Richard Sharpe Shaver (October 8, 1907 – November 5, 1975) was an American writer and artist who achieved notoriety in the years following World War II as the author of controversial stories which were printed in science fiction magazines (primarily Amazing Stories). Shaver claimed that he had personal experience of a sinister ancient civilization that harbored fantastic technology in caverns under the earth. The controversy stemmed from the claim by Shaver, and his editor and publisher Ray Palmer, that Shaver's writings, while presented in the guise of fiction, were fundamentally true. Shaver's stories were promoted by Ray Palmer as "The Shaver Mystery".
During the last decades of his life, Shaver devoted himself to "rock books" – stones that he believed had been created by the advanced ancient races and were embedded with legible pictures and texts. He produced paintings allegedly based on the rocks' images and photographed them extensively, as well as writing about them. Posthumously, Shaver has gained a reputation as an artist; his paintings and photos have been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere.
Richard Sharpe Shaver was born on October 7, 1907, in Virginia to Grace and Ziba Shaver. He had two sisters, Claire and Isabella, and two brothers, Donald and Taylor.
The family moved to Berwick, Pennsylvania, when he was a young child.
The family relocated again to Detroit, Michigan, when his older brother Taylor found work there with the Federal Immigration Service. Shaver enrolled in the Wicker School of Fine Art and worked part-time as an art model. At Wicker, he began a relationship with his teacher Sophie Gurvitch. The pair married in Summer 1932, a few weeks after Wicker permanently closed. The two had a daughter, Evelyn, born circa 1935. Shaver found work as a gardener and welder.
In 1934, Shaver's older brother Taylor died from pneumonia, and Shaver's remaining family returned to Pennsylvania.
Shaver was admitted to the Emergency Ward in Detroit complaining of auditory hallucinations or voices talking about him. A doctor there noted that Shaver "gives a definite history of persecution for alleged imaginary communist beliefs and ridicule by his fellow employees for supposed homosexual practices." The doctor noted Shaver believed he had been hypnotized and reported a "dual mental personality" as if his words are uttered by someone else. The doctor noted Shaver was "in general he is able to rid himself to an extent from the ideas of persecution."
After his brother's death, Shaver was committed to the Ypsilanti State Hospital for mental health disorders by his wife, Sophie. He stayed at the hospital for nearly two years, with periodic visits home to Pennsylvania. During his hospitalization, Sophie was accidentally electrocuted by a space heater in her bathroom. Shaver signed custody of his daughter over to his parents. He was released from hospital, returned to his family's farm in Pennsylvania, and soon left to travel across the Northeastern United States and Canada. Shaver was arrested for stowing away on a merchant vessel in Newfoundland in December 1937, and in early 1938 he was deported from Canada and sent to Grafton State Hospital in Massachusetts. He was transferred to the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Michigan later that year, where he remained for five years. He began writing the year he was discharged, in 1943.
In January 1944, newspapers announced Shaver's marriage to Virginia Fenwick of Texas. It was reported that both were fiction authors, with Shaver's "A Warning To Future Man" recently accepted for publication by a popular magazine.
In 1946, Shaver advertised for assistance with radio. In October 1946, papers reported that Shaver filed for divorce, alleging that Virginia had deserted him on March 28, 1943 – two months after their wedding. Divorce was granted in November 1946.
During 1943, Shaver wrote a letter to Amazing Stories magazine. He claimed to have discovered an ancient language he called "Mantong", a sort of Proto-Human language that was the source of all Earthly languages. In Mantong, each sound had a hidden meaning; by applying this formula to any word in any language, one could decode a secret meaning to any word, name or phrase. Editor Ray Palmer applied the Mantong formula to several words, and said he realized Shaver was on to something.
According to Palmer (in his autobiography The Secret World), Palmer wrote back to Shaver, asking how he had learned of Mantong. Shaver responded with an approximately 10,000-word document titled "A Warning to Future Man". Shaver claimed to have worked in a factory where, in 1932, odd things began to occur. As Bruce Lanier Wright notes, Shaver "began to notice that one of the welding guns on his job site, 'by some freak of its coil's field atunements', was allowing him to hear the thoughts of the men working around him. More frighteningly, he then received the telepathic record of a torture session conducted by malevolent entities in caverns deep within the earth." According to Michael Barkun, Shaver offered inconsistent accounts of how he first learned of the hidden cavern world, but that the assembly line story was the "most common version".
Shaver wrote of extremely advanced prehistoric races who had built cavern cities inside the Earth before abandoning Earth for another planet due to damaging radiation from the Sun: an example of a cryptoterrestrial hypothesis. Those ancients also abandoned some of their own offspring here, a minority of whom remained noble and human, "Teros", while most degenerated over time into a population of mentally impaired sadists known as "Deros"—short for "detrimental robots". Shaver's "robots" were not mechanical constructs, but were robot-like due to their savage behavior.
These Deros still lived in the cave cities, according to Shaver, kidnapping surface-dwelling people by the thousands for meat or torture. With the sophisticated "ray" machinery that the great ancient races had left behind, they spied on people and projected tormenting thoughts and voices into our minds (reminiscent of schizophrenia's "influencing machines" such as the air loom). Deros could be blamed for nearly all misfortunes, from minor "accidental" injuries or illnesses to airplane crashes and catastrophic natural disasters. Women especially were singled out for brutal treatment, including rape, and Mike Dash notes that "[s]ado-masochism was one of the prominent themes of Shaver's writings". Though generally confined to their caves, Shaver claimed that the Deros sometimes traveled with spaceships or rockets, and had dealings with equally evil extraterrestrial beings. Shaver claimed to possess first-hand knowledge of the Deros and their caves, insisting he had been their prisoner for several years.
Palmer edited and rewrote the manuscript, increasing the total word count to a novella length of 31,000. Palmer insisted that he did not alter the main elements of Shaver's story, but that he only added an exciting plot so the story would not read "like a dull recitation". Retitled "I Remember Lemuria!"; it was published in the March 1945 issue of Amazing. The issue sold out, and generated quite a response: Between 1945 and 1949, many letters arrived attesting to the truth of Shaver's claims (tens of thousands of letters, according to Palmer). The correspondents claimed that they, too, had heard strange voices or encountered denizens of the Hollow Earth. One of the letters to Amazing Stories was from a woman who claimed to have gone into a deep subbasement of a Paris, France building via a secret elevator. After months of rape and other torture, the woman was freed by a benevolent Tero. Another letter claiming involvement with Deros came from Fred Crisman, later to gain notoriety for his role in the Maury Island Incident and the John F. Kennedy assassination. "Shaver Mystery Club" societies were created in several cities. The controversy gained some notice in the mainstream press at the time, including a mention in a 1951 issue of Life magazine.