The Shaver Mystery

A welder heard voices in his equipment describing the Dero — degenerate beings in ancient caves, tormenting the surface. A magazine ran it as fact for years.

Here's something that actually happened, and it's every bit as wild as the legends it inspired. In 1945, a science-fiction magazine printed a story that its own editor swore might be true, and readers by the tens of thousands wrote in to say they believed it. This is the Shaver Mystery, and unlike a lot of what we cover, this one is documented history. The events are real. It's the underground monsters that are the question. So picture a welder named Richard Sharpe Shaver. In the early 1940s he mailed a letter to Amazing Stories magazine claiming he had discovered an ancient alphabet and, more than that, that he could hear voices. Shaver said he was receiving thoughts from a hidden world beneath our feet, populated by degenerate beings he called deros, short for 'detrimental robots,' though he meant them as living creatures. These deros, he claimed, were the malformed descendants of an ancient super-race, and from their caverns they tormented surface humanity with rays and telepathic cruelty, causing accidents, madness, and misery. Now here's where it gets strange, in the publishing sense. That letter landed on the desk of an editor named Ray Palmer. Palmer was a brilliant, showman of an editor, and instead of tossing the ramblings aside, he saw gold. He reworked Shaver's material into a story called 'I Remember Lemuria!' and ran it in the March 1945 issue, and crucially, he framed it not as pure fiction but as possibly based on real racial memory. He invited readers to write in with their own experiences. And they did. In droves. Circulation reportedly surged. Letters poured in from people insisting they too had heard the caves, felt the rays, glimpsed the deros. The magazine leaned in, running Shaver material for years. To many, this looks like the moment modern American pop-paranoia and the UFO age were being born in real time, just a couple of years before the 1947 flying-saucer wave that Palmer would also help popularize. So what do we make of the deros themselves? There's no evidence they exist. Shaver genuinely seems to have believed his experiences; some later suggested he may have suffered from mental illness, hearing voices he interpreted as real. That's a compassionate reading, and we should extend it. We document his sincerity without endorsing his cosmology. But the phenomenon, the flood of belief, the editorial gamble, the birth of a subculture, that is real and consequential. The Shaver Mystery is a genuine chapter in the history of science fiction and of the UFO and hollow-earth movements that followed. And it links outward, doesn't it. Shaver's malevolent underground world is a clear ancestor of the Dulce base legend, that neighbor node of secret tunnels and hostile beings below. It feeds the older myth of Agartha, the fabled subterranean kingdom, and the broader hollow-earth tradition it shares a border with. On the map, we don't plant this pin in a cavern. We plant it in Chicago, Illinois, in the 1945 offices of Ziff-Davis and Amazing Stories, where a welder's letters and an editor's daring lit a fuse that's still burning.