucers.
It's really interesting. More obstrut you've been listening to months
the Science Show about Monsters. I'm Blake Smith, and you
just heard a discussion with Jerry Drake and Jebcard about
the strange history of theories around the Hollow Earth and
the collaboration between Richard Shaver and Raymond Palmer that became known.
Speaker 1: As the Shaver Mysteries.
Speaker 2: Tune into the next episode for the conclusion, in which
we learn how Ray Palmer becomes known as the father
of UFOs and what happens to Shaver Palmer and the
narrative of the Darros and the Tarots. Morenstert, Welcome to
Monster Talk, the Science Show about Monsters. I'm Blake Smith.
In this episode, we're going to continue our look into
the curious narrative created by Richard Shaver and Ray Palmer
and its impact on culture. I'm tempted to say American culture,
but honestly, this got bigger than that. As you'll hear
in the interview. Palmer was an early and prominent member
of science fiction's fandom. His interests even predates the use
of the phrase science fiction. He'd been involved when Hugo
Gernsback was a encouraging everyone to call it scientifiction and
abbreviating that as STF instead of the more widely known
term sci fi, which is abbreviated as SF. Fans have
been arguing about which term to use for the field
since the nineteen thirties. In two thousand and nine, when
the television network the Sci Fi Channel, which was spelled SciFi,
changed it to sci Fi spelled Syfy, it rekindled this
argument yet again about what the name should be for
this field of literature. That the selection of what name
to call a group with common interests would be the
kind of wedge that could split people into factions should
not be surprising to listeners in a world where people
routinely split into factions around what TV shows they like
to watch within this genre, or split into groups around
fictional characters such as Team Cap or Team Stark, or
a Team Edward versus Team Jacob, or a Team jar
Jar versus Team Annie. Anyway, the point is, people who
have lots of reasons to join together can find plenty
of reasons to split apart. Whatever you want to call it,
fantom at this time was in its infancy. The word
fan is a diminutized version of fanatic. When you're a
fan of something, you may find yourself quite passionate about
stuff that you're really not in a position to have
control over. Your joys and disappointments become rallying points for
you and others like you. Fans of science fiction quickly
connected via mailing lists, home brewed newsletters, local clubs, and
of course, through the letters pages of their favorite magazines.
Insider terminology was developed which could be used to identify
other fans. For example, a collection of fans could be
called a Finn, similar to how the plural version of
man is men.
Speaker 1: This linguistic development is still ongoing.
Speaker 2: Terms like fanfic a fan written fiction that occurs within
the setting of some popular intellectual property or shipping when
someone fervently wishes that particular characters would form strong romantic relationships.
Are slashfic, which describes non canonical fanfic involving characters having sexual,
often homosexual liaisons. Despite the many reasons fans might be
united by their common interests, these early fans almost immediately
factionalized around politics, ideas, around the direction of the field,
over capitalism versus socialism, and even over a variety of
made up religions. Sorry, Flying Spaghetti Monster and Reverend Bob Dobbs,
your biding satirical take on religion is not new. I'll
put a link in the show notes to a site
called encyclopedia dot org, which is just full of deep
esoteric history around science fiction fandom. It's a fascinating resource
if you want to see how we got to now.
And as Jerry and Jeb describe, the Internet culture on
these fan topics is merely the electronic version of a
much longer pin and paper tradition. We talked a little
bit in Part one about how Richard Shaver had been
struggling with mental illness, and how Ray Palmer took his
story of detrimental robots and integrated robots the Darrow and Terot,
and expanded on it and then framed it as both
real and reminiscent of a pre existing body of lore
with which many readers would have already been familiar. He
was blurring the lines between fact and fiction and did
not give a fig about it. This delighted some readers
and infuriated others, and have included a brief clip from
the Long John nebl Show which includes audio of Ray Palmer,
Richard Shaver, and of course Long John talking about this topic.
When you hear the show turn into a sort of
old timey recording, that's me playing the clip, which I
forgot to introduce. A link to the full episode of
Long John Nebel's party Line will be in the show notes.
A couple of words come up in this interview that
are not very common, so I'm going to go ahead
and define them here just in case you aren't familiar
with them. The first one is shibbaleth, a word or
saying used by adherents of a party or sect or
belief and usually regarded by others.
Speaker 1: As empty of real meaning. These are different from.
Speaker 2: Jargon, which are specialized terms with precise meaning for a
technical profession. I like the word because of the story
behind it. It was a term used in the Bible,
where there was this common word shibolith, and it became
a password to distinguish between members of one tribe from
possible impostures from another tribe who couldn't pronounce the sh
sound because it wasn't part of their native tongue.
Speaker 1: The other word I wanted to fine.
Speaker 2: Is reification, to consider or represent something that's abstract as
material or concrete, to give definite or concrete form to
a concept or idea. This term reification is about making
something like an idea into a more concrete form, but
the word also has multiple meanings.
Speaker 1: In various fields.
Speaker 2: For example, there's a logical fallacy where you would argue
against an idea as though or a real thing, and
that's considered to be a reification fallacy. And in information technology,
reifications when you fully define a data model so that
you've got a complete, functional, virtual model.
Speaker 1: Of a real thing.
Speaker 2: Amusingly to me, I had to look this up myself,
despite the fact that I do that very kind of
work all the time without ever using that term. So
I'm not sure who in the IT world uses the
word reification, but I know that everybody in software development
is doing it during the process of making software. We
also briefly discussed in this interview the contact ee UFO movement.
Early UFO history includes a variety of people who came
for to say they'd been contacted by intelligent humanoids from
outer space. Now, this is quite different from the abductees
who occur later. The abductees are taken against their will.
The contactes are mostly happily contacted by these intelligences. These
include people like George van Tassel, who also started a
large UFO convention in the desert at Giant Rock. There's
Georgia Damski, who was another contactee who was also previously
involved in theosophy.
Speaker 1: And ran a Hamburger stand. And I'm not being tried.
Speaker 2: He really did run the Hamburger stand and would tell
customers all about his UFO experiences in addition to writing
books about his work with the aliens and being interviewed.
We've also talked about Woody Dedrenberger before, who's probably most
well known for his meeting with Indrid Cold, as depicted
in the movie The Mothmon Prophecies. I've said it before,
but if your only knowledge of Indrid Colds from the movie,
you should take the time to either read The Mothmaon
Prophecies or read Woody's own book about his meeting, or
you know what, you can listen to an interview with
Darren Berger himself talking about meeting Indrid.
Speaker 1: I'll put a link to that in the show notes.
Speaker 2: If you've ever been frightened by the movie version or
had trouble sleeping because of it, I think hearing Woody's
own story will probably allay your worries. And if you
do find yourself spooked by the movie version, you can
think rich HadAM, who has appeared on Monster Talk and
who kindly bought me some very nice cocktails in real life.
Speaker 1: I thank you a lot, Richard. I owe you a
couple of rounds. Man. I need to get to la
and have some kind of Monster Talk meetup sometime. Okay.
Speaker 2: Finally, while the core material of the Shaver Mystery comes
to Richard Shaver, as we discussed in part one of
the show, Ray Palmer expanded the text considerably and was
probably respond possible for much of the theosophical, Atlantean, Lemurian
and other referential material that ties the Shaver stories to
other works around the Hollow Earth, lost civilizations, and ultimately
to ancient alien lore that already existed prior to the
nineteen forties.
Speaker 1: We read a lot.
Speaker 2: Of material to prepare for the show, with the biography
of Palmer called The Man from Mars. Ray Palmer's Amazing
Pulp Journey by Fred Natus was particularly helpful.
Speaker 1: A few points that.
Speaker 2: We may not have made in this interview but are
worth mentioning because they give some insight into Palmer's views. First,
Raymond A. Palmer used his initials as a nickname. People
called him Rap. When he had a son, he named
him Raymond B. Palmer. It's difficult to get a feel
for how seriously Rap approached all this stuff. He definitely
played with reality far more than just in the Shaver mysteries.
After a childhood injury, he had spent years in forced
traction and reduced mobility around curing his spinal damage. Reading
was his escape, and he was a voracious reader and
highly imaginative. He never had a college education, and it
seems he resented the kind of language common to scientif fiction,
later sci fi, and the technical jargon. Comment to his
competitor magazine, Astounding, which was edited by John W. Campbell,
Palmer had a mischievous, prankish nature. He frequently used pseudonyms
to pin his columns and stories, and then would proceed
to berate in the editorial page this fictional author.
Speaker 1: Who was himself.
Speaker 2: His work with Shaver led to a blurring of the
lines between fantasy and the cult. Madame Blavatsky had done
something similar when she claimed that Bulwer Lytton's The Coming
Race book was actually based on real history, but Shaver
really mainstreamed it to the American pulp magazine public. When
Palmer promoted Kenneth Arnold in nineteen forty seven, he had
set himself on a clear course to weirdology. We talked
about this a bit in the interview, but later in
life Palmer promoted some writers who were clearly antisemitic, while
he vigorously denied that he himself held such views. Promoting
the writing of Nazi sympathizers this is a poor way
to desistance himself from such accusations. We've already covered the
Nazis' obsessive interest in the occult in a previous episode,
but what I find troubling is the way that it's
become twisted by a variety of parties, including Nazi sympathizers,
that the Nazis actually had real occult powers. These allegedly
included magical powers, connections to the hollow earth flying saucers
and other occult energy sources. This glorification of Nazi power
often is threaded together with Holocaust denial, and I find
that abhorrent. There's a very thin line between using fictional
versions of Nazi occult fascination to that of celebrating Nazis
as misunderstood victims. I still find it hard to believe
we have to see modern neo Nazis being celebrated and
publicly defended by anybody. I don't like mentioning politics on
the show, and I know some listeners have been annoyed
that we've talked about politics at all, and I get that.
But if people are confused about whether the Nazis or
the bad guys, something has gone horribly wrong. Not sees
are bad. If you feel a need to defend the Nazis,
please go read some real history books or talk with
actual Holocaust survivors. As much as I hate politics, I
hate more the normalization of.
Speaker 1: Racism based on junk science.
Speaker 2: I think Jerry and Jeb do a good job of
contextualizing the role of the Shaver mystery has had in putting
us in the world we're in now.
Speaker 1: It's a frequently ignored.
Speaker 2: Foundational text that builds to a time when ancient aliens
and hollow Earth theories are threaded through the foundations of
modern pop culture as deeply as the tunnels of the
Darros are in Shaver's conception of the Earth. Don't believe me.
See how you feel after this part two of the interview. Oh,
one more thing. I know, the flat Earth gets lots
of press and is shockingly accepted by a lot of
the misinformed, Gulbible and anti establishment types of in our population.
But the hollow Earth is all over the place. It
even shows up in the latest Godzilla movie. It's in manga,
it's in anime, it's in comics, it's in horror films,
it's in fantasy films. I mean, where would the D
and D world be without the underdark and those extensive
caverns and dungeons? And where do you think those ideas
came from. Also, we talk a little bit about a
famous science fiction writer and fan who was angered by
the Shaver mystery.
Speaker 1: But what we didn't mention.
Speaker 2: In the interview is another writer who read the Shaver
stories and was also suffering from the same kind of
psychological effects of an influencing machine.
Speaker 1: And that's Philip K. Dick.
Speaker 2: If the things we create are influenced by the things
we consume, Shaver's influence is going to last a long
long time, even if people.
Speaker 1: Don't know his name or work directly.
Speaker 2: Now, if that's not enough background the info for part
two of this discussion, you can check the show notes,
where there's even more reading. I don't think the world
is hollow, but this Shaver stuff does seem to go
on forever. Let's find out why this stuff matters and
get on with the Morgell. So we're back.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So these stories came out and it created some nineteen Yeah,
let's talk about how they were received by the science
fiction fandom.
Speaker 5: They hit like crazy.
Speaker 6: I think the magazine's letters returned letters to the editor
went from something like fifty to like twenty five hundred.
I mean, it basically became like the no Sleep Reddit thread,
where everybody else suddenly had a share in these experiences,
and they immediately began to build the exact same kind
of mythology you would find on Reddit or four chan.
Speaker 5: Now, so one of the.
Speaker 3: Things the listener needs to understand here is that this
was not just an amazing stories thing. This had existed
with weird tales, where people would write letters in and
they would communicate, and at some point they I already
printing the address of the letter writer so that they
would start writing each other. This became the network that
becomes fandom. I mean, when we talk about the Internet
existing on paper, this is the equivalent of Oh, I
could I could send a direct message to this person,
I could send them an email or something. I could
comment on their comment and take it out. And so
fanzines would emerge and communities would emerge. Now, but as
as you all were.
Speaker 6: Saying, the numbers here exploded, and I think, and I
suspect this was what Palmer was at least somewhat trying
to do.
Speaker 3: I don't think it was like all of a sudden,
There were a ton of sci fi fans who are
like I like ray guns, but also the DROs, the
fact that it was the Muria. I don't think that
that name was chosen by any accident, the fact that
it's basically warmed over theosophy. I think, all of a sudden,
you know, it's like, you know, you make a mistake
in the in the keyword you use of the hashtag
using Twitter, and all of a sud you're like, wait,
why am I surrounded by hollow Earth people? What the
hell has happened? Yeah? I think that's kind of what
he was doing, was basically using this network but trying
to tie it into another community that then glommed onto it.
Speaker 2: But he also received pushback from some sci fi people
who thought that this was disingenuous, that it was exploitative,
and that it was contrary to the science focus that
had been the hallmark of science fiction before before.
Speaker 3: And science fiction is beginning to emerge as something quasi legitimate.
It's not just ray guns and you know, big eyed monsters.
You're starting to get what becomes the golden era of
science fiction. It's about to hit. And he's like, also,
by the way, Victorian occultist Tripe.
Speaker 2: I think that that sort of fan pushback.
Speaker 1: Was legit.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think, I mean it was an interesting
and legitimate argument, right when I think about these sort
of discussions. This came known as the Shaver Mystery.
Speaker 6: Palmer calls it the Shaver Mysteries. That's the name, and
he sort of brands it under.
Speaker 2: He's being coy. Uh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's an understatement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's he's basically trying to have his cake and
eat it too. He's saying, you know, we're not commenting
on whether this is true, but it's claimed to be
true by Shaver.
Speaker 3: That's a and it clearly resonates with everything we know,
like stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yeah, he can't just leave it alone. He's
got to say that it seems to like be based
on the underpinnings of you know a lot of lore, right, yeah.
Speaker 3: And and so these people start writing in and they're like,
you know, I went into the caverns and my friend
was vaporized, and I have a hole the size of.
Speaker 5: A coin in my arm my arm.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, and you know, because they ran into the
DeRos too. And and so these people start writing in,
as Jerry was saying, like like no sleep like creepy pasta,
Like what's what's that one with the institute like sc something?
Oh yeah, yeah, where it's just like these stories. And
I don't think everyone writing in was trying to tell
a real story. I think some of them were like
this is fun, this is fun. I'm gonna tell a
creepy story.
Speaker 5: I have a confession to make.
Speaker 6: If you go back and listen to the Mel's Whole
episodes of the Art Mel Show. Oh boy, go ahead,
I am a trucker in one of those episodes who
tells a ripping yarn about a hole into the center
of the earth. Total book. I was a college kid
board at work and had not, you know, had the
level of adult adulting that I have.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 6: People lie, People lie a lot, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean, you're not the guy who you know, told
them the story of Half Life, which is you know, famous.
But yeah, no, exactly, and I would expect a lot
of that. But then, so I think one of the
things that's interesting here, we're going to get into the
idea that Palmer invents the flying saucers. We'll get to that,
but skip forward even a couple of years, and certainly
by nineteen fifty you have a number of people, many
of them tied into the Shaver network, who had deep,
long histories in this occult lodge, this theosophical group, this
ancient teaching that as soon as you get rockets, and
then especially when you get flying saucers, they're like, oh,
I used to get stuff from the ascended masters. I mean,
I mean they're from Venus actually, I mean they're from Venus.
And this becomes the Contact Team movement, one of whom
Maurice doriol Is directly plagiarizes people from the Lovecraft circle,
like Lovecraft himself and Roberty Howard and Frank Bell Knap
Long and is involved in the Shaver community of letter
writers and whatnot. That emerges, and the the idea of
like the Reptilians basically comes in right through there.
Speaker 6: Yes, I can't remember off the top of my head
who introduces Lovecraft to theosophy, but he writes one of
his letters, He's like, gimme, He literally says, give me
more of that stuff.
Speaker 3: So he from what I think, there's two introductions. One
he gets the ideas from stuff he reads, so he
reads is always I always forget the name of Scott Elliott.
Speaker 2: But the Atlantis, the book that Jeb's trying to remember
is the Story of Atlantis by William Scott Elliott, which
was later expanded to the Story of Atlantis and the
Lost Limoria. I put a link to that in the
show notes.
Speaker 3: But right before he writes Cthulhu, he reads a book
on the idea of Atlantis and Lost Continence. And again
I'm blanking on the name. Later in New Orleans, E.
Hoffman Price introduces him to theosophy like for real. And
but that's well after he's written most of his stories.
Speaker 6: Right, So it's a reification machine really at that point
where the Lovecraft didn't believe any of this stuff. But
it's authors who are sort of going, oh, I love
this mythology and I'm going to adopt it. Believers read
a story by someone by Lovecraft like Lovecraft and goes,
oh God, there's my mythology. They must also be channeling
the ancient mask.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, and Damski was straight up trained in theosophy,
wasn't he? Yeah, yeah, yes, And.
Speaker 3: And doriall the guy who introduces reptilians to UFO or
through Shaver. He ran a lodge in Colorado, he ran
he ran a magical lodge. Now we mentioned love We
just mentioned Lovecraft right now. I want to make a
huge distinction here, And I did this on the Twitter
thing last night. During his lifetime, Lovecraft, mind you, had
a lot of faults. We've talked about him before, h
But he mined the theosophical stuff, he mined all this stuff,
turned it into fiction and did have ramifications later, but
when he started to get letters of like, tell me
more about the reality of Cthulhu. Tell me where I
can find a copy of the Ecronomicon. Where are you
getting this? Where you get He's like, it's fiction, it's fake,
it's not real about it. Yeah, stuff that he really believed,
like for example, Margaret Murray and the Witch cult he
would go on and on about. But if he didn't
believe it, he's like, look, and not only that, I
don't want He literally said, I don't want people like
looking for this stuff. I'm happy to tell them that
ecronomicons not real. It's fun to write about, but it's
not real. Palmer is literally the opposite.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he's taking stuff that's not real and wholesale re
regurgitating it as as this true.
Speaker 2: Story that's really good. I mean, that's a really good comparison. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he has a much faster impact. And I
think that's important to note. Lovecraft stuff does eventually inspire
a lot of ancient aliens. I think ancient aliens would
have happened without him, But he's a huge influence on it.
Palmer immediately, so these stories, the Shaver stories, they blow up.
But yeah, sci fi fans aren't happy. He quickly gets
kicked out of Amazing Stories, but he had already kind
of started to build a escape plan and found several
new magazines, including Fate Magazine, which becomes a major standard
of the paranormal world. In nineteen forty seven, when Flying
Saucers emerge hed, they get instantly locked into the Shaver
mystery because he'd been talking about, you know, flying from
the caverns of Mountain Shaft and all that, and he
hires Kenneth Arnold, the guy from the first Flying Saucers sighting,
to go investigate the Moury Island UFO hoax.
Speaker 6: Yes, indeed, Moury Island is one of those oh my god,
it shows up in everything. I don't know, if you
guys read the background literature for the latest Twin Peaks,
Moury Island is like one of the major subplots in there.
And then in the podcast Tannis, they use Marie Islands
as a plot point. So it's one of these things
that is alive and well. And I expect, you know,
a Hellier type documentary about Mario any minute. Did Josh
Gates just deal?
Speaker 5: No, he's he's trying to go legit one of the
big shows that.
Speaker 3: They did it on, well, they did it on UFO
Hunters years ago.
Speaker 6: Es they did, but there was one that just ran
like a couple of weeks ago where they were looking
at some of the metal from Morio at I it
might have.
Speaker 5: Been Josh Gates, I can't remember. They all read it's
all just one.
Speaker 3: So I have heard, I'm hesitant to say this this way,
I have heard responsible UFOE people that I kind of
do actually like as historians if you fology, et cetera,
et cetera, who are really fascinated by moriy Island. And
I'm not like, it's pretty obviously a hoax.
Speaker 2: It was a hoax. While uh Keith Arnold was still
on the ground, he knew it was. Yeah, I mean,
it was a host. But the fact that it's being
regurgitated and uh and heated up and swallowed as a
are presented as a scrumptious meal is disturbing to me
because it's a although like Groswell, it's grown a little bit,
not even close to as much as Roswell's grown, but
it's grown.
Speaker 3: It's comparable to like Aztech, the az Tech UFO story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 6: Has.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's let's talk about it. I mean, I don't
want to go off into a huge tangent about Marie Island,
but basically, people claim that they saw UFO and it
dropped slag or metal parts on their metal.
Speaker 5: Burning burning silver metal slags, and.
Speaker 2: It killed killed their dog. And uh, Palmer got very
excited because he wanted to cover it for his new magazine.
Speaker 3: So he hires Kenneth Arnold, the pilot right and and
and fire extinguisheder salesman, to to go out and investigate it. Yeah. Now,
Paul literally like a movie.
Speaker 2: I mean, Kedith Arnold is not a UFO investigator, he's
not in any investigator, and he it's he realizes he's
kind of in over his head really quickly.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The people there are, the people who are making the
claims are cagey, to say the least, they're inconsistent. And ultimately, yeah,
the slag turns out to be from a nearby foundry
if I remember correctly.
Speaker 3: Well, that's that gets a little conflict. And then they
put it on a plane to take it away because
the air Force is actually investigating, and the plane crashes
kills two air Force officers, and I think the two
reasons this is continuing to reverberate through wu Landia uh
is one, the plane crash adds this element and I'm like, wow,
that's not awful back to Salem. But two, because Fred
Christman shows up in the friggin Jim Garrison JFK investigation.
Oh yeah, one of the guys involved in this.
Speaker 6: Well there's two. There's two additional legacies. It shows up
in Gray Barker's book. I think it came out in
fifty six All Men in Black Business, much about the
Flying Sauces and Diestic twelve documents reference it after that.
Speaker 5: So it's it's got a story that keeps rolling.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it becomes an anchor point that you can hand,
you can hang stuff on it, basically, but it's itself.
There's not much there there.
Speaker 3: Well, let me let me ask you all. So Arnold
when he goes out there, says, oh my god, somebody
like phoned ahead and got me a hotel room. And
I don't know who did it. I want to like,
I want to ask you, is it a Arnold is
just making that shit up? Or b is it Ray Palmer?
Speaker 2: I assumed Palmer.
Speaker 5: It's Ray Palmer.
Speaker 3: It's got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean, Palmer was trying to build this UFO mythology
once he got to Fate, and Fate is the place
where it all happens, right, and.
Speaker 2: Fate is because so he goes to found Fate. He's
partnered with is a Jern Clark, Well, Jermee Clark's one
of the editors. Later, yes, later it's pick.
Speaker 3: Well, while you're trying to think of that, it was
just the Fullers, yeah.
Speaker 2: Well the family. Yeah, but he was to get away
from Ziff Davis because they're ever so slightly limiting his
editorial control.
Speaker 3: Right, So let's let's do a very quick chronology here.
Nineteen forty five forty six Shaver mysteries explode, but they're
causing controversy, and Palmer's like, I need to do something else,
and he wants to go paranormal. It's very very clear.
Forty seven flying Saucers. He hires Arnold to go investigate
More Island. Now here's the thing. Nineteen forty seven Flying
Saucers June twenty fourth, and then a whole bunch of
sightings over about three weeks, and it basically ends with
the flying disc at Roswell on July eighth, nineteen forty seven,
and after that there aren't really a lot of Flying
Saucer things. Now in the halls of power inside the Pentagon,
there is actual interest with Project Sign and then later
Project Grudge, Project Saucer all that, but out in the public.
While it's a fun, weird thing, they don't generally associated
with aliens or martians. It's they're probably weapons, and it
kind of goes away, and it only sort of re
emerges in nineteen fifty and fifty one when it begins
to be what we think of as UFOs today, that
they're aliens, that they're you know, all the stuff that
we now think of those three years is when Palmer
is building it.
Speaker 6: I mean, don't forget. Do not forget that. The first episode,
issue volume one, number one, and I've got it right
over here of Fate Magazine was headlined with Kenneth Arnold's
The Truth about the Flying Saucer. They used that story
of him flying in his Sessna seeing the discs out
across the sky as the foundation for this new business opportunity.
Speaker 3: And it is a business, yes, When so that we
didn't call Palmer the man who invents flying saucers that
actually comes from John Keel. Yes, yep, and I think
he's largely right.
Speaker 2: I don't disagree at all. The more I read around this,
the more I became convinced that we wouldn't have flying
saucers and that whole lore the way we do today.
If it hadn't been for Palmer, it would be very different.
It'd be very differ. Indeed, it'd be very different, and
Fate I became like a really safe place to talk
about any kind of weird.
Speaker 3: Well not just any kind of weird shit. I'd like
to point out when he creates his basic thesis for
what Fate is, it is like, yeah, we're going to
investigate like I don't know, ancient mysteries, and I'm like mother,
It's just like, can I get away from it? You know,
spooky archaeology is always at the base. It is always
at the base because it's it's the myth that props
all the rest of it up. But I digress.
Speaker 6: I want to point out one thing about UFOs. You know,
the people in the government aren't dumb, and people in
the government read Trashy pull Up Magazine two yep, and
Roswell is buy ranches in Utah. They buy ranches in Utah,
they collect twenty plus thousand occult books and sit in
Victorian libraries doing podcasts in the middle of the night too.
The thing to realize is that when Oswell happened, it
was the government that said it was a UFO, and
that becomes a kind of a kind of beat throughout
the Cold War. And I would offer up the hypothesis
that if a government counterintelligence person would much rather have
Joe Public looking up at the sky and seeing something
weird and saying, well, what's a man from Mars, then
that's an exotic spacecraft or an exotic piece of aeronautics.
So there's there's a there's there's a lot of reification
that goes on in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, where
where the UFO movement suits a.
Speaker 5: Lot of diverse interests in a very convenient way.
Speaker 3: I I don't know how much it does earlier earlier,
my own personal take. Earlier, I think a lot of
it is accidental. It's I think I think Roswell's entirely accidental.
But by the eighties it's not. By the eighties, they
are clearly doing.
Speaker 6: But Roswell just it works so well.
Speaker 2: So yeah, oh, we should probably take a moment here
and say rest in peace Stanton Freeman. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
all right.
Speaker 3: Just that curiosity. Did either of you meet him ever?
I've met him, Yeah, yeah. I only met him once.
I saw him give a talk once, and then I
met him in an Applebee's because he was the only
place near the hotel out near the airport in Albuquerque,
and he sat down next to me. When I went
to the UFO festival in Roswell, he sat down next
to me when I was trying to understand this whole thing.
I'm like, well, guys built this myths. Just sat down
and we had this conversation. And that was when I realized.
Prior to that conversation I thought he was not just
full of like Charlatan. I thought he was making this
stuff up. That conversation made it clear to me that
he wasn't. He actually did believe this stuff. It's just
that he had given the talks that he gives.
Speaker 2: So many times. Yeah, yeah, that it.
Speaker 3: Comes across as canned and insincere. Yeah, but no, I
met him once and it was it was actually quite interesting.
I don't believe he's right about pretty much anything involving Roswell.
But I digress.
Speaker 2: I don't know Matt Moneymaker, but the times I've interacted
with him, I believe that Matt Moneymaker believes the things
he says. I mean, yes, he's figured out a way
to make money on it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he has a very unfortunate last name. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, you know his.
Speaker 5: Dad's name is Rich Moneymaker, which.
Speaker 7: Is oh, oh my, oh my god, you know my pick.
Speaker 6: I run into this guy in the government all the time.
You know, it's an interesting character who who was highly educated,
often Ivy league educated, you know, xtremely privileged and smart
person who will plant the flag on something and let
it destroy their career. And it's such a I don't
know if because we don't have to do we have
to be.
Speaker 5: Right enough to keep getting paid.
Speaker 6: I think there's a there's not a lot of self
checking as you as you age. And Friedman always struck
me as one of these guys who had just he
had planted a flag on this thing.
Speaker 5: It was paying his bill.
Speaker 6: It mean, into enough of a celebrity for him to
you know, get the ego ego boost out of it
that he was sort of satisfied with the idea he
was right about what was happening. But it's a it's
a trait among academics that I mean, it just happens,
like everybody knows that kooky guy who believes in well,
I mean there's some Jeff mir there's some characters out
there who have just planted a flag on this thing.
Broke anyone in conversation, anyone in this conversation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I would say with Friedman, I personally think, uh,
we should get back to Shaver in a second. But
I personally think that my own belief is that he
kind of got stuck with MJ twelve. Like I absolutely
think he thought it was an amazing Watergate at the beginning,
and I think at some point I think cognitive dissonance
is a hell of a drug.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it is. And those documents are not authentic, like
I have analyzed them myself. If I know anything, it's
government documents and the history of how they were produced,
and those are not authentic government documents. There there are
too many obvious flaws in them. Yeah, I mean, it's
a very good hoax by somebody who did not know
if I hoaxed the government document from that time period,
you would not be able to to tell that.
Speaker 5: It was a hoax.
Speaker 6: So this was not someone who was don't don't about
that stuff, man, don't about that stuff, I.
Speaker 3: Mike, all right, So so Shaver, So Shaver and Palmer.
They continue to the Shaver mysteries for like a couple
of years, and then it basically becomes flying Saucers.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it morphs into the flying flying souther religion almost, yeah, Saucerianism.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And the first wave of contactees sort of
start to appear basically doing what I would argue Palmer
was doing, taking decades of the Western occulture tradition or
a century or more of the Western culture tradition and
Sci fiing it. Yep. Yeah, So like like Adamski, like
like all the others.
Speaker 2: That's a really interesting distinction though, the the religious approach,
the spiritual approach, the New Age approach, versus the nuts
and bolts approach, or like what I would say, the
sincere inquiry into what are these things and where do
they come from? Uh, there's there's a pretty big divibe
between the people who have been given wisdom from these
craft and from the inhabitants of these craft uh. And
the people who just see lights in the sky and
have strange experiences. Uh. And and that that early schism,
as far as I can tell, it's still out there.
Speaker 3: I don't. I don't. I don't know if it is anymore.
I well, I mean, I'm a champion for the puff
do you know that? But it's not like it, you know,
it's it's not like it is when there's a keyho
around or nycap or anything like that.
Speaker 2: Well, what about what did Tom DeLong stuff? What do
you think their goal is?
Speaker 3: Tom DeLong is working with the dude with the ranch,
with Space poultergeists.
Speaker 6: It's Space Poulter guys and and techno wizardry.
Speaker 3: And the higher wolves and synchronicity. No, there's no barrier there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And you know, I say, you're saying the
barrier is just broken down completely, gotcha. It's not not
that one side one or the other they just merged.
Oh no, I think one side one, Well, who won the.
Speaker 3: I personally think that the putting theology on the end
of weird shitology, cryptozoology, uthology, parapsychology is largely a structure
of the social status of the sciences. In the middle
of the twentieth century, and as that social status declines,
so do they. We live in a world. Here's anology
for you. We live in a world of a new demonology.
But this idea that I'm going to looking for a
gigantopithecus or a plesiosaur, or I'm trying to understand recurrent
spontaneous psychokinesis, or I'm looking for people from Zeta reticuli
makes a lot of sense from basically the end of
World War Two and maybe a little earlier and about
the nineteen seventies. And that's when it begins to break down.
Is in that period, and I think at this point
it's gone.
Speaker 6: Well. I will admit that I have two things in
common with Kenny Fetter, well three things if you count
the profanity. A degree in archaeology. And I first learned
about Eric von Danakin in a barber shop. I was
Carl's barber shop in Louisville, Texas, as a high school
junior senior. And in the pile of books you could
read that smelled like nicotine and you know barber oil
was a copy of von Dannakin's first book, and I
started reading it and to my sixteen or seventeen year
old mind, you know, steeped in the religion of Indiana Jones,
it made a five sense, But after I finished about
my second or third class as an undergraduate in formal archaeology,
it didn't make a lick of sense. But I can
totally understand how people who are exposed to that stuff,
well crafted and well written, could totally turn Jesus into
first and ascended Master and then second into an alien.
Like it makes perfect it's logistically logically convenient.
Speaker 3: To preserve your beliefs, like I think, it's actually harder
to keep it as nuts and bolts or pelts and paws. Yes,
like I have. I have very hard times with a
gigantopnthists Bigfoot. I actually have less problems with demon portal
Bigfoot because I don't know how Demon's great work, but
I know how Gigantopithecus would probably work.
Speaker 6: Actually, I wrote a I wrote a blog about that
for a friend of mine's paranormal cy called Quantum Bigfoot,
where I made that same case where I was like, look, guys,
a dimension time hopping Bigfoot is more believable than Bigfoot, Like, yeah,
there's nothing in the fossil record. There's no way this like,
if you want.
Speaker 5: To believe in Bigfoot, believe in Bigfoot.
Speaker 6: As a time hopping alien, not as any kind of
a North American primate, because there's nothing about Bigfoot that
makes any food sense.
Speaker 2: So what you're saying is that the Bionic Bigfoot was
a documentary.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean that's a lot closer now. And so
here's I think.
Speaker 3: Where this ties into the into the the Shaver stuff
is that you have sort of flying saucers get taken
over and it explodes in an era of big science.
Initially there's contact ease and they kind of, you know,
die on the vine for a bit. The Shaver stuff,
the fact that the sort of the initial seed is
straight out of theosophy, it's straight out of Lovecraft, it's
straight out of all those things. I think that that
is I think there's an element of the fruit for
the fruit of a poison tree. I think the fact
that it's since it's there at the beginning, Yes, you
can have people talk about radar traces and government conspiracies
for a while, but eventually it was going to go
back there and it absolutely has u And I think
that that's one of the integral parts of Shaver is
Shaver gets downplayed and made to be this weird, little
quaint thing by historians of sort of eufology, not necessarily
historians of contact eaism or flying saucersm but historians of euthology.
But you fast for the early twenty first century, and
it looks, frankly, a lot more like the Muria than
it looks like Zada Reticuli.
Speaker 6: Well I drew down from the shelf.
Speaker 5: Here the book that changed all of that.
Speaker 6: It is The Interrupted Journey The Lost Hours of Border
Flying Saucer by John G. Fuller, And my copy is
autographed by Benjamin Sein and the doctor who wrote the introduction.
So this is of course the Barney and Betty Hill
case took uphology out of the hands of people like
Palmer and legitimize. That's nineteen sixty five, so that's roughly
twenty years after the Shaver mysteries first show up, and
about eighteen seventeen years after Roswell, and it completely changed.
It opened the door for the spiritual version of ufology
that we see in the seventies.
Speaker 3: I would say two books in quick succession do that
one and Passport to Magonia. Yeah, absolutely, and Passport to Magonia.
I only only learned this back and I read it
years ago, and I had forgotten this. I was preparing
for a paper I was given earlier this year at
a conference on like the Deep Past and fairies and
all this stuff. It opens with pacall sarcophagus, Right, what
the fuck.
Speaker 2: Is which straight out of cheers to the gods.
Speaker 6: That's the Yeah, the magicians.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the these two. Well, yeah, there's that, There's that
whole element. But yeah, the basically Shaver anticipates and well
Shaver doesn't Palmer anticipates all. Well, I guess Shaver does.
I mean Shaver and Essence is anticipating the sexually charged
narratives of abductions.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely absolutely, And that's that's that runs right.
Speaker 5: Through all the Shaver stories, right up until the very
last ones.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean his like we were talking about how
the pulps were slowly becoming basically erotica and porn. His
stuff had to be massively tamped down to make it
into the pages.
Speaker 6: Well, he has in the story, he has a wife
that lives with him in the cave, who's very like
the woman that people in the real movement see from
time to time, like like hot blonde women you know,
giving you the good news is a pretty common trope
at this time, and contact.
Speaker 3: Ease with the same thing, with our rains and all
of that. And then there's all this weird like sort
of sado masochism and these other kind of like ageah,
this weird stuff.
Speaker 6: Is it, Jeb You may know, because I don't. Is
it Palmer that introduces the whole concept of the Nordics
and the tall whites and that whole.
Speaker 3: No, uh, not really because because honestly, in Lameria and
Shaver stuff, it's all they're all weird and giant sixty
foot snake women elder things.
Speaker 6: So all that comes from the contacts.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, the early fifties. But it's just like the
stuff before.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, but isn't it basically repurposing the
stuff from Blovatsky with the race core types in some sense?
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Well and also quite a
few of the contact ees, I mean, so you know,
I've gotten this far without mentioning Michael Barkum, but you know,
quite quite a few of the contactees are have other
kinds of rejected knowledge, like like Nazism. Yeah, and so
one of the one of the contacts, George Hunt Williams
Williamson that Shaver or Palmer published, was basically a Nazi sympathizer. So, yeah,
the tall Whites and the Nordics and all of that.
You know, the the idea that the Nazis had a
base in Antarctica and they had super secret technology that
was coming from Nazi sympathizers within years of the war.
Speaker 2: Yes, let's let's let's actually hop back to this timeline
thing for just to make because we're gonna I want
to get to that, but I wanted to come in
context to the timeline. So we have this controversy in
Palmer and the fandom. He breaks off and forms Fate magazine.
Speaker 3: They're forty eight, there are.
Speaker 2: We've talked about a monster talk before.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: The other big media at the time around this kind
of stuff was long John nebyllh Nebll Yeah, and so
Long John was already having on contact Ease and psychics
and all sorts of things. Uh, and he started to
include some of the Shaver mystery stuff on his show.
So that was coming out of New York and they
actually had the shows the party line, the party line. Yeah,
it was. It was a precursor to Coast to Coast.
If you haven't listened to our episode about it, I
recommend that you do. So there's some there's some audio
out on YouTube. We can put links to that in
the show notes. It's it's really amazing. I think it
holds up very well. It's very engaging.
Speaker 6: Uh, listen to it because this was at a time
when everyone, every American white male sounded angry.
Speaker 3: Uh, that's that's not happened since.
Speaker 6: But it's like, sir, it's it's the opposite of the
Rogan experience where it's like, sir, do you mean, sir? Sir, sir.
It's it's hilarious to listen to.
Speaker 2: They're very polite, but but like you say, the anger certitude.
People people are eloquent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot
of eloquence.
Speaker 6: And but then there's some great Brooklyn accents in there too.
Speaker 2: There are there are you can be eloquent and be
from Brooklyn.
Speaker 3: I mean, what we're hearing Palmer talk on the radio
does not help your attitude towards his credibility.
Speaker 2: No, but you know, you know, we've talked about Palmer
all this time, we haven't mentioned something really important about Ray.
Speaker 1: Ray.
Speaker 2: Ray had a physical injury when he was about seven
years old, and as a consequence of that, his back
was broken and he spent a huge amount of time
locked into traction. They thought he was gonna die. Basically,
he was sent off to a centatearium to die. There's
various versions of this story, but Ray was apparently about
four feet tall because of his back injury. Yeah, he
has a hunchback. I think Jerry mentioned that, and that's
how he self described.
Speaker 6: And this is of course why he does not go
to World War Two if we're wondering he was. He
was not a countard or a draft on it.
Speaker 3: He had never been drafted yet.
Speaker 2: Right, right, So he did other things, you know, he
entertained people, I suppose. But this this is actually tied
to this interesting thing that you mentioned before, Jeb, where
people are contacting you and they're thinking you're talking about
Ray Palmer the Adam. Yes, and this is I find
this fascinating. So what happened is the Adam was one
of those characters that d C had picked up and
was going to revitalize, and so they decided to turn
the atom into a science hero. And this is Julias
Schwartz who was doing this work, and he's a friend
of Ray Palmer's, and he calls up Ray and says, hey,
I want to turn the atom into a hero again.
We're gonna do it DC, and I want to name
him after you. And of course the joke being that
the Adam's power is he's very small, but he's also
a science guy, which is I think, uh, I think
not that accurate. I mean, Ray is known for his
science fiction work, but when you actually read what Ray wrote,
it's not that science Yuh well, yeah.
Speaker 6: Let me let me cavea out. That just a little
bit blake if you read the old fake magazines. We're
kind of being a little hard on him. Fate did
a lot of hard science, and they did, and in
later years in the seventies, they did a lot of
good debunking on once Palmer had kind of left the scene.
But Fate is brought low by the worst of it.
But there's actually some damn good stuff in there. There
are whole issues that read more like like Popular Mechanics
than then a UFO zine.
Speaker 3: So you're saying it's more Discovery Channel than History Channel.
Speaker 6: It's more Discovery Channel than History Channel in that occasionally
there is a little nugget of goodness in a sea
of just stuff I watch while I'm.
Speaker 5: Folding my laundry.
Speaker 2: Well I have I don't have some of the really
oldest fates, but I do have some. Uh the the
Watertown ghosts mystery I tried.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, was that boy that was.
Speaker 5: Born out of Fate magazine, wasn't it?
Speaker 2: To an extent? I mean, the the photo existed long
before that, But the first serious investigation, well even that's
not true. Harowood Carrington investigated it, but I don't know
if he published his work, But the later on it
got researched in most of the details we have, and
one of the better photos we have of the original
is from Fate as well. So yeah, yeah, So anyway,
I didn't mean to sidetrack on that, but the uh yeah,
Palmer has broken off from this, and so I was
gonna say, the science fiction community is mad at him
because he keeps keeping this coy attitude around whether or
not these things are true. Does he really believe in
the Shaver mysteries? Is that stuff's really supposed to be
happening or is it all fiction or what is going on?
And one of the famous stories around that is that
at one of these science fiction conventions, which were still
in their early days back then, Palmer gets cornered in
a elevator by a fan who's also a writer, a
guy named Harlan Ellison, and Ellison insists that Ray tell
the truth about what's going on with the Shaver mysteries.
Speaker 3: And I'm just gonna put this out there, Harlan Ellison
would make if I was in an elevator with him,
he would make me pee my pants because he's a
terrified individual.
Speaker 2: He was a very terrifying individual. He was also not
very tall. I was just these both of these guys
are basically titans within science fiction, yet tiny and life
so uh, I just imagining the two of them having
that encounter in elevator. I would have loved to have
been a fly on the wall. But Ray basically said, look,
I was cornered, I was an elevator. It was obvious.
Harlan wasn't going to let me go until I confess.
So I gave him what he wanted, so he let
me out of the elevator.
Speaker 8: Right, let's a shame him. Let me talk with Ray
Palmer again for a couple of minutes, if you will,
please Hello, hell right, ask it lay sometime. Ad All.
We had a young man on the program just about
a year ago, a young man who writes science fiction. Yes,
and he made the statement that he met you at
a convention of science fiction writers convention a few years back.
That is correct. And you know who I'm referring to
the thank you, Harlem Ellison at that he made the
statement on the program here the two gold him. That's
the uh, that's the shame in tree all things that
you published them just to create good circulation for amazing history. Well,
I think now that that's demands an explanation, which I
think I can give you when you try.
Speaker 6: Please.
Speaker 8: When I went to that convention, I was very sick.
I was invited to the convention and made the trip
inspite of being ill. Now, when I got there, I
expected to receive what D say, courteous reception, and instead
I met with a group which I which I believe
was mostly linked with mister Ellison. It would have me
decided that they were going to bagine me. I see now.
They kept asking questions which actually you can't answer without
it's a sort of a question to do you well
beat your wife in the fact ration. Finally, when he
to in front of me in the cellarator, I said, well,
what do you want me to answer to the question?
He said the truth. I said, well, I've told you
the truth and you haven't existed. This is my only
alternative is to tell you what you want to hear.
And this is entirely fiction, and that it was donal
their purpos's raising circulation. Now this was done in what
you might say, with anger. It was done off but
said hadn't, and it was done to rid myself of
these this group which intended to follow me the home
the whole of convention and apparently we're having to take
you the fun out of measuring me. They had no
intentions of of giving me a chat to get out.
Sary say, I'm saying that is the actual conditions in
my statements semester Ellison. I've had several runn with mister
Allison sis and one of them came about as a
result of his oppearance on your program. And I did
at that time tell him that I at my statement,
Sam and I elevator work were in the in the
vein that we got to just describe to you. I see,
I think it's cold, easily understand that.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 8: I don't believe that it is necessary to give an
honest fanswers or personal UH. Does give me the courtesy
I see of the chance to give you an honor STANSWERU. Actually,
I don't think that anybody with the against an editor
trying to increase the circulation of a magazine. Well, I
want to clarify that too. If I wasn't hired by
this Day's too to get a lot of returns. I
was hired to sell magazine. And I realized from the
very beginning that the fam Mystery was the thing that
was so magazine. He had certainly from around fifty thouds
when I took this thing over, and it was and
thirty five thous when I got hold of the gabor mestery.
Over night we raised in fifty and eighty five thousands,
which is a finger for a fiction magazine of that type.
Speaker 3: That's possibly the most honest thing I've ever heard him say.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it truly is. But it's impossible to underscore how
small that community was at that time.
Speaker 2: And he's not talk about how tall they were. He's
talking about how tiny the community in number.
Speaker 6: I regret that I'm just slightly too young to have
gotten out of the early sort of sci fi stuff
that I went to in the eighties and early nineties,
because that community even then was very small.
Speaker 5: You could show a bit of sci fi.
Speaker 6: Convention and meet legends, yeah know, and not only meet him,
you could eat lunch with him.
Speaker 5: Yes, like that anymore.
Speaker 3: This is when it was still actually like freaks and
geeks and weirdos and not the only thing that is
the part of our economy, right.
Speaker 6: Exactly, So have Harlan Ellison and Ray Palmer in the
same elevator is not fantastical. It also underscores the extent
of which the Shaver mysteries at the time were influential,
and we've just sort of decided to forget about them.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, because upologists absolutely wanted to
you know, the you know, Keyho and nihap and and
traditionally euthology. They didn't want to do with the contact ees,
they didn't want to do with occupant cases, they didn't
want to do with crashes. All these things were being
reported and said, and they're like no, just radar, just photos. Okay,
maybe because there's a hypnosis involved this couple in New Hampshire,
maybe with the with the hills. Yeah, but this was
a large chunk of it. I don't I don't know.
I would say the bulk of it. But there's been
a long history of pelts and pause or nuts and bolts,
people ignoring demonological or religious imagery, and abduction cases or
strange you know, portals and UFOs and whatnot in cryptozoology
cases and all these things being weird in your mixed
and I would argue that it is when people are
able to tell these stories themselves, not unlike the letter
columns with the Internet, that all of a sudden.
Speaker 6: This comes back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know that the gatekeepers aren't gatekeeping.
Speaker 6: So the point is is that Ray Palmer created, in
his own way what we might call modern Saucerianism, with
the idea that in his mind, the Saucerians, the creatures
from another planet, didn't come from another planet, they came
from inside the Earth, right Like. That was what he
was pushing, is that these these critters that we see
as aliens were actually the precursors to modern humanity.
Speaker 3: And in a way.
Speaker 6: That's a lot neater and cleaner than the idea that
somebody could develop faster than light travel and get here
to planet Earth.
Speaker 5: And that's like using them and then look like us exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, And in fact, you see that idea that
things were here and then they go out. I mean
the X Files eventually went there, for example, in fiction,
all the time afterwards you know it's it. And of
course there's elements of the previous writers have been talking
about as well. No, it's super influential and no one
wants to mention it. And I kind of get why.
Like I have been trepidacious about this episode, because the
more I read of I remember Lemuria, the more I
read this, I'm like, I don't like this guy. Like
this guy is using a man with clear mental problems
with mental illness, taking his stuff and capitalizing and searching
for others like he's for other shavers. She just didn't
find them. Yeah, and then coyly, which is probably the
most polite way one can tricks to really say it
spins it into a small industry all for the benefit,
and he pretty much just smirks about it through the
rest of his life. And I'm like.
Speaker 1: The one.
Speaker 3: The sort of the takeaway from me, I have been
interested in this stuff sense of very early age, you know,
like every other gen xer. At some point I could say, well,
I watched in search of you know, but like since
a very early age, I've been interested, and I have
been interested in this academically for a very long time.
And the thing I had always been told by folks is, oh,
don't there's no interest in that. It's just cooks and Charlatans.
You know, it's just people in Arkansas. You know. It's
just now I think they're wrong in terms of the
big social First of all, you look into the history
of redology, it's actually tied very much to elites and
all other kinds of people all across the spectrum. Everyone
has elements of this. It doesn't work that way. And secondly,
it's clearly had a massive impact on our society. It's
been a lot easier to talk about conspiracy theory since oh,
I don't know, November eight, twenty sixteen, but literally getting
to the bottom of flying sauces in UFOs and seeing
a guy hearing stuff from an arc welder and a
guy who's basically a Charlatan selling. It is not really
making me feel good right now about studying people who
believe in UFOL. What happens next?
Speaker 2: What happens next?
Speaker 3: What does he do?
Speaker 2: He goes, he makes Fate magazine. What happens to the
Shaver mysteries?
Speaker 6: I mean he keeps running them up until the fifties.
I think the last Shaver mystery story is nineteen fifty six. Yeah,
and they are heavily built on by other people. I
think it's actually a woman that writes in and proposes
the mythology.
Speaker 3: That's that.
Speaker 6: And this goes to the whole Dulce story. This idea that, uh,
there are elevators that can take you in all world's
major capitals down into.
Speaker 5: The place where the darros and tares exist, push.
Speaker 3: The buttons a certain amount of time or something like that.
Speaker 6: And so there's these people that run around looking for
elevators to try to take them down into.
Speaker 3: The basements under a pizza place.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well can you give it?
Speaker 6: Hit that pizza place and there's no basement there.
Speaker 2: Well, there's no Bob. That's the common problem. Can you
quickly talk about Dulce?
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 2: Some of our listeners have probably never heard of it.
Speaker 6: Oh you have not. You have never done an episode
on Dulce head close as we can't.
Speaker 2: We briefly talked about it when we talked about skim Walker.
Speaker 6: So Dulce Bass was one that was sort of born
out of the Art Bell Show. Really a lot like
John Long. I assume you're if listeners don't know Art Bell,
they need to log out right now.
Speaker 3: And do some different Well comes out of it's a
fair to some degree.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 6: And it's this idea that under Dulcain, New Mexico is
a giant alien base. I'll tell this story since we're
since we're talking, I got a call a couple of
years back. My first job with the agency I worked
for was treaty archivist in the United States. So I
get a call from a guy who a soccer fan
from the UK, who has an English accent and probably
likes Cyan colored shirts, who asked me for a copy
of the greata Treaty between the United States Government, President
Eisenhower and the Gray Aliens. And I informed him without
even walking into the vault, that we did not have
such a treaty. Of course I knew what it was.
This was supposed to be in nineteen fifty four, and
we got into a huge road that lasted about two
hours in discussing this this is not something that you're
supposed to do in your capacity as a government employee.
And whenever he found out my last name was Drake,
that made it. That's a that's a very that's a
very icky situation to be in. Yeah, if your name
is Drake and you work for a certain government agencies,
that's not great.
Speaker 2: You were on the phone for two hours, were able
two hours to get like a snack, like a like
a some ike and mic or hours.
Speaker 6: And there was a point blake where I literally had
my feet up on the wall and I was like
stomping the wall trying to get off the phone with
this guy. The greata treaty does not exist, but it
was a treaty that it was supposed to be between
the Gray aliens, who some people are villainous, who are
in others are good guys. And basically what President Eisenhower
supposedly agreed to was that we would allow the Grays
to take a certain quota of human beings from the
Earth in exchange for access to their advanced technology.
Speaker 5: And I cannot remember the guy's name in God I
wish I could.
Speaker 6: Supposedly, on the Art Bell Show, it was disclosed that
the base where the Grays, the Draco's, the Tall Whites,
all these characters interact and live together is under a
mountain in Dulce, New Mexico, and it goes down into
the part of the world that is inhabited by the
Darrow Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like they were they were they were building
a base, they were already trying to build a base,
and they break into and already existing cavern and they're.
Speaker 6: Like, oh, exactly people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, this this comes out of even I think
even before the Art Bell thing. So there's the Paul
Benowitz stuff in the eighties, and I am blanking on
the name of the abductee that allegedly she has been
down to level six, the hell level the hell where
they are like like mutating people, and that there's people
down there that are screaming for help, but the guards
are said, don't talk to them because they're clearly crazy.
And so if you've ever heard any story stories like
man talk like Pizzagate, like all these things of oh,
by the tens of thousands people are being kidnapped and
used for horrible experiments and sacrificed and cannibalized. This story
in the in the in the eighties, that becomes dulce.
It's very Shaverian, It's extremely shaving.
Speaker 6: It totally is, and it requires shaver for that piece
of the mythology.
Speaker 5: It really was.
Speaker 6: But the idea that you can get on these magical
elevators and go down into the world really adds to
the sort of the mythology of it. I've even I
even saw somebody the other day who suggested that Alyssa
Lamb was trying to get to the the Darro's world
in that elevator in that damn hotel where she ended
up in the Oh God, like these stories.
Speaker 2: That's that's the wrong way she was going up. I know,
I know.
Speaker 6: But the point is is that these stories are so
fluid and so universal in these tropes that anything, it's perfect.
Speaker 3: For the puffed Oh yeah, well, I mean bark Barker's
apocalyptic Uh what does he call it? Improvisational apocalypticism?
Speaker 5: I mean exactly.
Speaker 6: Any Any of your convenient mythologies related to the paranormal
can be folded into this. From QAnon, Pizzagate, Alyssa Lamb.
It all works. You just keep adding, you just keep adding.
You know, lego expansion kits to the original mythology, and
you can go on for it.
Speaker 3: And I think the fact that it starts with Palmer
doing that in fact, gives it part of that cast,
like you know it. I think that I think that
is important to the fact that UFOs have always been
the one like this, you know, you know, we're talking
about the parentlym unified field theory. One could argue it's
a takeover of all the rest by parapsychology. But if
you look at those those things, you look at crypto,
you know, the normal thing that monsters talks about, you
look at parapsychology. For most of the twentieth century, they
if I had to stay within their alleged academic whatever
you want to call it, we're looking for plesiosaurs, we're
looking for psychic abilities. Whatever. UFOs started there, but it
was always the one that bled farther, you know, that
would produce a Kiel, that would produce a Valet, that
would produce abductees and Level six and all of that.
And I think the fact that it started with a
mishmash of Ojaspi and pulps is part of that.
Speaker 6: Well, it's the people's literature in the same way that
four chan and read it and eight chan and all
that is the people's literature. It's a place where those
folks can get affirmation in a way that they can't
get from traditional academia. I mean, they're trying to build
a sidebar to legitimate intellectual pursuit that satisfies their ends.
Speaker 3: And I'm trying to remember the exact quote from Ray Palmer,
but Ray Palmer at some point basically said something like
the purpose of the parent is to make.
Speaker 5: You think, yeah, but it kind of doesn't.
Speaker 3: No, it just makes you regurgitate these ideas, but call
them new and shining.
Speaker 2: He also said, I mean, he also kind of tied
into my pet peeve about the way that fiction and
fantasy sort of overlap and in folklore.
Speaker 1: He said that.
Speaker 2: Fiction often shapes our perception of reality, particularly of the extraordinary,
and he was specifically talking there about how that people's
perception of the unusual is affected by the things they've
read or experienced in the world of fiction. So you're like, yes, yes, yes, Ray, Ray, Yes,
the things you are writing, is affecting how people perceive
the stuff that they're experiencing. Yes, exactly so. And also
one more thing that I think is of interest. There's
a sort of stereotype of the skeptic who just dismisses
these weird claims as that person's got a mental illness.
That person and you know in the non piece way
that that person's crazy.
Speaker 3: Like all the people telling me why you're looking into.
Speaker 2: This, right, exactly so. The thing is, though, there are
people with mental illness, and I think in this particular case,
multiple people with mental illness have been taken advantage of,
manipulated and lost a lot because of others who were
trying to control the narrative. Not just Benwitz, not just Shaver.
I'm thinking here of like Phil Schneider, who was another
dulce person who.
Speaker 3: Well, well here's one for you. I mean, so Shaver.
But to be fair, as I sort of alluded to earlier,
Shaver's life actually sort of settles down. He I mentioned
the rocks. We should probably have mentioned this. He eventually
starts finding like pictures in rocks everywhere, which is a
whole other fascinating thing. But paranoid, yeah, which I mean,
as an archaeologist, people are constantly bringing to our office like, yes,
I found this, I found this, and like that's a rock,
and they're like, oh, but it's got this, like it's
a rock. And then at some point I just have
to I'm like, look, I'm sorry, I can't tell you anymore.
But here's a here's an excellent example. So Shaver and Palmer,
Shaver's life settled down and he kind of found a purpose,
and one could argue again sort of a certain therapy.
But here's one for you. The mon Talk project, where
you have these guys that clearly have stuff going on
with them, which gets which gets rationalized into well, they
have problems because of all the awful things that were
done to them in the caverns underground for a Shaverian,
which then not only develops a whole bunch of paranormal
war becomes the clear basis given that the show was
initially going to have the title mon Talk, Yeah of
Stranger Things Thanks, which becomes this gigantic thing and inspires
a whole bunch more based off of people that are
basically based off of like modern day Richard Shavers.
Speaker 2: And causes revitalization of Dungeons Dragons. Well, that's true.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the the Stranger Things Dungeons and Dragons set is
pretty sweet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have seen one and it is pretty nifty.
But yeah, no, this is this is a recurring theme,
Like I have I have long thought someone not me
needs to write an article about this kind of diad
of an a exploiter or whatever word you want to use,
and someone who has like clearly getting things that there's
there's some sort of mental health element and it's being
rewritten and repurposed. Benewitz is an example. Mon Talk's an example. Uh,
the Philadelphia Experiment falls in here. Oh yeah, and there
are there are others.
Speaker 6: Carlos Ayende, the Philadelphia Experience, Montak. I don't want to
talk about Montac. I think there will be a time
in the future when people will talk about Montak, but
now it's not the time to talk about it. But
with Carlos Sayende and in the Philadelphia Experiment, that was
just literally a very sick person who who had found
a hobby that people just decided to believe in. Like
he's a guy that just wrote crazy stuff in books
and people decided to adopt it as a and man
Philadelphia experiment.
Speaker 5: That is one of the ones I really want to believe.
I really want to believe it.
Speaker 6: I loved that movie as a kid. It was so
perfect and the mythology is so rich. I just want
that one to be true so badly.
Speaker 3: It's a it's a great iya. I mean Burlitz, you know,
he batted a thousand on that bring me the Triangle
Roswell Incident, Philadelphi experiment, you know, publishing that stuff in
the seventies. He had a very Palmrian like I for
inspired talent, if you want to put it that way.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean the Eldridge story. I mean the Eldridge
is now the last time I looked into it, it
was a Greek shipping vessel. But I mean, none of
the story is true, and and Carl Allen was not
in any of the places he said he was in.
But it just it's just great and it and it
was so compelling that even the Office of Navy Intelligence
slipped into it like they got that thing and was like, look, man,
we need to take a look at this.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Well, that that's a topic for a whole other discussion.
The the the reification or the not the ratification. The
ratification of of claims. When the government's like, oh, we'll
look into it, and it's like oh no, no, no, no, no,
no no, no, higher hire a freaking folklors higher anthropology use.
Speaker 2: As soon as they look into it, it gives it
just it gives it a.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, governments look into it. There's gotta be something there.
Speaker 6: So I have to say this, like the volume of
crazy mail we get is you couldn't even conceive.
Speaker 5: But I don't even want to talk about how much
crazy mail we get at work.
Speaker 6: And but yet we still have to read it and
go mm hmm, there's nothing here, there's nothing here, there's
nothing here.
Speaker 5: Wait a minute, wait a minute, we better look into
this one.
Speaker 6: And as soon as you have to look do some
due diligence on something, it gives it a lot of legitimacy.
And then the whole world is suddenly on you, you know,
like flies on what flies go on, you know, and
that you know, the government is cognizant of that, Like
we tend to be fairly careful about our level of
exposure because again, we read this stuff, we understand this stuff,
and we know that as soon as we put our
eye on something that the world's eyes on it. So,
but people stumble onto stuff all the time that they
interpret incorrectly and and then write letters about I mean,
that's just reality. Yep, it's true.
Speaker 2: It's true. But uh uh, well, the thing is And
I realized we've kind of rambled all over the place
because but there's first of all, I knew we would,
and and second of all, it's because this story has
threads that go all over American weird culture. I mean
all over the place.
Speaker 5: And so I want to I want to ask you.
Speaker 6: A question, doctor Atlantis. Who is the monster in the
Shaver Mysteries story? Is it UFOs? Is it the Darrows?
Is it mental illness?
Speaker 3: Who?
Speaker 5: Who is the monster in this story?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: I mean capitalism, the Americans, the American failed mental health system. Yeah,
how about that?
Speaker 5: How about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Uh the the if if America had a better
mill health care system, then instead of being imprisoned and
locked up and maltreated, then maybe Shaver would have gotten
some help that he desperately needed. Now, in a sense,
he got help and was able to make a living
because of Palmer. So in one sense, Palmer as a
person who really values testable reality, Palmer could be seen
as sort of a villain to me, exploitative, But everything
in my reading suggests that Shaver and Palmer did not
have a exploitative relationship. They had a friendship that just
was one that also led to them both relying on
each other to the point.
Speaker 6: That they seem to have moved very close to each
other at a point later, and they died in the
same year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think, you know, a lot of friendships
come and go, and there's was no exception. It had
its ups and downs. But I think Shaver really cared
about Palmer, and I think Palmer really cared about Shaver,
and I think it seemed like by the end of
his life, Richard was getting some pretty decent therapy through
his rock art. Even though it appeared to be nothing
more than paradolia, he was also able to take that
and make fairly impressive looking artwork.
Speaker 3: Out of it and to contextualize it. Yeah, you know,
there's a difference between I'm writing howling manuscripts about like
people being shredded under the earth by cannibals, and hey, look,
I know the mysteries of the universe through my rock art,
Like that's one is a lot healthier. So I mean,
I guess the conversation here, I still don't like Palmer.
I don't know if i'd call him the monster if
I had to actually sort of find a monster. I mean,
I said capitalism somewhat jokingly, but I think I would
elaborate and instead say this, this sort of attitude of like,
it's it's kind of fun, it's kind of true. Does
it really matter that that? Does it really matter? Attitude,
which absolutely Ray Palmer clearly had, yes, and so many
people after him have had. You know, when your smug
friend is like, oh, well, age and aliens, that's fun.
No one really believes that, And I'm like, yeah, actually
they do. They do. They absolutely do. That's the monster
whatever that is.
Speaker 2: No, I agree, I agree. So I want to say
though that Palmer, towards the end of his life we
started to talk about this before, and I cut you
off because I wanted to kind of hit it chronologically.
But he got involved in, first of all, some very
right wing politics. He got involved with supporting some people
who were let's say, Palmer himself tried to distance himself
from the anti semitism, but the people he was publishing
did not.
Speaker 3: And then he became a big fan of George Wallace.
Speaker 2: Yeah wow, Yeah, so making some really I would say,
poor political choices.
Speaker 3: It turns out if you write about hollow Earth ancient civilizations,
he turned into a hell of a racist aka also
a Lovecraft who knew.
Speaker 2: Yeah, except that you can see this today everywhere. But
Palmer also got in with this Giannini guy talking about
the hollow Earth again, this time talking about Admiral Byrd
and the Poles.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Some really weird I would say weird science. It's not
even science fantasy. But it's built on a sort of
a hoax around the idea that bird had actually gone
inside the hollow Earth and knew about it and there
was a governcover up. That was a fairly interesting story because,
as you were.
Speaker 3: Saying, this actually came.
Speaker 2: Out of uh sort of pro Nazis story. But I
do find that that that narrative around the Earth being
hollow is still out there. And oh yeah, it's not
going away. I mean it's it's I it's not as
prevalent as the flat earth.
Speaker 3: Okay, remember when the flat earth was a joke and yeah,
no one really believes that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there is this.
Speaker 6: There is this concept in politics right now, and I'm
not going to make fun of anybody's politics, despite the
temptations that I have to do so that if you
are anti establishment, then you're right by default. I mean,
I'm as establishment as you can come. I believe in
the establishment. I believe in the idea that you work
your way into the establishment and then you you you
advance your agenda based on having earned a place.
Speaker 5: At the table.
Speaker 6: But a lot of people believe that, you know, the
whole idea of righteousness in politics comes from the fact
that you're the ultimate outsider. So anybody's who's anti establishment
by default as a hero. Maybe that's Julian Assange, maybe
that's Brad Manning, Chelsea Manning.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 6: But the reality is is that there is this weird
contingent in American and European politics that if your anti establishment,
you're automatically valid. And I think you see a lot
of that emerging, especially in the fifties and sixties in
this kind of eufology in so Serrianism, where they the
fact that these people have an anti establishment voice automatically
grants them legitimacy. And what I'm seeing is a lot
of people adopting some super effing racist beliefs simply because
they're not part of the establishment right now.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, no, I mean that I would absolutely agree.
And that's the turn we've taken, is oh, if it's
if you know. And again I mentioned Michael Barker. He
wrote Possible, in my opinion, the best book on this
back in two thousand and three or two thousand and two,
culture Conspiracy, whereas like it all gets thrown into the
gutter of rejected knowledge and once it's in there, you're
you're going to pick it up.
Speaker 6: Like there's a little more anti establishment belief than the
idea that the world is not freaking round.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, I don't know. I can't stop laughing
at but it the people who believe it. While they
may be basing that on the way that it drives
other people crazy, some of them are basing it on
the fact that they have bought into this conspiracy.
Speaker 3: That that No, I don't I there was a time
when it was there was there was an ironic component.
I don't think there's much of that left. And I
just want to say, and maybe this is why again
with the Shaver and well Palmer's really the issue why
this kind of really hit some bad buttons with me.
I haven't laughed about any of these topics in a
long No.
Speaker 5: They're not funny. Yeah funny, man.
Speaker 6: I mean this is like we are literally looking at
the birth of everything that created the decadent anti intellectual
culture that we're struggling with right now. Yes, and this
stuff's not funny.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's important. But and this is sometimes where I
have a hard time with some people that do follow this,
where it's like, oh, well, you know, I'll follow this
because it's a music and laugh at the people's like, Okay,
here's your fiddle. There's a city of Rome. It's on fire.
If you haven't noticed it's on fire.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, I.
Speaker 5: Think you've been struggling.
Speaker 6: I can tell Jeb from the your comments with the
idea that studying this stuff is not important. I think
that this is the exact reason why it's important. If
we ignore the fact that people would rather believe some
convenient bullshit as opposed to reality, then our mission is
teachers and educators and scientists is just completely thrown out
the window.
Speaker 3: I know it's important, it's just I struggled for so
long to be like this is an important part of
our culture. Is like, oh, it's just nuts and cranks
and seeing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's missing the point and an.
Speaker 3: Origin point that sounds like that, I guess is just
more that. But no, it's it's far bigger and it's
far and it's far more important. And I think that's
why we have done a very long episode about this,
because it's like, wasn't that just a piece of history.
It's like, no, you don't get where we are today
without this. Yeah, Like this is super integral, and it's
super integral for the way it turned out, Like this
is one of those moments. I'm not saying to send
a terminator back to do something to Ray Palmer, but
this is one of those cases where like, if you
had paid Ray Palmer to go just write space opera,
the future would have turned out quite different.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And the fact that nobody even knows who the
guy is is to me especially compelling, Like we all know,
you know, l Ron Hubbard, but at the end of.
Speaker 3: The day, he's had far less, far less influence on western.
Speaker 6: Far in because he was such an obvious crank. Apologies
to the five scientologists that listen to this part.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I doubt we have five, but but if you
are listening, I hope you're Thetan free good luck.
Speaker 5: Yes, theytan free since ninety three.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, Well, guys, is there anything else we
want to add? Because I feel like we've done a
really good job of covering what's a pretty difficult topic.
I know, I'm going to edit this a little bit.
Speaker 6: Blake.
Speaker 5: This is a very difficult topic because a part of
me wants.
Speaker 6: To just put on my party hat and you know,
drink a gallon of booze and ride through it as
a romp. But then, you know, I'm glad that Jeb
is here to anchor us in the reality that this
stuff is really like, this is the this is the
zeitgeist we're dealing with, and it was born out of
a poor man's inability to understand.
Speaker 5: What was going on inside his head.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I will say to balance that, twenty years ago,
when I really started to look into this more significantly,
I would have talked about Shaver. I remember this because
I talked about it in classes and things of like, oh, well,
it was this weird thinging. Yeah, it's a little questionable
because this guy probably had problems, but this other guy
sort of and now I'm like, oh, fuck this. And
and it's because I because of what has happened and
also seeing it's it's it's tendrils everywhere everything. So I
get I get that tendency because you're like, he's got
a dear girlfriend, not one he finds his deer. One
that's a frickin already adactyl that he's got mind control
raised under the earth. And there's an immediate like, oh
ha ha ha, that's funny. Look at that. You know,
Oh look it rained on the create on the Noah's
Ark and it got broke. Isn't that funny? You know
that that sort of thing.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I mean there's a we kind of talked
about it privately, but there's a documentary out right now
that's Reinventing the paranormal and it's straight out of the
Shaver or mysteries.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, And I mean we've we've talked about it.
I was just say that the hell your thing, it's
it's come up and and and you mentioned it earlier,
and it's it's out of a lot of things. I
don't think it's out of juth, actually I do. But
we'll leave that there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, death is not a planet, by the way, it's
a it's a dwarf planet. It's the dwarf planet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess I think we covered everything. The only
thing I'll see was we didn't talk about Martin Gardner and.
Speaker 3: His uh sort of oh his his his his dissing
on on on Palmer from seeing him in the seventies. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know what, Palmer.
Speaker 3: Palmer does not need anyone to physically observe him to
tell you what he's about. He makes it amply obvious
what he is about.
Speaker 6: Like that.
Speaker 3: That's you know, I don't I saw that part and
I'm like, eh, whatever.
Speaker 5: I mean, I have a question to I know we've
been going a while, but I hope you guys don't
have to work tomorrow. But why.
Speaker 6: Why does it go to the Jews? I mean, you
don't have to put this in the episode, but Jeb,
how does it get there every fun time?
Speaker 3: Well, I'm okay with actually discussing this. I at one
point I would not have been able to answer that question.
I really do think as an archaeologist, there are not
everyone would agree with this, but especially an archaeologists that
works with certain I'm not gonna get into that. I
am a believer in the concept of deep tradition that
while there are huge changes, while there are transformations, that
you can look at certain traditions and see deep echoes
like the area where I am trained and I have
done most of my archaeology, meso America. Does it go
through huge changes over thousands of years? Yes? Can you
see core concepts at all mech sites in eleven hundred
BCE that you see in the Mashika Empire in the
in the fifteenth century? Is it the same? No? Are
there some connections, Yeah, there are. I would argue that
there is a deep myth, a deep tradition that emerges.
I don't know exactly when this is outside my abilities
of a it's clearly tied to I mean, and there's
other versions of this, but there's a specific one, a
specific one that's clearly tied to medieval Christianity. That is
that there are two enemies, that there are a decadent
urban anti christ enemy that starts off being identified with
Jews in Europe in league with a barbarian outside which
is pretty obviously the Turks and you know, and all
of that, and it starts with the pilgrims against Jews
in Europe in the medieval period. Then it transfers over
to the templars where they get the exact same, are
very similar accusations thrown at them that are thrown at
Jews before that, when they are thrown out of countries.
Then about a century and a half later, which panics
which had not happened before, but they're the exact saying, oh,
they don't meet in the Sabbah, they meet in the Sabbath.
It's very very different. And then that gets thrown onto
Illuminati and Masons and Catholics, and then it gets thrown
on onto Illuminati again. Uh, and then we get into
the Satanic panic, and then we get to Pizzagate and
QAnon right exactly. So I think it's I don't think
it's it's not one of these reinvent things. I think
there's an element of that. I used to like when
I started looking at witch trials, I'm like, oh, it's
what I call the crucible model. Well, when you get
in a certain kind of circumstance, these ideas like reinvent,
it's like the circumstances make them more palatable to more people,
make them more possible to be in the mainstream. The
idea is centuries old, so I think I think that's
why I think. I think these ideas are much older
and they get transformed. But the reason they're successful is
that they're digging into a thing that's already there.
Speaker 5: The enemy has a certain set of characteristics that.
Speaker 6: Translate over to the person who seeks to persecute the enemy,
and the hedgemon has to make itself into a victim.
I believe that's the case. The hedgemon in this case,
the white American male, has to be a victim in
order to engage in persecution. And that's a pattern that
has existed as long as humanity has been around.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's as
long as humanity. I don't know about that. It might be.
I would say, however, the fact that you have a
persecution narrative that goes back to the Roman Empire. Sure,
of course for the Abrahamic tradition, I think does actually
play into that. I think it's actually quite important there.
Whereas I can look at you know, say, Phuronic Egypt,
they don't feel that way. They're like, no, everything's yeah,
there's awful chaos monsters out there, but society is pretty solid.
Speaker 6: Well the Hicksaws or Aqunans, sure, yeah, but.
Speaker 3: Those are but those are weird periods. But but that,
but that's the thing whereas you get to everything that
comes after the Romans and the encounter with the Abrahamic religions,
I agree with that, and that is a very wrong
narrative in that tradition. And so I'm a believer in
deep traditions that yeah, they're because you're like, why on
earth are the protocols of the Elder of Zion showing
up in friggin Behold a Pale Horse? But the fact
that these are all basically just the same myth being
retold and retold and retold.
Speaker 6: I actually I want to highlight that. I don't know,
Jeff if Blake sent a petition to show, but Behold
a Pale Horse is the ultimate puffed Bible.
Speaker 5: Everything is in there. Oh yeah, all in there.
Speaker 6: It's one hundred percent the entirety of the paranormal linked
with conspiracy theory into one single document, and it has.
Speaker 3: Never been out of print, and it has never done poorly.
Speaker 6: It's not a bad book. It's not a bad read.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, Bill, Bill Cooper long Beyond the Grave
has has can you know he's he's one of those prophets.
I would argue that he's not quite keel, but he's
one of those profits that well he's not.
Speaker 5: Only a profit, he's a martyr.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, there you go.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, if you're not going to pay your taxes
and you're going to get shot by the government, what
better way to prove your point.
Speaker 3: Make sure you do it right around two thousand and
one too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Bill Cooper annoys me. Although I think you've
you've fairly well convinced me that my first UFO documentation
that I saw in the wild outside of a UFO
book was probably Horse Well, it was probably the Cooper
documents around that with the alien types and stuff. Yeah
so yeah, uh yeah, it's very peculiar.
Speaker 6: Said.
Speaker 3: This actually turned out more coherent than I was expecting.
Speaker 2: I think, good, good.
Speaker 3: I like this.
Speaker 2: I mean, uh, I was going to add one more
thing about the anti Semitism stuff. I mean, Palmer was
working for years with Shaver doing stories where their secret
influence their secret controllers, and then in his life for
years he's working for Ziff Davis.
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, so he's.
Speaker 2: Not able to do all the things he wants to
do because the people who were in charge are Jewish,
right and not letting him do what he wants to do.
And whether he consciously resented that or not, it would
be an easy step.
Speaker 6: Well exactly. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. In
the West, secret masters are always jewsed like, that's just
part of the tradition, and I think in this case
it was very concretized. I mean, you know, God like,
that's just the way we interpret it. And it's regardless
of politics. The left and the right in America in
twenty nineteen have the same problem with Jews as they
ever had it.
Speaker 3: Well, and the beauty of it is is that because
it's it's this very specific like urban elite idea. It's like,
oh yeah, most of them are, but well that one's not.
But he's like them, you know, you know this this
this the coast you know, the coastal elite. The uh
you know. No, and and I don't even think that's
a code at this point. I think it's more just
being generous with numbers, if if if that makes if,
that makes sense, But no, I think it's a historical myth.
I I really think that I wrestled that for a
long time, like why does it always go back there?
And I think it's ultimately these ideas are a lot
more powerful on this than we think.
Speaker 6: It is integrated into the DNA of Western politics. Yeah,
it's at it's at the fundamental level.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it literally goes back to the medieval
period at least.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so the real monster was man all along?
Speaker 2: Yeah, monster, you've been listening to Monster Talk, the science
show about monsters. I'm Blake Smith, and you just heard
part two of our coverage of the Shaver Mysteries with
doctors Jerry Drag and Jeb Cart. There are a lot
of links in the show notes if you want to
dive deeper into the Hollow Earth and the Shaver mysteries.
I've received a lot of interesting links to a variety
of fictional properties that directly or indirectly build them this mythology.
I didn't try to include them all in the show notes,
but there are plenty of them, and the numbers growing.
When the Hollow Earth material showed up in the Godzilla
King of the Monsters movie, I was the only one
in the theater cackling madly. I may have spent too
much time on this topic for my own good health,
but I hope that you all enjoyed the fruits of
this effort. Monster Talk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
No Darrows or Tarots were harmed in the making of
this episode. This has been a Monster House presentation that
could split these folks into fashion people into factions. Should
not surpell that would split folks into factions in a
world where people non canonical fan fiction fiction?
Speaker 1: Uh, because I really should.
Speaker 2: Not even be saying this, you know, Honestly, I'm just
having trouble here and probably was responsible for much of
the theist to the tech jargon that was that was
into his competitive ah well basket.
Speaker 1: We already recovered, not that in fantasy it's